Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: IT

  • IT becomes the plumbing

    IT becomes the plumbing

    One of the things that jumped out of last week’s smart city tour in Barcelona is that Nicholas Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter is coming true — IT is now the plumbing.

    That’s not to depreciate IT, it means the technology is now becoming so embedded in society and business that people no longer notice.

    Like roads, electricity and water people assume it will be available but don’t notice the massive effort or investment required to make sure these services work.

    With cloud computing, pervasive internet and connected devices, most business never need to see an IT worker.

    For telco executives, IT managers and tech support people this is a blow to their egos as they always wanted their industries to be more than utilities.

    In one way being a utility legitimises IT as it makes the industry more important than just a bunch of geeks playing with computers.

    That also means that things have to work, ‘best effort’ services no longer cut it when you’re a utility and things have to work 99.99% of the time. Just like in plumbing.

    Becoming the plumbing could be the best thing that happened to the IT industry.

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  • Google, Facebook and the Silicon Valley paradox

    Google, Facebook and the Silicon Valley paradox

    One of the great advertising campaigns of the 1980s featured entrepreneur and Remington Shaver CEO Victor Kiam telling the world “I liked the product so much I bought the company”.

    The modern equivalent of Victor Kiam’s slogan is “eating your own dogfood” where businesses use their own products in day to day operations. It’s a great way of discovering weaknesses in your offerings.

    One of the paradoxes of modern tech companies is how they don’t always eat their own dogfood when it comes to their business philosphies – they expect their customers to take risks and do things they deem unacceptable in their own businesses and social lives.

    The best example of this are the social media services where founders and senior executives take great pains to hide their personal information, a phenomenon well illustrated by Mark Zuckerberg buying his neighbours’ houses to guarantee his privacy.

    Just as noteworthy  are the policies of Google’s IT department, for past five years most tech evangelists – including myself – have been expounding the benefits of business trends like cloud computing and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.

    Now it turns out that Google doesn’t trust BYOD, Windows computers or the Cloud, as the company’s Chief Information Officer, Ben Fried tells All Things D of his reasoning of banning file storage service Dropbox;

    The important thing to understand about Dropbox,” Fried said, “is that when your users use it in a corporate context, your corporate data is being held in someone else’s data center.”

    This is exactly the objection made by IT departments around the world about using Google’s services. It certainly doesn’t help those Google resellers trying to sell cloud based applications.

    Fried’s view of BYOD also echoes that of many conservative IT managers;

    “We still want to buy you a corporate laptop, get the benefits of our corporate discounts, and so on. But even more importantly: Control,” Fried said. “We make sure we know how secure that machine is that we know and control, when it was patched, who else is using that computer, things like that that’s really important to us. I don’t believe in BYOD when it comes to the laptop yet.”

    Despite these restrictions on Google’s users, Fried doesn’t see himself or his department as being controlling types.

    “But the important part,” Fried said, “is that we view our role as empowerment, and not standard-setting or constraining or dictating or something like that. We define our role as an IT department in helping people get their work done better than they could without us. Empowerment means allowing people to develop the ways in which they can work best.”

    Fine words indeed when you don’t let people use their own equipment or ask for a business case before you can use Microsoft Office or Apple iWork.

    That Google doesn’t give its staff access to many cloud services while Facebook’s managers restrict their information on social media shows the paradox of Silicon Valley – they want us to use the products they won’t use themselves.

    Back in the 1980s, Victor Kiam liked what he saw so much that he bought the company. You’d have to wonder if Victor would buy Google or Facebook today.

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  • Smart cities and the sensors in your pocket

    Smart cities and the sensors in your pocket

    National Public Radio’s Parallels program has story on how the Spanish city of Santander is wiring itself as a ‘smart city’ with a network of sensors wiring everything from garbage bins to parking spots.

    The hope with the sensors is they’ll will improve local government’s services, allowing things like more efficient garbage collection and better pricing of parking meters.

    What’s notable about the story is that smartphones are included as ‘sensors’ with Santander residents being able to submit data from their handsets.

    The idea of smartphones as sensors isn’t new — pothole reporting apps were early to the iPhone — the increased sophistication of handsets and improved tracking technology is making them more powerful.

    So we have another Big Data problem with local councils being flooded with information.

    Processing all this information is going to require the community pitching in so the data is going to have to open.

    Once governments make the data open it also creates opportunities for smart entrepreneurs to create new services and technologies.

    Creating new opportunities is a hope of government sensor programs around the world, including Tasmania’s Sense-T project .

    With factors like water quality and weather being monitored, existing sectors become more efficient and new industries are being created.

    Hopefully the urge to hoard this rich, community data will be resisted by governments.

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  • Penny wise and pound foolish

    Penny wise and pound foolish

    “We were penny wise and pound foolish” says Peter Trimble, Finance and Systems director of the V8 Supercars, about the IT setup he found when he started with the motor sport organisation 18 months ago.

    The V8 Supercars were like many businesses who had outgrown their basic IT setup and were struggling as a result.

    A touring organisation – “a travelling circus” as described by CEO David Malone – with 15 races in Australia, New Zealand the US has some fairly unique challenges as contractors, teams and a dispersed workforce put demands on the businesses which a basic small business system struggles to cope with.

    What Trimble found at the business were employees struggling with cheap internet connections and antiquated, inadequate servers.

    Focusing on the pennies and missing the bigger picture is a common problem when managements skimp on technology which leaves their staff spending more time on IT problems than getting their jobs done.

    Basically the $80 a month home internet connection doesn’t cut it when you have more than two or three workers and the server that worked fine when those people were in the same office becomes a security risk when a dozen a people are trying to login over the Internet.

    It wasn’t surprising the V8 Supercars management decided to go with a cloud computing service – in this case Microsoft Office 365 – and invest in proper, reliable internet connections.

    What the Supercars found that being penny proud and pound foolish with IT doesn’t work for a business, office tech is an essential investment.

    Paul travelled to the V8 Supercars in Launceston courtesy of Microsoft Australia. 

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  • Bringing your own device and business change

    Bringing your own device and business change

    Two years ago I realised that the management trend of staff bringing their own computers to work – BYOD – was more than a fad when I noticed executives were bringing the then new iPads to meetings.

    Most of these executives worked in organisations where IT departments had waged war on employees connecting their own equipment to the corporate network, so this was a serious development in the computing world.

    In many ways employees had been bringing their own technology devices to work for years. It was, and still is, quite common to see public servants and those working for other bureaucratic organisations arriving at meetings with an underfeatured work supplied handset and their own smartphone.

    IT managers hated this as they saw those private devices as a security risk and another headache for their overworked staff to deal with.

    When the iPod was enthusiastically adopted by the executive suite, the game was over for those IT managers. Suddenly they had to deal with these devices and the issues involved.

    At a seminar run by systems integrator Logicalis earlier this week looked at some of the issues around BYOD for companies. What was striking in their presentations were the need for HR and legal departments to be part of the process for adopting this philosophy.

    The BYOD philosophy is a big jump for organisations as it means relaxing controls on employees and for many managers that is the biggest challenge.

    Part of that challenge is controlling the organisation’s data on devices that could be going anywhere and doing anything.

    While companies like Logicalis and Citrix address this with remote desktop applications that create a virtual Windows desktop on the employee’s device, networking giant Cisco offer their ISE devices to run “identity services” that set up rules controlling what staff can access and where they can access it from.

    Cisco Australia’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Bloch gave a good round earlier this week up of where they see BYOD driving business. To Cisco, the move to mobile devices is irresistible as shown in their Global Mobile Data Traffic Update.

    Interesting both Kevin and the Logicalis speakers see BYOD as being part of the recruitment process. Increasingly younger workers expect they will be able to use their own devices rather than relying upon employer issued workstations and mobile phones.

    According to Kevin, Cisco’s research is finding many employees would trade salary for the right to bring their own device which is something that should grab the attention of budget constrained managers.

    This also ties into other employer trends such as Activity Based Workplaces where companies provide hot desks and staff are expected to store their items away at the end of each workday.

    Ross Miller of the GPT Group described how this is another trend driving the paperless office as staff using hot desks find packing away files and paperwork each day is an unnecessary hassle.

    What we’re seeing with businesses adopting BYOD policies is a big change in the way places operate and this has consequences for all divisions of an organisation from HR and legal through to marketing and corporate affairs. It’s a genuine game changer.

    How the BYOD philosophy is changing business is good example of technology driving our habits and work practices in ways we don’t always anticipate.

    One thing is for sure, the workplace of the future is far more autonomous and diverse than those we’ve been used to for the last hundred years, the businesses who don’t adapt are those being left behind.

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