In a mutual boot-strapping beginning with the dawn of Homo sapiens, mankind and information have both exploded in variety, velocity, and volume. Our fates have been intertwined. We advance by harvesting, using, and sharing information. Along the way, information persists, mutates, and diffuses further. Turning the crank, we find — no, we create — even more information. In a race to compete with each other, we endlessly seek more information to help us do better. The mass of information grows larger still, revealing more secrets. From the primordial single bit of information at the dawn of the universe has sprung a thing that now feeds itself in a never-ending cycle of perpetual novelty. And the …
Author
Vince Kellen, Ph.D.
Jun 042013
Sep 082012
As we all know, Abraham Lincoln was largely self-taught in the midst of meager means and living on the frontier in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, far from centers of learning and culture east of the Appalachians. For him, the book represented the path, and he sought them with great effort. As president he sought books on military matters during the Civil War in order to educate himself. As a result of his own drive and intellect, Lincoln emerged as a very capable, if not supremely capable military strategist. It is illustrative to learn how far one person can advance themselves by reading. The bibliography of Lincoln’s reading is noteworthy since it reveals his penchant for …
For several years now, so many pundits, experts, and concerned citizens of the IT world have prattled on about IT alignment with the business. So much so that whenever you hear any phrase that starts with “IT must be aligned with the business,” you already know what’s coming next. Yawn. What we often don’t talk about — and really should — is how each employee has (or has not) aligned him or herself with their own skills and interests and their current role. I contend it is here that most organizations struggle at every level, from the top executives on down. Which is worse: misaligned people or misaligned IT organizations? Is there a difference? When …
As expected and sudden was the inevitable and tragic end to Steve Jobs’s life, so too is it surprising yet necessary that an outpouring of praise and emotion would follow. We all loved his inventions. The Twitterverse was rightfully aflame with stories about Steve. As if drawn nearly as perfectly as the interfaces he and his team dedicated their lives to, the final measure of his arc marks a very clean and a nearly perfect transition into history. The last brilliant burst that characterized his second tenure at the helm of Apple was a perfect, if not — from today’s vantage point — a seemingly inevitable concluding crescendo. Beethoven would have been proud. Jobs will …
Oct 072011
All the focus on big data is missing the point. Yes, high performance computing architectures let us analyze very large data sets. And yes, that is interesting and helpful. But let’s go with a thought experiment here. Imagine the following: Real-time data feeds from all source systems; Incremental, multi-generational real-time data feeds and data storage so all prior versions of data are accessible; The end of batch processing, nightly loads, ETL or other boring stuff in order to prepare data; All queries you can dream of (well, maybe 98% of the queries) running in in less than a second; All the rest of the queries running in minutes, not hours and yes, even crazy Cartesian …
Jul 122011
Excellence is an old topic, more honored in a book than observed in the workplace. Nonetheless, it is an important topic because of some almost unbearable forces that are shearing the workplace. IT may be lowering barriers to entry in many industries allowing new, smaller firms to find a home, even for a short while, and threatening larger players. But despite the thousand flowers blooming, IT-intensive markets tend to get dominated by a few very large companies, with fast-growing upstarts that are getting too big for their britches getting mercilessly culled in this economic Darwinism. But things aren’t as rosy for even these large firms. Firm life expectancy is shortening over the 20th and now …
Imagine, if you will, that all owners of data centers and agents representing buyers of computing cycles get together daily and buy and sell commodity computing units (we’ll call them containers) in an open exchange. Now imagine another group of buyers and sellers who are not just exchanging those containers, but buying and selling options on the containers — the right to buy or sell those containers at a future date. This exchange would be trading the 21st-century equivalent to the pork belly. Pork bellies were introduced as a commodity in the early 1960s in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in tradable units of 40,000 pounds. In a strange way, the world of data center virtualization …
Wikileaks has done more than anything else could have to make a strong emotional impact on world leaders across the globe. Wikileaks is the 9/11 of global diplomacy. The Internet is no longer benign. It has its malignancies. Over the next year, expect world leaders to begin to assert direct and indirect control over the Internet, including networks and data centers. Also look for more governments and militaries to use the Internet for what Internet edgelings have long been doing: communicating with the public. The big government spin on this will range from the transparent to propaganda to unilateral control. When information is power, powers that be will attempt to control information. 2010 was a …
Apple continues to make waves with the iPad and the iPhone. The iPad is probably already a US $2 billion line of business in a scant 80 days. Name another product that generated so much revenue so fast. I am finding how Apple pulled off that feat to be a more significant lesson in the design and engineering of a businesses than the glitz and splash of the iPad usability. Apple is adept at building business models perhaps more so than devices, at least for now. But I think we haven’t seen anything yet. All the competitors — such as Dell, HP, phone manufacturers, and others — that were caught with their pants down when …
In a bit of technological determinism, Nicholas Carr suggests that the Internet is making us dumber. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, he writes that “a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the Net, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is also turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers.” Knowing what distraction does to expertise development, in 2007, here at Cutter Consortium in an executive report on Web 2.0, I had written: “Unfortunately, Web 2.0, with its high interrupt-driven, instant gratification, rich Internet application (RIA)-powered user interfaces, may be creating a context that destroys expertise before it can develop. Expertise development requires dedicated, uninterrupted time on a complex task so that a human …
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