On Sandhill.com

A short Q&A on our experience deploying Enterprise Collaboration Technology was posted today.

Recent Evolutions of the Internet

At the CTO Roundtable this morning, Steve Crocker, long-term CTO Roundtable member and Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICANN (the not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with global participants that coordinates the governance of the Internet) led the discussion with two of his colleagues: Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society, and Jamie Hedlund, ICANN's Vice President of Government Affairs - Americas.

Jamie provided an overview of the new how ICANN is rolling out gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains). This will allow the creation of a whole new set of domains like .bank, etc. The idea is to try and make the internet more open and create a pathway for further innovation. It reamins to be seen if this options will start expanding internet URLs away from .com, that now has over 100 Million names. The thinking is that communities built around these new top-level domains will develop enhanced features that better serve the goals of the community members. Also, ICANN, for the first time, is moving away the closed-door selection process that they followed to date to a more open and democratic process.

Leslie then talked about why she believes that 2012 will be the year of IPv6. As we have now allocated most of the 4Bn IPv4 addresses, the long-term way forward is IPv6. IPv4 addresses are bing sold at approximately $11 per address. She believes that this will drive adoption. Also, several large content providers are permanently moving to IPv6 as the default. Let us see if 2012 turns out to be the year of IPv6.


pic: sunset over first snow in 2012

Center for CIO Leadership Success Case
I have been a member of the Center for nearly 5 years now. The interview gave me a chance to reflect on my career and the experiences that prepared me for my current role. We discussed my thoughts on how IT needs to continue to evolve as an integral part of business.

Check out the blog post for an overview or read the full article (PDF).

BYOD

There is an irreversible trend in the workplace of employees owning the computing devices used for work. Given the accelerating rate of new and improved devices hitting the market, enterprises are finding it harder and harder to provide the latest and greatest tools to employees. Teleworkers frequently prefer to work on their home machines than maintain two machines at home.

I agree with the Information Week position that we need to move from protecting the network and the end-points to protecting Enterprise data. While networks and devices are assets that must be well managed and controlled, the true asset is information (data) and insights. So, enterprise IT must primarily focus on securing data. I believe that, for a long time in the future, we will be required to manage hybrid environments where some devices are owned by the enterprise while others are personal devices that employees will like to use for work as well. So, the only way to secure our assets is to secure and manage data.

I continue to look forward to a future innovation where security is embedded with the data and not is just a wrapper around it. That will make our job of securing enterprise data much easier.

Business drives technology today
My interview in the CIO Insights column of the Silicon India Magazine.

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.