Tag: You're IT!

Tag: You’re IT! Meet Ken Stewart

Last month, I tagged Ken Stewart.

1. Ken, when did you first discover your love for technology?

I think I have always loved to play with gadgets. I was always tearing things apart to see how things worked, but I always had spare pieces when I put them back together, and often broke more than I fixed. Gee, not much has changed

It wasn’t until I joined the US Marine Corps that I really understood where my calling was, though. It was there I really discovered that there needed to be a bridge between people and technology.

2. How do you earn a living?

I am presently the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions, finding ways to connect people with technology to hopefully make their work life much more satisfying. In other words, I focus on enabling technologies.

3. What do you love most about your job?

The beating drums of change. Although the pace can be a little harrowing, I relish the fast-pace and challenges I am tasked with overcoming, as well as the puzzles about how to build a better mousetrap I think up myself

4. What keeps you up at night?

Not too much really. I could sleep 18 hours straight if you let me. I suppose what worries me the most is staying focused on being a servant to my team and my family and not allow life to get in the way of living.

5. What do you do when you’re not working?

Hmm I don’t think I ever quit working. Outside of focusing a lot of energy on my new blog, ChangeForge.com, I enjoy weekends with my family and spending time in Aikido. Those 2 things give me a chance to be more balanced in my life and offer me a much needed recharge for my batteries.

6. You’ve looked in your crystal ball and have seen the future of enterprise IT. What does it look like?

Enterprise IT must learn to be the servant and not the gatekeeper. With demand increase on everyone’s time, IT will align itself to deliver business-enabling technologies. Security will continually become an increasing concern and will most likely be the counter-balance to the enabling technologies. This dynamic will create a very tight road for IT to walk, but businesses will find a way to carry on as they always have either in finding, creating, or doing without this component of the business.

Bonus Question: What’s your favorite quote?

Here’s one by Max Lucado from A Gentle Thunder that really stuck in my craw:

Much of life is spent rowing. Getting out of bed. fixing lunches. Turning in assignments. Changing diapers. Paying bills. Routine. Regular. More struggle than strut. More wrestling than resting

You thought marriage was going to be a lifelong date? You thought having kids was going to be like baby-sitting? You thought the company who hired you wanted to hear all the ideas you had in college?

Then you learned otherwise. The honeymoon ended. The IRS called, and the boss wanted you to spend the week in Muleshoe, Texas. Much of life is spent rowing.

Tag: You’re IT! — Meet Mark Schoonover

Last week we tagged Mark Schoonover. We invite you to tag his blog and follow Mark too!

1. When did you first discover your love for technology?
As soon as I was old enough to hold a screwdriver and take things apart!

2. How do you earn a living?
I’m a developer on the United States Navy and Marine Corp Intranet.

3. What do you love most about your work?
Very challenging assignments, great people, huge network.

4. What keeps you up at night?
Lately it’s been devoting time to the Drizzle project.

5. What do you do when you’re not working?
Coach soccer, referee, ultracycling, bugging my wife and kids….

6. You’ve looked in your crystal ball and have seen the future of enterprise IT. What does it look like?
Bigger, faster, more cores! There’s going to be a limit on CPU speeds, so the only way to go faster is to do things in parallel across many cores/CPUs at a time.

Tag: You’re IT! Meet Pam Baker

Last week we tagged Pam Baker!

1. Pam, when did you first discover your love for technology?
I’m the cat that curiosity is always stalking! I love to learn new things and technology is constantly about new things, so it’s a natural match for my questing mind. There is much to accomplish but only one lifetime to do it in; technology allows us to super-speed our accomplishments to roughly double the time we actually have. Combine the lightning speed action with the continuous intellectual exercise, and you have the reason I’m addicted to tech!

2. How do you earn a living?
I am a full-time freelance writer who also does significant analytical work as a contracted analyst for various research firms, most notably for UK-based Visiongain using the pen name Pam Duffey, but also for several other research firms. I also do “big picture” consulting work, meaning I help start-ups and tech companies figure out how to make money from their great tech ideas. I repair the disconnect between great adoption rates and poor monetization.

3. What keeps you up at night?
Fear of human nature. Technology within itself is neither good nor bad — the humans wielding it however are often both. Greed is growing at an unprecedented rate while compassion, decency, and respect for privacy are wilting everyday. I fear what the man behind the curtain may do to the munchkins of the land if left unchecked. To many of our so-called over-seers and governmental regulators are far too ignorant of technology to properly protect the people — and they too are a mix of good and evil. In my opinion, human nature is the scariest thing out there.

4. What do you do when you’re not working?
I play hard. Not being one to tackle anything half-heartedly, I go after pleasure with the same gusto that I tackle a work project. Generally, I love to travel and learn new cultures whether that’s in another state or another country. Once there, I try out just about anything the locals enjoy. Told you, the cat that curiosity stalks!

Downtime at home, I enjoy great sci-fi movies, books of all kinds, my wonderful dogs, and long walks through the woods. Pretty sedate really.

5. You’ve looked in your crystal ball and have seen the future of enterprise IT. What does it look like?
A greatly diminished data center as everything goes Software as a Service (SaaS) and to cloud computing. Companies will crystallize their efforts to their core competencies and outsource everything else; hosted everything will rule the day. Unified communications and universal compatibility will make everything easier to do and use. Vulnerability, however, will sky-rocket because of this.

Outsourcing things like contact centers to foreign countries, however, will crash and burn as great customer service once again becomes vital to bottom-lines and companies realize that “cost per contact” is not nearly as important as “outcome per contact.” Using locals in contact centers for any given region is the only way companies can achieve the customer satisfaction levels they need to boost sales and brand loyalty, so expect offshore outsourcing to revert to near-shore and onshore outsourcing. In fact, some of that is happening now.

Nanotechnology will finally burst through the manufacturing obstacles and devices and hardware will become much smaller, better and faster, further reducing the size of the data center, the impact on the environment, and the cost of IT.

Google and Apple will eventually break the U.S. carrier stranglehold, possibly Yahoo will have a role in that as well, and the U.S. will finally see more benefits in mobile technology than we imagine today. That too, will further change enterprise IT. But until we get our carriers to play ball, mobile’s not going to be much more than it currently is here. Mobile advertising here is going to fail, largely because of carrier shortsightedness and their fear of becoming “dumb pipes.” It will take years before companies will be willing to try mobile advertising again after that, but they will eventually, and the second wave will be tremendously successful because carrier obstruction will be dealt with and because new business models will make mobile advertising more lucrative.

Broadband speeds in the U.S. will finally come up to par to other countries, once we eventually get around to redefining what constitutes “high-speed” broadband. Broadband issues will become paramount as companies turn to more telecommuters worldwide in order to satisfy their talent needs and lower energy needs. Enterprises will push hard for the change — and get it — as they learn from the global marketplace how badly out-of-whack the U.S. is, comparatively speaking.

The same is true with SOA. Only the U.S. sees SOA as a reuse advantage, other countries see it as a business process advantage. Because of this, U.S. based companies are not realizing the full benefits of SOA, but that will change in the near-future.

That’s just a few of the changes I see coming.

Bonus Question: If Stephen Spielberg was going to make a movie about your life, what would it be called?

It would definitely be an action movie, most likely a sci-fi movie too because the role technology has in my life, and a bit of a thriller since even I never know what’s going to happen next, lol, so maybe it would be called “The Wonder-lust Chronicles” or “Chaos Trapper.”

Tag: You’re IT — Meet Alan Kay

Today, we tagged Dr. Alan Kay

1. Dr. Kay, when did you first discover your love for technology?
I can’t remember when I wasn’t fascinated by “the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone”, i.e. all kinds of causality in all kinds of systems. The non-specific children’s building toys of the 40s (like TinkerToy and Erector and Meccano) plus growing up on a “farm with books” put me in contact with a lot of real examples of causal systems and lots of ways (adults, reading, building, taking apart, etc.) to get more savvy about them.

2. How do you earn a living?
For a few years, I earned a living and college expenses playing jazz guitar, then gradually the majority income came from computer programming. In 1966 I went to grad school and started to earn my living by being sponsored to do research. This was easier in the late sixties and through the seventies when research funders understood the game, and has been more difficult since with funders who by in large do not understand how to fund research (and do not really understand how “research” differs from other technological pastimes).

3. What do you love most about your work?
It’s similar to other forms of art in which I’ve participated. The “stuff” (materials) and flow of ideas one encounters in a civilization create “itches that must be scratched” and “smells that must be followed”. The compulsive nature of this is one of its main properties, and it has nothing at all to do with any kind of compensation or reward, but the need to “scratch” and “sniff”. There is a tension that new ideas relieve.

However, nothing about the process guarantees that success will produce anything cosmically good or useful (think of a huge flea market as evidence for compulsions that produced enormous numbers of items of little artistic or pragmatic value). A tricky part of dealing with the compulsions is to also somehow set thresholds for “goodness” that are more than subjective. This results in a super-tension. The complex part of dealing with this is how to be super-critical about one’s ideas without sliding into immobilizing depression.

The “love” is quite like and is as intense as one’s feelings for one’s beloved, which in part is to want to merge with one’s love. I have a friend who is a glassblower and who once said that he would take a bite out of a glob of molten glass if he could. That is, he wants to become one with the glass. I understand what he means quite deeply.

4. What keeps you up at night?
Human beings stubbornly staying unaware, becoming ever more dangerous, and doing ever more dangerous things to themselves and their surrounds.

5. What do you do when you’re not working?
“Working” for me is fund raising for our research, and to a lesser extent dealing with the human factors associated with the group nature of computing research. Everything else has been and is real play, both in computing, music and my other interests. The key is to spend more time playing than working….

6. Youʼve looked in your crystal ball and have seen the future of enterprise IT. What does it look like?
Enterprise IT has changed very slowly over the years (and in some senses has not changed at all except for size). For a large variety of reasons it has always been disinclined to learn important things about computing and has eschewed the idea of taking control of its own destiny despite the enormous backing and resources available.

Contrast this with Xerox PARC in which the major technologies of today were invented in a few years by about two dozen researchers total, including designing and building all the hardware and software. This was relatively easy, very inexpensive, and produced a revolution in how computing can be done. It also earned Xerox about a factor of 100 in profit over its costs for PARC (10,000% ROI, which my business friends say is good).

Nonetheless I’m not aware of any company that is funding processes like those of PARC today. As Pogo said in a cartoon “We have met the enemy and they are us”. This is not likely to change anytime soon, since how businesses are trying to cope with situations that actually need new inventions, is making the situations worse, to which they respond with more coping instead of sponsoring much better ways to do things.

Bonus Question: If Stephen Spielberg was going to make a movie about your life, what would it be called?
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind

Tag: You’re IT — Meet Aseem Kishore

We tagged Aseem Kishore this week!

1. Aseem, when did you first discover your love for technology?
When I was about 7 years old. It was the first time my father asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I told him to get me something that was “electronic”, whatever it was. For several years, I took apart anything that was no longer being used: VCR, camera, watches, etc. After that I knew I would always be interested in technology.

2. How do you earn a living?
I work as an IT Systems Analyst/Programmer in Dallas, TX. I mostly design and write software for a laboratory.

3. What keeps you up at night?
Usually thinking of ways to quit my job and start my own Internet Marketing or blog consulting company!

4. What do you do when you’re not working?
You can find me spending time with my wife, reading blogs, researching the newest gadgets like TVs or computers, and writing my own tech blog.

5. You’ve looked in your crystal ball and have seen the future of enterprise IT. What does it look like?
Virtual. Virtual servers. Virtual desktops. Also, cloud computing. Everything will eventually be in “the cloud”.

Bonus Question: If Stephen Spielberg was going to make a movie about your life, what would it be called?
The Digital Life

Tag: You’re IT — Meet David Berkowitz!

We tagged David Berkowitz this week!

1. David, when did you first discover your love for technology?
One of my earliest memories of really embracing technology was when I wrote my first book report in first grade on Stuart Little. My family had our first PC (my brother already had an Apple IIe), and I learned how to use the thesaurus on Wordperfect. I never turned back. Typing had a great impact on me too, allowing me to get thoughts on paper much faster than I could write them, so even in the early 80s I seemed to be itching to be a blogger.

2. How do you earn a living?
It isn’t by blogging. I’m Director of Emerging Media and Client Strategy at 360i, the digital marketing agency, where I help big brands with their social media and mobile strategies.

3. What keeps you up at night?
I sleep pretty well, thanks. What really keeps me up though is information overload.

4. What do you do when you’re not working?
I’m relatively recently married (still within the first year) and my wife and I love to travel. During the summer it’s fun exploring various parts of New York City, where I live. I like to catch movies, I read a good amount, and thanks to the DVR I manage to watch a lot of TV (my latest ‘discovery’: Californication - can’t wait for the next season).

5. You’ve looked in your crystal ball and have seen the future of enterprise IT. What does it look like?
It’s a big, white, puffly cloud. Not the cumulo nimbus kind. This is a very happy cloud, the cottony kind.

Bonus Question: If Stephen Spielberg was going to make a movie about your life, what would it be called?
Bloggers of the Lost Ark? No… Saving Private Berkowitz… no, that’s not it either. Here it is - I’d actually title the film by the screen name I used on the dating site when I met my wife: “Google This.”