Category: Business

Categories
Business Technology

Replacing the Bad

I was watching a talk recently by Bob Mahar and this quote jumped out at me:

If you do something poorly. It’s easily supplanted by anything.

I take this as a warning against complacency in technology. Many times it is comfortable to let systems continue to run until they start causing problems. An issue arises when things have gotten to the point that they can be replaced by anything just because “it is better”. When you get to that point, ANYTHING is better, even solutions which are overall worse in the long run.

That is one reason to keep pushing forward with new technologies and updates. You want to be able to make the best decisions possible, but replacing technology that doesn’t work can sometimes lead to sub par solutions.

Categories
Business Life Technology

Making Decisions

When questions arise and you need to start making decisions, how does one start? What is the framework one might use to frame the discussion. You need something to start with, some way to start to try to piece together what a single decision might mean.

How you frame decisions is a good way to judge what is important in your company or just important to you. Is price the determining factor at all times? Well, that says something about what you value (good or bad). Do you look for what everyone else is using? The newest? The fastest? Best value? Least cost-of-ownership? Most readily available? Allows you the most control? Allows you the least control?

There are thousands if not millions of other questions you can use to frame a decision, and each one says something slightly different about you, your company, and what you value. Good or bad.

Here are some questions I am currently sing to frame decisions at work:

  • Is this something we need to do?
  • Is this something we should be doing?
  • Should this be do-able on a mobile platform?
  • Do we need to have a mobile solution for this?
  • Are we legally able to do this?
  • How much extra effort will this take?
  • Do we have the expertise to do this well?
  • Do we have the resources in place to do this well?
  • Why are we going to do this?
  • Where is the money coming from?
  • Who is pushing for this?
  • Why are they pushing for this?

That is just a sampling, but they are usually floating up in my noggin just waiting for answers. If you look at this, almost every one of them could have the answer of “no”, and that is important because you need to be able to say “no” to things that really need it.

Does every question need a “yes” answer in order for you to do something? Of course not, but every question’s answer needs to be weighed in some manner so that you can make an informed decision when the time comes. Otherwise you are just making arbitrary decisions without really thinking things through.

Categories
Business Technology

A Collegiate Opportunity

I wanted a good title, so this is what I came up with.

The rise of Apple, mobile devices, and the quandary Microsoft currently finds itself in with the uncertainty at CEO along with product issues (Windows Phone, Windows 8, etc.) is providing a unique opportunity for 3rd party software providers to get into colleges and universities by providing a better experience than Microsoft can offer with the influx of non-Microsoft devices.

Providing services for all platforms is where these 3rd parties need to be headed. While the “cloud” might sound all fluffy, there are concerns about security and control which need to be addressed but they need to be addressed in such a way that there is still flexibility as to what devices can be used and where. That is a weak point right now.

Apple isn’t going to provide it, and Google is going to keep it to themselves s (on their own servers and services) so it leaves an opening. Companies who have been pushed into the background would do well to take advantage of this unique opportunity.

I added Collegiate to the title because I see it where I work. Students no longer use the file server space we provision for them and even many faculty and staff members have gone outside to find the flexibility they crave. Providing a solution to provide flexibility along with appropriate amounts of control would go a long way to solving many issues.

When I entered college in 2005 it was still relatively rare for an undergraduate to have a laptop (at least where I went, a small private college in the midwest). Now, however, a single student will have three or four distinct devices attached to their name … and that doesn’t even count the ride of Xbox and Playstation as not just a staple for gaming entertainment, but entertainment in general. I spent the better part of a couple of days figuring out which headers our firewall was stripping from just the Playstation 3’s Netflix application because it was affecting enough students on campus for someone to finally contact me.

Those are huge changes and more are on the way. Just today a student showed up with a 7″ ASUS Windows tablet and was having issues connecting to WiFi on campus. Besides being an abysmal experience (I’m sorry, it just is for me), it is ANOTHER new type of device to try to take account of.

The pace of change means that IT departments are looking for ways to continue to provide tools to students and faculty. 3rd parties have a great opportunity right now to provide something, anything, to make this easier and/or better.

It won’t be there forever.

Categories
Business Technology

Mobile Parity

The phrase “mobile first” is tossed around quite a bit in technology circles and for good reason. Mobile devices (e.g. tablets, phones, etc.) are selling in ever greater numbers to ever more diverse people in more locations. For many people, a mobile device is now their primary device for accessing information via the internet and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

It really is a continuum when you think about it. I’ll try to lay it out as my mind perceives it here:

  • Mobile Only
  • Mobile First
  • Platform Parity
  • Desktop First
  • Desktop Only

For a long time we were at the Desktop Only side of things because, simply, desktops were the only things available. You didn’t need to worry about mobile devices because mobile devices didn’t exist.

Or at least not the extent we think of now.

We are now in a time where we have a multitude of different devices, form factors, and connection opportunities to be able to stratify products and services so that we can put them in the place they are most needed and will be the easiest to accomplish. There is no need to only support a single platform outside of resource constraints.

Also, don’t get me wrong, resource constraints are a huge issue.

However! In order to have the best experiences for your colleagues/users/customers you need to start asking the following question: where would this best be used? I’ll give an example.

Harvest is a wonderful web-based time-tracking and invoice-sending app. I’d dare to say they have the best interface for easily tracking invoices and time attached to work. I’ve used them a lot. They do have a mobile app but it is a focused mobile app (thinking specifically on iOS). You can’t do everything on the mobile app (yet), but you CAN track time and expenses attached to project.

Those are things you probably would want to be able to do while out and about with your iPhone.

It never needs to be an all-or-nothing endeavor. It doesn’t have to be mobile-only or desktop-only but you can pick and choose where tasks and services can best be used to provide the best and most flexible experience for everyone.

The proliferation of mobile devices isn’t killing the desktop or generalized computing but freeing generalized computing devices to be good at what they are good at … and allowing mobile devices to just be good at what they are good at.

There is going to be a lot of overlap, but also going to be unique use-cases as well. I don’t need picture-taking applications on my laptop or a full-blown IDE on my phone. Let’s stop trying to pit one-against-another and instead see what we can do when we let the constraints of different platforms guide us to unique and new decisions.

Categories
Business Technology

Better Training

I posted Better Documentation not too long ago and since then I’ve started my CLA training through SUSE.

I’m working through their On-Demand offering and so far I’m looking forward to digging into it. Many of the topics seem to cover stuff I have a cursory knowledge of already. That’s the benefit of being exposed to Linux since at least 2005, and Unix even a little before that (thanks OS X).

The one downside right now is that the website I use to access the training has the following limitations:

  1. designed almost exclusively for desktop browsers
  2. requires Adobe Flash to play video and other interactive content

Deal-breakers? Of course not.

Funny enough, Apple pushed out an update for the iTunes U app for iOS that same day which brought the design more in-line with iOS 7.

I’ve watched and participated in a number of classes through iTunes U and Apple has greatly expanded what you are able to do within the app itself recently as well. When the update came down, a thought floated into my head which I quickly discarded as untenable (since Apple doesn’t allow companies to charge for content through iTunes U), but I do think there are lessons to be learned.

What if companies offered training through an iTunes U-like app interface? I’d be happy if it were through iTunes U itself, but that’s not going to happen.

What if we take the good parts of iTunes U, create a community around that, give it the ability to have both free and paid content available, and then get publishing tools created around such an ecosystem.

Impossible? Maybe.

Wanted? Definitely.

Would it need to be app-based? Maybe not, but I feel that for the best experience you would want it to be so. In order to have an offline training experience worth time and effort, I think that native apps are almost a given. Build interactive communities around the training as well. There is no need to make training something that only happens once and then you let things stagnant. Build communities around sharing knowledge specific to training for specific products.

None of this sound seven remotely easy, but I think there is an opportunity to really start turning the training and certification markets on their head. Work doesn’t need to be the only thing done remotely … training could be as well. What is missing, in many cases, is the tools to do so effectively.