One of my mentors died today. I first got to know Brian back in 2001. It came from one of those rare occasions when an unsolicited piece of direct marketing fell onto my desk at a serendipitous time. It was advertising an Internal Consulting training course at Techniques for Change. I had been working for … Continue reading Brian Prytz
Category: General
I've a handful of speaking engagements coming up in the next few months, to talk about the opportunities that Cloud and Software as a Service give to CIOs to reinvent their departments (continuing on from the Porter's Five Forces article I wrote a few weeks ago), and our experiences in the past 12 months at … Continue reading Things to talk about…
It's well acknowledged that Steve Jobs took great inspiration from a visit he and others from Apple made in 1979 to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Xerox were a strange company - they invested in an R&D facility that had huge prophetic influence, and yet they managed to commercially exploit just about none … Continue reading Steve Jobs last insanely great idea was in 1979…
I've been witnessing the NHS at reasonably close quarters again in the past fortnight. Dad has been in for fairly major surgery, and will be convalescing for some time to come. My experience of the health service, both as punter and as consultant (management variety) makes me think that the fundamental issues facing the NHS … Continue reading The perils of expertise
There's a model that's common within the MBA world that describes the different sorts of competitive forces to which an organisation may find itself subjected. Defined by Harvard Business School's Michael Porter in 1979, his "Five Forces" are, in simple terms: - market rivalry (simple competition from others doing what you do); - client power … Continue reading Porter’s Five Forces (and the news for CIOs)
The first phase of our Google project, migrating 550 users across the globe onto the system for email, calendar, contacts and chat, completed last week. The project has run very smoothly so far, and it looks like we are in a good position to move forward into utilising Docs and Sites in the next few … Continue reading Continual improvement
So here we go. The 2010 General election. Something to keep the bookies busy in the run up to the World Cup. Whilst my own voting intentions are already made up (I don't like tax evaders at the best of times, more so when they have the audacity to ask for responsibility for spending HMRC … Continue reading Election 2.0
Inspired by a big screen set up in the Google reception area over in Victoria, here's a fly-by view of the Global office network for which my team and I provide services. Google Earth does continue to become a more and more amazing product... Load up the KMZ file into Earth, and select the folder, … Continue reading Google Earth Fly-By
Yesterday I wrote an article about how bandwidth requirements are getting ever greater. Today, for the first time, I ran over my monthly blog bandwidth allowance. So that's over 100Mb of data transferred this month, all of it text (the images are hosted on Picasa). Of course, in this day and age, almost all of … Continue reading Oh, the irony….
This may sound like the bleedin' obvious to you, but in planning that we have begun to look at refreshing core network infrastructure at work, it is notable that the world seems to be heading for fatter, low-latency data, and that that proves a substantial challenge for corporate network design. In the old days, the … Continue reading Fatter, faster…
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