Archive for FASTForward '08
by Joe McKendrick
September 9, 2008 at 4:20 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, FASTForward '08, User Revolution
FastForward colleague Bill Ives provided a glimpse of his summer hours, 21st-century style, which is informal, yet highly productive. He relays how his colleague Tom Davenport stays connected, even from the wild dunes of Cape Cod.
That was the case with me as well. Call me a wannabe “Technomadic.” From Chicago (where I was a panelist for a session at The Open Group Enterprise Architecture conference — details here), on northward to the wilderness of Upper Peninsula Michigan, Mackinac Island (pictured here), Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and, later in the summer, to the Green Mountain Inn in Vermont, I posted blogs, collaborated with colleagues, published research, and worked on applications, quite seamlessly, without anyone knowing where I was on any given day.
The Green Mountain Inn’s claim to fame is that Lowell Thomas, the famed broadcaster, would conduct his shows from the inn during ski season. In other words, Lowell wanted to get away on ski vacations without leaving work, so he brought his work with him. Now with wireless access and broadband, every average Joe can broadcast from the inn.
Some might say it’s a little obsessive to want to always stay connected; but I am my own boss, and therefore do not receive vacation pay. So I prefer to stay in touch with the world. But by spending a couple of hours a day online at a minimum, work flowed and clients were kept happy (I hope) and I still had a refreshing amount of downtime.
Technomadic is a term coined by Steve Roberts, who many years ago, set off on a cross-country trek on a bicycle outfitted with a satellite uplink, the latest communications technology and microprocessors of the time. Now, anyone can compute and collaborate, anywhere, anytime. The Web has made sense of place irrelevant to modern-day work.
by Joe McKendrick
July 29, 2008 at 11:12 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Barriers, Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Social Computing
The beauty of cloud computing was that it was something you just did without having to think too hard about it. Now, apparently, some people are trying to think very hard about it.
HP, Intel, and Yahoo! have just announced the creation of a “global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.”
What is the purpose of having a test bed? I mean, isn’t the Internet and its user base the test bed for such things? (This is said partially tongue in cheek…) According to the joint press release, the “official” Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a testing environment to study cloud computing issues “on at a larger scale than ever before.”
The institutions supporting the test bed include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. HP, Intel, and Yahoo! will also host centers.
Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational later this year. Parties interested in using the test beds for their own budding cloud applications will need to go through a selection process, however.
This initiative is another sign — a very high-level one at that — of the tectonic shift taking place beneath the feet of the entire computer and software industry. End users are increasingly looking to the network to take advantage of applications, services, and utilities, versus installing and maintaining these artifacts at their own sites.
by Joe McKendrick
March 5, 2008 at 4:01 pm · Filed under
Change, Collaboration, Dead Paradigms, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, IT Department, Messy World, User Revolution
In the old days, radicals talked about workers owning the means of production.
What about owning the means of production in today’s information age?
Bob Lewis has a 21st Century take on this: why not leave it up up to the end users to supply their own computers on the job?
Here’s the lay of the land, as Bob puts it:
“When using their home computers, end-users experience a vast array of possibilities, but at the office they operate in a very constrained space; and increasingly, ‘work/life balance’ is giving way to “‘live your life wherever you are.’”
As we’ve seen from the many insights coming out of FastForward ‘08, users need to be unleashed to get their jobs done with the tools they see fit. So why not let employees do their thing with their own PCs? As Bob Lewis put it:
“No corporate-owned PCs at all. Let employees buy their own — whatever they think they need to do their jobs. It’s Nicholas Carr’s vision in reverse: Only central IT remains. Employees take over ownership of the periphery, including responsibility for their own PC support.”
We already see plenty of instances of employees using their own mobile devices for work-related connectivity. And, countless users log in from their homes to check into the intranet or for updated communications.
Of course, the legal departments would pull their hair out at the notion of everyone bringing in their own machines to work, especially in light of fears of data being taken out the door. But if there were a way to effectively lock down data either online or offline, wouldn’t this idea make a lot of sense?
So, Bob put another idea out there — virtualize. “Give end-users two virtual machines.” One virtual machine — the corporate virtual machine — could be “buttoned-down, corporate, protected, fully supported, and strongly connected.” The personal virtual machine could be the “sandbox,” on which users can do anything their hearts desire.
by Paula Thornton
February 28, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under
Barriers, Change, Control, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Freedom, Social Networking, User Revolution
Marketing Daily released a piece today that sounds remarkably similar to the key messages shared at FASTforward ‘08. It details the actions of Ford of Canada:
FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA is launching its biggest marketing push in six years with a campaign that focuses on letting Ford customers serve as brand ambassadors.
The ads carry the theme line: “A car is just a car until it’s powered by you.”
The campaign also includes a new Web site, Fordpoweredbyyou.ca. The site is intended as a social-media forum where consumers can air their opinions of the Ford brand, technology and vehicles.
“We don’t own the brand the way we used to; consumers own it. It’s not about claims any more. Consumers don’t want to be preached to. It’s about a dialogue and discovery, giving people the chance to comment,” he says. “We see it as more of a consumer site than our site.
I draw attention to the fact that Ford is an American company with the actions taking place in Canada. I add to that the fact that many of the brightest voices on this blog, are Canadians (I can only claim founder heritage in the 1600s).
I have noted more and more conversations where the opportunities to leverage 2.0 (or the willingness to embrace/adopt, typically in pursuit of innovation) are greater outside the US. The US was founded on the pursuit of freedom to act. With that freedom it became the economic leader of the free world. Are US enterprises typically places where people are free to act?
It would appear that the titans of industry need to take a step back and rethink their positions and their methods of conducting business. As Don Tapscott so powerfully illustrated in his keynote last week, the tsunami is on its way. There are crumbling foundations that will not withstand the force. And there won’t be armies bearing humanitarian aid in the aftermath.
by Paula Thornton
February 25, 2008 at 1:28 am · Filed under
3.0, FASTForward '08, Intent, Interaction, Metadata, Semantic
Not to diminish my colleague Joe’s efforts to report on John Hagel’s comments, the true potential is not in the Attention Economy but in the Attraction Economy (not to be limited to emotional connection, see also video [7:21] — emotion is one dimension in a personal economic model of decisions, and is relevant but not a priority in enterprise interactions).
Attention is the goal; attraction is the most effective means to achieve the goal: moving from reactive to interactive. The new ROI is Return on Interaction.
Hagel misses the real potential when he recommends moving from “push” to “pull” to optimize resources. Basic laws of physics suggest that the level of energy (effort) expended is the same for either push or pull – there is no net gain. The only way to capitalize beyond push or pull models is to leverage existing energy (effort for free) – by tapping the ‘draw’, the natural forces of attraction between: the customer and the company, the employer and the company, any combination of resources seeking each other.
Several different speakers illustrated how this attraction can be facilitated: zero-term search, liberal use of personal metadata and related metadata to build inference.
Ok, so if we’re going to talk inference then we’re really pushing toward 3.0. But the true innovative stories were leaning in that direction.
Gerry Campbell of Reuters, spoke of the significance of context — the need to create an ecosystem (infrastructure) that provides capabilities beyond core business operations. To move themselves and their customers toward such a reality, Reuters purchased a technology upon which they built Calais to enrich content with semantic metadata. Over time, user-generated context also needs to be fed back into the system. Such efforts move toward a big “tent” revival, where Michael Cleary of Reuters suggests that con-tent is brought together seamlessly with in-tent.
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