Seradigm: Knowledge Management

In season 1, episode 8, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer “I, Robot, You Jane”, Giles, the librarian comments to Jenny Calendar, the computer science teacher that what he doesn’t like about computers is the smell.

“What do you mean, computers don’t smell”

she says. Giles replies

“Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell… musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is… it has no texture, no context. It’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um… smelly.”

I first met Paul Reynolds of McGovern Online (or @littlehigh as he became known on Flickr, Twitter and other social networks), at the National Digital Forum conference in 2007. The NDF is a “a coalition of museums, archives, art galleries, libraries and government departments working together to enhance electronic access to New Zealand’s culture and heritage”, something which I learned was very dear to Paul’s heart.

I had seen Paul on TV once or twice before, and admired his insightful and engaging style. We bumped into each other once or twice a year at conferences, or walking along Lambton Quay. I regularly listened to podcasts of his ‘Virtual World’ discussions with Jim Mora on Radio New Zealand.

Many of us in the Internet, open government, and open data space spent much of our formative years in the digital world. Playing video games as kids and teenagers, hacking on early home computers, and reading cyberpunk novels. The digital world had colour, and sound, but it was garish, tinny, maybe even a bit sterile.

What I loved about Paul Reynolds was the way he brought texture and richness to the digital world. He had a unique way of connecting the beautiful, tactile, physical, and even musty nature of art galleries, museums, and libraries with the expression of knowledge in digital environments. He seemed to understand the innately human aspects of both, and bridge them in a way no one else could.

He understood the relationship between content, people, and place in the physical world, and effortlessly applied that understanding to technology, the web, and social media. He did so in a way that was wry, amusing, and both pragmatic and visionary. He explained new things in ways that were easy to understand, often simultaneously with the excitement of a 7 year old boy, and the wisdom of a 70 year old man.

Paul, with your beautiful lilting accent, your expansive mind, and your love for literature, art, culture and technology, you gave the digital world texture, smell and sound. You shall be missed.

As an independent consultant I’ve always worked hard to be technology agnostic. This means understanding (and to the extent that I can, using) the full range of operating systems, desktop and server software platforms, stacks, and development tools and languages. It also means mixing and mingling with people from different parts of the IT landscape, including free software advocates, Microsoft evangelists, and everyone in between.

I use Linux, Windows and MacOS on a daily basis, and for the last 10 years have been watching with interest the philosophical and commercial battle between opensource and proprietary software. About three years ago however, I started wondering whether the next big battle wouldn’t be between Microsoft and Linux, but rather it would be between Microsoft and Google.

It first started being described as ‘Application Service Providers’, then ‘Software as a Service’, and it finally seems to have settled on ‘Cloud Computing’. ASPs had promise, but in terms of infrastructure and middleware provision seem to have suffered in part from lack of initial scale to get the required cost benefits. SaaS has had some successes, such as Salesforce.com and others.

What’s made me really realise that the space has changed from an idea to a business reality is not the media, the reporting, or the fact that ‘Cloud Computing’ on Google Trends has almost overtaken SaaS. It’s the people, and the business names.

I’m seeing a third set of people emerge, they’re not OpenSource stallwarts, or Microsofties, they’re Cloud junkies. They’re embracing Google Apps, Amazon’s S3 and EC2, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others. They’re starting businesses in New Zealand with names like Cloudbreak, Waveadept and Memia Cloud Services Architecture. They’re advocating, promoting, and selling Cloud based solutions. They’re starting to address and answer questions about sovereignty of data, privacy, security, disaster recovery, service level agreements and contracts with cloud providers, and total cost of ownership calculations.

In New Zealand we’ve seen these companies helping Auckland University put 50,000 students on Gmail, and NZPost moving 2,100 staff to Google Apps.

I recently went to an event in Wellington hosted by Cloudbreak and Waveadept.  There were a couple of telling quotes from Google staff:

“Is email [provisioning] core to your business, I hope not because if so you’re in competition with me” (and implicitly, you’re going to lose…)

“Microsoft Office is like Photoshop, every business should have a couple of copies”

I don’t agree or disagree with these statements, but they are telling. They signal a potential shift from the way we’ve been using information technology over the last ten years.

Is cloud computing just an obvious next step after the server virtualisation movement we’ve seen in the last five years? Will organisations move everything to the cloud? Or will they maintain a mix of proprietary/opensource solutions hosted behind the corporate firewall, and couple that with some Cloud based services.

There are some obvious benefits to cloud computing:

• Reduction in risk of data loss/security breaches due to people losing their laptops or thumbdrives while travelling
• Cost take out, i.e. switching from a mixed fixed cost (capex) + variable cost (opex), to a purely variable cost model
• It gets rid of the challenges of building out your own overcrowded server rooms/data centres
• Improved functionality rolled out in real time, without having to go through painful upgrade cycles
• Reduced time to value in implementation of new services

There are also some real risks and concerns about:

• Performance and reliability over Internet connections and the (limited) bandwidth we have in & out of NZ
• Sovereignty of data (data sitting under different jurisdictions and laws)
• Control over the data, and restricting others from using it inappropriately
• Risk of the cloud computing provider holding the data going out of business
• The implications for staffing levels in IT departments

The SSC recently released a set of guidelines about Government Use of Offshore Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Service Providers to help agencies make good decisions about venturing into the cloud computing realm.

On the small business front, I have a friend who’s started a niche online business providing parent-teacher interview scheduling services for schools. It’s being adopted at a much faster rate than he’d imagined. Although he has expertise in providing web hosting services himself, he’s now very glad he decided to build it in Google App Engine, as it’ll scale to meet the increasing demand in a ‘pay as you go’ fashion.

While the way it will play out is still a little misty, it’s clear cloud computing is going to have a major impact, and I predict we’ll see a lot more startup companies with cloud based metaphors in their names.

In closing, I’m reminded of the ever prescient Mark Andresson, founder of the Netscape browser. In 1999 he started a company called Loudcloud to provide managed Internet services. It was a bit before its time, but even so evolved into a successful business that HP acquired for $1.6B…

I just bought an iPhone. This is, without question, the most fantastic purchasing and setup experience I have ever had with a piece of technology. It even beats my Prius (only just though).

I decided it was time to get one once a colleague and friend of mine acquired an iPhone to replace his iTouch. The number of people at Kiwifoo that had them, the apparent ease of unlocking them, and the availability of a community of users in NZ tipped the balance for me.

My colleague recommended I use www.mob.co.nz. I was reassured by the clarity of the information on their site, the apparent ease of unlocking the iPhone to work in NZ, and an excellent price. I placed the order at about 5:30 pm on Monday. You could pay by credit card, Paypal, or Internet banking. I got an email from them the next day confirming the order. The staff were friendly, courteous and helpful. It arrived by courier at about 10am this morning.

Like everything Apple the packaging was beautiful. I turned the iPhone on, and it took about five seconds to configure the WiFi. On the mob.co.nz site it provides instructions for unlocking the iPhone. In the email the guy said that I could just put my Vodafone sim in. I did that, and it connected to the network. No unlocking, no configuration, no entering settings, it just worked. Mob.co.nz preconfigure the phones with the appropriate settings for NZ.

The next thing I did was to plug the iPhone into my laptop. It’s a Windows XP Tablet PC. As a side note, I also use an Ubuntu desktop at work, and we have two iMacs at home. I see it as my duty as an IS consultant to be technology agnostic, and in my book that means actually using and being experienced with everything. On the Tablet I’ve used Outlook 2003 to sync calendar, contacts etc to my Treo. I also use a plugin in Outlook to sync everything to Plaxo, which then syncs everything to Gmail and Google Calendar, LinkedIn, and the address book in Thunderbird on three different machines.

When I plugged the iPhone into the laptop iTunes opened, and asked me if I wanted to sync my calendar and contacts with Outlook. I agreed and it did it. Just like that. I have never had this happen before with a Palm device. It’s always taken a bit of configuration, trying different things, and a few goes to sync everything. iTunes also synced all my music, audiobooks and podcasts (I’ve been using an iPod nano for those). All in one go. It literally took me less than 10 minutes to have the whole thing set up, with all my data. On one perfect device. Apple is insanely great.