Category Archives: Technology

The Cloud Manifesto

The Catalyst for Cloud

I  just spent two great days in Banff at the Cloud Matters conference representing IT World Canada.  The conference had over 175 people and a star-studded list of speakers.  At the end of the conference, I was part of a panel where each member was asked to give three minutes on what we could do to provide a Catalyst for Cloud Computing in Canada.

Our panel consisted of:

  • Jim Love, CIO IT World Canada
  • Timothy Grayson, Director epost Product Development Canada Post
  • Chris C. Kemp, CEO Nebula and Co-Founder Open Stack
  • Peter Coffee, VP/CTO and Head of Platform Research Salesforce.com
  • William Dupley, Chief Solutions Officer HP Canada
  • Harpreet Dhillon, Cloud and Open Source Program Manager City of Calgary
  • Robert Hart, Founder and CEO Canadian Cloud Council
  • Wayne Walls, Chief Cloud Strategist Rackspace
  • Ian Rae, CEO CloudOps

My contribution took the form of a “rant” which I dubbed The Cloud Manifesto – A Catalyst for Cloud.  It was partly original opinion, partly ideas inspired by the speakers over the two days of the conference.    Here it is…

The Cloud Manifesto – A Catalyst for Cloud

Ten points which will provide a catalyst for the movement to Cloud computing: Continue reading

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They killed Neo – the Matrix resumes

Hackers for right, we are one down.(from a tweet by Tim Berners-Lee father of the World Wide Web)

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His eyes haunt me.  From those pictures that adorn the articles that pay tribute to this astonishing young man, he stares out at you.   Depending on the shot, he is alternately mysterious, thoughtful, intense and occasionally mischievous.

His accomplishments daunt me.  At 14 he was co-creator of RSS, the syndication process is at the core of internet publishing.   He co-founded Reddit the social news web-site which, love it or hate it, is one of the most active forums of real discussion on the internet.

His passion for freedom inspires me.  He was a co-founder of Demand Progress, a group which fights for Internet freedom.

His death diminishes us all.   Continue reading

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Internet Addiction – Why You Need To Break the Cycle Before It’s Too Late

My name is Jim and I’m an internet addict.  There.   I said it.

That’s the first step in a 12 Step program.  Admitting you have a problem.  Which is great, except for one thing.  How do you admit you have a problem if you don’t really know you have a problem?

Until last week, I didn’t realize I had a problem.   Like most people,  I’ve joked about it.  I used to refer to my Blackberry as a “crackberry” in jest.  I’ve checked email far too frequently on my iPhone.   But if you would have said I had a problem, I would’ve merely laughed — pretended to have my hand shaking as I went through the withdrawal of not checking my phone.

I’m not laughing anymore.

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Cutting through the clutter — Curation and the new 3 Rs of content.

Two-thirds of tweets are either “so-so” or not worth reading at all.  So says a study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Georgia Tech.

There is a delightful irony that I found this little gem in a tweet.  I read it on a feed from Chris Zane who runs Zane’s Cycle.   I interviewed a few months back for “The Customer Experience Show” a podcast that I host.   I follow Chris on Twitter because he is truly one of the great experts in customer experience.  What he has to say is worth listening to.

If truth be told, I had an little extra incentive to review his twitter stream.  I got a notice that Chris had mentioned me in one of his tweets.  When you get someone who you respect like I do Chris and THEY think that you’ve said something intelligent, you want to know what it was you said.

I — like so many others — say and pass along a great deal of information.   If this study is correct, about a third of it is worth saying.  Despite the source, I don’t believe it for a second.

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Passport to Innovation at Technicity.ca

Thanks to Doug Ford, most Torontonians know that we live in a very literate city –a city of the arts. We know that our city is home to literary giants like Margaret Atwood, one of the world’s great novelists. They’ve come to see that this isn’t merely of interest to some snobbish artistic elite. They have come to see that at the base of this boiling pot of creativity is economic engine brings that hundreds of millions of dollars into our city every year and creates thousands of jobs.

What many haven’t yet realized is that within this same city is another equally creative centre — one that attracts some of the greatest minds in technology — the third largest technology centre in North America.

Most don’t realize that when they are riding the subway or walking down Yonge street,  they could be standing beside some of the giants of the tech industry.   To take only one example, how many average Torontonians know  their city  is home to Mark Surman.  Who is Mark Surman?  For those who don’t know him,  Mark is the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, which, among many, many things brings us Firefox.  You might not know Mark, but you would have to have been vacationing off the planet to not know what Firefox is.  But did you know how it’s linked to our city?  Probably not.

In fact, most Torontonians really do not know how much prosperity the tech sector brings to the city.  How much prosperity? Continue reading

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Unplugged

The smart money was on the third day.  I’d go running and screaming for my iPhone and come back to the world as we know it.

The challenge?  I was undertaking at 10 day retreat.   Totally unplugged.  No phones.  No internet.  Not even books.  And – here’s a kicker.  10 days in total silence.  I would talk to no-one.  Totally unplugged. Continue reading

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Digital Deniers

Do it if you want to — just don’t be proud of it.

I phoned my cousin Mike yesterday to make arrangements for dinner.  We were about to compare calendars and I was stalling while Outlook came up on my machine.  Mike laughed.  He was ready.  All he needed was a date book and a pen.   He laughed and said — “I’m 51 and I still use a date book.”

Of course, as always happens whenever there’s a challenge like this — Outlook took it’s sweet time loading.  Actually, it hung for a minute, as if to prove the triumph of high over low tech.  Mike took the moment to gloat.  So he should.  And it’s okay.  In this circumstance, keeping track of a few social engagements — an electronic calendar is overkill.

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Teach me how to fail – we need the money!

We only learn by our failures. Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard that before. And your cheque is in the mail.

We all repeat this by rote like a demented parrot. How many actually believe it? And if we do, why don’t we act like it?

The cynic would say that the reason we don’t actually allow people to fail is that companies lie. They say they want to encourage taking chances but they really don’t. They simply do not want to pay the price. I suggest that it’s not hypocracy, that gets in the way. The problem is we don’t know HOW to fail. The good news is that you can learn to embrace failure – and reap the rewards. Continue reading

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A pen is just a pen…or is it?

A pen isn’t just a pen. Not when Mark Graham holds it up. He looks at, studies it and holds it up in the air for the audience to see.

“This is exciting!” he says. Tonight, everything Mark talks about is exciting. Pens are not just a product. They are his product. And a pen isn’t just a product — it’s a story — a story about what it takes to produce it and customize it for his customers. If he’s passionate about his products, he’s really excited when he talks about his customers.

At 34 years old Mark, the president of Rightsleeve.com, he has a wisdom beyond his years — and he’s discovered the the real secret to success. It’s this. “Love what you do.”

If you lived through the 90’s where greed was good, or the tech bubble when things were “built to flip” or if you’ve thought about those whose greed and stupidity dragged us into this recession, Mark is a breath of fresh air.

Like people who love what they do, he’s not just playing the game. He’s changing the game.

He’s doing it using technology to advance his strategy. So that’s why he was here tonight, speaking to a group of strategy consultants in CMC Canada’s Strategy special interest group. In addition to my duties as chair of the Toronto chapter, I also chair this group, which I helped found. I love it. It’s where you can meet people who are changing the game.

But back to Mark — and how he’s using technology so well. Because he is using it very well.

There’s a lot of hype about social networking, open source, web 2.0 — the technology industry has never met a buzzword it didn’t over-hype. What’s rare are good examples of how these buzzwords can be used practically to advance your business in new and exciting ways. That’s where Mark comes in.

I met him at a seminar weeks ago. He was there, on a panel with representatives of the big vendors who were spouting the usual blah, blah, blah — buy our products you’ll be the next internet sensation, we love small business, blah, blah, blah. Sorry guys, but my business isn’t going to be energized because I buy your server versus somebody else’s. And it was also a breath of fresh air to hear someone who could say open source without being condescending. It’s hard to take people seriously when everything is a sales pitch for their product.

Mark wasn’t selling us his solution. He simply explained what he’d done, the challenges he’d faced and the results that he’d achieved. No hype. Just a guy who loves what he does.

That sort of thing has real credibility. So when Mark talks, you have to listen. And I did. Along with the rest of the room tonight. In fact, I made notes. Here’s some of the tips that picked up from Mark:

Use technology to foster conversations about important things:

Mark’s open source systems allow him flexibility to dream and adapt — and he’s used that ability to facilitate conversations about things that are important. He has taken a page (literally) from social networking applications like facebook and twitter. He’s uses these to keep people in his company up to date on key activities.

The important words here are key activities. Mark was smart enough to take the essence of social networking, not just adding some features from another application. What makes it work is that they made a conscious choice of what things were most valuable and these are selected and displayed as part of their own in house news feed. By focusing on the information that has the most value — people in his company watch it. Contrast that with what appears on most social networking sites.

There is a law called Sturgeon’s Law and it says that 90% of everything is crap. So if you cut through that and go to what is really valuable, you provide a real service — especially in these days when everybody is overloaded.

Activities, events — new clients, orders and prospects — all of these conveniently packaged, shared and used to make sure everyone knows what is going on and can contribute. I immediately thought of virtual enterprises, like our own company. We have people all over the country, sometimes all over the world. We could use this to keep everyone up to date — even though they aren’t in the office.

Hmmm.

Here’s another great idea that Mark talked about which is close to my heart. Jim Collins, the renowned business writer says there are three things that go into a strategy. You need passion and you need to know what you can do better than anyone else in the world. Mark’s got those covered. But Collins says there’s a third thing — you need to really understand the metrics that drive your business. Sounds easy, but even if they get it (which I doubt) few companies understand it. They publish reams of data or none at all. They don’t give the vital few pieces of information that guide their employees to understand what they have to do on a day by day basis to help fulfill the company’s strategy.

Mark’s company has a great approach to this as well. For example, he has a great little application which shows a sales person what their commission is going to be on each and every sale. So they can see how they are doing constantly. Motivation 101. But Mark’s company goes a step further and guides them with costs so that they can see the profitability of the sale. Sales people know what they can and can’t do. And….there’s more. Operations people are also plugged in with data they need. They can see the orders that are coming in — again in real time. They can sort it by supplier to make sure they can cover multiple orders at one time. Everyone is up to date. The old “sales/operations” feuds are reduced, if not eliminated.

I do a lot of process transformation work using something called Lean. It’s a way to radically improve customer satisfaction, quality and efficiency (yes, you can have all three).

Lean is customer centric. It says that any process that doesn’t generate value to the customer is a waste. It also says that you find ways see all inefficiency and waste. One way to avoid waste is to eliminate mistakes before they happen instead of trying to catch them in the “quality control” steps.

So picture this. Some of Mark’s customers can have their own web-site to order goods. Their standards for orders are place on the each order page — right down to the exact description of the company colours in technical terms. This is important. Companies spend an enormous amount of money on their branding. They want consistency, quality and above all — accuracy. By making all of this visible and having a preset group of items for a company on their own web store, Mark’s company eliminates the potential for error AND increases the efficiency of the process. It’s not rocket science, it’s just damn good process design — enabled by a very friendly, customer focused technology.

But Mark’s approach, like Lean, is not just about efficiency. It’s about a relentless focus on what is of value to the customer. It’s a way to really engage your customer. Once again, Mark is using technology to help. He opens up his site to allow customers to participate. For instance, his customers can comment directly on products they have bought.

That’s where this is about more than technology. It’s about courage. If you only ask questions where you know that you’ll like the answer, you are not really listening. But if you take a chance and ask — people will tell you what they really think. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes its not.

Many companies shy away from real discussions with their customers because they don’t want to face the reality of dealing with issues. How many times have you heard those programmed words, “is there anything else I can do to help you?” when the “customer service” person you are talking to in some far distant land hasn’t helped you at all?

Mark’s people pounce on customer problems and address them. Why not? They are on the customer’s side. If the products tare substandard, they want them fixed or they want them off the list. When you really feel this way, you will have the courage to ask — in public — “what do you think?”

The added bonus is that your customers trust each other more than they will any sales person. Getting that real information adds value to the shopping experience.

This honest is the best way to engage your customers. My favourite saying about customers is from a book called “The Cluetrain Revolution” and it’s as fresh now as it was almost 10 years ago when I read it. It says that “Elvis was right. We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.” In so many companies today, Elvis has truly left the building.

As a strategic consultant, I think one of the best questions that I like to ask is “what do you want people to say about you when you leave the room?” Then I set out to help the client make that happen. Hey, did I say strategy was hard? It’s not — it’s doing it that’s hard.

Conversations in the age of social networking are no longer person to person. They are one to many, thanks to networks like twitter, facebook, Linked In and a host of others. If you can get people to say good things about the company you can get incredible coverage. How do you do that? Easy — well not exactly easy. If you want people to say great things about you or your company, you have to do things that they value. If you have an event, you have to make it a great one so that if someone is on twitter, and followed by thousands of people, their twitter message will say — having a great time @ Rightsleeve.com party. In fact, that has happened.

Doing the small things right. Relentlessly pursuing a dynamite customer experience. Having the creativity and flair to make your message distinct and worth telling. Those are the real tools of using social networks effectively — not just technology. And whether it’s giving out Rightsleeve.com underwear or his hysterical YouTube video with the tag line “friends don’t let friends buy bad promo” — everything is aimed at the customer experience.

To paraphrase my earlier question, the issue is to understand “what do you want people to say about you when they are engaging their social networks?” Then make it possible for them to say that in a way that’s fun and interesting.

Right down to his blog, Mark takes that approach. As a blogger myself, I wish his three rules which he shared were universal:

– write it yourself
– be authentic
– have fun

Notice that “mention your product” is not on the list. Be yourself. Be authentic. Have fun.

And when you do that, even a pen becomes exciting. And it’s rewarding for everyone. And I’ve always maintained that this is good for the bottom line. I won’t tell any tales out of school, but Mark’s company appears to be defying any of the trends that you are seeing in the papers. Sales are up and the company is growing profitably. And that, too, is exciting.

What can I say? Sometimes the good guys win.

I had a great time.

Thanks Mark.

Mark Graham’s company is called Rightsleeve.com and they go in to my “mission statement hall of fame” because you can actually tell what they do from what they say they do. RIGHTSLEEVE.COM uses design, promotional media and technology to deliver outstanding marketing results.

Check them out! I don’t think you’ll regret it.

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Is this a relationship?

My sister Chris is on Facebook. No, it’s not the sign of the Apocalypse. It’s a sign that social media is moving to a new phase.

I’m sure Seinfeld had a show about this — how to tell when something was no longer cool. I’m sure Jerry and the gang had some secret sign that told them when something had left the edge and simply become mainstream.

I remember when I knew that email had reached that point. It was when my parents got an email address. That was it — it was over. The rollout was complete. Global domination was achieved. Sure there might be a few left over folks who wouldn’t get with the program. Heck I’m sure there’s somebody out there with a black and white tv. But outside of a few hold-outs, the job was done.

I wrote a column once called the “dot customer” that predicted when consumer oriented e-commerce would reach that bellwether of success. It was when my wife started shopping on-line.

What I was amazed at then was the acceleration. For those of us who used it in its early primitive form, primarily as a business communication tool and occasionally as a way of keeping in touch with folks around the world — the rise of email took a long time. Years.

The move to e-commerce took a noticeably shorter period of time.

But social networking — wow. It seems like months ago that Facebook hit the scene and now — everyone is on the bandwagon. Even my sister Chris. The last Luddite. She sent me a “friend request” the other day.

Somebody told me in conversation that the biggest growth in Facebook ranks was now, as he so delicately put it, “people in your age range.”

Now on one hand, this is the triumph of Metcalfe’s Law. For those of you who don’t know Metcalfe’s Law, it’s a way of calculating the value of a network. For those who think this way, a network’s value is the square of it’s nodes.

For those who can’t quite grasp that, let me explain it the way it was explained to me. What is the value of one fax machine? Nothing. There’s nobody to send a fax to. Add one more and what is the value? It just went up — because there is someone to send and receive your fax. And there might be mutual value for them. Start adding people and the value of the network grows by doubling and redoubling — until it starts to grow at exponential rates, gathering speed like a snowball rolling down hill.

A guy named Metcalfe predicted that. Smart guy.

What I don’t think he anticipated that was that this growth of network value would itself increase in speed each time. Hence the rapid rise of social networking from uber-cool to ubiquitous.

But here’s the point where I want to ask the question. Has the network really grown in value? This isn’t me being simply a contrarian. In fact, I don’t have an answer. I simply raise the question.

Not everything that gets mass acceptance increases in value. Fads burn out, trends die. And when they die — or crash, the seeds of that destruction are hidden by the initial success. Think back to our Seinfeld model and think of a restaurant that had amazing popularity, but was on it’s way downhill while still drawing record crowds. As Yogi Berra was reputed to say, “nobody goes there, it’s too crowded.”

Or if you are astute, think of the dot-com crash. Or the recent financial meltdown. From “top of game” to “down in flames.”

Now this isn’t a big deal for my sister Chris. She might not even notice the bubble bursting — if it does. It might be a problem for a corporate sponsor who invested heavily in social networking only to see it go down in flames — if it does.

The good news is that rarely are these permanent crashes. Many times the sequence is that something hits a success track, gets over hyped, crashes and burns — and then resurfaces months or even years later under a different name. Yesterday’s Application Service Providers were replaced by today’s Software as a Service. I’m sure you can think of a few more.

But the life of some companies, people’s investments and a few careers can take some hard knocks — and they have.

So what are you to do? If you don’t get on board, then you miss the boat. If you jump in, you could go down in flames or waste your money and efforts on something that won’t pay off.

I don’t have all the answers on this one. I can offer a couple of observations. First, there are some worrying items in social networking as we see it. One thing that bothers me is that it appears to be built on a house of cards. Everyone is trying to be the new Facebook, but I’m not sure that’s sustainable. Facebook grew out of the student market and tapped into a phenomenon associated with a younger demographic. From the time when you saw how many kids you could put in a Volkswagen, to sit ins and marches — there has always been an attraction to trying to draw the largest crowd of friends together.

It’s not that this has no attraction to an older segment — but it has it’s roots and it’s big appeal to the younger demographic. Indeed, I would maintain that when this phenomenon hits an older demographic, there has to be more than simply the joy of attendance. Crowds require causes or some additional value.

I haven’t really seen that in the social networking arena yet. Not that I’ve given up. I’m a twitterer, I’m Linked-In, I “Plaxo” and — although I use it less and less, I’m on Facebook. I have contacts. I have seen some value in tracking people I haven’t seen for some time. But I work at it. I can’t afford to invest hours upon hours with no value coming from it.

Much of what happens isn’t relationships. Relationships are about mutual exchanges of value My friend Ray Mackenzie and his co-authors made that point in the book The Relationship Based Enterprise. It’s that word mutual that holds my attention. I’m struggling to see that in this new explosion of social networking.

I don’t poke very much. I tweet a little. I never throw a sheep. And if you find me on a friend finder, and I don’t know you, I probably won’t respond to your invite to become a friend. In fact, I joined Plaxo as an experiment because they seemed to be aiming at those who wanted more exclusive — and more valuable networks.

And if I said I wasn’t worried about the “Hotel California” syndrome I’d be lying. For those of you who don’t follow the reference, Hotel California was a song by the Eagles with the famous line, “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” When I see Linked-In’s top end price of $499 per month (that’s right – per month) I wonder what the end of this game looks like.

But I don’t know where this is really going. I’m watching carefully. I’m building my network based on value and I’m finding ways to use these tools. But I’m not betting the store on them. Not without a clear indication of value. Because investing in value — whether it be stocks or technology — has a way of paying off in the long run. I’m looking for things that enhance that mutual exchange of value that defines a relationship.

How about you? I’m really interested in your comments.

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