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Get Your Head Out of the Cloud: Why Adaptive Computing May Be the Best Fit for Your Organization
Amongst the many emerging technology trends of 2011, cloud computing has increasingly been mentioned in mainstream media. While not being a completely new technical paradigm, cloud computing has become strategically relevant to companies that span numerous industries. The term cloud computing, in my opinion, is a vague and 
misleading term. Historically “cloud” refers to the pictorial icon that network engineers use when representing “the internet”. When drawing any type of network architecture that involved the internet, a fluffy cloud was used to represent the ever increasing plethora of networks that make up the Internet.
I don’t like the use of cloud because it betrays the real value that businesses can realize by embracing this technical paradigm. Clouds are nebulous, immaterial and unstable things. The services that are now available for companies within the manufacturing industry are the complete opposite of those traits. Rather than using the term cloud computing, I prefer to use the term adaptive computing. Understanding this new paradigm can provide cost saving and growth opportunities for companies within the manufacturing sector. There is a real potential for manufacturers to leverage adaptive computing to provide them with flexibility in the way they procure and operate technology.
App Wednesday: News360
For those of you who know me (or read my blog often or follow my Twitter feed!) you’ll know that I am a news and info junkie. This week’s featured app is one I’ve really enjoyed using. It is similar in concept to Zite (another great app) but has some subtle differences that I really enjoy.
The app is News360 and it is really an excellent news aggregator app that learns what you like to read and continues to refine the stories it brings forward. That is a lot like Zite. What I particularly like about News360 is that you can link it to a variety of social media sites you might use like Google+, Twitter, Facebook. You can even link it to your Evernote account! Then News360 goes out and scans those sources and learns about the types of things that interest you. Post a link on your Facebook wall about the new iPhone 4s and News360 will learn to bring you more articles about that topic. Tweet something about the latest high speed internet stick for Rogers and presto, News360 will again begin to personalize your experience.
I like this type of application because it curates content for me but makes it simple to refine the criteria that goes into creating my personalized experience. It is basically invisible to me and requires very little effort beyond the initial setup. Add to that a wonderful looking user interface with some innovative ways to present stories (the 360 degree view is nice to have scroll by while you are working on something else and simply have your iPad resting on your desk) and you have a winner of an app! Did I tell you it’s free.
It’s free!
So go grab it and start enjoying another personalized content experience on your iOS device.
A Week of Using Siri
I wanted to put down a few thoughts on Siri now that I’ve used for over a week. By now you’ve no doubt heard about 
this voice recognition functionality that Apple has built into the iPhone 4S. Let me start off by saying that Siri is no gimmick. It’s not awkward voice commands that you need to memorize to try to do simply things like call a contact. The other mobile phone vendors, like Microsoft and Google, have dismissed Siri as being unnecessary, but let me assure you, after seeing it, I’m sure that both those two companies are feverishly working to try to create their own version of Siri to replace their simplistic voice command systems on their respective platforms.
I wanted to high light two aspects of Siri that I used repeatedly all last week that drove home the value of this new interface. The first is for setting reminders and calendar appointments. Looking back at my reminders from last week I set ended up setting 37 reminders that were a mix of work and personal items. Using Siri it is dead easy.
- “Remind me next Thursday that it’s parent teacher interviews at 7pm”
- “Remind me to pick up a new power cord when I’m near the Eaton’s Centre”
- “Remind me to mail thank you cards when I arrive home.”
- “Book a meeting for tomorrow morning at 9am to work on presentation.”
- “Remind me to email my presentation when I arrive at work.”
- “Remind me to pick up toast bread and juice when I leave work.”
- “Remind me everyday at 9pm to sign my daughter’s agenda book.”
- “Remind me to call [client name] when I arrive at the office”
- “Book a lunch meeting for this Friday with [name of person] for noon.”
The above is just a sampling of some of the reminders I set for myself. As if by magic, these reminders were set flawlessly. Correct dates and times. Some set up as repeating items automatically. Some set to trigger only depending on my location. It is as simple to set as it is to tell someone to remind you. It’s transformative. Calendar appointments that take 3-5 steps normally are done in a single sentence. Again, transformative.
The second is the ability to send text messages via voice. At first I thought that this would be very useful in the car. It is of course, as it means I don’t have to type while driving, which is unsafe and a legal no-no. What has surprised me however is that it is also useful when you are simply running around doing things.
For example, I was walking to a lunch meeting last week and my friend texted me “Have a table” and I simply spoke while crossing the street and said “Tell [person's name] I am on my way”. Siri then simply sent a text back to that person that said “I am on my way”. It was flawless. I didn’t have to slow down, glance down, finger type and send the text. I simply spoke as though on the phone. That scenario played itself out repeatedly last week with voice commands like:
- “Tell [person's name] Heading to meeting room A now.”
- “Tell my wife I am heading to the car now”
- “Tell my daughter I’m almost at the school.”
- “Tell [person's name] Running late. See you in five.”
It is these types of things, naturally spoken, that make Siri incredibly valuable. As people begin to experience this value, they will start to use Siri for other natural language commands and searches. It is the natural language search that has companies like Google and Microsoft terrified, and rightfully so.
App Wednesday: Mindjet
This week’s feature app here on mip’s scan is a wonderful tool for creating mind maps. If you are unsure what a mind map is, there are several examples here in this detailed description, but in short, it’s a great way to capture unstructured thoughts and create a map (visual representation) of that information.
There are many tools that can be used to create a mind map, ranging from desktop software through to the good old-fashioned pen & paper approach. Over the years I’ve used a number of tools but always seem to gravitate back to my 
favourite which is MindManager from Mindjet. It has served me so well over the years ranging from tasks such as planning meetings, capturing requirements, completing RFPs or leading a brainstorming discussion.
This week’s App Wednesday high lights the excellent iPad version of Mindjet’s tool, simply called Mindjet on the iPad. I had tried to use a number of other mind mapping tools previously on the iPad but they were always lacking in one way or another. As well, none of them allowed me to easily work with the desktop tool that I’d become so accustomed to. I was really pleased when the iPad version was launched.
Putting aside the fact that I like the desktop version, and that I like mind mapping itself as a technique, the app itself is wonderful because of how it has been built. They didn’t simply take a desktop app and port it over onto the iPad. You can tell that it was designed with the iPad in mind, leveraging the various strengths of what makes the tablet such a joy to use. It is easy enough to use on the fly in a meeting without the tool getting in the way of the task at hand. It has an intuitive set of controls. When you are all done, you can transfer the map from the device via a simple email or by wireless downloading.
If you are a fan of mind mapping, or are planning to try using this technique in your work, then looking at this iPad app is really a must. Just one more way to make your iPad an excellent productivity device!
mip’s scan Podcast: The End of The Week Update!
Thanks for joining me for today’s podcast! It’s been a short week, a busy week, and I’m happy to pause and discuss a couple of items in today’s 15 minute podcast. Today I talk about things like:
- the launch of the iPhone 4s
- RIM’s catastrophic global outage leaves it with a black eye
- Strategic Perspective: Make IT a Revenue Driver Inside Your Organization
I hope that you find the topics today to be entertaining, informative and thought provoking.
To listen to today’s show, simply click the link below.
Time For Actionable Strategy
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book Actionable Strategy: How IT Transforms Traditional Strategic Planning which focuses on the changing nature of strategic planning in light of the disruptive technologies that permeate every industry.
It has been my experience that strategic planning has always gotten a bad rap. Strategy has often been viewed as a theoretical exercise, a make work project, that yields a lofty plan that is placed on a shelf to collect dust. The sad reality is that in many respects, strategic planning has earned that bad rap. I’ve been inside numerous organizations where past strategic attempts have results in exactly that scenario. From an IT perspective, which is where I’ve focused most of my strategic engagements, grand plans have often been developed only to find no foothold within the organization to begin adding any value. I started asking myself the question “why” many years ago. Why is it that strategic planning seems to yield so little result in many circumstances? About 6 six years ago, I realized that IT strategic planning was missing an important element, namely, a solid connection to the business it found itself in. There was often a disconnect between the business and the IT group. Any strategy produced in this kind of silo approach was doomed for failure.
At the time, I refined my approach to delivering strategy to ensure that it began and ended with the business and the goals of the business. I took the huge cookie cutter approach methodologies and created a series of tool kits that were rooted in understanding an organization and its business. I called my approach at the time Business First Strategy to reflect the mindset that IT could not be viewed strategically, until a solid understanding of the business needs were established and supported. In time, I refined my approach to take into account a new dimension that began to emerge back in 2008. Strategic planning exercises simply took too long. The longer the time frame, the higher the risk that the strategy would fail. This was true for a number of reasons:
- stakeholder would come and go. Organizations changed and often you’d have to deal with different people.
- the business environment changed before you could finish the strategic planning exercise and people would get discouraged that they were dealing with a moving target
- the cost to deliver a big bang approach strategy was difficult to justify and if such an exercise did begin, the strategic objectives needed to provide huge ROI to justify the process in the first place
Taking those factors into consideration, my approach to strategic planning for IT built off of my previous work, but endeavoured to chunk planning done into smaller pieces of work. Each piece of strategic work would have to standalone and produce value on its own. That value, if proven to be true, would drive further future strategic engagements. I called this approach Rapid Strategy, which allowed me to deliver strategic IT plans to organizations within a 90-day period. This was a real breakthrough moment for me and the many client’s I was privileged to work with. It allowed me to take my initial toolkit approach and find ways (processes and technology) to accelerate the process. It’s a “do it fast” and “uncover surprises fast” and “make adjustments fast” and “realize value fast” approach.
Now in 2011 it seems that the strategic planning approach needs to evolve once again. It’s a natural evolution that has been occurring, but has now been accelerated because of the environment we are finding ourselves in. The progression has been to take strategic planning from a step-by-step cookbook approach, first to an approach rooted in business needs, then to an approach that was faster and now, for the next step in strategy, to transform it into an approach that retains the value in the first two iterations but added a much-needed third component. What is that component?
Action!
I first began to realize that something was missing when I observed what happened to strategy I’d done after I’d delivered it to an organization. In some cases, I stayed involved at the organization’s request and we observed that real and expected value began to be realized from the strategy. In some cases I remained with organizations through to the completion of the implementation of strategic plans, and again, there was value. There were instances, however, where I was not involved in the implementation of strategy, only to find out later that the organization hadn’t realized the value they’d hoped for.
App Wednesday: Project Management using SG Project Pro
If you need to manage projects and you want to leverage your iPad to do so, there are various options. Many of us have used Microsoft Project for planning, but it often proves to be cumbersome to use. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find a tool for the iPad that was easy to use for managing a variety of projects. I used Liquid Planner for a time and it is excellent, but it requires you to be connected which proved from time to time to not work for me personally.
My search eventually took me to this Wednesday’s app of the week: SG Project Pro
This app is fantastic for managing multiple projects. It gives you a nice simple set of tools to create Projects with associated Tasks and Actions. I particularly like that they have the ability to create Project Risks that get associated and managed within the project. As well, being able to go to the Portfolio Home and see a bird’s eye view of you projects and their status is awesome. I also like that the app allows me to easily share various view with other people. I can do an update to a project plan, for example, during a meeting and then, send the PDF version of that plan to the participants. Or I can send an executive summary PDF version to senior people who might not want all the details. Additionally, I can save to Dropbox, which is an added bonus leveraging the strength of the cloud.
Some of the features highlighted by SG Project Pro are:
- Create projects and manage a portfolio of active projects
- Create task schedules with table and Gantt-style views
- Create and manage Action Items for each project
- Create and manage Risks for each project
- Associate Action Items and Risks with tasks in a project schedule
- Set a cost for each task and view cost-to-date, cost-to-go, and total cost
- View and study the overall schedule for your suite of active projects
- Produce customized reports for projects, team members, and a group of projects
- Email a variety of PDF reports directly to the project team or stakeholder
- Export or email project data in XML format
- Share data easily using Dropbox
- Share your iPad display using a VGA projector
- Share project data easily with SG Project Go for iPhone
It really works well and leverages the strengths of the iPad. If you are looking for a solid project management tool for your mobile needs, be sure to give SG Project Pro a look!
mip’s scan Podcast: The End of The Week Update!
End of another week here and that means another End of the Week Update!
It’s been a busy roller-coaster kind of week and so I’ve kept it a brief update. I’ve got a short reflection on the passing of Steve Jobs and how he influenced my working life. As well, I’ve got a very brief teaser on the new OS coming out next week for download. I put it onto my iPhone 4 and it’s awesome and I share just a little thought on it without giving too much away.
To enjoy today’s podcast, click on the link below.
Rest in Peace Steve Jobs
What can be said about Steve Jobs on this sad day. So much has already been said and will be said. I thought this morning, I’d share a clip that I’ve watched numerous times. It is likely that most of you have seen it, but if not, it is definitely worth watching. Steve Jobs has influenced me for many many years. In many ways his influence has shaped the way I’ve worked – not just through the tools he’s provided the world, but also in his mindset. This clip really captures the essence of how Steve Jobs lived and worked.
He will be missed.
App Wednesday: Skype on Your Mobile Device
This week’s App Wednesday features a favorite of mine for great video calling and VoiP calling while on the go. I’m talking about Skype, a tool that millions of people have used for years on their computers. I have it installed on my iPhone and my iPad and it is indispensable for me. I often FaceTime, but Skype has the benefit for me that so many people already use it on their computers. With FaceTime, I can only video call people with an iOS device or if they have FaceTime on their Mac. With Skype, I can call PC users, Mac users, Android users and iOS users. Its market penetration is a real strength. Of course, market penetration alone wouldn’t make this a great app. It has to work. On my iPhone and especially on my iPad it works outstandingly. The recently launched iPad version has a great user interface, making it easy to use. Call quality is very good for both voice and video.
You can grab Skype for your iOS device here for the iPad and here for iPhone.
You can also grab the Android version here, thought I haven’t personally tested that version yet.
