Email wrong-number

Sometimes technology can have significant and unintended cultural impacts. Email in its infancy was a minefield, in that we never realized it was an inappropriate (and one-sided) tool for expressing emotions. It took us a while, but we finally taught ourselves to reread and pause before hitting the send button. In Japanese, there is a word for "unsay" to take something back, but alas not in English, nor is there a reliable unsend in email.

I've been using a Blackberry for phone and email for a while, and I've noticed an interesting phenomenon. I will call it the "Friendly wrong number". I meant to call Wendy A, but instead called Wendy B, since I dialed from my email address book and they were adjacent. "Hi, Wendy?" "Yes, who's this?" "Its Jon" "Jon? Oh, we haven't spoken for a few years, You still working at...?". Damn, wrong Wendy. But here's the kicker. I know Wendy and can't just say sorry, wrong number. This could get dicey if your boss is "Jamie B", and your best buddy is "Jamie C".

A variation is the call-back from someone you just spoke to, but by mistake. Some new phone feature must be causing that, I am guessing. Another variation is in email, the dreaded auto-fill feature in Outlook.

This makes me wonder what unintended future impacts technology will have. Many of my LinkedIn contacts have photos, and it won't be long before they also show on phone and email messages on my Blackberry. Will the prevalence of GPS maps make us lose our orientation, and we'll need to carry compasses with us where ever we go (Compass, what's a compass?). I guess we'll find out.

Worthless processes

When reviewing a write-up or new process/project proposal, a filter that I will apply is "Does this make a difference?".

Let's say one of your team was asked to write up a plan for "managing execution risk", and they wrote a document describing a process for doing this. After you read the document, you decide that while it all makes logical sense, it really will not make a difference. For example, tracking how many lines of code are written each day makes no difference. Who cares? Its business outcomes that matter.

As a CTO, it is your job recognize tasks that don't make a difference, and tell your team that they can stop doing. If something is worthless, say so. Or go one step further, and ask your team to tell you tasks they believe are not useful or optimal. Think of it as spring cleaning. Some tasks are not negiotable and are in fact important for compliance reasons (ie Sarbanes Oxley). But if its internal driven, reexamine it. Our teams are so busy, they'll appreciate the time savings.

So, what processes/tasks are your team doing that you can throw away?

Birds of a Feather

One of my most rewarding experiences is spending time with other CTOs. Who else knows what its like to do what you do? Nothing like hanging out over chinese food and a few beers with like-minded colleagues that I trust.

Earlier in my career, I felt competitive with my peers, both at work and outside. I felt that it was an "either/or" proposition, either I succeeded/got promoted, or they did. I was comparing myself to them. Eventually I realized that my success (and others) was independent of anyone else. If I was successful, I would be rewarded, regardless of anyone else.

Now I am realizing that younger technology managers I've watched over the years are joining our peer network, and its great to see them advancing as I did. It's such a pleasure to have them as peers, and to see them grow into their leadership roles.

One thing I always experience from peers is "have you thought about...". Its great because (1) I trust and respect their views and, (2) it challenges my thinking on something I hadn't considered. Reminds me of my high school days with a great teacher when I would have a break-through epiphany on a complex concept. There is always something to be learned from your peers.

Technology around the globe

David Goodman, CTO of International Rescue Committee (http://www.theirc.org) blogged about his recent trip to Africa, where he spent time in Kenyan and Ethopian refugee camps and reviewing technology needs (http://ctoinafrica.blogspot.com). One discovery was that the internet band-width was poor, and David's blog got me thinking in general about how technology is different around the world.

I was going to title this posting "global technology", but that implies we use the same technologies around the world, but that's just not true. Yes, there are similarities, but from a CTO's point of view technology management is quite different once you leave the US, whereas I am convinced that managing technology in the 48 continental states is effectively the same.

I am going to skip the obvious differences (currencies, consumer shipping & payment methods, multi-language, multii-byte character sets, telecomm, regulatory issues), and focus on other non-obvious issues relevant to a CTO dealing with technology overseas. Here are just a few:-
1) US companies do more custom/in-house development than other countries
2) No-name PCs are often used, as not all vendors are established in all countries (i.e. Dell recently lost their presence in Israel)
3) Phone text messaging is more prevalent at executive level than Blackberries

Clearly, some differences will change over time as companies adopt US practices. But the point is, you can't just apply best practices from the US overseas. Be careful about decisions like "every application must run in a browser", it won't necessarily work. I believe the best approach is to support local technology management in individual countries/regions, and as a CTO support those individuals. Disagree, or have a different experience? Let me know.

Every CTO should be on Facebook

Every CTO should be on Facebook. Why? Facebook could well be what applications look and work like in the future. I don't know if Facebook itself will persist, but certainly the ideas behind it will.

By now, I assume most of us are using LinkedIn, and finding it to be a valuable business networking tool. While Plaxo is mimicing LinkedIn, LinkedIn is mimicing Facebook. You can now load your picture in Linkedin. And LinkedIn just added "today", "yesterday", "last week". Guess where that comes from? Facebook.

"Facebook?", you say. But that's mainly kids. I am not saying that you will get a social networking benefit from using Facebook, but you will learn tons about how new social network interfaces are evolving. Facebook follows the same connection rules as Facebook, other members can only connect to if you accept. I have some personal rules for using facebook. First, accepting links/friends only from people I've met and know. And most importantly, I limit myself to 5-10 mins at a time, Facebook can be really addictive and time-consuming.

There are 1,000s of developers (or more) developing applications for Facebook, and you can try all of them out. Facebook is truly a technology marvel., if your not checking out Facebook, you may really be missing something.

Video promise

Two bigs trends on the web right now are Social Networking and Video. I've been following internet-based video off-and-on, starting when I did some consulting for a CLEC in 1998. I also looked at IP-based video conferencing for international collaboration. It always seemed to me that video was a promise that never delivers; stiff video conferences and postage stamp-sized choppy video were hard to get excited about.

Well, consumer video (like youtube) is changing all that as it takes off, clearly exploding in use. The combination of high-speed internet and the fact that almost all single-shot digital cameras can also shoot and download video clearly helps. Anyone can shoot a video and download it, and then have youtube or similar deliver it at no cost. Google search results now frequently include videos.

What crystallized the potential of video for me was my own experience playing the guitar. As I hear a song that I would like to learn to play, I now go to youtube to see how other amateurs guitarists have played it. They've shot themselves close-up, with view of guitar fret board, so you can see what chords and strumming patterns they are playing, verses trying to learn the song from listening to the recording. This has been a completely breakthrough for me on new songs, and has improved my playing immeasurably.

I can't help but imagine that there are thousands of other examples, both personal and business, where simple-shot video can be used as a training, business, sales or help tool. Expect to see video really take off in 2008.

Enterprise Social Computing

My last blog posting was "The problem with Social Networking", and I should have realized that there were smart people already working on the problem. I quote from my last blog:- "Instead of a social network home page, what I would like to see is the intersection of SOA (service-oriented architecture) and social networking". It appears the solution is Enterprise Social Computing.

I attended today the first-ever Alfresco User Conference in New York, Kaplan is a recent customer using their WCM platform. While I could only stay for the morning, I had the privilege of attending Alfresco CTO John Newton's presentation on their product roadmap. He started with a description of his conversion into an open source vendor (John is formerly from Documentum), and how open source is changing market dynamics. John talked about current trends, my favorite quote is "Web 2.0 is right-brain", meaning it is about people, concepts and creativity.

Further into the presentation (and where I got truly excited), he described how enterprise employees use both internal tools like email, MS office, intranet, CRM, etc, and external tools like google search, linkedin, wikipedia, google maps, etc to perform their jobs, and that these tools should be integrated together in an Enterprise Social Computing platform. Yes!!

John went on to describe what enterprises needed:- Facebook-in-a-box. He described how Alfresco had integrated itself into the Facebook api in 3 days, and productized the results in 3 weeks. This was music to my ears, and exactly along the lines of what I believe to be the right solution for corporations.

Enough of facebook, time for me to get some of that facebook-in-a-box (or linkedin-in-a-box) John was talking about. Maybe email will finally start to go the way of the fax and memo?