Leveraging Social Media
My blog post on the "center for CIO leadership" blog.

My Notes from @D9 - Eric Schmidt
I always enjoy listening to Eric - my third time in the past 3 years. As usual, he was insightful and very crisp with his thoughts. At D, he talked about the simultaneous rise of 4 large technology platforms (Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon) creating significant technology opportunities. Walt and Kara teased others (Microsoft, Twitter, etc.) throughout the conference for not being on Eric's list. This is a very different environment than the days when a single large platform (first from IBM and then Microsoft) dominated the market. Each of the four platforms are orthogonal and offer different capabilities and features.

He also talked about the world moving from the days of information concentrated with a few people to ubiquitous access to vast amounts of information at a global scale. Just a couple of decades ago, the average person had practically no access to information. I personally believe that information is empowering the weak and the oppressed across the globe.

He also demonstrated Google Payments - NFC (Near Field Communication) based payment system for the Android platform.

In Eric's view, the next big opportunity is in products that will integrate mobile, local and social capabilities.

I found it interesting how frequently he talked about the need to allow customers to manage their privacy. He is very concerned about the openness of the internet being affected by regulations.

pic: spring in our backyard

Games @ Work
Over the past six months, I have been thinking about the potential use of gaming within the enterprise. The explosive growth of Zynga and other social gaming companies demonstrates how engaging the combination is. In addition, we humans respond extremely well to rewards: loyalty programs, bonuses, etc. Reward programs are also widely used to incent certain customer and employee behavior.

Recently, I came across a new term for this trend - Gamification. I like the Wikipedia definition: The use of game play mechanics for non-game applications.

Game theory is beginning to be widely used to influence customer engagement, behavior and even employee productivity. This BusinessWeek article has examples of use of game theory at a broad range of companies: SAP, Hilton, Siemens, UPS, Nissan, Target, etc.

Earlier this week, Gartner, jumped on the bandwagon with a bold statement: "over half of innovation will be gamified by 2015". Here is a ZDnet story covering Gartners' report in detail. Gartner is advising that "Enterprise architects, CIOs and IT planners must be aware of, and lead, the business trend of gamification, educate their business counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization".

I am pleased that we at the CTO Roundable of Washington DC sensed the trend early and are putting together our next Summit on "What CTOs should learn from Gaming" in early fall.

Image: Pacman by Preeti

Social tools in the workplace
I presented at the marcusevans CIO Summit on Tuesday, April 12 in Dallas. After briefly covering how knowledge workers are craving social features in consumer technologies within the workplace, I talked about the Why?, What? and How? of our Enterprise 2.0 initiative:

• Why? In my view the enormous increase in pace of product cycles is primarily driving the need for Fast and Efficient solutions to support Knowledge Work. IT has traditionally focused on Process Automation and Transaction Processing. ERP systems and other enterprise technologies are very ill-suited for knowledge work. Given that fact that companies must innovate faster, Enterprise 2.0 tools that help knowledge workers be more productive are in great demand and are being deployed at a very fast pace. Our main requirements for a solution are: need to create an online workplace for our dispersed workforce, an efficient communication platform and an easy to use interface. Cost is also a big driver for us.
  
  
• What? In my mind, each company has specific needs that must be analyzed before a system is deployed. Standing-up a SharePoint instance and letting customers design applications of their choice is not sufficient to turbo-charge collaboration and innovation. We hired the Dachis Group for a short project to help analyze our requirements and prioritize our needs from within the best-practice features for such a platform. They also helped us ramp-up our teams' knowledge in the domain.
  
  
• How? Our guiding principles for designing a solution are:
  - Optimal User / Enterprise balance
  - High-quality user experience
  - It is a program, not a technology
  - Low cost to operate
  - Low customization
  - One platform, many communities, many teams
  - Easy access management (auto provisioning, SSO)
  - Measure ... Iterate ... Measure ... Iterate
  
  We are building the solution on a leading-edge Open Source platform.

We then discussed how companies are making these platforms successful. Unfortunately, I did not get much input from the CIOs in the room. We have yet to deploy our platform, so, I did not have any real experiences to share. I did discuss some information I have gathered from analysts. Will try and write another post on the topic after 6 months.

Pic: Spring was recently in our back yard!

CTO Roundtable: Big Data
Interesting discussion led by Michael Brown, CTO at comScore at our CTO Roundtable breakfast meeting.

Michael and his team manage and analyze one of the largest datasets processed by a local company. It is fascinating how thinking has to evolve when the volumes reaches billions of rows of data per day. Some of the key takeaways for me were:

• Leverage sort before processing
• Shard the dataset to create smaller more manageable files
• Parallel processing improves turnaround and allows for scalability
• Open source tools have reached a level of maturity to be relevant solutions to consider
• Most of the processing is now accomplished on smaller commodity machines
• Machine memory is more of a limiting resource than hard disk
• Solid-state disks can be selectively used to improve performance for IO intensive processes
• Security is best managed by selectively separating and focusing on securing sensitive data
• SQL is still king as it is very easily grasped by non-technical folks. Therefore, it is easier to find and develop talent with SQL skills.

Micheal has clearly lived through the evolution of technology for managing Big Data over the past 10 years. I enjoyed the event a lot.

Exploring the power of 4G
I moderated a panel at this event organized by the Northern Virginia Tech Council (NVTC). The panel was nicely balanced between the Telcos and users. After an initial discussion about what is 4G, the discussion focused on what applications does the audience see enabled by 4G. Most of the discussion was focused on new applications for mobile, not essentially requiring 4G.

Here is a short list of some of the ideas that came up:

• Mobile Payments
• Viewing mobile invoices on handsets
• Real-time translation of conversation from one language to another
• Better usage statistics captured by the network
• Faster delivery of analytics and visualization of data for better decision making
  
• etc.

Video Conferencing Demo: The session ended by Dr Andy Barbash, Head of Neurology at Holy Cross Hospital setting up a live video conference with 5 of his colleagues from across the country. The quality was choppy at times but one can see the mobile bandwidth is rising to a level where mobile video-conferencing will soon be a reality.

We also discussed the need for standards for application and data portability on smart phones.

Overall, it was a very interesting discussion.

Smart phones for Gaming
Sony Ericsson’s ran a Super Bowl ad for the Playstation phone - Xperia Play.



Steve Ballmer Microsoft talked about extending the XBOX experience to the Windows Mobile 7 phones at CES.

I believe that we will be seeing more mobile devices that, besides performing the core functions (phone, e-mail, photo / video, etc.) extremely well, will be tuned to a specific use-case: gamers, bloggers, sales persons, accountants, senior citizens, etc. It is very hard to find the right set of mobile applications that best service a function. Further, these applications are not integrated to work seamlessly. I expect a whole slew of devices built (or pre-configured) to enhance the productivity or the experience of a particular user group.

My Interview and upcoming presentation
I was recently interviewed in preparation for the Marcus Evans CIO summit in Dallas. I will be speaking there on: Getting a Grip on the Social Tools for the workplace - Enterprise 2.0.

Cloud Forecast 2015 @ CIO Insight
I was interviewed by Tony Kontzer of CIO Insight for this article. We had a broad discussion about the state of cloud services and how services need to evolve in the areas of management, monitoring, portability and security.

CES 2011
I enjoyed the show much more than last year. My top-5 list:

1. Video over the top is gaining momentum. It is integrated with TVs, DVD players, game controllers, and on stand-alone devices (roku, apple TV, boxee, logitech revue, etc.).
2. Smart TVs The world has finally moved beyond TVs with web-browser access. TV manufacturers are embracing the app store model with apps for Netflix, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo TV, Comcast Xfinity, Interactive white board, etc. Samsung made the biggest splash and seems to be leading in Smart TVs. They are offering access to content on Samsung TVs, PCs, Tablets and Smartphones. It seems to be a closed solution like the one from apple. They did bring a lot of partners on the stage (Time Warner, Comcast, Hulu, etc.).
   
3. Microsoft Xbox 360 and Kinect are now central to Microsoft strategy and product suite. Gesture and voice control on these devices works very well. Microsoft sold 8M Kinect units in 60 days. Windows 7 phone is also being hitched to the Xbox. I believe that Kinect presents as huge step forward in human / technology interface. Microsoft is the only one with a commercial product using the human body as a controller. This is one area where they have a significant lead in the market place.
   
4. 4G LTE from Verizon presents a huge opportunity for new products leveraging real mobile broadband access. Tablet experience with video and animation may finally be good on a cellular connection. Google, Verizon and Motorola are partnering to challenge Apple. Consumer excitement about 4G LTE was demonstrated by a huge crowd at the Verizon booth. The quality of video conferencing on 4G was also quite impressive.
5. Android continues to enjoy fast evolution and broad adoption
   

Other interesting technologies and News:

1. Several products with glasses free 3D HD phones and TVs (Toshiba, Samsung, LG, Intel, etc) were on display. The technology is still not ready for prime time but it is very promising and might be what is required for 3D HD to take off.
   
2. Microsoft unveiled a new version of the Surface computer. It was 4 inches thick and looked cool. They claim that the camera has now been embedded in the display. I will like to learn more about how the technology they are using.
   
3. Android tablets were every where but not very impressive. There was an interesting Motorola announcement of an tablet based on Android v3 (honeycomb). There were several inexpensive tablets from Korea and China.
4. The blackberry PlayBook tablet was actually quite good. However, I am not sure if they can attract the developer community to build on the platform. iOS and Andriod have their full attention.
5. No tablet from Microsoft
6. Google chrome OS seemed lame
7. I did not see any new e-book readers. The functionality seem to be migrating to the tablets. Google demonstrated a nice eBook app on Android 3.
8. Saw some very impressive tiny LED projectors. I believe that projectors will some day converge with smartphones and tablets presenting an easy way to show and share media with others on small devices
   
9. Smartphones as payment devices might finally arrive in the US in 2011 ... haven't we heard that before!
   
10. Large scale 3D displays from Sony and Samsung were very cool. I was amazed by the quality of 3D on large wall displays
11. Nokia and Sony are in trouble. HTC also seems to be losing out to Samsung and Motorola
    
12. Many smart appliances were on display: LG, Samsung, Haier. I am not sure if consumers will really use web-connected ovens?
13. No major Chinese manufacturer on the scene yet (Haier?)

Overall, the trip was worthwhile and fun!

Pic: Samsung TVs merge with a Seurat painting ... very attractive!