Erik’s presentation on social media and the impact on corporations and consumers was eye-opening. As most of you know, I am pretty uneasy about social media because of privacy issues. However, Erik’s viewpoints have made me thinking about what is eluding me, the importance of understanding social media and the impacts on personal level and corporation alike. It doesn’t necessarily mean I will jump on the bandwagon right now and start to write on facebook or twit (I still prefer to keep my thoughts and information to myself), instead, I will start pay more attention to how social media technology is operating as well as the trends and future of the technology.
Erik had several important examples of how social media enable individuals to take on the big corporations. Any individual has the access to the mass media that was never within reach and has the level field to go to battle with big corporations. Although not all the individuals will catch the attention of media, but the fact that some non-technical individual was able to win the battle with corporations, like the musician’s battle with United Airline, is enough to make big corporations to pay close attentions to customers’ complains. However, the question I have is how do corporations to balance delicately the needs of customers and abuses from a few customers. “Customer is always right” is a good slogan, but in practice, it is impossible to satisfy every customer. The only defense I could think of is what Amy said in class, online community to policy itself, or corporations will file law suits against the abuser (of course, we will get into first amendment debate again, can we just drop that debate? Just kidding).
Enough about potential bad things could happen to the corporations. Let’s discuss the benefits for corporations. Erik used some great examples on how corporations to get online community involved in contributing ideas and knowledge. DELL asks customers what they wants, goldmine company used crow sourcing to find new gold location, and more recently NETFlex awarded a team of researchers for finding the best customer renting pattern. Those are some of the successful stories. But I think corporations should also open up for ideas to solve their problems within the companies. Before opening up to the world, corporations should open up to their employees. For example, how do you cut budget in a tough economic environment? Who knows that better than the employees and the managers who spend the money? They know how much and what to cut without jeopardizing the quality of the products and services. Instead of downsizing or outsourcing, CFOs just tell the employees that they need to come up to a total saving of x amounts. I have seen projects waste 50% of the budget just to meet the project requirement of within certain percentage of the budget. Crowd sourcing initiative inside the corporation is not wide spread yet in the corporate world, but it worth into that.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
PC Reboot and Some thoughts
An exciting event happened today at work, all users’ PCs are starting to reboot and reboot in loop conditions. It reminded me of a virus few years back that forcing PC into reboot loop. Everyone was curious to find out the root cause of the problem. It took IT couple of hours to trace the problem back to antivirus definition file. However, my discussion point is not about PC reboot. There are two thoughts come out of this event, business continuity and the value of Information Technology that often asked in this class and from business units.
Organizations large and small are focusing on the business continuity practices since the unfortunate event of 911. However, most organizations are focusing on recovering IT infrastructure. While it is important to have a plan to recover IT infrastructure, organizations often miss a great opportunities on how to recover their business without IT. It was not that long ago, PCs were not at every employee’s desk and some or all employees worked on the telephone and used paper to process business transactions. Such manual process has lost since PCs took over the organization’s business activities. The assumptions of IT infrastructure availability is always there are bad for business in case of either natural disaster events or human errors like we had today. Those unpredictable events can stop business processes cold and dig a big hole for business to recover if the outages last more than just a few hours or even a few days. Business needs to have a manual process for the most critical business in order to survive in the most extreme events. Hacker penetrations are also a big concerns, not too long ago, Google’s network was compromised by hackers (according to a report by New York Times). The hackers could have done more damages other than stealing Google’s code, but who can guarantee knowledge stolen won’t be used in future attacks to disrupt or bring down the whole network.
The second thought is about the value of Information Technology bringing to the business. It is difficult to put a dollar sign on Information Technology, but today’s event does demonstrate the value of Information Technology. We can tell that without Information Technology there will be no business, just like employees. Without employees, there will be no businesses. It is true that business can go back to manual process as stated above, but the question is can you compete based on that kind of business model? I challenge anyone who said they can. Therefore, the value of Information Technology is embedded into business process. If you must put a dollar amount for Information Technology, ask yourself a question, how many more employees do I have to hire without the help of Information Technology? Can you compete without Information Technology? Do you know the answer?
Organizations large and small are focusing on the business continuity practices since the unfortunate event of 911. However, most organizations are focusing on recovering IT infrastructure. While it is important to have a plan to recover IT infrastructure, organizations often miss a great opportunities on how to recover their business without IT. It was not that long ago, PCs were not at every employee’s desk and some or all employees worked on the telephone and used paper to process business transactions. Such manual process has lost since PCs took over the organization’s business activities. The assumptions of IT infrastructure availability is always there are bad for business in case of either natural disaster events or human errors like we had today. Those unpredictable events can stop business processes cold and dig a big hole for business to recover if the outages last more than just a few hours or even a few days. Business needs to have a manual process for the most critical business in order to survive in the most extreme events. Hacker penetrations are also a big concerns, not too long ago, Google’s network was compromised by hackers (according to a report by New York Times). The hackers could have done more damages other than stealing Google’s code, but who can guarantee knowledge stolen won’t be used in future attacks to disrupt or bring down the whole network.
The second thought is about the value of Information Technology bringing to the business. It is difficult to put a dollar sign on Information Technology, but today’s event does demonstrate the value of Information Technology. We can tell that without Information Technology there will be no business, just like employees. Without employees, there will be no businesses. It is true that business can go back to manual process as stated above, but the question is can you compete based on that kind of business model? I challenge anyone who said they can. Therefore, the value of Information Technology is embedded into business process. If you must put a dollar amount for Information Technology, ask yourself a question, how many more employees do I have to hire without the help of Information Technology? Can you compete without Information Technology? Do you know the answer?
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Electronic HealthCare Record
I went to the Loyola CIO award event last week where Dr. John Halamka was the recipient. Dr. Halamka is the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and is well known in the national health care IT. In fact he is the Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel and Co-chair of the HIT Standards Committee. He talked about some of the new technologies with healthcare, like eHR (Electronic Healthcare Record). Some of the vendors include Microsoft, Google, and IBM. So I decide to take a look at the eHR, of course Google is easy to find as usual as oppose to other vendors. Many people concern about the privacy of the eHR that needs to be addressed. I will just go over some of the features of Google Health so you will get a taste of what to expect if you decide to give it a try.
After you login to Google Health @ https://health.google.com (need a Google account), you will be asked to setup a profile about yourself that includes insurance, conditions, medications, allergies, procedures, test results, and immunizations. It also asks for your personal data, i.e. sex, race, blood type, weight, and height etc. You can also add/import your healthcare data (files and images) to your profile after setup. To address the security concerns, Google Health has notices service to either email or mail alerts to you if your information was breached by unauthorized access.
After you add medications into your profile, drug interactions will show any potential drug interactions that could be harmful for you. If you have a new prescription, it will tell you if you should take the prescription. Drug complications is a big problem in healthcare industry and such service will help to reduce the risks posed to the patients and reduce insurance cost for doctors because medical malpractice litigations will drop as a result of this service.
Explore medications and treatments show the available online services to you. You can link your profile to one or more of the web sites and get the services. One word of caution, if you link your profile to the service provider, you may consent them to see your medical records. One of the online provider is Cleveland Clinic MyConsult provides second opinions if you need. Of course, it depends on how comfortable you are to get medical service online.
Other services provided by Google Health include “Share this profile” to share your record to your family members and doctors. “See who has access” provides limited reports on who has what kind of access to your records. “Medical contacts” allow you to add contact information when medical notification is required. “Find a doctor” provides a tool to search a doctor that provides the service according to your profile.
Above is just a brief overview of Google Health. If you feel like it, you may want to investigate more on your own. Since this is linked to your Google account, I would advise to create a new Google account just for this purpose if you worry about security.
After you login to Google Health @ https://health.google.com (need a Google account), you will be asked to setup a profile about yourself that includes insurance, conditions, medications, allergies, procedures, test results, and immunizations. It also asks for your personal data, i.e. sex, race, blood type, weight, and height etc. You can also add/import your healthcare data (files and images) to your profile after setup. To address the security concerns, Google Health has notices service to either email or mail alerts to you if your information was breached by unauthorized access.
After you add medications into your profile, drug interactions will show any potential drug interactions that could be harmful for you. If you have a new prescription, it will tell you if you should take the prescription. Drug complications is a big problem in healthcare industry and such service will help to reduce the risks posed to the patients and reduce insurance cost for doctors because medical malpractice litigations will drop as a result of this service.
Explore medications and treatments show the available online services to you. You can link your profile to one or more of the web sites and get the services. One word of caution, if you link your profile to the service provider, you may consent them to see your medical records. One of the online provider is Cleveland Clinic MyConsult provides second opinions if you need. Of course, it depends on how comfortable you are to get medical service online.
Other services provided by Google Health include “Share this profile” to share your record to your family members and doctors. “See who has access” provides limited reports on who has what kind of access to your records. “Medical contacts” allow you to add contact information when medical notification is required. “Find a doctor” provides a tool to search a doctor that provides the service according to your profile.
Above is just a brief overview of Google Health. If you feel like it, you may want to investigate more on your own. Since this is linked to your Google account, I would advise to create a new Google account just for this purpose if you worry about security.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Neutrality
The U.S. Court of Appeal ruled today that FCC (Federal Communications Commission) does not have authority to require broadband provider to give equal access to all internet traffics. I know some of you may look at this ruling from big government's angle, which I will not get into. But one must realize the potential affect on the future of the internet in the United States. Neutrality is important because it could diminish internet innovation and lose the edge we have in the world.
When broadband providers control the traffic flows, they can pick and chose what applications will get the best bandwidth. Such controls can either make application owners to pay for better bandwidth or share some part of revenues. This is in addition for broadband users paying their own services so broadband providers will receive payments from two sources, application users and owners. The amount of revenues from these double source can be huge and consumer will always pay it at the end because application owners will pass the costs to the consumers to maintain their share of the revenues.
Another important issue regarding to neutrality is that the broadband providers have total control, like traffic cops. They have the power to decide what consumers can get and which applications the consumer should get. How so, you might ask? Since they control the speed of the traffics, they can affect user experiences by reducing/increasing bandwidth according to their preferences. They can increase bandwidth for their favored applications while reduce bandwidth they don't like. As we all know, once we, as consumers, had bad experience, we tend to abandon that application. If you think about it, the broadband providers have enormous power to sharp up the future of the internet instead of letting market, consumers, to decide.
Here is another one. Some of the most popular applications today, Yutube, Flickr, and Hulu for example, started from very small. They reached today's popularity because of the neutrality. If they had to pay for bandwidth, who knows if they can get the popularity they enjoy now. When broadband providers control internet traffics, new applications will have a harder time to reach to the targeted audiences and will slow innovations. Entrepreneurs will be hard to find in this country while other countries will gradually catchup with us and eventually pass us. In addition, without neutrality, our free market based economy will no longer be true.
One argument I heard was that broadband providers spent billions of dollars to build up their networks so they should be able to control the traffics on their networks. The problem I have with this argument is that consumers pay for the services and they should have the freedom to go anywhere I want. If Comcast doesn't provide a competitive video on demand services, then consumers should have the choice to watch videos on hulu instead of being forced to watch videos on Comcast.
When broadband providers control the traffic flows, they can pick and chose what applications will get the best bandwidth. Such controls can either make application owners to pay for better bandwidth or share some part of revenues. This is in addition for broadband users paying their own services so broadband providers will receive payments from two sources, application users and owners. The amount of revenues from these double source can be huge and consumer will always pay it at the end because application owners will pass the costs to the consumers to maintain their share of the revenues.
Another important issue regarding to neutrality is that the broadband providers have total control, like traffic cops. They have the power to decide what consumers can get and which applications the consumer should get. How so, you might ask? Since they control the speed of the traffics, they can affect user experiences by reducing/increasing bandwidth according to their preferences. They can increase bandwidth for their favored applications while reduce bandwidth they don't like. As we all know, once we, as consumers, had bad experience, we tend to abandon that application. If you think about it, the broadband providers have enormous power to sharp up the future of the internet instead of letting market, consumers, to decide.
Here is another one. Some of the most popular applications today, Yutube, Flickr, and Hulu for example, started from very small. They reached today's popularity because of the neutrality. If they had to pay for bandwidth, who knows if they can get the popularity they enjoy now. When broadband providers control internet traffics, new applications will have a harder time to reach to the targeted audiences and will slow innovations. Entrepreneurs will be hard to find in this country while other countries will gradually catchup with us and eventually pass us. In addition, without neutrality, our free market based economy will no longer be true.
One argument I heard was that broadband providers spent billions of dollars to build up their networks so they should be able to control the traffics on their networks. The problem I have with this argument is that consumers pay for the services and they should have the freedom to go anywhere I want. If Comcast doesn't provide a competitive video on demand services, then consumers should have the choice to watch videos on hulu instead of being forced to watch videos on Comcast.
Online training experience
A few years back, I took two technical online training classes because I could not take two weeks off to attend classroom training. The training classes included the following features: class training materials, remote access to the servers, interactive messaging with trainer and classmates, call-in phone to listen to the class lectures, and PowerPoint presentation. I ended up dislike the training classes and will share some of the pitfalls of the online training so others can learn from.
First, you need to find a place you will not be disturbed. Since I had to work while taking the training classes, I ended up taking the classes in my own cube. That was the biggest mistake. People constantly disrupted my training sessions, some for business related works while others just stopped by for personal conversations. Each interruptions made me fall behind the class and I had to work really hard just to catchup what others had already done. I was extremely stressed over the whole training classes and the end result was I did not learn as much I was hoping for. For those who prefers online training, my suggestion is to isolate yourself from all different kind of disruptions. Otherwise, you will not learn or struggle to catch up with the class.
Second, you need to make sure you can self control and discipline. For the long training classes like the ones I took, there are some part of the classes that you may not like and away from classroom makes it easy to find something else to do, like checking your emails, browsing news, reading blogs, twitting, writing to your friends on facebook, or just catching up with friends. No one can control the participants' environment in online class while classroom can be tightly control. It is up the participants to show self restraint from wondering out or the class experience will end up like I had, disappointment.
Third, you must make sure you have reliable communications and connection to the virtual classroom. Before register for the class, you need to make sure your telephone, computer, software, and internet connection speed meet the requirements. For example, make sure you have a headset if the class is long, or make sure you have enough internet bandwidth for video conference. Any additional software required for the class should be installed ahead of time so you don't have to worry about something goes wrong while installing software. Not enough bandwidth can make your online class experience miserable.
Fourth, you need to make sure you have enough knowledge prior or basic understanding of the online class materials. It doesn't make any sense for a college to provide online orientation for incoming freshmen because their never had any kind of college experience before. The same can be said about technical training. If you have never had any kind knowledge before, you are better off taking in class training or at least you need to spend sometimes on the topic before the class. Comprehending new concepts or understanding new technology can be time consuming depending on each individual. However, the better you prepared, the more you will gain from online training.
Hopefully, my own experience will help someone else to avoid the mistakes I made and get the most out of the online training.
First, you need to find a place you will not be disturbed. Since I had to work while taking the training classes, I ended up taking the classes in my own cube. That was the biggest mistake. People constantly disrupted my training sessions, some for business related works while others just stopped by for personal conversations. Each interruptions made me fall behind the class and I had to work really hard just to catchup what others had already done. I was extremely stressed over the whole training classes and the end result was I did not learn as much I was hoping for. For those who prefers online training, my suggestion is to isolate yourself from all different kind of disruptions. Otherwise, you will not learn or struggle to catch up with the class.
Second, you need to make sure you can self control and discipline. For the long training classes like the ones I took, there are some part of the classes that you may not like and away from classroom makes it easy to find something else to do, like checking your emails, browsing news, reading blogs, twitting, writing to your friends on facebook, or just catching up with friends. No one can control the participants' environment in online class while classroom can be tightly control. It is up the participants to show self restraint from wondering out or the class experience will end up like I had, disappointment.
Third, you must make sure you have reliable communications and connection to the virtual classroom. Before register for the class, you need to make sure your telephone, computer, software, and internet connection speed meet the requirements. For example, make sure you have a headset if the class is long, or make sure you have enough internet bandwidth for video conference. Any additional software required for the class should be installed ahead of time so you don't have to worry about something goes wrong while installing software. Not enough bandwidth can make your online class experience miserable.
Fourth, you need to make sure you have enough knowledge prior or basic understanding of the online class materials. It doesn't make any sense for a college to provide online orientation for incoming freshmen because their never had any kind of college experience before. The same can be said about technical training. If you have never had any kind knowledge before, you are better off taking in class training or at least you need to spend sometimes on the topic before the class. Comprehending new concepts or understanding new technology can be time consuming depending on each individual. However, the better you prepared, the more you will gain from online training.
Hopefully, my own experience will help someone else to avoid the mistakes I made and get the most out of the online training.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Presentations from co-CIOs
Three important things I got out of our two CIO speakers are how to build a career, what are the important factors to have co-CIOs in the organizations, and how insulate yourself from outsourcing by adding value to the organization. They are extremely important as graduation date is approaching and continuing difficult business environment in the World. Learning from the successful CIOs is helping to set a attainable career goal and correct course my me personally.
Joyce's presentation touched me mainly from two fronts, career path and how co-CIO works. The path of Joyce from manger trainee to her current co-CIO demonstrated on different levels how to pursuit career goals and be successful. Her earlier featured a fearless young professional who was brave enough to tackle any challenges in the career path. In the process, she built her own credibility with her boss and gradually moved up. But when personal interests, career, and corp culture didn't match, it was better for her to move on instead of being miserable and stayed. I had the same experience as Joyce that I was so unhappy at one of the previous company that I decided to leave and it didn't matter what kind of monetary reward I would get (recently I was told that my recruiter short changed me on the compensation, but I would make the same decision again). Work/life balance was another big issue for Joyce and she did turn down good opportunities that didn't fit her life style.
Both Joyce and Dan spent fair amount of time talking about co-CIOs. It seemed both were happy to be the positions and had a good working relationship between them. To me, and to a extend, many of us, there were some disbelief that co-CIOs situation worked out so well. My experience in the corp world was that the in fighting for power were always there and it was not uncommon that back stabbing occurred in any corporations. The management theory I learned from leadership also contradicted co-CIOs, that in order to be effective, one needed more power than the other to get things done. But since Joyce and Dan knew each other very well and worked together in the past from a different company, they could work out their agreement and obeyed by it. I give them the benefit of doubts and believe them. There are always exceptions in theories and real world events.
Dan's presentation was useful in how a current CIO views the future trends and opportunities. Dan talked about how globalization impacted the IT, in terms of outsourcing to the east. The trend of outsourcing was irreversible process for IT and other business, like productions. I thought it was very insightful for Dan to point out the way of shielding from this trend for us. Moving up to the higher value chain would mean better values for the company that could not be outsourced. Learning and types of jobs were the two different ways to protect yourself from outsourcing. The more you learned and the more you could offer to the company. If you were in high value type of jobs, then you were better protected because outsourcing could not provide such high value. Dan also mentioned about IT trends and I thought it was very helpful relating high value jobs. Often trends were associated with innovation and cutting edge technologies, therefore they were not targeted to be outsourced by the company until they became mature technologies.
Joyce's presentation touched me mainly from two fronts, career path and how co-CIO works. The path of Joyce from manger trainee to her current co-CIO demonstrated on different levels how to pursuit career goals and be successful. Her earlier featured a fearless young professional who was brave enough to tackle any challenges in the career path. In the process, she built her own credibility with her boss and gradually moved up. But when personal interests, career, and corp culture didn't match, it was better for her to move on instead of being miserable and stayed. I had the same experience as Joyce that I was so unhappy at one of the previous company that I decided to leave and it didn't matter what kind of monetary reward I would get (recently I was told that my recruiter short changed me on the compensation, but I would make the same decision again). Work/life balance was another big issue for Joyce and she did turn down good opportunities that didn't fit her life style.
Both Joyce and Dan spent fair amount of time talking about co-CIOs. It seemed both were happy to be the positions and had a good working relationship between them. To me, and to a extend, many of us, there were some disbelief that co-CIOs situation worked out so well. My experience in the corp world was that the in fighting for power were always there and it was not uncommon that back stabbing occurred in any corporations. The management theory I learned from leadership also contradicted co-CIOs, that in order to be effective, one needed more power than the other to get things done. But since Joyce and Dan knew each other very well and worked together in the past from a different company, they could work out their agreement and obeyed by it. I give them the benefit of doubts and believe them. There are always exceptions in theories and real world events.
Dan's presentation was useful in how a current CIO views the future trends and opportunities. Dan talked about how globalization impacted the IT, in terms of outsourcing to the east. The trend of outsourcing was irreversible process for IT and other business, like productions. I thought it was very insightful for Dan to point out the way of shielding from this trend for us. Moving up to the higher value chain would mean better values for the company that could not be outsourced. Learning and types of jobs were the two different ways to protect yourself from outsourcing. The more you learned and the more you could offer to the company. If you were in high value type of jobs, then you were better protected because outsourcing could not provide such high value. Dan also mentioned about IT trends and I thought it was very helpful relating high value jobs. Often trends were associated with innovation and cutting edge technologies, therefore they were not targeted to be outsourced by the company until they became mature technologies.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
New Hardware and Virtualization
AMD announced new product Opteron 6000 with eight and twelve-core x86 processors earlier this weekend (link http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20100329/bs_nf/72455 ). Here is one of the major advantages of the new platform, it provides 119% better performance over AMD’s last generation server chips without losing processing power and the price will stay just about the same. Just like many times in the past, both Intel and AMD are improving their products very rapidly. The new platform is designed to replace older platform products by AMD.
The importance of this announcement is what Dan talked about in our class, one of the major trends in IT, virtualization. The concept of virtualization comes from unused computing power of physical servers. Space and power usage are two other important factors in virtualization push. The growth of the Information Technology requires more servers to host applications and processes. Modern data centers are filled with tens of thousands of servers and space for servers are hard come by and expensive to maintain. The costs of cool a data center require lots of power day and night. It is one of the major expenses in operating data centers. I attended a Microsoft webcast last month about their new Visual Studio 2010 preview. One of the topic in the webcast was about cloud computing and virtualization (here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3b5Ca6lzqE ). The presenter showed a Microsoft data center in Chicago. Microsoft used truck load to put new servers in their data center and tried to save cooling power costs by opening roof of the data center.
My experience in the IT field told me that applications within an organization will alive until the last user leaves that organization. No one will voluntarily give up his/her applications unless forced to and will give you ten thousand reasons why the application should live for another day. For this very reason, you will see tens of thousands of servers are dedicated for legacy applications. DOS (for those who still remember) applications are still common in many organizations. What virtualization comes to play is to consolidate many of the old servers that are still needed to run applications together, but they won’t require too much processing powers. I don’t have the proof, but I would image a new AMD Opteron 6000 will probably have more processing power than 100 Intel Pentium I processors ten years ago. Other service providers will also benefit from AMD’s new product. They will be able to provide more services to the clients with less space and less power consumption.
The importance of this announcement is what Dan talked about in our class, one of the major trends in IT, virtualization. The concept of virtualization comes from unused computing power of physical servers. Space and power usage are two other important factors in virtualization push. The growth of the Information Technology requires more servers to host applications and processes. Modern data centers are filled with tens of thousands of servers and space for servers are hard come by and expensive to maintain. The costs of cool a data center require lots of power day and night. It is one of the major expenses in operating data centers. I attended a Microsoft webcast last month about their new Visual Studio 2010 preview. One of the topic in the webcast was about cloud computing and virtualization (here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3b5Ca6lzqE ). The presenter showed a Microsoft data center in Chicago. Microsoft used truck load to put new servers in their data center and tried to save cooling power costs by opening roof of the data center.
My experience in the IT field told me that applications within an organization will alive until the last user leaves that organization. No one will voluntarily give up his/her applications unless forced to and will give you ten thousand reasons why the application should live for another day. For this very reason, you will see tens of thousands of servers are dedicated for legacy applications. DOS (for those who still remember) applications are still common in many organizations. What virtualization comes to play is to consolidate many of the old servers that are still needed to run applications together, but they won’t require too much processing powers. I don’t have the proof, but I would image a new AMD Opteron 6000 will probably have more processing power than 100 Intel Pentium I processors ten years ago. Other service providers will also benefit from AMD’s new product. They will be able to provide more services to the clients with less space and less power consumption.
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