Category Archives: Business & Technology
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.
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!
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.
Cloud Is Where It is Going, But It Isn’t About Clouds….
Over the past two years I’ve watched as cloud-based offerings continue to emerge, strengthen and increasingly provide value to countless organizations. What I haven’t like is the very use of “cloud” whether it’s for cloud computing, cloud services, cloud storage, cloud-whatever. I don’t like it. The reason I don’t like it is twofold:
- clouds by their very nature are nebulous, wispy things. That concept betrays the very values and characteristics you should look for in this type of offering. Oh I know why the term cloud is used (for those who don’t the Internet itself has often been drawn as a cloud in networking diagrams. Now that services are being moved to the Internet, people equate what’s happening as your services moving on the diagram from behind your firewall and out into the cloud) but it doesn’t capture the true strength of the offering. That strength is adaptability. We’ll talk more about that in a moment.
- the second reason I don’t like cloud is that it’s too often a marketing buzz word being thrown around by vendors trying to capture the attention of senior people within organizations. Put cloud into the sales pitch and suddenly it’s trend and worth looking at (so the story goes). This hyped-up catch-all idea, The Cloud, can mislead companies into thinking they’ve hit on a panacea that will solve all their computing issues.
mip’s scan Podcast: The End of The Week Update!
Good morning everyone! Give a listen this morning to a short podcast where I hit on 2 areas of discussion:
- Windows 8 – I’ve had a chance to install the beta release and wanted to give some thoughts as to what I’ve seen
- IT Risk – expanding on a post I’d done earlier this week on risk and in preparation for an upcoming presentation I am giving on the topic, I discuss briefly this morning the importance of identifying and dealing with risk as it relates to technology within organizations.
I hope you enjoy today’s show! To give it a listen, simply click the link below.
App Wednesday: LogMeIn Ignition for the iPad
This week’s app for App Wednesday is truly one of those “must have” apps for me. The app is LogMeIn Ignition which allows you to remotely access and control your PC or Mac from wherever you are.
For quiet a while, I have used the LogMeIn service via other computers and browsers. The way it works is that you simply setup and 
account (there is a cost) and then associate your PC or Mac with that account. I have three computers associated: my work computer in the office, my personal iMac at home and my personal Mac Mini at home. The service has traditionally allow me, for example, to be on my laptop working remotely (let’s say at a client location) and then if needed, I could access through a browser any of my computers. Once you’ve logged into the service via a browser, you can then remotely control the computer at the remote location.
With the introduction of the iPad app, this service became even more valuable to me. It means that I can even more comfortably travel with just my iPad and not worry about needing my computer. If something does arise where I need my actual computer, I can easily bring it up on my iPad and work at as though I was sitting in front of my actual computer.
It is apps like LogMeIn Ignition that really enhance the value of the iPad. In a sense it gives you the best of both worlds: all the portability and unique apps/experience of using an iPad while still giving you access to the legacy stuff/functionality you may require from your traditional computer. Remember, this is a transition period as we are at the start of the post PC-era and tools like LogMeIn Ignition will help to make that transition for many users.
Do You Have A Risk Mitigation Strategy in Place?
Based on some of the questions being emailed to me from this morning’s post on Identifying IT Risk, I thought I’d create a quick poll to get some realtime input from readers. So the question is “Does your organization have a risk mitigation strategy in place?”
Identifying and Managing IT Risk
There is no doubt that we live in a world of high risk especially when it comes to the technology that we use in our businesses. I often encourage clients to take steps to manage and mitigate risk so to avoid costly and disruptive issues in the future. I am preparing for a presentation in November where I will be speaking about risk in IT and thought I’d share a few thoughts here.
The first step in beginning to manage & mitigate risk is the ability to identify risk. There are three key areas or categories that you should consider when assessing your own IT environment, which is comprised of people, processes and technology (don’t just focus on the tech or you will undoubtedly miss important risk areas).
What Should RIM Focus On?
By now you’ve heard that RIM performance has again fallen short of expectations. If their performance wasn’t bad enough, 
it also seems that the overall brand is also taking a serious hit – so they are losing market-share and mind-share. Not a good combination of market dynamics.
A post I’d previously written about with regard to building an Ecosystem has had some good discussion and I got numerous emails from readers that sparked some thoughts for me. In that article I spoke about the need to create a strategic core access point (SCAP) and referenced what others had done. People in the discussion thread asked a good question, “what would RIM’s SCAP be? push email? security?”
I would say that what RIM should focus on is their Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). You can’t built an ecosystem from a device. Pinning all hopes on QNX powered phones or some version 2 of the Playbook will yield the same results as we see today. What RIM should do is leverage the SCAP that they and they alone control at this point. That is the BES. IT departments are falling out of love with RIM phones but the BES still remains a key enterprise strength. Of course if RIM’s market share continues to drop, there will be little to no need for a BES in the coming years. What RIM should do and do quickly is open up their BES to all the handhelds. That is their SCAP. From there they can build an ecosystem. They can drive security measures to Android and iPhone devices. They can fend off the threat that Microsoft is sure to present shortly with the update to the phones and the partnership with Nokia. From the BES they can begin to build an enterprise ecosystem. To do otherwise will only continue the downward trend they’ve found themselves over the past 12-18 months.
