Month: June 2008
Enter my office: using Adobe Acrobat Connect
I have picked a primary online meeting tool for my consultancy (Crucial Point LLC). Although I will use any tool a client or associate needs me to use, the tool I prefer is Adobe Acrobat Connect.
Why did I select Adobe Acrobat Connect? A key reason is that no downloads are required for this to work (assuming, of course, that you have flash player installed on your system, which 98% of the computers on earth already do).
Sea Dragon and PhotoSynth
This first post is on Sea Dragon and Photosynth.
SeaDragon
is a capability that promises to change the way people use screens,
from wall sized displays to mobile devices. Visual information can be
smoothly browsed regardless of the size of the dataset or the bandwidth
of the network. For more info see:
http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx
A YouTube demo of Seadragon is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-DqZ8jAmv0
I would highly recommend watching that video. It really makes this technology easy to understand.
At the second half of this YouTube video is a demo of the next technology: “Photosynth.”
Photosynth was called “the coolest technology I have seen in recent
memory” by Jeff Jonas. Its power comes from its ability to find
context in images and link that context to other images and other
metadata so the context is accumulated. Photo collections can be
turned into entry points to explore the entire world. You can explore
gigabytes of information in seconds. This helps humans make sense of
what they are looking at. For an appreciation of what Photosynth might
do for our mission area, see the same YouTube video I mentioned above
at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-DqZ8jAmv0
As you watch this video, imagine if all the images any source anywhere had taken were
linked together in the way you will see images of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
Adm. Stavridis: Think, Read, Write and Publish, and Blog Too
In a previous post I mentioned the AFCEA/JFCOM Joint Warfighting Conference. I’ve e-mailed friends and associates more detailed thoughts on the significance of the conference. If you would like my views drop me a note and I’d be glad to share.
During the conference there were several very important messages for CTOs, including a few controversial points I’m still trying to think about how to diplomatically blog a
bout. One topic I’d like to discuss now is encouragement from Admiral Stavridis, the four star USN commander of U.S. Southern Command. He strongly supports and encourages leaders to publish, and I think that is a message all CTOs should listen to.
A good summation of his call to publish is on the Signal Scape blog at:
Adm. Stavridis: Think, Read, Write and Publish
Here is a quote from that entry:
Adm. James G. Stavridis, USN, commander, U.S. Southern Command,
stepped away from
Clayton Christensen, Disruptive Innovations and Enterprise IT
Today I got to meet one of the most influential
thinkers/speakers/writers in the globe today– Clayton Christensen. He
spoke to a small group of technologists (CIOs and CTOs) at the Cisco IT
executive forum, and held us all spell-bound by his fascinating (but
sometimes dismal) projections based on his understanding of some major market forces.
Although I recognize most of the thoughts he presented from his
books and articles, it was good having his personal context. It may
help some of those concepts to sink it a bit more, and will help me as
I try to maintain an eye on the horizon for the next technology
disruptions.
One thing I realized right away is that I have been using the terms
he coined a little bit differently than he does. I hope that is just a
matter of perspective and not a misuse of the concepts he articulates
so well.
AFCEA, JFCOM, Blogs and Twitter
AFCEA just pulled together another great conference (Joint Warfighting 2008). They have been
real pioneers when it comes to using new Web2.0 technologies during
these events, and that really came out during this conference. For example, some of
Signal Magazine's greatest writers, including Maryann Lawlor, were at
the conference blogging the highlights of the key events as they were
occurring (they also encouraged other bloggers to post, including the
military PAOs). For a look at what they did: The AFCEA blog for the Joint Warfighting 2008 conference starts here. The JFCOM blog for the conference starts here.
Both AFCEA and JFCOM also used Twitter to give a running feed of what is happening where. To see what the AFCEA Twitter Feed looked like click here. To see what the JFCOM feed looked like click here.
I've been using twitter a bit as well, and I encourage all CTOs to
check it out. If you use it wisely and configure it to automatically
update your Plaxo feed and Facebook it can be an easy way to keep comrades up to speed on items of interest. I've also posted a feed on my blog here as a bit of an experiment (I might decide to move that to my personal page instead).
Why do folks like me see a potential benefit from Twitter? One
example is in the post I did before going to the conference last
week. After some friends saw that we were able to pre-arrange some
meetings that we would not have done without Twitter. And, by
following Signal and AFCEA's twitter feed, I was able to maximize my time at
the conference.
You can check out my feed at: http://twitter.com/bobgourley
ITIL for CTOs
ITIL is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, a set of tips, techniques, processes and concepts for managing an IT enterprise. ITIL focuses on infrastructure, application development and operations. ITIL is without a doubt the most widely accepted approach to enterprise management. It provides a full set of best practices.
I've come to believe that all CTOs should learn ITIL. I don't believe ITIL holds all the answers for enterprises, but it has many useful models and many best practices that can be of enormous benefit, so enterprise class CTOs will increasingly find a familiarity with ITIL comes in handy. For CTOs in vendors, integrators or startups, you will be interacting with enterprise technologists and should understand the power of ITIL as well.
ITIL came out of the UK and the name ITIL remains a registered trademark of the UK's Office of Government Commerce (OGC), so I should tip my hat to them. The OGC and the many other contributors to the ITIL have done enterprises everywhere a great service and they deserve our thanks.
The reference library of ITIL is provided in five core texts:
- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operation
- Continual Service Improvement
Benefits of ITIL, asserted on the ITIL site, include:
- reduced costs
- improved IT services through the use of proven best practice processes
- improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
- standards and guidance
- improved productivity
- improved use of skills and experience
- improved delivery of third party services through the
specification of ITIL or ISO 20000 as the standard for service delivery
in services procurements.
The following info on the books of ITIL v3 is condensed from Wikipedia's entry on ITIL:
Service Strategy
Service strategy encompasses a framework to build best practice in developing a long
term strategy. Topics include: general
strategy, competition and market space, service provider types, service
management as a strategic asset, organization design and development,
key process activities, financial management, service portfolio
management, demand management, and key roles and responsibilities of
staff engaging in service strategy.
Service Design
The design of IT services conforming to best practice, and including
design of architecture, processes, policies, documentation, and allow
for future business requirements. This also encompasses topics such as
Service Design Package (SDP), Service catalog management, Service Level
management, designing for capacity management, IT service continuity,
Information Security, supplier management, and key roles and
responsibilities for staff engaging in service design
Service Transition
Service transition relates to the delivery of services required by
the business into live\operational use, and often encompasses the
"project" side of IT rather than "BAU" (Business As Usual). This area
also covers topics such as managing changes to the environment.
Topics include Service Asset and Configuration Management, Transition
Planning and Support, Release and deployment management, Change
Management, Knowledge Management, as well as the key roles of staff
engaging in Service Transition.
Service Operation
Best practice for achieving the delivery of agreed levels of
services both to end-users and the customers (where "customers" refer
to those individuals who pay for the service and negotiate the SLAs).
Service Operations is the part of the lifecycle where the services and
value is actually directly delivered. Also the monitoring of problems
and balance between service reliability and cost etc are considered.
Topics include balancing conflicting goals (e.g. reliability v cost
etc), Event management, incident management, problem management, event
fulfillment, asset management, service desk, technical and application
management,
as well as key roles and responsibilities for staff
engaging in Service Operation.
The above is just a short introduction. For more info, I recommend the booklet Visible Ops, by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford. The book is a very fast read and will leave you with enough of an understanding of the power of ITIL to let you decide how fast to move your organization into implementing it.
CMU: An impressive resource
I recently finished a visit to one of our nation's greatest intellectual resources, the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. The incredible work being accomplished at the university includes the globally famous Software Engineering Institute and the equally renowned CERT/CC. CMU also serves the nation by hosting and supporting Cylab. More on each of these is below.
SEI is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC). SEI processes and practices, which are almost certainly familiar to readers of this blog, are now being taught at universities everywhere. Their comprehensive approach to quality is being used today by development organizations around the world and is producing fantastic results. There are many reasons for this, but the short version is that SEI processes like the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), the Team Software Process (TSP) and the Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis (SEMA) have proven to enhance the quality and performance of software activities while reducing cost and development time. Read more at: http://www.sei.cmu.edu.
The CERT/CC is a group I first stared working with in December 1998 when I was one of the startup grew of the JTF-CND. I've been a big fan of them sever since, and have tried to track what was going on there, but frankly I lost touch and am really glad I got the in person update. The CERT/CC is a critical enabler of hte IT industry's ability to detect and remediate vulnerabilities, conduct computer forensics, visualize cyber information, and respond to incidents of every scale. For more on the CERT read more at: http://cert.org.
The Cylab is the nation's largest university based research and education program focused on cyber security, dependability and privacy. Cylab conducts sponsored research as one of the NSF CyberTrust centers. According to the CyLab website:
The CyLab Strategy is to integrate response, prediction, research
and development, and education both nationally and internationally and
build capacity in:
- Technology – by pursuing an aggressive, highly
interdisciplinary research and development agenda that integrates
technology, policy, and management- Human Resources – by educating professionals in Information Technologies, Business, and Policy, and by creating “cyber-aware” citizens worldwide
- Industry – by transitioning technologies to large, medium, and small companies and by creating start-ups
For more on the Cylab read more at: http://www.cylab.cmu.edu/.
Thanks to all at CMU for doing what you do, it is really appreciated by computer scientists, CTOs and leaders everywhere. Please keep it up.
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