I ran across a couple of articles about innovative Data Center cooling and power strategies based on good old seawater and tidal waves.
It seems the island nation of Mauritius (yes, you can find it on Google Maps) plans to develop a system to use seawater air conditioning (SWAC) to support data center tenants. The concept taps deep-water currents that bring colder water within two miles of Mauritius.
In Scotland, huge data centers will share energy generated by a tidal power generation project. This article also references Google’s proposed floating data barges that would use oceanic power.
Unfortunately, we aren’t close enough to the coast to harness sea power in Beaverton, but certainly our mild climate offers some power-saving cooling alternatives. (Stay tuned…)
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.
More IT departments could be more successful if it weren’t for the mindset of the people managing them, according to Ilya Bogorad of Bizvortex Consulting Group, located in Toronto. “I often encounter situations where I can’t help but feel that an IT department could be a runaway success within its organization if it weren’t for the beliefs that their leader seems to hold,” he says.
Ironically, some of the ideas holding down IT (and one suspects other parts of the organization as well), seem on the surface to simply make sense. But Bogorad encourages organizations to examine these ideas at a deeper level. Here, for example, are three of them:
1. We are under-resourced.
“This is a universal complaint,” Bogorad says. “You can never have enough time, staff or money if your priority system is out of order. The key is in using the resources you have in such a way that they produce the best ROI possible.
2. Projects must save costs or generate revenues.
“If you merely concentrate on the financial side of costs and benefits and require that all projects have a positive immediate ROI to be pursued, you’re killing innovation in your organization,” he contends. “Think about it. How innovative would you want to be if every suggestion you make is immediately evaluated in respect to financial benefit?
3. In difficult times, we must cut costs
“Prudent financial management is a must at all times, good and bad. But consider this: it’s impossible to become successful by pinching pennies,” Bogorad warns. “It just doesn’t happen. The best value generated by an IT department today does not lie in trivial and often mindless cost-cutting but in innovation, business alignment and strategic thinking.”
Bogorad has this advice for executives in these difficult times: “Invest – not cut – time, money, and executive support into business-critical projects, while completely abandoning projects that are no longer relevant. You must constantly challenge your people to critically examine the ways you do business and to improve them.”
For more of Bogorad’s observations and ideas, visit his column at TechRepublic.
Investments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are greatly responsible for the nation’s productivity gains over the past decade, and a key advisor to President Obama is encouraging more investment via the government’s economic stimulus package.
“If you invest in ICT infrastructure in an economic downturn, you not only get better short-term job-creation effects but you get better long-term productivity impacts,” says Robert Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington, D.C. think-tank, and member of Obama’s transition team.
Atkinson notes that the current stimulus plan invests $7.2 billion in broadband networks, “but the market could have absorbed at least $15 billion.” And with the world economy so mired, it’s important that new technology get into place ASAP. “You want these projects to hit the ground running over the next 18 months, and ideally sooner than that,” he told IDG News Service.
Explaining that stalling on stimulus-related technology projects could result in diminished economic output and increased budget deficit, he said: “If you make these investments and you make then right, you can certainly have long-run economic impacts, which can be very sizeable.”
Innovation is like apple pie — of course it’s a good thing. Executives agree on that point, but a fair share of them doubt their companies do it very well. This “innovation deficit” is brought out loud and clear in a recent IDG Research study that AT&T sponsored.
In a poll of 100 IT and business leaders on the topic of innovation, the study found everyone agreed innovation is a good business practice and 44 percent even said their companies place “a very high level of importance” on it.
The rub came when they were asked about how effective their companies were at stimulating innovation. Only 14 percent felt they were in the “very” or “extremely effective” categories. At the other end of the scale, some 23 percent said their companies were “not at all” effective. The middle 60 percent felt their companies demonstrated average behavior regarding innovation, neither outstandingly good or bad.
So where does your company fall on the innovation scale?
