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Wow, time goes by quickly. I can’t believe it’s been 5 years since my last post. Just before our family catastrophe. I guess it shows that life take turns and your focus changes to other things. I had almost forgotten about this signpost out here on the interwebs until I saw an old presentation with the URL for this site. So I blew off a little dust and decided to get caught up. You’ll see some of the old LinkedIn articles here as well as a collection of notes that I call “Thinking Thursday.”

Let’s get caught up.

Security and environmental sustainability remain top-of-mind questions for Canadian businesses.

I got to talk about both last week:
Best spending value is on security awareness,  and

Vancouver’s Global Relay at cutting edge of cool data

People sometimes “anchor” on past experiences when managing new and complex problems.  The challenge in anchoring opinion / perceptions in the rapidly evolving world of technology is that the frame of reference often used in decision making can move dramatically in the space of a few month.  It’s like the insurance commercial where Nan explains her photos that she’s pasted to her livingroom wall.

As organizations look to increasingly adopt cloud service, it’s essential that they adjust their frame of reference (or haul up their anchor) from the single server that they administered to a new frame of reference for hyperscale cloud.  After all, running over 1 000 000 physical CPUs is not the same as taking those processes you used for that box in the closet and multiplying a million times.  I’ve captured a few thoughts on adjusting our frame of reference in this video

Laser Cats

Sometimes those expensive safeguards might not be giving you the big benefit you expect.  Often the biggest impact can come from the low cost tools.  Have a look at what I mean in this video.

That Hat

With the NBA All-Star game weekend behind us in Toronto (and that unusual anthem brouhaha), the battle between Uber and Taxis in the city will go quite until the next flare up.  Cities around the world are wrestling with the policy question of how they manage ride sharing and taxi services.  While debate about how to smooth the introduction of ridesharing in an existing (yet broken) taxi marketplace is required, policy makers need to look to incredibly close future where there is no longer a driver behind the wheel.

We are already seeing trials of driverless taxis in Japan, seen long-haul trucks of the future, Local delivery vehicles and even air mules.  Disruptions in transportation technologies are palpably close, but the policy foundation seems to be lagging a little behind.  Some of the considerations are longer term, such as “What new jobs will replace those professional driver jobs?”  Others are more immediate, “Do we create special lanes for driverless cars?”  Let’s make sure our policy/rule makers are beginning to think about these things so that we can avoid as many unintended consequences as possible.

In exploring this question, my friend Darrell O’Donnell asked what governments I thought would be the first to ban human drivers.   After some thought, here’s what I came up with:

1. Singapore:  While the members of the Singapore Ferrari Owners’ Club won’t be happy, I would expect Singapore to be top of the list.  Given its history of intelligent transportation systems and ability to execute, they would be a geo to watch.
2. Tokyo – I’m thinking that the smart taxis and the social acceptance of new technologies would place this city at the top of the list as well.
3. Amsterdam – This city is perhaps a bit of an outlier, but my thinking here is all about environmental sustainability and their success in moving people out of their cars by being one of the most cycle friendly cities in the world.
4. London, UK – Say what you will about the Congestion Charge Zone, there is a certain willingness to try new things to reduce high traffic flows (and raise investment)

Of course that doesn’t mean other cities aren’t going to see connected vehicles and driverless cars (see Ann Arbor and even Stratford) It just means that other cities will probably need to take a less dramatic approach and set aside lanes or routes in place of outright prohibitions.

The conversation for commercial transportation is a little different.  I see Australia leading the way for long-haul trucks in place of their road-trains.  When you think of these road trains, it also helps to remember the Clay Christensen  “job” of the driver.  The driver not only drives the vehicle, they also provide security for the load, making sure to avoid bandits along the route.  Good thing MB still has an office up front in their driverless truck 🙂

What do you think the biggest policy question for driverless cars will be?

Ok, so I admit I have a bit of a soapbox around word finds, math quizzes, fuzzy puppies on social media.  Lately these seemingly innocent diversions have shifted to troublesome requests.  Requests that may put you at risk.

We all remember the study in the UK where people provided detailed info in return for  piece of chocolate.  Are we doing the same for less return?

These seemingly innocent quizzes may on the surface seem like a fun reminiscence, but what happens if someone trawls these answers and links them to your email address.  You might say it’s not a big deal, until you recall those password recovery questions you’ve used.  Since the development of recovery questions can be difficult, we keep seeing the same questi0ns come up time and time again: What’s your favourite movie, your elementary school or your first pet appear as questions again and again.  It’s a quick pivot to recover your password using the answers you’ve shared.

And while we’re on the subject of fraud, let’s also put an end to the “Likes Fraud” that’s creeping in as well.  I know y0u’ve seen Colby’s post.  Of course no one would think not to like a message like that (at this time over 962K people liked it on FB) and now it’s on Linkedin making it’s rounds every week or so from someone else, each getting ~5K likes.

Can we once and for all just say “Stawp!”

~

Since it’s been over 5 years since the “Economics of the Cloud” whitepaper was published, it’s time that we dust off that copy that’s been sitting at the bottom of our documents folder.  No doubt there are a few people that are “new to cloud” and might not be aware of this gem and there are a few people that certainly can be reminded of its content as they build new custom IT projects.

I’ve worked on a wide variety of cloud initiatives over the past 5 years and seen the supply side economics first hand.  For one initiative, I contacted suppliers of containerized data centres to purchase 10 containers.  I was a little taken aback that I could only be offered retail pricing for a quantity so small.  It was the same story for energy and also for floor space.  Operations and management also faced the same challenge, with every customization adding not only additional costs, but also introducing release drag by introducing new dependencies that needed to be considered with every release.

As I worked with Canadian organizations, I also encountered constraints on the demand side.  Clustered communities couldn’t take advantage of the business cadence of the other potential users (for example: An education-only community cloud has generally the same cadence.  Ditto for retail)

Organizations are building out business cases for their move to the cloud and they include a variety of elements in their analysis.  This generally includes all the traditional IT costs (hardware, licensing, personnel, floor space, energy costs).  Often overlooked are the costs associated with supporting bespoke services/solutions.  Creating organization specific documentation, training materials, education programs and configuration management should all factor in to the business case.  Non-standard configurations and services also introduces delays in incident management since the external support organizations wont necessarily be familiar with your specialized deployment.  Using standard public cloud approaches allows organizations to leverage the readily available training materials, standard templates and documents.

So if you’re planning to build your own cloud or looking to cluster with organizations like your own to build a community cloud, it’s important to revisit the Economics of the Cloud paper to appreciate the dynamics of scale that drive hyper scale cloud.

Like many Canadians, I grew up watching some, ok a lot, of US network television.  I admit that there wasn’t a great deal of educational value there.  Perhaps an episode or two of School House Rock that told me what conjunctions are, but not much more.  Now that Saturday morning cartoons don’t dominate my schedule, although I can’t pass on the Simpsons, those “educational” experiences are less overt.  But they still come up on occasion.

One such occasion happened a few years ago during the US mid-term elections.  It just so happens that the US network stations that we get here in the Nation’s capital herald from Detroit.  We Canadians were bombarded with campaign commercials from any number of candidates seeking seats on the US Congress or US Senate and perhaps even a few seats in important places.  Of course I can’t recall any of their names, nor tell you who won the important jobs.  I can tell you what struck me most was the commentary from the many autoworkers that lent their support testimonials in the TV ads.  Most of these people were supporting particular candidates for helping provide funds to keep their particular automotive plant open.  It struck me that perhaps these hardworking people would have been better served by funding training programs to prepare them in today’s evolving job marketplace.  The recent turmoil in the US automotive industry, personalized by the Oscar nominated HBO documentary “The Last Truck” suggests that perhaps more could have been done to better prepare these communities for the Digital Economy.  Let’s keep a close eye to make sure we really learned this lesson.

The second learning came more recently, well actually earlier this week when I saw another commercial.  Yes I only pay attention to the commercials.  This commercial from the Detroit Medical Center promotes a web-based real-time Emergency Room wait times at their five hospital facilities (http://www.dmc.org/ERwait ).  ER wait times are a key concern here in Ontario as well http://www.health.gov.on.ca/en/pro/programs/waittimes/edrs/default.aspx.  Before you jump to conclusions about the results on either site, stop.  There are too many differences between the measurements to even start to make any reasonable assertion.  What we can learn is that someone, someplace in Michigan has found a way to report useful data about the ER in what seems to be a real time basis, and that the data is useful for the community to help them make an informed decision should they have the luxury to plan their visit to the ER.  This is the lesson of making data more readily available to empower individuals to make more informed decisions.  And that’s one to grow on…