Lucky # 7 – avoiding information overload

I feel much more at ease than I did yesterday. The reason is that I just read a whitepaper of the Atos Scientific Community on ‘Information Overload’.

The paper explains that in general we humans can only remember 7 things – what a relief! Trying to remember more creates stress.

Young Girl Talking On Telephone (by David Castillo Dominici at freedigitalphotos.net)

So I decided to stop trying.

Human beings have clear limits on the amount of information they can process, often called bounded rationality. The phenomenon is clearest in the ‘magical number’ that is linked to our short-term memory: at most, we can keep seven (+/- two) items at once in our working memory, (…). Any item beyond seven, causes the added item (…) to be partially ignored, forgotten, distorted, or otherwise lost.

Suffering from Information overload is clearly a choice. If you suffer from it, it is because you fail to recognize your boundaries and/or, in relationship to that, fail to use the proper tools to manage your work.

In many corporations we see that there is a fundamental shift in the way information gets distributed and used for collaborative purposes – moving away from email and ‘the corporate newsletter’ (the push mechanisms) into a more ‘social’ network of information sharing and collaboration.

These Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) are modelled after public social networks as Facebook, Twitter and others and are being explored as alternative ways of working in enterprises.

Within a corporate social network, much of the potential for Information Overload can be avoided if the phenomenon is kept in mind during the design, creation and use of the network.

So the premise of the paper is that a properly designed and implemented ESN can help avoid Information Overload and increase efficiency in the workplace, but if done incorrectly can increase the problem and create a very unhealthy and inefficient working environment.

In order to understand the success-factors, we need to understand human behavior and make sure they get addressed:

  • Noise filtering; the capability to assess and reflect on information and filter the data in a way it makes sense for the work we have to do.
  • Predictability; the fact that standardization and methodologies help us structure the way we work, focusing on the content instead of the process increases motivation and quality of work.

If the ESN allows us to address these elements we have a good chance of success and we can further increase the quality by understanding how an ESN will impact the way we work.

The concept that every message must be seen by everyone, and that everything that is said on a corporate social network is relevant to every user has become outdated in the social media era.

I believe this is a fundamental characteristic of what we will be able to achieve through a successful implementation of an ESN; empowerment of people.

Moving away from the top-down pushing of information, but instead creating cross company collaboration processes in (virtual) communities.

 


This blog post was previously published at http://blog.atos.net/blog/2013/09/03/watch-this-space-lucky-7-avoiding-information-overload/


The consequences of a stolen phone

Your wallet is stolen. You wanted to pay for your tall latte and it is gone. You search all of your pockets and looked around, bewildered.

Maybe somebody found it and will hand it to you. No. It’s gone. The nice lady at the counter understands and gives you your coffee anyhow. That’s nice.

 

Cafe Latte (by amenic181 at freedigitalphotos.net)It doesn’t change the fact that your wallet is stolen. In your mind you create a list of everything that is in it. Some money, the tickets for the theater, your bank card and your credit card, some pictures of your children and a business card you got while you bumped into an old friend on your way to the coffee shop.

So now you reach for your phone, you have to call the bank to block your cards, you do not want some punk to get his dirty hands on your salary.

Oh wait and sh@#$%^&*, your phone is gone too…

In a recent white paper of the Atos Scientific Community the security aspects of mobile devices is addressed , as well as other aspects in the management of devices in the new bring-your-own-device concept that is being allowed by many companies and full heartedly embraced by employees.

The quotes below are from that white paper.

“Enterprise Mobile Management solutions currently available in the market address different aspects of BYO. Balancing those with network & access as well as data and applications usage will pave the way for a successful BYO implementation…”

Ok. It is gone, you do a quick mental inventory of what is on your phone.

Access to your personal and business email, Twitter and Facebook account. Your contact list of about 400 people with their email addresses, home addresses and telephone number included. On top of that access to your DropBox account with all the info on a recent bid and the complete cost break down of all products.

And because you have a new NFC enabled phone, your credit card is also in digital format on your phone. Now what?

“The key area to support BYO in 2016 will be tablets and their descendants (e.g. wearable computers), along with smartphones. We see these as the two key device segments.”

The white paper does not only cover this case of a stolen phone – it goes into all measures you can take if you adopt the bring-your-own-device scenario in your company.

What to do with applications, data and network access; all these aspects are clearly explained and some best practices are listed for any CxO that is looking into this.

“Security in such dynamic environments as BYO must be built on the assumption that anyone or any device may get access to the data, but that only authorized users should be able to use it for the intended and agreed purpose, and under a defined context.”

“Sir? Is this yours?” When you turn around you see a nice person holding up both your phone and wallet – you start breathing again.

At the same time you think about what you could do to avert the disaster that did not happen this time.

 

 


This blog post was previously published at http://blog.atos.net/blog/2013/06/24/watch-this-space-the-consequences-of-a-stolen-phone/


Would you like a cup of IT

The change in the IT landscape brought about through the introduction of Cloud Computing is now driving a next generation of IT enablement. You might call it Cloud 2.0, but the term 'Liquid IT' much better covers what is being developed.

In a recently published white paper by the Atos Scientific Community, Liquid IT is positioned not only as a technology or architecture; it is also very much focused on the results of this change on the business you are doing day to day with your customer(s).

"A journey towards Liquid IT is actually rather subtle, and it is much more than a technology journey"

The paper explains in detail how the introduction of more flexible IT provisioning, now done in real time allows for financial transparency and agility. A zero latency provisioning and decommissioning model, complete with genuine utility pricing based on actual resources consumed, enables us to drive the optimal blend of minimizing cost and maximizing agility. Right-sizing capabilities and capacity all of the time to the needs of the users will impact your customer relationship – but, very important, designing such a systems starts with understanding the business needs.

"Liquid IT starts from the business needs: speed, savings, flexibility, and ease of use"

Existing examples of extreme flexibility in IT (think gMail, Hotmail or other consumer oriented cloud offerings) have had to balance between standardization and scale. The more standard the offering, the more results in scaling can be achieved. This has always been a difficult scenario for more business oriented applications. The paper postulates that with proper care for business needs and the right architecture, similar flexibility is achievable for business processes.

Such a journey to 'Liquid IT' indeed includes tough choices in technology and organization, but also forces the providers of such an environment to have an in-depth look at the financial drivers in the IT provisioning and the IT consumption landscape.

"The objectives of financial transparency dictate that all IT services are associated with agreed processes for allocation, charging and invoicing"

There are two other aspects that need to change in parallel with this move to more agility in IT; the role of the CIO will evolve and the SLA that he is either buying or selling will change accordingly.

Change management will transform into Information Management as the use of IT as a business enabler is no longer the concern of the CIO. IT benchmarking will become a more and more important tool to measure the level of achieved agility for the business owners. The focus on the contribution to the business performance will be measured and needs to be managed in line with business forecasts.

The white paper authors conclude that "Business agility is the main result of Liquid IT" – sounds like a plan!

This blog post was previously published at http://blog.atos.net/blog/2013/03/08/watch-this-space-would-you-like-a-cup-of-it/


 

The PaaS cloud computing lock-in and how to avoid it

Cloud Computing changed from choosing an easy solution, into making a difficult decision.

The reason is the proliferation of cloud offerings at all layers; today we do not only find ‘everything-as-a-service’ cloud solutions, but also ‘everything-is-tailored-for-your-specific-situation-as-a-service’ tagged as cloud solutions.

Is this good? I do not think so.

My main objection is that you will end up with a cloud solution that is no different than any solution you have previously designed and installed yourself, at a cheaper rate and lower quality SLA.

True cloud solutions should not only focus on cost reduction, increased agility and flexible capabilities. You should also be buying something that supports portability between the private and public computing domain, and across different vendor platforms.

In early cloud solutions, mainly the ones focussing on Infrastructure-as-a-service, this portability has been heavily debated (remember the ‘Open Cloud Manifesto’?) and in the end we concluded that server virtualization solved a lot of the portability issues (I am simplifying of course).

We also had Software-as-a-service and some publications showed that the portability could be addressed by looking at standardized business process definitions and data normalisation (again, I am simplifying).
Now the Atos Scientific Community has published a whitepaper that looks at the most complex form of cloud computing; Platform-as-a-service.

PaaS offerings today are diverse, but they share a vendor lock-in characteristic. As in any market for an emerging technology, there is a truly diverse array of capabilities being offered by PaaS providers, from supported programming tools (languages, frameworks, runtime environments, and databases) to various types of underlying infrastructure, even within the capabilities available for each PaaS


So a common characteristic that can be extracted of all this diversity is the fact of PaaS users currently are being bound to the specific platform they use, making the portability of their software (and data) created on top of these platforms difficult.

As a result we see a slow adoption of PaaS in the enterprise; only those groups that have a very well defined end-user group are looking at PaaS – and mostly for the wrong reason: ‘just’ cost saving through standardization.

In the Atos Scientific Community whitepaper they are identified as:

Two primary user groups which benefit from using Cloud at the Platform as a Service level: Enterprises with their own internal software development activities and ISVs interested in selling SaaS services on top of a hosted PaaS.”


The current situation where PaaS is mostly resulting in a vendor lock-in scenarios is holding back the full potential for applications on a PaaS.

By introducing a general purpose PaaS, we would allow a comprehensive, open, flexible, and interoperable solution that simplifies the process of developing, deploying, integrating, and managing applications both in public and private clouds.

Such an architecture is proposed and explained in detail in the whitepaper; it describes the desired capabilities and building blocks that need to be established and it also offers an analysis of market trends and existing solutions, in order to establish a future vision and direction for PaaS, as well as outlining the business potential of such a solution.

We can all continue to feel positive about the power and the business potential of cloud computing.

Changing your cost base from capex to opex, increasing your speed in your go-to-market strategies and the flexibility in capacity and location are very important for your business.

We should not however confuse vendor specific solutions with cloud solutions only because they promise flexibility in cost and easy deployment; being able to shift and shop around is always better – also in cloud computing.


This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/10/15/watch-this-space-the-paas-cloud-computing-lock-in-and-how-to-avoid-it/