Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Are you a hammer or a nail?
If someone gave you a hammer to dig a hole, and you didn’t know any better, you’d probably come to the conclusion that the hammer wasn’t a great tool. Of course, you’d be wrong because it’s the perfect tool for driving nails…it just wasn’t designed for digging holes.
This scenario seems be one of biggest challenges in many large enterprises. We take a perfectly good tool, and try to use it in ways for which it was not designed. In the process we undermine people’s perception of the tool’s value, though no fault of the tool, not to mention our own credibility.
We also treat people like hammers and then wonder why we get suboptimal results...
| | View blog reactionsThis scenario seems be one of biggest challenges in many large enterprises. We take a perfectly good tool, and try to use it in ways for which it was not designed. In the process we undermine people’s perception of the tool’s value, though no fault of the tool, not to mention our own credibility.
We also treat people like hammers and then wonder why we get suboptimal results...
Tuesday, February 04, 2014
Does salesforce.com have anything to do with selling?
I have always been fascinated with salesforce.com but even more fascinated with the users of it. I have noticed an interesting trend amongst my professional friends who are sales people. The ones who suck at using salesforce.com actually are good sales people. The opposite is also true in that the ones that are great with salesforce.com kinda suck at selling.
I attribute my observation to the fact that people who keep systems such as salesforce.com up to date do so because they really don't like talking to people. It is so much easier to check emails and perform other low-value clerical tasks than it is to sell. Sadly, many sales managers feed this reality. I hope I am not alone in believing the only way to make money is to talk to people.
| | View blog reactionsI attribute my observation to the fact that people who keep systems such as salesforce.com up to date do so because they really don't like talking to people. It is so much easier to check emails and perform other low-value clerical tasks than it is to sell. Sadly, many sales managers feed this reality. I hope I am not alone in believing the only way to make money is to talk to people.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
2014 Thoughts on Public Speaking...
Like most IT professionals, I too am an introvert. The key difference in me is that I am confident in my abilities to think on my feet and love the challenge of difficult questions asked by competitors, hecklers and jokers.I find immense reward in the opportunity to talk about things that interest me.
In 2014, like any other year I plan on speaking at four to six events on a various of IT topics.If you’d like to invite me to your event (and don’t already know my contact details) then I’d suggest contacting me using LinkedIn (I prefer introductions over connection requests). When contacting, share a little bit about why you think I would make for a great speaker for your event, a little about the event itself with an emphasis on who are the attendees and of course whether I will have to seek out work travel expense approval or whether you have that covered on my behalf.
I generally prefer events where there’s no pay to play and it’s my opinion that you’re after rather than a pseudo endorsement of my employer...
| | View blog reactionsIn 2014, like any other year I plan on speaking at four to six events on a various of IT topics.If you’d like to invite me to your event (and don’t already know my contact details) then I’d suggest contacting me using LinkedIn (I prefer introductions over connection requests). When contacting, share a little bit about why you think I would make for a great speaker for your event, a little about the event itself with an emphasis on who are the attendees and of course whether I will have to seek out work travel expense approval or whether you have that covered on my behalf.
I generally prefer events where there’s no pay to play and it’s my opinion that you’re after rather than a pseudo endorsement of my employer...
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Industry Analysts, IaaS and Operating Systems...
Once again, I will point out missing aspects in industry analyst conversations around cloud computing...
The conversation around cloud computing tends to classify technologies according to whether it is viewed as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS) representing them in an almost stack-like notation that never seems to address fundamental architecture concerns of any particular layer.
Should we be asking ourselves, does cloud computing deserve a different type of operating system? Many applications whether written in Java, .NET or even Ruby on Rails runs in some type of virtual machine container that has its own mechanisms for traditional operating system functions such as memory management. So, why are we duplicating functionality across stack components? Would cloud not be more efficient if we eliminated this type of redundancy?
Consider other aspects of how we deploy applications to the cloud and how this differs from traditional enterprise computing. In cloud, we often deploy a specific part of our application whether it is an application, database, web server and so on in its own virtual machine (VM). In this scenario, we don't need an operating system to provide either process isolation nor complex security schemes to provide one account/user from another.
The operating systems we run on cloud environments still are centered around the notion that infrastructure people twiddle configuration files vs the cloud paradigm of providing APIs for dynamic configuration change programmatically.
Since industry analysts love to show disrespect to open source as well as treat Microsoft as the whipping boy, why can't they beat up on operating system vendors to create a cloud operating system that is separate and distinct but otherwise fully interoperable from an application perspective that lightens the stack....
| | View blog reactionsShould we be asking ourselves, does cloud computing deserve a different type of operating system? Many applications whether written in Java, .NET or even Ruby on Rails runs in some type of virtual machine container that has its own mechanisms for traditional operating system functions such as memory management. So, why are we duplicating functionality across stack components? Would cloud not be more efficient if we eliminated this type of redundancy?
Consider other aspects of how we deploy applications to the cloud and how this differs from traditional enterprise computing. In cloud, we often deploy a specific part of our application whether it is an application, database, web server and so on in its own virtual machine (VM). In this scenario, we don't need an operating system to provide either process isolation nor complex security schemes to provide one account/user from another.
The operating systems we run on cloud environments still are centered around the notion that infrastructure people twiddle configuration files vs the cloud paradigm of providing APIs for dynamic configuration change programmatically.
Since industry analysts love to show disrespect to open source as well as treat Microsoft as the whipping boy, why can't they beat up on operating system vendors to create a cloud operating system that is separate and distinct but otherwise fully interoperable from an application perspective that lightens the stack....
