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BIZSCI IN BRIEF
With continued weakness in the U.S. dollar and increases in India labor costs due to greater talent competition and wage expectations, I expected to see changes in the shift of U.S. service work to India. Indeed, during a recent trip to India, I did see clear evidence of a slowdown in U.S. outsourcing growth. But based upon confidential estimates from in country contacts, the U.S. outsourcing market is still growing (albeit at a slower rate), and any slowdown in U.S. growth will be more than covered by anticipated growth from Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.

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In chatting with the car driver about prices in India, he calculated that the dollar, approaching three to a hundred rupee, buys just a kilogram of the cheap shorter grain rice. Calculating further, he indicated the same dollar buys just a few cups of the prized long grain balsamati used for many local dishes.

More...

Tags: Globalization

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BIZSCI IN BRIEF
Virtualization. You think consolidating the work of twenty servers onto one is impressive? Consider that fact that a modern Dell PC can handle billions of instructions per second, more than any thousand employees in most companies could ever task. If that's the case, then maybe your consolidation goal should be ALL servers onto one, .... or two for redundancy ... or three for added Disaster Recovery. You think 100+ to one server consolidation is not possible? Read on ...

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We are a large law firm with about two thousand workstations and two hundred production servers in data centers. As a CIO with a Windows shop for most of the last decade, I have leaned to live with the predominant WinTel Cisco IT Infrastructure design. But If you know me, you know I also think that same IT architecture is absolutely nutty. Billion dollar enterprises shouldn't have to eek a computing existence from a slow network of graphical workstations that devote nearly all their tremendous resources to communications overhead, self maintenance, security monitoring, waiting on network, waiting on storage and just about anything but completing the work of the company.

But that's another thread.

Today I want to give an update on an IT topic I am enthusiastic about: Virtualization. Virtualization is amazing because it can help make the nutty, better. More...

Tags: X86 Mainframe, Virtualization

This is a continuation from Part 1

Our goal was to move all production and just under one hundred test and development devices to a single environment, then double the equipment in that environment (for redundancy) in the primary SF area data center and add a another environment to the DC DR site. A year ago I calculated minimum computational requirements for the firm (another project) and plugged in the numbers for the entire company. I calculated that between two and four servers (with an x86 mainframe design) could probably cover the entire firm ... that's a ratio of 100:1 or 150:1 depending on how you calculate it.
We budgeted 2-3x redundancy, i.e. 6 servers.

In Jan our engineers, Jim, Tom, Ryan, Chris, Rolando and the rest of Albert's team began working in earnest on the project. As you can guess, the hardware design required a little more than:

Step 1: Pull Dell out of box ,
Step 2: Install VMware
Step 3: Auto migrate servers.
More...

Tags: X86 Mainframe, Virtualization

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BIZSCI IN BRIEF
For most companies, the Internet should not be viewed as a strategy on to itself, but an important component in a total market communications strategy. To improve your Internet strategy, first prioritize the products you want to sell to important market segments. Next, determine where you need to improve your Internet assets to make it easiest for segments to both find and buy your products. This is only the first phase of an overall profit strategy that includes Profit Forms analysis and constant optimization of the product-segment mix. WJones

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Question
I am researching options for developing and growing my company's website. Experience has provided me with plenty of opinions on what to do, but I am interested in formalizing to a greater degree my approach and am curious about options for utilizing existing plans or tools for defining Internet strategy.

More...

Tags: Q&A, Marketing, Information Infrastructure

This is the second article in the Forward to the Mainframe? series
Part 1: Revisiting the Mainframe Utility Computing Model
Part 3: A Virtualization Machine - the X86 Mainframe

The history of the Luddites is a interesting study, particularly for practitioners in the computer industry. In the early 1800's, Ned Ludd's textile culture defended hand looms over the new large knitting frames. This was despite the fact that the larger looms produced much more cloth with far less skilled labor.

Instead of looms, today's Information Technology workers repeatedly choose servers without the virtualization or processing redundancy needed to keep critical applications running. And they choose these servers over commercially available mainframes and other highly available systems with proven track records.

Let's look at the factors that led and continue to lead an intelligent and informed business computing market to chose lesser technologies.
More...

Tags: X86 Mainframe, Efficiency

Spoke in Atlanta as a keynote along with Dan O'Connell of Gartner on Voice over IP. Good session with good questions.

HOSTED VoIP EDUCATIONAL LUNCHEON
LEARN HOW A PRESTIGIOUS GLOBAL LAW FIRM—VOTED BY FORTUNE MAGAZINE READERS AS A TOP "GO-TO LAW FIRM” EVALUATED AND IMPLEMENTED A HOSTED VOIP SOLUTION

The presentation in flash format is here.
The event notice is here.
More...

Tags: Law Technology, Information Infrastructure, Efficiency, VoIP

The Minimum Computational Requirement or MCR is an analytical method for helping an organization determine the least amount of technology required for a function or organization.
More...

Tags: Green, Efficiency, Information Infrastructure, Minimum Computational Requirement

In the next few articles, we will take a deep dive into how data centers can be made more reliable and less expensive. Since mainframe design is an important part of this discussion, there will be frequent mention of the mainframe in future articles. In this article, we attempt to grok the term "mainframe".

Let's start of by pointing out that while I will often cite IBM and it's products when describing the historical development of the mainframe, the mainframe is not proprietary to IBM. Quite to the contrary, I believe the mainframe design, inclusive of IBM's innovation, represents the most effective effort to "get technology right" for general business and scientific computing purposes.

As I have stated in a prior article on the mainframe computing model, the transition from mainframe technology to networked PC Server technology, was typically not a quest for better technology. Instead, companies that purchased networked PC Servers were generally seeking a better computing buying model. Companies found that servers enabled them to grow rapidly without pain because of opportunities to add capacity and new features at lower cost. In contrast, those same companies felt increasing apprehension about their mainframe investments, as changing business requirements and increases in business output always led to higher mainframe costs. More...

Tags: X86 Mainframe, Virtualization

Ever notice that your fastest computer is the little one in your pocket?

Consider some of the daily tasks you need technology to accomplish, read e-mail, check your calendar, answer the phone, listen to a song. You can browse any e-mail in seconds, as long as you use your Blackberry. Similarly you can find and play any song or video in seconds, as long as you use your iPod.

Unfortunately, it typically takes longer to perform these "simple" tasks on your office desktop or laptop.
More...

Tags: Efficiency, Green, Information Infrastructure, Minimum Computational Requirement

What's the best way to create a more efficient IT organization?

• Implement ITIL?
• Outsource?
• Better align IT goals with business strategy?
• Integrate enterprise processes using web services?
• Focus on growing the skills of your resource pool.

What if there was a better way to provide more services per dollar, one that had nothing to do with your ability to execute as an organization? I am talking about business growth, and the impact running an IT organization at a belt tightening Gap (Limited Brands) vs, heading a similar organization at a rapidly growing Nordstrom.

My analysis provides a surprising and very disheartening result if you are CIO at a company with weak or negative growth. IT departments in growth companies have a significant cost advantage.

Thus if you are right now heads down figuring out how to give your low growth company a cost advantage so it can ... "catch-up" with the industry leaders, you might want to read this article, ... because your job just got a bit tougher. More...

Tags: Finance, Efficiency

This is the third article in the Forward to the Mainframe? series
Part 1: Revisiting the Mainframe Utility Computing Model
Part 2: WinTel, the Luddite Revolution

Forget everything you think you know about mainframe technology. Everything that follows
X86 Mainframe Home Page More...

Tags: X86 Mainframe, Efficiency, Green, Virtualization

Mainframe Utility Model vs. the Server Ecosystem

A mid-size firm might run more than two hundred (200+) production Wintel servers, each with hard drives, memory chips, power supplies and fans expected to fail within four (4) years which equates to about two hundred (200) weeks. If you stagger equipment purchases, then statistically, one of the two hundred servers will either fail or need service each and every week.

A midsize manufacturer or bank might invest in a single IBM zSeries mainframe. Managed properly, the company should experience no more than one outage over the four to seven year life of the system. More...

Tags: X86 Mainframe

This is the first article in the Forward to the Mainframe? series
Part 2: WinTel, the Luddite Revolution
Part 3: A Virtualization Machine - the X86 Mainframe

IBM's Mainframe Business Model

As the original utility computing device, the mainframe business model enables a company to invest in a system that it can grow with.

With a mainframe purchase, you buy a machine that typically can do more than you need. This "utility" computing model enables you to buy only what you need. Thus, instead of paying a price of two million dollars for unlimited use of a mainframe, you might pay one million dollars to obtain the computing power you need today. More...

Tags: X86 Mainframe, Efficiency, Green, Virtualization

I've got this idea about a simple little box that would be sold by a big company. The box would be amazing because it would support most anything a CIO would want to do. More...

Tags: X86 Mainframe, Open Source, Virtualization

Document management will become the strategic responsibility of the records department - You are in a great position because you control (as I recall) both Records and IT. That was essential, because the conversion to Electronic Files as we call it, is first a product of the Professional Responsibility Committee (PRC) and Records Department and second a product of IT. Tanya, who runs our records and conflicts has become a defacto senior member of my organization ... and Ron, our General Counsel and head of the PRC is on my speed dial. Records and IT people have practically eaten and slept together each week for two years.

There are two conversions: document management and file management – ... And the file management conversion will last at least two years after the DM conversion. We ran two conversions, the standard IT new desktop hardware, new OS, new version of ... and an Electronic Files conversion that’s still underway. If you are like us, they last time you trained all your secretaries on how to use file folders was ... Never. This was a lesson that we learned late, the existence and value of the institutional knowledge on how to manage files for lawyers.

Here are some of the things we had to teach secretaries:

• How to request custom top level electronic file folders via the New Business Process
• How to manage the primary matter worklist for a lawyer
• How to setup shortcuts to multiple lawyer’s matter workspaces
• How to setup shortcuts and favorites for a lawyer to access his and other folders within matter workspaces
• How to remove items from the matter workspace
• How to re-file large sets of documents

....

We initially thought that with the Recent Documents, Recent Workspaces, and Favorites features in iManage, we could simply add new matters to the My Workspaces list and that would be it. Imagine a merged support team of 20 people from IT and records, web based surveys of all firm members, a status level of red, yellow, or green for each person as to their ability to work in electronic files.

Each secretary had to be taught nearly one-on-one
independent of the technology conversion that showed secretaries how to use the software, they needed each to be sat down separately from the technology and taught how to manage file folders for their lawyers electronically.

Tags: Law Technology, Knowledge Management

This document provides an analysis of knowledge management at law firms and describes our approach to implementing KM Best Practices at Pillsbury.
This document attempts to answer the following questions:

• Can we create a culture that promotes knowledge management across the firm?
• Can we stop the leakage of knowledge capital?
• Can we leverage knowledge capital to improve the efficiency and quality of legal services?
• Can we provide technology that facilitates knowledge management on-line and off-line?
• Can we integrate KM with Outlook and other collaboration tools?

see full PDF
More...

Tags: Information Infrastructure, Knowledge Management

Here is the list of must have applications on my desktop:
MS Office productivity suite - I have to be compatible with the world... Word, Excel and PowerPoint are always one click away.

Novamind mindmapping tool - the first application I open when I get a new idea. Novamind, like its Windows competitor, MindJet, Novamind let's me quickly organize a cloud of thoughts. With the latest version, those thoughts can be used to easily generate a presentation (via Keynote), a project document (via Merlin), a formatted outline (via OmniOutliner Pro), or even a website.


Merlin project management software - there are lots of things I love about Merlin: 1) it is a great project management tool that does all that MS Project can do and more, 2) it is stable, 3) it can be operated via keyboard, and 4) It plays nicely with other tools. I can import an outline or mindmap directly from Novamind. Since Novamind can read .opml files (as generated by Omni Outliner) and can output presentation documents, I can now move between mindmap, outlining, project management and presentation tools, without loosing my outline structure. Try that on windows. Microsoft doesn't seem to know opml exists.

Rapidweaver - I use Rapidweaver to create and edit this blog. I know that you can create a blog with any text editing tool, but ... WHY? For just a few dollars, you can create richly formatted content that supports both RSS and Podcast extensions. With Rapidweaver, you can create rich sites that would take much more time to develop with Dreamweaver (which I also use). While there are other tools that are great for creating websites, developing RSS feeds or publishing podcasts, I credit the people at Realmacsoftware for being the first to combine the three in one elegant package. I just showed a Rapidweaver site to our Director responsible for client web technologies. If only our enterprise web systems could do what Rapidweaver does.

Tags: Macintosh

We spent several years at Pillsbury creating a pure electronic files and knowledge management capability. While you will see other material from me talking about the long road to e-files, this document is a sign at the end of the road. It shows in six simple steps how a new employee performs the mundane tasks of opening an electronic record and saving documents to it.
see Full Report
Adobe Acrobat
XML version readable by Visio 2003 and OmniGraffle

Tags: Knowledge Management

The tools used to develop software grow with every enterprise system we put into production. This is a layout of the tools and respective expertise areas of our development team.
Adobe Acrobat PDF OmniGraffle Chart

Back in 1999 I had a new idea for a news site. The concept was that rather than generate news, the site would:
1. Summarize top headlines, and
2. Provide an index to multiple news sites with content related to current headlines.



I called the site IJNews.com, and introduced it in 1999. Here is a link to a saved archive of the site (provided by archive.org). You will note that the site's layout was crude by today's standards (including an automatically updated current date display where the actual 1999 date should appear). Isn't it wonderful that our best and worst is preserved equally by this Library of Congress funded project!!!

The hackworthy contribution of this site was the layout of the layout of the news site. There were two new things I did here:

1. I wrote my own headlines. This enabled me to spotlight stories without creating Intellectual Property issues.
2. Below each headline I provided clearly identified links to various news providers with related stories.

Most web news fans will notice the similarities between my format and the format re-invented a few years later by the Google people. Since we all know Google is the best, I deem anything like it (in even the smallest way) hackworthy.

Tags: Internet

I spoke at a Customer Advisory Forum gathering hosted by Autonomy Software at the Ritz Carlton in South Central Park, Manhattan Thursday and Friday morning. Autonomy is a company based in Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, USA that provides some amazing tools for finding and managing information. They support search in just about any language and any type of information including text, audio and video. As can be the case with these events, there was more energy spent converting the converted than needed. But overall, the event was well planned and executed. I heard a some good presentations and learned a few things.

I've made heavy use of Autonomy technology when building PWSP's information infrastructure. Autonomy offered a powerful search platform that includes every conceivable search related facility. Autonomy's search links our enterprise systems and enables employees to simultaneously search expertise, best practice documents, contacts, clients, prior work, docket (calendars), intranet and internet content. The PWSP LLP infrastructure includes millions of pages of documents and other media types, each requiring some level of security. Autonomy's security is rock solid.

My presentation provided an overview of the development of Information Infrastructure at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. I showed our first and second generation systems and described our lessons learned with each. I also gave a glimpse at the next generation, currently under development. Presentation in Acrobat PDF format.

At the seminar, there were a dozen attendees from the U.S., U.K., and Austrailia. Media and healthcare companies were well represented. The most interesting presentation was presented by Joseph Britto, MD of Isabel Healthcare who was motivated to develop a medical diagnostic KM system after the loss of a patient. Dr. Britto provides a good demonstration of the potential of KM software in the medical profession and also a great human interest story.

Tags: Knowledge Management

The Governance Model was the first of three experimental models for next generation legal services I worked to develop between 2002 and 2005. After the Knowledge Folders initiative proved successful at answering the technical question of how to manage knowledge, these new models sought to answer the next question, "How do you apply information infrastructure to maximize the utility of client service?". The basic conclusion of the governance model was that law firms should cease allocating resources for marketing activities other than brand awareness. Instead, law firms should concentrate resources on assuring the delivery of precise and timely information for each and every client.... Said otherwise, law firms should focus systems on enabling lawyers to be an indispensable source of information on the client's governance team.
One reason driving the development of the Governance model was the high cost of servicing Client Teams. Most large law-firms have been unable to service more than a few dozen teams although many have more than 1,000 active clients. This is due to that manpower intensive nature of current client team organization. By sitting ten people at a table each month with an average bill rate of $500, a single team can annually cost more than sixty thousand dollars. Consider additional administrative expenses and you have clarity on this issue.
The goal of client teams was to address the new reality that specialization necessitates collaboration among lawyers when serving a client. This does not just apply to the client as a company, but to each individual in within a client company. As a CIO with more than a dozen years with law firms, I can write my own contracts. Yet I still will need the services of both a corporate and labor lawyer on any given year. My legal service needs are completely independent of peers such as the CFO or our General Counsel.
When we count the individuals served, the average top 100 law firm may have as many as 100,000 clients that need multi-counsel service. Obviously the Client Teams model cannot meet this need and another model is required.
To ensure information delivery would indeed be precise and timely, the governance model requires that a risk profile be established for each client (person) at the start of each engagement based upon his or her roles and responsibilities with the client company. Setting up a profile would be no more complicated than creating an account at Yahoo. Technology would then be used to automatically route knowledge and enterprise information related to the profile to his or her lawyers. Lawyers would in-turn quickly forward relevant risk information using the same technology.
Sources for risk information would include content created expressly for the client (i.e. Docket dates, documents) and general content that could be applicable to any client (i.e. news, written Alerts regarding changes in the law, invites to training events hosted by the firm). Since the provision of general content and invitations to clients is typically the purview of marketing, re-assigning those resources seemed a natural fit. Companies requesting legal services almost without exception request more of law firms.

Tags: Knowledge Management