Integration Woes

April 2008 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “Integration still is the No. 1 problem facing many organizations that require more than one internal system…”

Why You Should Jott Yourself

April 16, 2008 from PC World – “In a recent column, Memos on the Go, I briefly mentioned Jott. It's a free service that transcribes voice messages you send it into text, then e-mails a transcription of the message to you. The idea is to make it easy to record memos and reminders for yourself.

I didn't have the space to get into more detail about Jott then, but the service is definitely worth a longer look. In fact, like PC World's Steve Bass, I've become a fan. In my opinion, Jott is a fantastic productivity tool that every busy mobile professional should try.”

180 View – Looks good to us. You could use this program not only when you have a great idea while in the car and don’t want to forget it but also to dictate notes from your last meeting and fresh in your mind. Our only concern is that some people may gain some productivity at the expense of bad driving.

The Forecast for Cloud Computing

March 5, 2008 from CIO Insight – “Thanks to the phenomenon known as cloud computing, businesses can rent access to applications and IT infrastructure that reside on the Internet, pay for them on a subscription or per-use basis and provide employees with access to information from anywhere at any time with nothing more than a connected device…

But theory isn’t reality, and just because cloud computing holds promise doesn’t mean that’s going to translate into practical solutions for real business technology challenges—at least, not anytime soon...”

180 View – There are a number of success stories in the clouds with Salesforce.com and NetSuite, and we believe there will be a lot more action up there.

SharePoint

January 22, 2008 from ComputerWorld Canada - “According to London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group, customers expressed satisfaction rates in the 92 per cent range around the functionality and total cost of ownership of SharePoint, but nearly one quarter said they were disappointed with how well the world’s largest software company was able to assist them with it. SharePoint is Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server is a tool that companies can use to create an internal portal to collaborate, share ideas, and manage documents.

Info-Tech published a sample comment from one of the 258 respondents to its survey, who said: “I don’t think they (Microsoft) knew what to expect, and they were the first ones to admit it because they didn’t expect that SharePoint was going to reach this kind of demand. They are just overwhelmed with calls.”

180 View – The title of this article was actually "Users claim six month wait for SharePoint support" but could have also been SharePoint achieves 92% Satisfaction Rate. Whatever the title, the story is that SharePoint is one hot technology.

Amazon – more than books and music

February 21, 2008 from Baseline – “By stepping beyond its circumscribed sphere of selling books, toys, music, DVDs and computers online, Amazon is not just poaching far from its own turf by penetrating an entirely new market, it’s also challenging the established players in the emerging software as a service (SaaS), managed services and grid-computing sectors. It’s as if General Motors suddenly opened up its factories worldwide to allow thousands of companies to make their products using its equipment and facilities…

This past holiday season, Amazon’s e-commerce site handled customer orders for a whopping 5.4 million items on Dec. 10th alone—more than 60 items per second. Its fulfillment network shipped 3.9 million units in a single day. Nintendo’s Wii game systems flew out the doors at an incredible clip—17 per second—when the coveted games were in stock.

Amazon’s e-commerce success hasn’t gone unnoticed on Wall Street. The company’s shares last year soared 135 percent, fractionally better than tech darling Apple’s and nearly three times the stock-value growth of search juggernaut Google.

Both revenue and profit spurted last year, with sales up 39 percent (from $10.7 billion in 2006 to $14.8 billion in 2007), and net income up 150 percent (from $190 million in 2006 to $476 million in 2007). Although its Web services foray has yet to be viewed as a major revenue contributor, Amazon’s computing-services revenues range from $46 million to $92 million, analysts estimate.

Unlike conventional software vendors that must build vast data centers to get into the SaaS business, Amazon is tapping its existing—and often underused—infrastructure. “Amazon has a lot of capacity that sits idle for a lot of the year,” AWS’ Selipsky says. It’s as if a thoroughbred racehorse, restricted to running in cheap claiming races for 50 weeks of the year, suddenly was spurred on to compete in the Kentucky Derby.

Amazon has long been hip to the idea of making a buck off its various e-commerce systems. Nearly one-third of Amazon’s revenue comes from third parties, such as merchants that use its various technologies. “This is a multibillion-dollar business for us,” Selipsky says.”

180 View – The article is interesting in Amazon’s eCommerce metrics but also in the direction the company is taking. Amazon and other companies will provide both the hardware and software and we will pay as we need it.

12 Windows Vista Tweaks To Boost Your PC's Performance

January 22, 2008 from InformationWeek – “Soon after Windows Vista came out, many suggestions for tweaking the operating system to improve performance emerged. Unfortunately, most of those tweaks turned out to be pretty disappointing: they either provided the illusion of better performance but did nothing of substance, or they were rehashes of existing Windows XP tips that might note even be valid on Vista.

Still, there are plenty of things that can be done to make Vista run better. Over the past several months I've kept an eye peeled as to what actually works, what doesn't, and why. With less work than you might think, it's entirely possible to have Vista running quite snappily. …”

180 View – Some of the advice in this article would have saved me (Michael Burns) a lot of time when I first installed Vista. Specifically, the advice included getting rid of preloaded programs.

Microsoft steps up assault on virtualization

January 22, 2008 from InfoWorld – “…Virtualization technologies separate the software on a computer from its underlying hardware, allowing it to be deployed in more flexible ways. Virtualization can allow multiple operating systems to run on one computer, for example, or allow application workloads to be shifted between computers more easily to improve hardware utilization…”

180 View – Do you hear as much about virtualization as we do? Anyone out there with good or bad experience they would like to share?

Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch

December, 2007 from The McKinsey Quarterly, a publication of McKinsey & Company – “Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways…”

180 View (written by Lawrence Young) – This illuminating article discusses eight emerging technology trends that are changing the way businesses manage relationships, assets and information. The authors emphasize by way of relevant examples that ‘technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value’, and that ‘companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business’.

Having been intimately involved in the deployment of technology in hundreds of companies over the past three decades, we’ve seen first-hand that the authors make an excellent point that has stood the test of time. Purchasing technology is simply not enough-business models and processes, as well as organizational structure, must be rigorously examined and re-engineered to maximize the return on a company’s investment in technology.

Some companies have reaped significant benefits by using technology and the information stored in their massive data warehouses to drive sales and elevate customer satisfaction levels. I am one of I suppose millions of consumers that, as the article talks about, have bought merchandise from Amazon.com after receiving an email informing me that one of my favorite recording artists had just released a new CD. Similar emails have suggested that I buy a book, which I’ve subsequently done, that falls under a subject matter of a book that I had previously purchased from Amazon.com.

Some of our clients have in fact expanded their core business models to exploit their own investment and success with technology and re-engineered business processes. For example, one client, who invested heavily in specialized software and processes to make his distribution company more efficient and profitable, offered his logistics capability to other distributors on an outsourced basis. The result-the company made a tidy fortune letting other non-competing companies benefit from the expertise and capability it had initially developed for its own internal use only.

More and more of our clients are realizing huge savings in transaction-processing costs by giving their customers and suppliers access to corporately stored data on a secure, need-to-know basis. Just think about what the banks have accomplished with ATM machines-the customer does the work of the teller, and often pays for this privilege to boot! Consider the impact on the corporate bottom line when your customer logs in to your web-based portal instead of calling your Customer Service department to see the price or availability of a product, to place a new order, or to get a tracking number of a recent shipment.

As the article aptly points out, ‘although technology always promises benefits, actually gaining them requires a good understanding of its real business implications and of the concomitant managerial changes’. Business leaders would be well advised to take this reality to heart in order to gain significant and sustainable benefits from the dollars they spend on deploying technology in their companies. Often times it takes little more than expanding a company’s existing business model to get the ball rolling.

Top 10 implementation mistakes

January 2008 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – If you read last month’s article (see “Top 10 software selection mistakes,” www.camagazine.com/softwareselection), you will know the software purchase process is riddled with pitfalls. But don’t expect implementation to be any easier. The article discussed the 10 top implementation slip ups you can make.

Top Ten 'Best of the Year'

December 21, 2007 from internetnews.com – “Yes it's that time of year folks, as news announcements wind down and reporters try to stay busy and show they know what they are talking about. It's time for year-end lists. For my part, I'm doing a Top Ten 'Best of the Year' list as relates to my wide swath of product coverage, including a few items from the lighter side of things.
1: Most Overrated Technology – Quad-core for the desktop.
2: Most Annoying Security Trend – Six degrees of too much security.
3: Best use of Adobe's Flash – Desktop Tower Defense.
4: Biggest Shift In Online Sales: From eBay to Craigslist.
5: Best Spillover Trend From Gaming – The Guitar Hero effect
6: "Doh!" Moment Of The Year – Virtualization starts to slow server sales.
7: Most Shameful Moment For Tech – Electronic voting.
8: Biggest Waste Of Money – Incessant virus conferences.
9: Most Mixed Message – Power use at home vs. the datacenter.
10: Best Argument Against DRM: Pandora/last.fm.

180 View – We thought this was the #1 best 'Best of the Year' lists.

Five Hot Trends in 2008

December 31, 2007 from CIO Update “What we’re interested in is not what might happen in 2008, but what is already starting to happen. The following trends are here.

1. Data leaks and IP Theft - Even as viruses grow more dangerous and zombie botnets flood us with spam, security experts are turning inward. The real threat is from within…

2. Virtualization - Until recently, virtualization has been focused on data-center optimization. With virtualized servers, hardware utilization goes up and flexibility increases. At the same time, costs associated with hardware and ongoing maintenance drop…

3. Software as a Service - SaaS has slowly been expanding beyond the mid-market, and since it dovetails well with other trends like virtualization and utility computing, 2008 could be a breakout year…

4. The Mobile Workforce - If your concerns about mobility are still centered on rogue access points and weak wireless encryption, you’re not keeping up…

5. Windows Vista - The question here is what should you do about Vista…

180 View - We would add web based applications to the list. We see a steady move away from Fat Windows client/server user interface (FUI) to a thin web-based user interface (TUI). Just as DOS applications that did not convert to Windows did not survive, the same will hold true for FUI applications that don’t convert to TUI. We made up the FUI and TUI acronyms and apologize to those of you fed up with 3 letter acronyms.

Collaboration: The $588 Billion Problem

January 3, 2008 from CIO Insight – “As much as e-mail, instant messages, blogs and their brethren technologies have helped knowledge workers better collaborate, interruptions and duplications derived from these forms of digital communication and content are overwhelming workers to the point of distraction.

The result is an egregious lack of productivity that may cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year, according to a report by Basex, which has tabbed information overload as the "Problem of the Year" for 2008.

"Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us," authored by Basex analysts Jonathan B. Spira and David M. Goldes and released Dec. 19, claims that interruptions from phone calls, e-mails and instant messages eat up 28 percent of a knowledge worker's work day, resulting in 28 billion hours of lost productivity a year. The $588 billion figure assumes a salary of $21 per hour for knowledge workers.

180 View – We are also guilty and too frequently check email and interrupt what we are doing. But we don’t agree with the findings. Most people don’t have the attention span to stay focused on the same thing for hours at a time. They need a break and lots of them. So if we are going to take a break, why not do it in a productive way by collaborating with colleagues, customers, suppliers and referral sources? And even if the email or instant message is with a friend, it’s faster than having a chat on the telephone.

Book Review: Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres

January 2008 and written by Gordon Hertzman - We now live in a world with more data than ever before, and where the power to “crunch the numbers” growing exponentially. So, does more data at the click of a mouse make us any smarter? According to Ian Ayres, a Yale “econometrician” and author of the bestselling Super Crunchers, the ability to mine large datasets is the new source of competitive advantage in business. It is foundation of Google’s success, and Wal-mart won’t make a move without it. It has also made for smarter public policy and for thousands of lives saved in hospitals.

In case you were wondering, Super Crunchers has nothing to do with a cereal, but refers to the statistical analysis of large datasets or data mining for better decision making. In Super Crunchers, its Man vs. Machine. As our world becomes more complex, we just can’t see that forest for the trees the way those supercomputers can.

For those of you who have read Freakonomics, you will see this book as derivative. For those of you have not, read it first. In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt “explores the hidden side of everything”. He applies statistical on a wide range of familiar issues from parenting to the how much we cheat. In Super Crunchers, Ayres also takes us “behind the curtain”, this time to large, familiar organizations who are crunching numbers to get new insights into how to do things better.

So how does a book about data mining make the Wall Street Journal bestseller list? It’s an easy read with a minimum of jargon, with a strong focus on anecdotes we can all relate to. The book starts with the story of Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton Economist who claimed that he could mathematically predict how good a wine vintage would be; no “swishing or spitting” required. Needless to say he was ridiculed by the wine establishment until he predicted that in 1989 (and again in 1990) that we would have the wine harvest “of the century” Today there is a lot more respect for the his notion that average temperature and rainfall is correlated to the quality of a wine harvest.

In the examples that follow we learn how companies we know as consumers have tailored their service offerings based on data mining. Under the hood, Google relies on massively large datasets for their search engine. Harrah’s Casino’s (big success story) track their customers at every touch point and swipe of their loyalty cards. They even calculate your “pain point” (how much money you are comfortable losing) and will usher you to the buffet if you get too close to it. “Happy Customers” gamble 24% more, and this adds up to millions for them. If your last flight was late Continental Airlines may buy you a drink on the next one. We all know about how Amazon recommends books. Netflix recommends other movies you would like, getting customers “off” the new releases. Blockbuster knows the probability that you will return a movie late. UPS can predict when you are about to switch to one of their competitors and will dispatch a salesperson accordingly. Monster.com refined their website using randomized testing. Best Buy and other retailers can predict how long you will work for them based on your job application. Ayres even talks about a credit card company that can calculate your probability of divorce based on a change in your spending habits. Better pay those “No Tell Motel” bills in cash…

It becomes clear that “super crunching” has paid off for many Fortune 1000 companies. This trend may in part explain the recent takeovers of the leading data miners. IBM just picked up Cognos for $5 billion and Oracle purchased Hyperion for $3.3 billion.

The world’s largest data warehouse (over 150 terabytes) is at Teradata, who is referred to in this book the way the Beatles would be in a history of rock and roll. Teradata does the “super crunching” for Wal-mart, AT&T, Best Buy, EBay, FedEx, Harrah’s, Verizon, PayPal and T-Mobile.

So who do you listen to, your “domain experts” or the analyst at Teradata? The books gives us many examples where the “truth” was only discovered on number crunching. “The numbers don’t lie”. “Google and scores of other businesses thrive in large part because they are masters of the algorithmic mindset”. This evangelistic tone the pervades the book; no balanced view here.

And what about the “dark side of data”?. Where is the mention that Harrah’s was at one time criticized for targeted marketing campaigns to compulsive gamblers, even those “on the wagon”. How about this privacy issues, or the increased intrusion of marketing efforts by companies who now know that much more about you. To his credit Ayers suggested that information should be shared so that all can benefit. Imagine getting a phone call from the IRS or Revenue Canada and hearing that if you reduce your inventory by 13%, your risk of bankruptcy will drop by 8%.

So, who wins in the end, Man or Machine? Even the BI experts will tell you it still requires human judgment to make sense of things, and there is a limit to “how much future the past can predict.” I prefer a more balanced view, and also remember that Mark Twain, quoting Disraeli, said "There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics." And also that Gregory F. Treverton in his book Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information, tells us that there is so much data out there that we can practically make a case for anything.

Software License Fines Fall Hardest on the Smallest

November 28, 2007 from eWEEK – “Most small and midsize businesses aren't even aware when they violate a software license, according to software industry sources, but that doesn't stop the fines from piling up.

Nearly 90 percent of the fines collected annually by the Business Software Alliance for software license violations falls on small and midsize businesses, many of whom have no idea that they are violating copyrights and cannot afford to pay fines, SMBs and software industry sources told eWEEK.

The Associated Press reported that figure Nov. 26, claiming that close to 90 percent of the $13 million burden in BSA fines falls on SMBs. The BSA represents major software vendors and promotes copyright protection, cyber-security, trade and e-commerce.”

180 View – Considering on how much we rely on software, it’s a good idea to ensure that all your software is up-to-date, licensed and supported.

Companies Checking Out E-Payments

October 22, 2007 from CFO.com – “Corporations are gradually shedding their unease with electronic payment methods, an evolution that likely will accelerate over the next few years, according to a new report from the Association for Financial Professionals.

The typical organization still makes 74 percent of its business-to-business payments by check, but that’s down from 81 percent in 2004, said the association, which in September surveyed 493 corporate financial professionals about their payment practices…”

180 View – I (Michael Burns) recently reviewed Telpay for a presentation at the Financial Technology Show. Telpay is an electronic payment system that allows Canadians to pay any bills both nationally and now internationally. Telpay processes 22 million transactions worth $10 billion annually. If Telpay does not have electronic account information, they will cut the cheque the old fashioned way.

The Cost of Complexity

September 27, 2007 from CIO Insight – “Is enterprise software just too complex to deliver on its promises?" That's the excellent question posed in an article on the Web site of the MIT Sloan Management Review by consultant Cynthia Rettig. Her answer is a forceful but thoughtful yes. And the upshot is that it's preventing companies from being flexible and IT organizations from being the force for innovation they could and should be.

And Rettig thinks the SOA, like ERP, will fail to solve the problem: The hallmark of SOA is its ability to claim to build modular business processes. However, "software does not work as Legos do," she writes."

180 View – SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) gets a lot of hype. A good chunk of my (Michael Burns) career was in software development, and we called SOA reusable code then. We tried hard to make code reusable but the more generic we made it, the more complicated it became. At a certain point, we gave up and kept it or tried to keep it simple. I have been thinking that perhaps I don’t know enough about the great software tools available today and should be less cynical about SOA. But I am not the only one who is skeptical about SOA.

Telepresence: Finally, videoconferencing that works

July 31, 2007 from Computerworld – “Telepresence is expensive, requires two or more dedicated conference rooms outfitted with specialized equipment (or in some cases, custom-built to house the equipment) and often runs on proprietary network technology. But it's such a vast improvement over any previous video-based collaboration system that enterprise users are quickly signing up.”

180 View – We are waiting for the day that high quality videoconferencing is cheap and easy, which we think will come as telecommunication speeds continue to improve. To put speeds in perspective, the modems we once used to connect to the internet gave us a maximum of 56 Kbps (kilobytes per second) but it was usually less. Now we typically use Cable or DSL providing speeds of 1500-2000 Kbps. You can expect speeds to increase rapidly especially if we get optical fiber connections at our office. Optical Fiber can now deliver speeds of 10,000,000 Kbps (enough to download a movie in 4 seconds). At the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference, IBM scientists revealed a prototype optical transceiver chipset capable of reaching speeds at least eight times faster than optical components available today. Exciting times ahead…

Counting Clicks: Monitoring PC Usage at Work

July 31, 2007 from BPM Today – “If your business has started to find too many employees endlessly surfing the Web, constantly instant messaging their friends, or spending too many hours viewing the latest YouTube videos at work, it may be time to check out some of the software tools now available for tracking who's doing what with your company computers, on company time.”

180 View – Unfortunately there are companies that don’t trust their employees and employees who don’t deserve the employer’s trust in the first place. I (Michael Burns) would not want to work for a company that did not trust their employees. I also would not hire someone I did not trust. Trust is the key to any good relationship.

Companies Falter at Aligning IT to Business

September 10, 2007 from CIO Insight – “CIOs have been talking about it for years, decades even—preaching alignment with the business as the silver bullet for making IT departments most effective. But a new study reveals that most companies have, in fact, done a poor job with both.

In a yet-to-be-released survey, the consulting firm Bain & Company found that companies grew faster and lowered costs more dramatically by first focusing on making their IT departments effective. Those that favored alignment before effectiveness, on the other hand, faced tougher growth prospects and higher spending rates...

One major problem, in Puryear's eyes, is that technology and business executives misunderstand the concept of alignment. Instead of synching up strategies, companies tend to allot IT resources to different business units and call that alignment. But that process leads to increased complexity—rife with fragmentation, redundancy and subscale operations. "By definition, that complexity is going to drive up spending," Puryear says.

Bain polled technology and business executives at 450 publicly-traded companies, asking two questions. First, the executives were asked how IT is aligned with the business organization. Bain defines alignment as the IT department fully understanding business priorities and having adequate staff to respond to those needs.

Second, Bain asked how effective—getting projects done as specified, on budget and on schedule—those IT departments have been. Based on that definition, 85 percent of respondents characterized their IT operations as ineffective…

With those findings in mind, Puryear urges companies to focus first on effectiveness before tackling alignment.

180 View – Bain defines effectiveness as “getting projects done as specified, on budget and on schedule”. We think that Bain and most project managers are ignoring the most important measure of effectiveness, which is whether the project helps the organization achieve its Critical Success Factors (CSF’s - those things that an organization must do well in order to be successful). And guess what, if the project does help achieve CSF’s, then it’s aligned.

Massive Amounts Being Spent on KM (Knowledge Management) Apps

September 27, 2007 from CIO Update – “The magic number this year is $73 billion. That’s what U.S. companies are going to spend by year’s end on KM software this year. And more will be spent next year. Why? Because many companies are going to great lengths to capture and utilize the vast amounts of unstructured information that is flowing through, and around them. KM is a vast, catch-all phrase that encompasses all kinds of software from portals to search engines to content management systems. It also encompasses the software needed to deal with compliance and ediscovery efforts. This is why the numbers are so big.

180 View – In the Information Age, knowledge is power.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills

May 24, 2007 from ComputerWorld – “Those in search of eternal life need look no further than the computer industry. Here, last gasps are rarely taken, as aging systems crank away in back rooms across the U.S., not unlike 1970s reruns on Nickelodeon's TV Land. So while it may not be exactly easy for Novell NetWare engineers and OS/2 administrators to find employers who require their services, it's very difficult to declare these skills -- or any computer skill, really -- dead.

In fact, the harder you try to declare a technology dead, it seems, the more you turn up evidence of its continuing existence. Nevertheless, after speaking with several industry stalwarts, we've compiled a list of skills and technologies that, while not dead, can perhaps be said to be in the process of dying. Or as Stewart Padveen, Internet entrepreneur and currently founder of AdPickles Inc., says, "Obsolescence is a relative -- not absolute -- term in the world of technology."

180 View – If your company is using any of the technologies listed (Cobol, Nonrelational DBMS, Non-IP networks…), then you might want to make a change. It’s not just because these technologies are fading, it’s because the people that support them are retiring making it all that more difficult to support. We predict a significant increase in new systems when the baby boomers retire.

You may not know these five products and services. You should.

August 1, 2007 from CFO Magazine – “Here at CFO, we get a lot of information from technology vendors offering products that promise to do everything from scrubbing your numbers to cleaning your computer screen. We dutifully evaluate these offerings so you don't have to. Lo and behold, some actually merit a little ink.

To winnow down our list, we summarily dismissed any product described by a vendor as "seamless," "mission critical," or "way cool." Even then, we also had to omit several excellent products for space reasons. For example, we recently visited the latest version of Teliris's VirtuaLive, a telepresence conference room replete with high-definition screens and integrated audio, and it's a knockout. Managers at any multinational business looking to cut down on travel expenses should seriously consider it. Those who have no choice but to hit the road on a regular basis will do well to look at Siber Systems's RoboForm2Go. This souped up thumbdrive offers road warriors a painless — and secure — way to take their passwords with them. On the road or at home, these five picks merit a closer look.

180 View – We don’t know enough about any of the products mentioned in the article to comment. If you have recently read a review of a “hot” product, please let us know so that we can spread the word.