Category Archives: Technology

Getting more for your money…

Having been in the midst of the both the dotcom boom and bust, I get a sense that technology companies will generally fair better than most during this current downturn. And with the likes of Google prepared to invest some of its many billions to keep the venture capital flowing then hopefully the pace of innovation seen in recent years will keep momentum too.

The dotcom boom saw technology companies grow at staggering rates due, in a large part, to ‘irrational exuberance’ that fuelled an unrealistic bubble. There were undoubtedly inflated expectations of what the web and its associated developments could deliver in the short-term. However, there was a lot of substance in many of the ideas at that time but some serious over-estimations of how quickly they could be realised.

Technology companies felt an enormous amount of pain in the bust period, which started in earnest in 2001, and many were still hurting 4 years on. The company I was working for during most of this period shed a staggering 120,000 jobs in wave after wave of redundancies. Ironically that worked in favour of the Enterprise Content Management deployment I was involved in at the time as consolidation of the company’s thousands of web and intranet sites was well overdue and couldn’t be argued with in those economic circumstances – So there are often upsides even in the worst of circumstances.

The benefit and potential of web technologies has very much been proven in the years following the bust and right now I’m certainly seeing signs of organisations being more prepared to spend in this area to get more efficient and competitive. A number of digital agencies I’ve been speaking with recently are reporting a rush to digital and business growing rather than contracting.

cost_cuttingLooking further afield, the launch of Windows 7  will be interesting. Like many, I saw very little point in upgrading to Vista and have not used a business or home machine with Vista installed on it since its release at the beginning of 2007. So how is Microsoft going to make its latest OS more attractive, particularly at a time when both organisations and consumers are cutting spending?  One of the more recent announcements that seems to have attracted interest is that Windows 7 will enable you to remove Internet Explorer. I guess that just shows the strength of feeling about Microsoft monopolising the desktop environment and eagerness to have more choice. To be honest I haven’t even given IE8 a single thought with regard to my home pcs.

With the steady development of web based applications, like Zoho, and companies like Dell offering low cost pcs with Ubuntu  (the Open Source operating system) it’s looking easier and easier to live without Microsoft. Although when I look at the level of indoctrination of younger generations Microsoft has achieved with its shrewd product positioning in education then it looks like its domination of the desktop is assured for a number of years to come.

Having worked for a hosted services company, I am a ‘Software as a Service’  (SaaS) advocate and it’s clear that observers and commentators are heralding new waves of interest in cloud computing, web 2.0 and virtualisation as organisation come under greater pressure to cut costs.

Personally I still believe the biggest barrier to broader adoption of SaaS is the idea of someone else having responsibility for your data. However, when you look at the poor security and privacy processes and lack of business continuity planning in many organisations, both large and small, they’d be doing themselves a favour in adopting SaaS. Sometimes though, SaaS providers do themselves no favours in perpetuating unsubstantiated claims as illustrated here in the 80% myth.

Thinking small – very small…

I’ve heard it said that the revolutionary things will be using in 10 years time are in the labs today.

Thinking back to my time at Lucent at the start of this decade I was often intrigued by what its research division Bell Labs was doing in nanotechnology. I didn’t understand much of it but was intrigued all the same.

This was very early days for this branch of research but 10 years on we are starting to see more tangible real world examples of how materials created at a molecular level have a practical application in our day to day lives.

A few months back I met with a former project management colleague at Alcatel Lucent, who is currently working on 4G and Long Term Evolution projects, and he told me that all of the technology that used to fill several 2m tall racks in the early 3G base stations could now be fitted into a box around the size of a desktop PC. Besides potentially enabling orgainisations to run 3G networks within buildings, this very much illustrated the progress in molecular level electronics over the last decade.

watchphoneI also remember it being said back in 2001 that all the technology in mobile handsets at that time would be fitted into devices the size of wrist watches within 10 years.

Nano-technology is making its way into our lives in many ways now to the extent that health organisations and trade unions are calling for tougher guidelines to prevent workers and consumers from being damaged by nano-particles.

The development of super strong materials and material types that could never have been conceivable before is well underway. Personally I’m looking forward to the self cleaning windows, cars and bathrooms as the useful output from such molecular level manipulation of materials. But beyond the many and varied ways in which the materials with which we build our world can and no doubt will be changed in amazing ways, the most significant output of nano-technology could well be quantum computing on an industrial scale.

There is a growing feeling amongst leading scientists that small scale quantum computers are just a few years away and some are even that confident to say they imagine quantum computers being on people’s desktops within 20 years.

When you look at the difference between today’s traditional computers and a quantum computer it is awesomely immense and to even consider having desktop computers that powerful in a 20 year timeframe is potentially world changing.

Typical personal computers calculate 64 bits of data at a time. A 64- qubit quantum computer would be about 18 billion billion times faster.

This type of capability will make the ‘power of Google’ that we worship today akin to a tortoise racing the space shuttle. Information creation and searching will be changed beyond measure and with quantum computing driving ‘the cloud’ every single one of use could have the computing power of the whole of Silicon Valley at our fingertips.

From fantasy to reality…

I watched Quantum of Solace the other night and it reminded me of when I was a boy and watching Bond films in the 70s. I particularly remember one of the Sean Connery films where a tracking device was fitted to a car and then monitored on a screen in the dashboard of Bond’s car. Although many of Bond’s gadgets and scenarios, then and now were pure fantasy, I distinctly remember thinking when I first saw this that it was all completely unfeasible and I couldn’t get my head around how it could ever possibly happen.

tracker1Fast forward to 1993 and I was actually promoting the work NTL’s Radio Communications Division had done with Tracker to create one of the world’s first stolen vehicle recovery services  – even that company’s logo reflected the scene in the Bond film. Another 15 years on, advances in digital radio communications, GPS, 3G, in-car sat nav, the iPhone and even Google Streetview makes this scenario completely commonplace and far more complex than anything envisaged in that Bond scene.

So, back to the latest film, which like its predecessor has a more gritty reality about it than many of the earlier films and has very few of the classic gadgets Bond has become associated with. There was a very stark contrast in this film between the dirty reality ‘on the ground’ and the high tech world of the spymasters.

It was in that high tech world that the visionary stuff was happening. There were echoes of Minority Report with touch sensitive information display glass and plenty of ‘surface computing’ concepts on show.

With all the current publicity around ‘surface computing’ primarily from Microsoft, it is certainly imaginable that such interactive touch driven displays will become commonplace within ten years. Obviously ‘touch screen’ technology has been around as far back as the 1960s but what we are talking about here is a deeper real time user interface into applications which is more akin to how we manipulate items in the real world. A real world example is Smart Table which claims to be so intuitive that kids can use it straight away.

The essence of the Bond sequences though weren’t just about touch display of information – the subtleties included deep application integration, voice activation and seamless integration with mobile networks.

While Microsoft is grabbing headlines with the demonstrable front end display stuff you have business computing heavyweights like IBM working quietly in the background on the backend innovation that could make the Bond scenarios reality and make the likes of Microsoft and Google sit up and take notice.

Project Blue Spruce looks potentially very significant to the evolution of computing over the next decade. In essence it is an initiative to create a platform that enables all applications to run in a browser. Beyond this it is about extending business collaboration to multi-user, real time scenarios (not unlike the Bond scenes) all based in a browser environment, driven by cloud computing.

Jobs for the girls…

I spotted an interesting comment on the blog of Alterian today. This is the company who bought the CMS company who bought the CMS company I worked for over a number of years.

It’s written by Bob Barker, who I’ve never met, but seems to be gaining some momentum on Alterian’s blog that looks like it has the potential to become a useful and interesting resource. The post is called ‘Is marketing just for girls?‘ and calls for marketing representation (which is often female dominated) to be elevated to board level so that crucial decisions (in this case marketing technology) are made effectively to counter the challenges of recession.

boardroom-legsThis reminds me of articles I’ve read in recent years about the importance of having women at board level for the health and success of organisations anyway. Apparently, statistics show that organisations with heavily male dominated management teams are far more likely to fail than those with strong female representation. This has become all too apparent with the massive and fundamental failure of our financial organisations worldwide – an industry notorious for its ‘old boys networks’ and male domination.

There are also some parallels here to the telecoms industry boom and bust during the late 90s which was again a very male dominated industry. The industry was rife with ‘irrational exhuberance’ and company balance sheets were being inflated often through fraudulent and questionable accountancy practices. I worked in the industry during the fallout years that followed and it was a period when women executives rose to board level very rapidly and were instrumental in sorting out the mess and rescuing some of these big organisations from high profile bankruptcy.

All this makes me grateful I have two daughters as I believe their prospects in the workplace will be somewhat better than mens during this coming decade. However, the prospect of ever growing legions of men losing a sense of purpose in their lives has the potential for massive social disruption so I hope that women are prepared to take pity on us for the sake of stability and not push things too far the other way.

I also have a piece of advice for Bob and that is to encourage his own management team to promote a woman or two to their board as it currently looks very unhealthily male dominated, as indeed was the board of the company it acquired. Personally, I think for a company who’s lifeblood is selling to marketing departments that are female dominated it would make a lot of sense to really understand ‘what women want’.

Sweden in the snow…

sweden_in_snowI’ve spent a very pleasant couple of days this week in Sweden attending the EPiServer annual partner and customer event held in and around Stockholm.

Firstly, it was interesting to visit a place so used to operating in sub-zero temperatures and constant snowfall. Unlike the south of the UK, for instance, that grinds to a standstill after a couple of inches of the white stuff lands. The views of Stockholm in the snow were quite magical in places and the myriad of islands, set in frozen seas with their bridges and tunnels made for a very interesting and engaging city experience.

As for the conference itself, I was very impressed with the latest developments of the EPiServer Content Management System and much of what I saw and heard validated the decision to use it for the project I am running in my professional life.

Web Content Management in one form or another has featured strongly in my career over the last 15 or so years – from the utter frustration of helping build and maintain a corporate site in html way back in 1994, to specifying and managing bespoke CMS developments between 1997-2000, helping deploy a global enterprise CMS initiative between 2000-2003, working for CMS/hosted services vendors between 2003 and 2008 and now project managing a global CMS and eCommerce deployment for a consumer products business.

I guess this gives me quite a rounded perspective on the CMS industry, an area that continues to grow and develop and will likely be reasonably recession proof as organisations shift more of their focus online.

The highlight of the conference for me was a keynote by the Forrester Group’s Tim Walters entitled “The end of web content management and other welcome developments”. This title seems to imply the opposite of what I’ve just said in the previous paragraph but was really a pragmatic assessment of how web content management has moved on with the advent of the social web and indeed tools like WordPress here that I am using for this blog.

In fact, you may notice in the archives that this blog started as an idea back in 2006 but didn’t progress from being just that until recently. It is very interesting to see how WordPress itself has developed considerably in that time and reminds of an article I wrote a couple of years back now (which is still being used here) where I observed, amongst other things, how the difference between blogging tools and CMS capabilities was becoming more and more minimal.

Likewise, the EPiServer conference illustrated just how far some of the mid-market CMS providers have come in that time in integrating meaningful social media developments into their systems.

Besides the insight into new developments, the conference  was also a great opportunity to chat with others who have experienced the evolution of WCM since the mid and late 90s and it was encouraging to find very similar conclusions being made on who the movers and shakers are in this industry right now. More on this in future posts.