Best of Breed versus Polyglot Revisited
If you feel that PaaS is a new-age devops/application management tool, like any management tool user or vendor, you’ll want maximum breadth of coverage. Nobody wants multiple monitoring, backup, deployment or configuration management solutions for each platform or application in their environment. Heterogeneous breadth coverage with the ever elusive “single pane of glass” is the [...]
Humans are Taking Jobs Away From Robots, Not Vice Versa
First let me set the stage. I’m a big fan of Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson who are the authors of Race Against the Machine, a book which explore how technological innovation is impacting our jobs, skills, and wages- more specifically how technology is taking our jobs. Andrew McAfee was featured in my book, The [...]
Only Yahoos Work in an Office!?
Ok, so I think almost everybody has either slammed Marissa Mayer about the new Yahoo non-remote worker policy or said that it’s the medicine they have to swallow. Very few are actually pointing out however, that Yahoo was probably just really bad at managing their remote employees. In the end, I don’t care, that just [...]
Why Did Yahoo! Ban Telecommuting for Employees?
If you haven’t heard the recent news, Yahoo! decided to ban telecommuting and is now forcing all employees to physically come into the office to work and if they can’t or won’t then they can find a job elsewhere. At first glance this seems a bit counter intuitive to what many other companies are doing. [...]
Managing customers’ expectations when moving your company’s application or service into the Cloud
In my last post, I outlined some of the challenges technology vendors often face when confronted with customer demands that don’t meet the vendors’ cloud providers’ contractual obligations. Now let’s talk about some of the strategies I’ve used to bridge these gaps when negotiating with the cloud service provider. Get your customer and your cloud [...]
Clown Computing–Entertaining and Attention Grabbing but a Flawed Thesis
Recently I attended Webstock, a conference in Wellington, New Zealand that is well known for bringing together technology, design and general brain stimulation. It was a great event, with some awesome speakers but one presentation, by Jason Scott, part of an activist preservationist group Archive Team, kind of stuck in my craw. In his presentation, [...]
Commoditizing Data Science
My ongoing conversations with several people continue to reaffirm my belief that Data Science is still perceived to be a sacred discipline and data scientists are perceived to be highly skilled statisticians who walk around wearing white lab coats. The best data scientists are not the ones who know the most about data but they [...]
Celebrity Engineers–Software’s Equivalent of Arts Patronage
Back in the days gone by, if you were part of the landed gentry, lording over your landholdings and the common folk who lived on said land, you’d look to becoming a patron of the arts as a way to ensure your name would live on after your death. While perhaps not a particularly sound [...]
Why Employees Should be Allowed to Work From Home
Today around 10% of Americans are regularly working from home, and for good reason. Many organizations today are starting to implement flexible work environments where employees can either work part time or full time from home or from a cafe, a bookstore, or anywhere else. There really is no longer a good reason to force [...]
Does it matter if you are popular on LinkedIn?
I am sure that some of us have gotten these really cool e-mails from Linkedin lately helping us put some kind of context around our relative popularity on the internet, or at least on the LinkedIn system. The problem is that being popular on LinkedIn does not matter to me at all. Sure the infographic [...]
Traditional IT Shops Starting to Evangelize Cloud, and End to the FUD In Sight?
I was interested to read some coverage of the recent event that was run by Amazon Web Services in Sydney, Australia to celebrate the launch of two Sydney availability zones for the company. As an aside its interesting to look at the list of services that AWS has chosen to go to market with. It [...]
Finding opportunities to unseat incumbents
On Quora, this question was asked: Competition: How do you assess the value of a new product or service vs an incumbent’s? Is there a starting set of criteria? eg. price, quantity provided, ease of use, breadth and so on. I’m thinking specifically of a product to supply financial news and information and prices. What [...]
Enterprise software wars: 5 points of advice for CIOs
Enterprise software, long a complex domain only of interest to specialists, has become the darling of venture capital investors and start-ups. This post presents context and concludes with advice for CIOs on navigating the changing enterprise software landscape. Enterprise software eats the world (photo credit: Michael Krigsman) To get a sense of growing interest in [...]
On the Ethic of Delivery – Required Watching
Over the past few years I’ve been a kind of informal adviser to the Defrag event. The role is less than onerous, Eric Norlin totally understands what his participants (and at defrag, attendees really are participants and not simply an audience) most want to see. Defrag has always been a
The Multi-Screen Employee Experience
Multi-screen experiences are crucial but they aren’t just for the consumer that has his tablet open while watching TV. The multi-screen experience is just as important for employees within organizations and is a necessity for the future of work. Let’s take at a realistic scenario: Tina wakes up in the morning to check her email on [...]
