EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

When is personalization of technology going too far?

I received a TomTom GPS device last year and finally spent the weekend playing with it. Like many devices, I could change the startup display to show family members... My wife was happy with that.

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The software industry in conflict

I've written a number of times about the SaaS movement and what organizations need to think about when looking at its value to them.

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IT happens

Unfortunately, IT at many companies is an emergent phenomenon - IT emerges more by accident than by design. No one really plans to create the mess, it just happens. There are too many individual decisions; each seemingly logical and defensible, each justified by an apparently well-defined business case, but in reality, each being made using short-sighted, narrowly-focused criteria that ignore the long-term, enterprise-level perspective. Each decision contributes one tile in a mosaic of IT assets with no overall governor to oversee the big, fully-integrated picture.

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Collaboration 1.0 or 2.0?

I was reading through a very interesting study by the Economist Intelligence Unit about collaboration. We have made tremendous progress on the technology front, as is reflected in the developments in the Web 2.0 space. In spite of all this technology advancement, it seems that face-to-face collaboration still has the greatest success rate.

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Cloud Computing Forecast

In Network World magazine there was an article that predicted a cloudy future for cloud computing. They listed a number of problems:

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The Long Tail

A lot has been written about the Long Tail, a re-cast of the "80-20" rule in business terms. Basically, specific retailers with low distribution and inventory costs can afford to have a large number of low-turnover items on hand, thereby creating a niche market for specific items of interest to specific market segments (or consumer markets).

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Innovation or innovation

Recently, there was a blog entry about patents, and oftentimes, innovation and patents are used in the same sentence. I want to reflect on some notion regarding innovation. There are two ways to look at innovation: the breakthrough-type of ideas that create new markets, and the incremental improvement of existing. We refer to the first one as "Innovation" (upper case and the latter one as "innovation" (lower case).

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Is the Market Ready for “Green Services”?

At the moment there is a lot of discussion going on around Green IT. In the broadest sense, Green IT can be defined as the practice of deploying and using Information Technology (IT) as efficiently as possible. Based on this definition, the concepts of virtualization, power management, technology refresh, and mobility can all be encompassed under the Green IT umbrella. Even from a data center perspective, the focus is on data center design, maintenance, and operation. As such, the overarching end-to-end data center Green Services solution may be there in practice, but it does not come to the forefront.

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Retailers at the Gate…

From a study by comScore, we can conclude that the current social networking society includes visitors that frequent retail site more often than the average Internet user. That brings to bear an interesting point of marketing: could and should these social networking sites adjust themselves and open up for more targeted marketing towards this very interesting market segment (from a marketing and advertising perspective).

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Event Driven Management and Opportunistic Computing

A while back I wrote a blog entry on Opportunistic Computing, what an organization can do with cloud computing that they wouldn't have done before. I just read an entry on the Smart Enough Systems blog that looks at some similar issues but from the perspective of proactive use of IT to increase the value of the business. He wrote that the characteristics of an organization using Event Driven Management are:

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Gaming and Business

In reading "Wargaming, the business", one can imagine that a simulation of a complete enterprise is created that over time can model different scenarios and associated outcomes. If we take a step back and see how teenagers and pre-teenagers are working and interacting with technology (specifically simulation and gaming), we gain an insight on how corporations have to adapt in the future.

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Gartner list of 10 most disruptive technologies for IT

I always look for articles like this to see what I've missed. This article about Gartner's list echoes many of the posts that have taken place on this blog recently.  I was a bit disappointed, since I was hoping for some new areas to discuss. ;-)

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Will Cloud Computing solution sing Sweet Caroline?

Last week I saw a demonstration of Project Caroline at Sun. Its main design features are to:

• Enable services to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources.
• Expose resources through high level abstractions, including language level virtual machines, networks, and network accessible file systems and databases.
• Provide a horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources as a single system, providing developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling these resources.

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Will Technology Become “Free”?

With Moore's Law still alive and kicking in the processor space, similar trends are taking place in the network space (Gilder's Law) and storage area (areal density law). These three technology laws, if taken at face value, would indicate that a fixed amount of money would provide you with double the amount of storage, processing capability, and network capability within an eighteen month time frame.

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Enterprise Mobility?

I finally made some time to go over some of the magazines and articles that were collecting dust. Charlie Bess' blog on the 8 Technologies to Master in '08 combined with recent article published in Asia on the Read full entry...