Month: May 2008
Standards Organizations CTOs Should Track
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from" teaches Andrew S. Tanebaum in his classic text on Computer Networks.
His point is so very important for CTOs to noodle over. Every vendor, integrator and PM will tell you they are following standards. GREAT! But so what? The point is they need to be following the standards you expect them to follow and they need to be building to your vision by following your guidance.
For CTOs, standards are things that everyone tries to deviate from.
They are created to make life easier and when appropriately developed
and used/implemented they can significantly enhance the overall
functionality and performance of all elements of the technology stack.
Even companies which develop proprietary, closed source code like
standards, but generally those companies tend to ignore standards
whenever it is convenient since doing so can help them lock others out
of key market areas.
As an aid to thinking through standards, I'd recommend CTO's turn to the standard for online encyclopedic information, Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a couple great entries on standards. The primary entry is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard. From there we read that a standard is "It is usually a formal document that establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes and practices."
Elsewhere on Wikipedia there is a list of all standards bodies. Not every standards body deals with topics of interest to IT focused CTOs. The list below is an extract from the Wikipedia article that only has those groups I think are working topics of interest to CTOs.
- 3GPP – 3rd Generation Partnership Project – Website
- 3GPP2 – 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 – Website
- AIIM – Association for Information and Image Management – Website
- ANSI – American National Standards Institute
- DMTF – Distributed Management Task Force. develops and maintains standards for systems management of IT environments in enterprises and the Internet.
- Ecma International – Ecma International (previously called ECMA). Computer standards with a business-like approach.
- GS1 – Global supply chain standards (identification numbers, barcodes, electronic commerce transactions, RFID) – Website
- IBTA – Infiniband Trade Association
- IEEE – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – Website
- IETF – Internet Engineering Task Force – Website
- ISO – International Organization for Standardization – Website
- ITU – The International Telecommunication Union – Website
- Liberty Alliance – Liberty Alliance – Website
- Media Grid – Media Grid Standards Organization – Website
- OASIS – Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards – Website
- OGC – Open Geospatial Consortium – Website
- OMA – Open Mobile Alliance – Website
- OGF – Open Grid Forum (merger of Global Grid Forum (GGF) and Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA)) – Website
- TM Forum – Telemanagement Forum – TMF Website
- W3C – World Wide Web Consortium – Website
- WSA – Website Standards Association Website
I'd recommend a review of the list and a familiarization with the sites of the organizations above. Staying fluent in the content on the sites above can help you provide valuable context and direction to development team and integrators, and can help in your dialog with IT vendors.
I’m so tired of pot shots from the peanut gallery
I saw an article title pop up in my RSS reader today that made me think "Oh no, here we go again." The title in the news feed was "Behind US Intelligence Failures." I immediately thought this was another re-hash of major failures to predict the course of human events. It is important for us to confront why it is impossible to know the future, so there is nothing wrong with studying and writing about failure, but I get tired of the way most in the press seem to think they could do better, and I really get fed up by cheap shots from the uninformed. But what the heck, I clicked on the link.
Much to my surprise, the link lead me to a very well written article in the Washington Post titled "The Real Intelligence Failure? Spineless Spies." It was not written by a reporter trying to look smart. It was written by one of the greats from the intelligence community, Mark Lowenthal. This article is well worth a read, and I hope it is debated and discussed by all citizens interested in national security.
But, this CTOvision blog is for enterprise CTOs. So I guess I better mention the hook for CTOs. This is it: Mark's article focuses on the core mission of the intelligence community, which is
The Future Is Changing Again
There have been several recent announcements by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project worth note. OLPC is a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the MIT Media Lab with the goal of providing one laptop for every child on the planet. So far they have delivered about 500,000 systems. That's huge by any standard.
The first new announcement is that project leaders have now announced that Microsoft windows will run on the devices. The laptops will have a duel boot mode so Linux will also be an OS. The decision adds cost to the laptop, but not much. More memory is required to run two OSs, and Microsoft is charging $3 per CPU in licensing fees.
The second recent announcement is a new design. The current design is a smart, futuristic looking device that looks great and provides great functionality in a form factor that can take a beating.
The next version, due in 2010, is a smaller model that has dual touch screens and no keyboard.
SOA: How to pick the right definition
The term SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) has been around for quite a while, and it seems like everyone is using it. But is everyone using it correctly? I guess that is open to debate, but since everyone seems to be using it differently the odds are that enterprise CTOs will have to think through their own use of the term and may need to issue guidance to vendors, integrators and internal staff on how the term is to be used in the enterprise. .
I wondered how many definitions of SOA there are out there today. So I did a Google Search. I wanted to limit my search to only those sites that claim to provide definitions. So I launched a search for "SOA intitle:dictionary "
Of course that search will not give precise results, I thought it would narrow my results down.
Thank goodness I narrowed my results down. I only got 12,300 hits back from that search.
Zettaflop Supercomputers and Moore’s Law
Intel's Pat Gelsinger, a guy in a position to know and help drive Intel's technology roadmap (he is Intel's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and SVP) spoke recently at the Intel Developers Forum where he gave a presentation called "From Petaflops to Milliwatts." In that presentation he described something we should all be glad to know, he believes Moore's Law will continue to hold good through 2029 (as I'm sure most readers here know, Moore's Law comes from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's statement that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years).
Read more on Pat Gelsinger's latest statement at the article on Web Sphere Journal.
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