Just getting back to Seattle after being on the road last week and stopping to visit my parents outside of Nashville in Franklin, TN on the way back. For years now I have made a practice of looking the pilot in the eye and saying "thank you" as I get off the plane. We all have bad days at work and I want the pilot/co-pilot to know that I appreciate them and what they do – including safely delivering me to my destination. You see, they do something I can’t do – safely take off, fly, and land an airplane.
Month: June 2007
Spot it, got it
There are plenty of books, thinkers, and pundits covering management techniques and leadership out there. Moving beyond buzzwords and acronyms you begin to get to fundamentals. One fundamental I use is the notion of "spot it, got it." We have all been in meetings or discussions where a problem is restated over and over or someone will point out that something needs to be done about X. My approach to these scenarios is that if you bring it up, you own it – be that figuring it out, researching it, or coming up with the solution. I sincerely believe that merely stating a problem without a proposed solution is intellectually lazy. You’d be surprised what kind of discipline that this will bring to a team or company – as well as drive creative thinking from those around you.
Enterprise Strategy Group whitepaper on intelligent message management
We announced the release of this whitepaper earlier this week and have gotten some good feedback on it. We have worked with Brian Babineau and team from ESG for some time and I am a huge fan. Brian is really knowledgeable and very approachable – things it takes to be a great industry analyst. Here is a short podcast overview and here is a link to the EDD Blog with their take. You can download it here or send me note and I’ll get you a copy.
What ‘Effective Teledensity’ is and why you should care
Many years ago while at Arthur Andersen I had the opportunity to work on a series of projects looking at the impact, drivers, and opportunity around mobile communications – both satellite based as referenced in this post and terrestrial cellular build out. During that time, I became acquainted with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) out of Geneva, Switzerland and their role in understanding, advocating, and setting policy around global telecommunications and their very Flash Gordon-like logo (to the left).
One of the many metrics that I spent a great deal of time analyzing for various markets was teledensity or the number of telephone lines per 100 people. Fast forward 10+ years and this is now measured as "effective teledensity" which includes both mobile and fixed lines per 100 people. Teledensity is an indicator of economic development for a country and those that are below 1 have a difficult if not impossible task of getting above it. One was perceived to be the tipping point to accelerate the connectivity of a population and, by default, economic well-being. Moving from 10 to 30 is defined as the "teledensity transition" where at 30 the majority of households and nearly all businesses have access to telecommunications.
From the ITU:
For the developed economies in the Asia-Pacific region, it took between 8 and 35 years (average 16 years) to make the transition between 1935 and 1995, with a progressive acceleration over time. However, for a sample of developing economies in the same region, it took only between 2 and 6 years (average 3 years) to make the transition between 1995 and 2006. The main difference between the two charts is that the developed countries made the transition using fixed-line networks, whereas the developing economies have invariably made the transition using mobile networks.
Don’t think that communications (especially mobile) is making an impact on the world, accelerating connectivity among people, and improving economies? Think again.
A new IT requirement – e-Discovery
More from our Reshaping Information Security MarketInsight study. This section deals with the pain and confusion surrounding e-discovery and how those responsible for information security get in the middle of e-discovery projects.
e-Discovery
One thing became very clear during the course of our discussions – information security and IT professionals are becoming very adept at e-discovery and their time is being filled with requests to produce emails. In many cases, the infrastructure is simply not in place to provide relatively easy access to the mountain of email produced by a company on any given day.
Following a normal program of deletion is deemed best practices, but even if you anticipate an inquiry and don’t save the email records, you could be in hot water. One company’s lawyer offered a definition of “transitory” email as one that is not for business purposes, however this created even more confusion. In some cases, companies manage separate environments to accommodate legal hold requests and to ensure there is no spoilage of possible email evidence going as far in one case to have a separate mail server where certain mailboxes are moved.
More and more, the participants viewed being able to assist counsel with litigation discovery as a component of their jobs and were actively working to develop cost models for an investigation to ensure legal wanted to bear the costs when a request is made. Of most concern to them was the “period of exposure” in a discovery request – figuring out what had and what they could produce within what time frame.
One participant cited 22 separate discovery requests he had to manage last year and another quoted over 40% of the employees at his company were on some type of legal hold. As for other media and ways to communicate, Instant Messaging (IM) was deemed to be “like a phone call” so there was no need to archive it as they don’t record calls and if thumb drives are permitted and advocated as a way to move files and save data, they now become discoverable.
How building software is like making sausage
Got an email from a good friend after this post on online vs. offline. Jim gave me my first product manager job and was a great guy to work with…am still trying to figure out a way to work together again at some point.
He taught me some valuable things about product management including that product folks will tell you the truth sans spin when asked a question and that building software is like making sausage (apologies in advance to you vegetarians out there) – you don’t want to see it being made but the end product is fantastic.
Anyway, here is some text from his email:
…just continued decentralization…Sun had it right — the network is the computer and that’s where Google is going. The Telecoms never adjusted and now Microsoft must adjust….Dumb pipes, smart peripherals, data storage costs zero, unconstrained bandwidth (this is the real kicker).
He goes on to point out that a good read on this is George Gilder’s Telecosm . Do I smell sausage?
Watching how people use technology
"It’s about what to design and when to design, because human behaviour changes very slowly; technology changes very quickly."
This quote is from a BBC article about Jan Chipchase who is a researcher at Nokia Design. He has a pretty cool job – travels the world and watches how people use their phones to understand where product design needs to go. As part of the process, he brings designers along so they can see first hand and uses a qualitative market research approach called convergent validity.
Mr Chipchase’s focus is on the uses to which people put their phones; where they keep them, how they answer them, and a million other details about our relationships with these devices that have helped shape our world.
Here’s an eye-catching statistic from the story:
By 2009 more than four billion people in the world – out of a population of 6.3 billion – are expected to have a mobile phone connection in their lives.
That’s 64% of the global population!
Another data point that confirms mobile devices will become ubiquitous and be the way most of the world’s population connects for the first time.
This is your brain on email
Funny post by Roger Matus of Inboxer on an article in the UK’s Times Online about how sending email and text messages causes the loss of IQ points (temporarily). Brought to us by our friends at HP (whose market research budget is obviously larger than mine).
"The noticeable drop in IQ is attributed to the constant distraction of “always on” technology…"
I have no idea what…….uh…sorry…just got a message…am back now..they are talking about.
Organizational dynamics and their influence on information security
Here’s an excerpt from our recent MarketInsight report – Reshaping Information Security. This section deals with the organizational dynamics related to designing and implementing an information security program around corporate messaging. You can download the full report here or send me an email for it.
Organizational Dynamics
Curiously, this came up repeatedly as both an obstacle and variable to consider when working to implement or design an information security program covering messaging. One interesting point of view was that people want to report good news and that this topic, at least in the beginning, is rarely good news.
Organizationally the Information Security function came out of the IT organization and in many cases reports to the CIO. It was described as an “immature business function” that can have a “conflict of interest” with the CIO complicating day to day operations. Further, security alone does not translate to risk management and, in one case, documenting the exposure for a management team was not well received because now something had to be done about it.
Proactive companies have committees or councils whose purpose is to address the broader content and security issues facing the company and often become a flashpoint for discussions around messaging and proper governance. These groups can include Legal, Internal Audit, Business Owners, HR, and various shades of IT.
One thing was made clear during our discussions – the more information you get, the more you must act. So questions around who owns securing intellectual property or who is going to be the “police officer” for the organization must be sorted at this cross-functional level. After all, it is very difficult to manage something you don’t own and we heard repeatedly that no one wanted to receive “hate mail” from the employees due to a new policy or technology control. Ultimately, there must be consequences for those that breach the rules and the urgency and enforcement must come from the top forcing, in many cases, divisions/departments to participate.
Sun people and cloud people in Seattle
One thing I have learned after living in Seattle for a while is that when the sun is out (like it was all weekend), people come out in force to be in it. I think it is indicative of the passion for both causes and activities that exists in this city. I joke that there are two populations here – sun people and cloud people. You won’t see them at the same time and get out of the way when the sun is out.
Couple of great runs this weekend along Lake Washington topped off with a cookout over in Seward Park after Marel’s soccer practice. Her coach (Cory) whipped up some amazing fresh salmon on the grill. Good times.
Venture Vice 