June, 2008

Gates last day; Microsoft sees an evolution

Nice piece June 27, 2008 in The New York Times. Excerpt below (full story here). The video below you may remember from CES 2008.

Bill Gates is retiring, sort of. He is still only 52, and he is going off to spend more time guiding the world’s richest philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He will still be Microsoft’s chairman and largest shareholder, but Friday is his last day as a full-time worker at the software giant, marking the unofficial end of his career as a business leader.

…

At Microsoft, there is scant sign of panic, despite its trailing position and its failed bid to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion as a catch-up strategy. Microsoft sees an evolution in computing, not a disruptive revolution that will imperil the company, said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer.

Mr. Mundie said Microsoft is preparing for a widening world of both cloud computing and “client” machines, not only personal computers but also cellphones, cars, game consoles and televisions, all running Microsoft software.

“The next big platform is the union of the clients and the cloud,” he said.

A quick, easy, fun and free way to transfer knowledge or deliver departmental training

You may be interested in a quick, easy, fun and free way to transfer knowledge to Business or Functional Analysts, or for the delivery of end-user training. For example, let’s say you want to move knowledge from SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to BAs (Business Analysts or Functional Analysts) with such objectives as increasingly moving business knowledge closer to the code, improving traceability from process to requirements all the way down the line to IT assets or objects (including automated tests). If budget, time or resource constraints prevent the usage of professionally certified trainers, you may want to augment workshops, training classes or traditional documentation (e.g., procedural or training manuals) with a free tool that allows SMEs and others to create video training that can be published to SharePoint. For more information see this post (creating departmental training quick and easy) by Michael Gannotti.

Embedding to increase accuracy (Socialcalc)

Let’s say you want to increase accuracy. Well a technology developed by a guy associated with the open source movement may help you to do so (e.g., by 80%). Cutting down on passing files around, maintaining a means of sharing, maintaining version control and a single reference point for data, Socialcalc enables users to embed spreadsheets into Socialtext’s wiki pages. In an interview on the future the CEO of Socialtext basically shares that doing a project collaboratively actually dramatically increases productivity and reduces email traffic. A few words from the related article on Internet Evolution that may get you thinking include: “When you look at social networking, if it’s done with a goal of actually solving a problem, then it’s less about who knows who and more about who knows what and who knows who knows what.”; “encourage customers to not categorize things by marketing buzzwords but categorize them by their goals and problems they’re trying to solve”; “help groups be more productive in the context of what they have”; “the patterns of ubiquity of technology, the long tail of specificity, those will continue to accelerate”; “the next wave is, how do you make it relevant”. (full story here)

All must increasingly work towards means to innately improve quality and value, and thereby in the process increase such things as integration, productivity, excellence and simplicity. By 2020 this will ideally increasingly apply to all aspects of IT Governance, a global IT profession, and improvements to quality of life for all.

The elements of style for IT

Q: By 2020 will there be an “Elements of Style” for IT and what might the deliverable resemble?

A: Time will tell however perhaps it will be a bit like Strunk’s rules (?) and created as IT Pros increasingly serve and collaborate with the global public.

Proactively preparing for Enterprise 2.0 and evolution of computing to follow

As computing draws ever closer to the masses, and as the Internet’s population draws ever closer to the world’s population, interesting challenges that search engine providers and others continually work on will be related to data and information (e.g., volume, storage, de-duplication, inherent value, increasingly improved content rankings and so on). As food for thought for IT Pros, and virtually any member of the general Business population, now may be a good time to increasingly become less reactive. Now may be a good time to increasingly work towards proactively preparing for (and contributing to) the evolution of computing. TechTarget sites, e-newletters and events may be a good means of help for you to do so. In any event you may find the following words interesting; they are from this SearchCIO-Midmarket.com article about the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference.  

The general consensus on the panel was that the biggest impediment to using blogs, wikis, Real Simple Syndication and other collaborative business software is the users themselves.

HP, and embedded de-duplication

Sharing awareness: This week HP formally launches data dedupe products (including for the enterprise data center, HP sources Sepaton, embedding its DeltaStor post-process deduplication software into its HP virtual library systems). Full story on SearchDataBackup.com. From the perspectives of libraries, and frameworks, standards, capability maturity models and so on, it may not be surprising to see HP continually contribute to service improvement such as by continuing to bring forth or contribute to inventions which consolidate, elevate and integrate volumes of information for increasingly greater dimensions of quality, value, excellence and simplicity. In the meantime you may wish to replay ITIL V3: Offering real business benefits for the enterprise (where you can “meet each of the five authors from HP who have been deeply involved with the refresh of ITIL V3”).

Embedded compliance, embedded efficiency, embedded value

Imagine compliance (e.g., relative to a potential host of regulations, frameworks, standards, capability maturity models and so on) embedded within your integrated enterprise suite which inherently includes the mapping of business processes, to requirements, to automated test cases and scripts, to software, hardware and database components. Perhaps such an OOTB solution exists for your environment, ideally by and beyond 2020 some major vendor(s) out there will strive to ensure it increasingly will.

People, Tools, Code… computing closer to the masses

This book states “Computing is slowly coming closer and closer to the masses”. With current PeopleTools has the pace picked up, or has IT been enabled to empower the Business more, or has IT been enabled to provide stronger governance, or has IT been enabled to eliminate (or improve integration with) the tools of other vendors such as perhaps HP or IBM/Rational?

Search chief officers and IT Pros, for what out of the box can really mean

Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer, recently wrote on SearchCIO.com that the “future of business is information technology”, she also wrote that it was fun to hear Susan Cramm, the former CIO of Taco Bell turned “leadership coach,” tell a ballroomful of CIOs that “at successful companies of the future — 2015, in her imagined scenario — IT will not be treated by CEOs as an expense to be minimized, but as an asset to be optimized.” (full article here) 

If risk exposure is often embedded in corporate values, and if the future of business is IT, should IT somehow be explicitly stated within your corporate values? Is it? Ideally so; and ideally your organization is making use of IT to replace inherent risks with something innately better.

If your organization produces or would like to utilize an OOTB type product, you may be interested in reading What ‘Out-of-the-Box’ Really Means (ideally you’re also interested in continual improvement and forward progress that increasingly strives to improve the quality and value within). 

Search chief officers and IT Pros, for what out of the box can really mean before, by and beyond 2020 if IT is treated like an asset to be optimized and if the quality and value associated within is increasingly improved.

Discovery Day

While Discovery Day does not refer to the space shuttle (e.g., such as when very recently Discovery completed NASA’s 123rd shuttle mission), it does relate to exploring and a historic landing… on June 24 the people in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador will enjoy a holiday while they celebrate Discovery Day in recognition of John Cabot’s landing in North America more than five hundred years ago (1497). Much has sure changed since then!

To all inventors and explorers, may you experience wonderful steps forward (e.g., perhaps relative to helping make quality and value increasingly intrinsic and pervasive), leading to, on, and beyond, this and every Discovery Day! 

Yahoo! - Google Announcement

Will Yahoo! and Google increasingly work together? Would interesting developments in software quality inherently evolve as a result? Here is the announcement in case you somehow missed it. And here is a related piece on InternetEvolution.Com.

IP3, do you know what it is?

International Professional Practice Partnership 

Stay aware and involved; the principle inherent quality is you. Click here for an update. This post takes no credit simply shares awareness.

Management as an enabler

Exploring the Word of the Day, you may find it interesting to read that Management is not about controlling human behavior; rather instead it is about unleashing possibility.

Congrats Newfoundland on your first Stanley Cup

I was watching the game on the big screen at one of the campuses of the College of the North Atlantic in Newfoundland tonight. This is just a quick post from a Nova Scotian to say congrats to Cleary and all Newfoundlanders. Given tonight’s victory by Detroit, good times may deservingly be going up in Newfoundland to celebrate one of their inherent qualities who is the first from the province to be a Stanley Cup champion.

Skills Framework for the Information Age

The skills framework information below was contained within a 5/30/2008 email to CIPS members from the Chair of the Canadian Council of Information Technology Professionals. For information about the Information Systems Professional designation, or the new Canadian IT Profession designation, contact gina@cips.ca (Gina is the CIPS Professional Standards Manager).

*International Information Technology Professional (IITP) Designation -

The first-ever IITP designation will be offered by CIPS in partnership with the International Federation of Information Processing Society - IFIP (a United Nations/UNESCO consultative body), and its global association partners when the IITP designation is launched world-wide in 2009.  (CIPS is Canada’s representative in IFIP.)  The IITP designation will be offered to more than 30 million IT practitioners around the world. 

** Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) -

Level 5: ensure, advise

Autonomy

Advises on the available standards, methods, tools and applications in own area of specialization and can make correct choices from alternatives. Can analyze, diagnose, design, plan, execute and evaluate work to time, cost and quality targets. Communicates effectively, formally and informally, with colleagues, subordinates and customers. Demonstrates leadership. Clear understanding of the relationship between own area of responsibility/specialization to the employing organization and takes customer requirements into account when making proposals. Takes initiative to keep skills up to date. Maintains awareness of developments in the industry. Can analyze user requirements and advise users on scope and options for operational improvement. Demonstrates creativity and innovation in applying IT solutions for the benefit of the user.