Bob Heye, a reporter for local ABC channel KATU called earlier this week to ask if EasyStreet could help their viewers learn about the importance of securing their Wi-Fi networks. So after a bit of encouragement from his manager, EasyStreet Tech Extraordinaire, Kenny Payne, came to the rescue. (Along with our other technical staff, Kenny is well versed about all things Internet.)
Below is a picture from one of our many security cameras showing Kenny being taped by the news crew. (Don’t even try to access our secure data center without being caught!)
You can view the entire resulting news story, “Is your wireless network a public porn gateway?,” including Kenny’s words of wisdom, here.
Since 1995, EasyStreet has been coming up with good reasons why companies should outsource their IT infrastructures. Now, technology giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo are echoing a lot of what we’ve been saying for 14 years. They too want to convince companies to move from costly and inefficient corporate data centers to the benefits of a cost-effective, shared environment.
The big difference, of course, is that the technology giants are talking about giant data centers shared by millions of users. Their lures are cloud computing and utility computing, which provides on-demand server capacity. But whether the message is coming from a giant company or from a considerably smaller EasyStreet, it’s clear that more and more companies are suffering from their own vastly overbuilt data centers, recurring upgrade costs and the dramatically escalating price of power.
TechRepublic.com’s editor-in-chief Jason Hines, writing on this topic, recently observed: “For governments, large financial institutions, and other high-security environments, outsourcing the data center will probably never make sense. For virtually everyone else, it’s going to become a very attractive option in the next 3-5 years. I suspect that a decade from now running your own data center will be the exception and not the rule, and IT departments will need a strong business case to justify the existence of a private data center.”
He notes that the Googles, Microsofts, et al, are arguing they can save companies from overprovisioning and overspending on server capacity while adding 24/7/365 monitoring, scalable load management and IT service management — same as you-know-who in Beaverton.
“Of course, the trade-off is that IT departments give up some control, and usually some staff positions as well,” Hines writes. “Many companies will be fine with that since IT is probably not one of their core competencies. They will welcome the expertise from a third party and will be happy to find a new way to control IT costs.”
Amen.
The days of the CIO as a viable member of the corporate C-suite may be numbered unless the role evolves beyond its current operational, shared-service mentality, according to Patrick Gray, author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology.
In this thought-provoking essay “The CIO is Dead (Long Live the CIO),” he says one reason is because of the technological savvy of today’s younger workers.
“Much has been written about the new generation of workers advancing through the ranks, a generation who grew up with technology, and spent their university years playing with Facebook and Linux years before ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘open source’ were bandied about in the boardroom. No longer the sole province of the computer science majors, the rising stars in your marketing, sales, finance and operational roles likely know more about technology than some of your IT staff. Integrating technology into their jobs is as effortless as breathing, and a monolithic IT organization that strives to block them from deploying relevant technology into the groups they manage is an anachronism to be worked around, rather than a critical resource.”
He continues:
“Aside from large-scale infrastructure like networks and provisioning hardware and software, nearly every new IT trend points towards those in operational roles making technical decisions, rather than leaving the task to corporate IT. Virtualization, cloud computing, Web 2.0, etc. will all push the implementation of new services to end users, and unless IT evolves, it will fade into a utility that is expected to be seen and not heard.”
It’s always gratifying to congratulate ourselves on a fine piece of innovation. It feels good to know we grappled with a situation, jumped outside of the box and came up with a plan, program or product nobody else ever thought of.
But there’s a potential harsh lesson embedded in this sort of pride: If our stakeholders don’t share our perspective on the value of our plan, program or product, we actually may have taken a step backward.
Writing on HarvardBusiness.org, Scott Anthony shared a good reminder of this lesson. He wanted to deposit checks using a newly installed, technically sophisticated ATM at his Bank of America branch. When the machine’s optical-scanner wouldn’t read all of the checks and left him worse off than with the older ATM would have, he reached the conclusion that the super ATM was a good innovation for the bank, but not so hot for customers. He wrote:
“Rightly or wrongly, my check-deposit struggles left me with an image: Bank of America is innovating to help itself, not me. The general point here is to make sure you evaluate innovations through the proper lens. The trap companies often run into is they think their view of quality is the same as the market’s. That’s not always true. If the innovation isn’t perceived to be better by the consumer, customer, partner, or supplier to whom it is targeted, then adoption could slow and frustration could grow.”
Anthony is the author of The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work from Harvard Business School Press.
With most economists now predicting the recession will conclude later this year, don’t get too comfortable. A recent post in the Harvard Business Publishing blog “Big Shift” contends we are entering a world of “constant disruption.”
One of the biggest reasons resides in the IT world: “We now face something entirely different. Today’s core technologies — computing, storage, and bandwidth — are not stabilizing.”
“They continue to evolve at an exponential rate,” the commentary continues. “And because the underlying technologies don’t stabilize, the social and business practices that coalesce into our new digital infrastructure aren’t stabilizing either. Businesses and, more broadly, social, educational, and economic institutions, are left racing to catch up with the steadily improving performance of the foundational technologies.
“For example, almost forty years after the invention of the microprocessor, we are only now beginning to reconfigure the digital technology infrastructure for delivery of yet another dramatic leap in computing power under the rubric of utility or cloud computing. This leap will soon be followed by another, then another.”
So strap in. If the topic interests you, be sure to read the entire post.
