Saturday, January 21, 2012

Controlling v Enabling - a tech rant

@nayanjadeja just posted at http://india-tech-trends.blogspot.com/2012/01/mdm-cloud-natural-fit.html a perceptive analysis that "consumerization" is driving corporate technology trends.

It's a subject dear to my heart - after thirty years in business, most of them closely involved with the technology side of the business, I, for one, think this is a very welcome development. But I'm also acutely aware that most CTOs/CIOs do not share this view.

I prefer the term "democratisation" to "consumerization" (btw, why is one spelt with an 's' and the other with a 'z'?). The latter appears (to my ear, at least) to be a more pejorative description. What is actually happening is that users are voting with their wallets to adopt these new devices that although expensive, are easy to use, sexy and fun - three adjectives that are normally incapable of being applied to corporate-decreed hardware and software.

They are finally getting a say in technology. They understand its capabilities far better than they used to (because these devices are, by and large, easy to use) and they are slowly becoming smarter users of technology.

And, frankly, this terrifies the average CTO/CIO who sees his turf being eroded, his territorial jurisdiction being trampled over, his ability to control multi-million dollar hardware and software purchasing budgets being blown away by multiple 'purchase managers' who bring their own hardware to work, using parallel software infrastructure that costs them nothing, and, as a result, are often more comfortable with this new way of life than they are ever likely to be with outmoded corporate technology infrastructure that takes months, if not years, to upgrade and move with the times.

So the old bogeys of security and compliance are trotted out, in the hope that

a) no one realizes that there is no such animal as a secure corporate network;

b) no one knows that most successful hacks take place via social engineering, rather than cracking the corporate firewall;

c) no one remembers the last time a corporate-owned piece of hardware failed (they do, you know, they're not immune to that);

d) no-one cares enough to compare the true cost of ownership between corporate-owned infrastructure and cloud-based 'leased' infrastructure; and

e) the non-techie powers-that-be don't understand the gibberish the CTO spouts anyway, and so will continue to happily turn a blind eye to their goings-on and let them get on with not doing whatever it is they say they're doing.

I still maintain a toehold in the corporate world via a once-a-week stint at a managing consultancy firm. While there each Wednesday morning, I struggle with Lotus Notes - a clunky interface that is stuck in the eighties - and Windows 7 (which, while it is certainly an improvement over Vista, is no Lion) and an ugly Lenovo laptop with an unresponsive trackpad and navigation buttons scattered over the place in a decidedly unergonomic configuration (and don't get me started on that joystick red button).

So, I sigh with nostalgia for my Macbook Pro sitting at home, and turn to my iPad and whiz through my GMail+Dropbox+Salesforce setup that helps me run my own business with a level of efficiency and at a price point that should make a CEO weep with envy.

[As an aside, when I implemented Google Apps for Business at my last company, we did a TCO evaluation for 3 years and discovered that for a 200-person installation, Google Apps saved us 50%. Read that number again: 50%.]

And then I look around at the cabin I share with 3 others, and, guess what? Yep, all 3 of them have iPads sitting on their desks next to their corporate-issued Lenovos.

The old-school CTO sees his role as a controller of technology. The smart one understands he needs to be an enabler.

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Saturday, January 07, 2012

Mumbai by morn

Took a 6 a.m. drive to the airport today. (Well, more like 6:20 a.m.)

Literally hundreds of runners, joggers and fast walkers along the entire stretch from Cuffe Parade to the Sealink - all, no doubt, practicing for the Mumbai Marathon next Sunday. The roads were what Mumbai's roads should always be but only are during the wee hours - fast, clean, clear.

The airport too was blissfully uncrowded. Usually, the ratio of people coming to see off (or welcome) a traveler is 16 to one. And they all hang around till the flight takes off, probably in the belief that they can be seen from the air during take off and thereby provide support and reassurance to the traveler. Today there were barely ten or twelve cars at the departure gate and even the lone cop on duty couldn't bring himself to toot his whistle at them. Felt like Newark - except for the construction all around.

On the return drive, dawn was breaking and smog smothered the city. Roadside fires from pavement dwellers added black smoke to the pall that hung over the highway. From the Sealink, one could see the towers that define the city's skyline, emerging ghost-like from the mist. I couldn't help wonder what this city looks like to someone who visits it for the first time from rural or small-town India. Like some other-worldly place, no doubt, forbidding, alluring, foreign. It's no wonder it's been a magnet for so long.

And as we turned past Babulnath onto the ridged and scalloped surface of Marine Drive, the sun hung over Nariman Point like an incandescent fried egg.

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Withdrawing from Facebook. Gently.

For some time now FB has been cheesing me off. Big time. They keep changing the look. They add in features I don't want and can't turn off. They remove features I had got used to.

I get strange invitations to weird games that I don't play. I get 'friended' by people I have no clue to. A friend's FB account got hacked. I read about features like Timeline that resurrect the dead past uninvited. And it doesn't get activated on my account. Dunno whether to rejoice or mourn.

If I comment on someone's pic I get inundated with everyone else's comments on it. It's like being at a wedding reception and having to listen to each guest wishing the couple. Gets old fast.

And may be that's what it is. I'm getting too old for this social media claptrap. Perhaps.

Or perhaps it's just FB that's stepping on my bunions. Besides, FB makes me lazy. Post a picture. Browse through some pictures of people who are only marginally relevant (at best) to my life. Read inane comments by all and sundry. Too passive by far.

So here's my resolve for 2012. Wean off FB. But breaking a habit, even one as sporadic as my FB habit is, is not easy. So, baby steps.

Step 1 - turn off notifications from FB on my mobile devices. Check. (Do I really need to know that someone somewhere commented something on someone else's photo of somebody altogether different sometime in the last two minutes? No.)

Step 2 - turn off email notifications. I will have to dive into FB's innards to achieve this and not altogether sure I want to do that. Will probably be simpler to set a filter in GMail to treat these as spam. 

Step 3 - Stop visiting FB in my browser or my mobile apps. Check. I hardly ever do that nowadays anyway unless prompted by a notification. And see steps 1 and 2 on how to fix those.

Step 4 - Start blogging again. Haven't done so in a long, long while. And blogs are so last decade. But what the heck.

Finally, one day, delete my FB account. May, just may, come to pass.

Ironically, my blog posts will be posted to FB. For all those FB fanbois.

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