AM Radio……and Beyond

Published March 22, 2013 Information Technology , Life Leave a Comment
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The VCR and the DVD – there wasn’t none of that crap back in 1970

We didn’t know about a World Wide Web

Was a whole different game being played back when I was a kid

Wanna get down in a cool way?

Picture yourself on a beautiful day

Big Bell Bottoms and groovy, long hair

Just a-walking in style with a portable CD player – No!

You would listen to the music on the AM Radio

Yeah, you could hear the music on the AM Radio

These are the opening lyrics to the song “AM Radio” from one of my favorite 90’s bands, Everclear.  I was a kid in the 1970’s and 80s, and I can very much relate to the picture painted by these lyrics.  While these lyrics are from the perspective of a kid growing up in the 70s, you could just as easily rewrite them from the perspective of a kid in 1990 or even 2010.

I still remember the excitement of getting an Atari, a “portable” jambox that weighed over 5 pounds, and cable TV.  The latter of which did not happen until I was in my late teens.  I remember feeling lucky to have a 12” black and white TV in my bedroom as a teenager, and it was a TV on which I had to use pliers to change the channel to pick up one of the 4 stations we could tune in over the air. I also remember going into debt when I was a junior in college to buy a Tandy (yes Tandy) computer so I could use a rudimentary spreadsheet program to help with my accounting classes.

I also remember getting my first laptop when I entered the  high flying world of Big 6 Consulting in the late 90’s – I don’t recall the exact specs of it, but my back to this day remembers that it was heavier than a brick.  And I recall connecting that laptop to pay phones (yes pay phones) at the airport so I could dial-into our Groupwise mail server.  And I can’t forget the awe and amazement when I was issued a cell phone a few years later.

Fast forward 15 years and I am now sitting on a plane writing this blog on a touch screen tablet that weighs less than 2 pounds and is connected via wireless to the entire world at 35,000 feet – all while listening to one of the 1000s of songs on a my iPod and thinking about which type of smartphone I want next  – smartphones that I am sure have more memory and horsepower than that first brick of a laptop I had and certainly much more than the Tandy computer that took me 2 years to pay off back in the early 90s.

As a kid, I never imagined we would have the real time interactions we have today.  To think that in my lifetime, I went from Polaroid picture to being able to stream real time video anywhere in the world from a 3 inch x 5 inch device in my hand is just crazy.  Just last week, I was riding in the back of car through the mountains of Colorado while having a conversation with a business associate in Australia via a tablet connected to a wireless hotspot.  While this is common place technology in today’s world, I couldn’t help but stop and think about how dang cool it was to do it.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

In the past two weeks I have had the opportunity to listen to people from Intel and Microsoft talk about what is coming down the technology pipe.  While many of us are amazed at the technology that is hitting the market now – all the touch laptops, tablets, phones and the ever increasing number of connected things – it sounds like what will become available in the next 18-24 months will rock our worlds – in how we work, how we learn and how we live.  The pace of technology innovation feels to be picking up.  The question is “Are we all ready to keep up with it?”

A few final disclosures:

1)      As a kid, my parent’s car had nothing but AM radio.

2)      We still have VHS tapes and a VCR to play them on at our house.

3)      I just recently took the very first DVD player I ever owned to Goodwill.

4)      I can now change the channel on my TV from my iPhone (no pliers needed)

5)      I still listen to AM radio on a regular basis.

Business Technology in 2020

Published March 5, 2013 Information Technology , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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I was recently asked by CenturyLink to contribute an article for an ebook on predictions for business technology in the year 2020. The ebook “Business Technology 2020″ can be found on CenturyLink’s ThinkGig blog. You can also view it using the following link/bitly: http://bit.ly/1149RVV Below is my contribution to the ebook.

I was recently asked the question, “What will business technology look like in 2020?”

My first thought was, “That’s so far out into the future; there is no way to think that many years ahead.” Then I looked at the calendar and realized it was almost 2013, and that 2020 really wasn’t far down the road. I also realized my oldest daughter will be wrapping up college around 2020 and entering the workforce for the first time. So I decided to ask her what she thought it would look like.

My daughter’s first response was one of shock that in seven years she would be starting a career. She told me she thought people would just be using some kind of tablet for work, but a tablet a little bigger than what we use today. One that lets you do multiple things at once: be on a video call, edit a document, and look at a Web page. She also thought the cube mazes at many offices would go away because people would not need to be plugged into anything to do their work.

Though the musings of the future in the eyes of a 13-year-old are interesting, I have my own thoughts on what business technology will look like in seven years. If the past decade is any indication, we are in for a wild ride. I have often said that if my company’s revenue and operating income had grown over the past decade at the same rate as our data storage and bandwidth requirements, I would have retired early. My crystal ball shows that growth in data to still be going strong in 2020, which means a continued demand for more and faster storage, faster network speeds, and larger data circuits.

I have said before that I could see being the CIO of a company without a data center. I don’t think that we will be there by 2020, but it will certainly be closer to a reality. I envision a continued contraction in the size of corporate data centers and the continued expansion of computing capacity being delivered by third-party service providers. I recall five years ago worrying about whether the main data center we built would be large enough to handle our growth and physical consolidation of smaller satellite centers. As I walk through that data center now, I worry about what to do with all the space where racks full of servers once stood — servers that have now been virtualized and take up a small fraction of the physical space. The worry of having a too small data center has been replaced with the worry of having one that is too large. As we march toward 2020, server virtualization and X as a service — X being software, platform, infrastructure, or application — will continue to change the shape of data centers. There will be fewer servers, more network hardware, and less energy consumption.

When I look back at how much has changed with end user devices since I entered the workforce in the early 1990s, I can’t help but think that we will see that same pace and innovation over the next seven years. They will not have gone completely the way of the typewriter, but the install base of desktops and laptops will be reduced substantially by 2020. Tablets and smartphones will be the standard devices in the workplace, and I am sure there will be some not yet thought of device form factor that will be the hot new thing in 2020. Rest assured: There will still be people camping out in June 2020 to buy the iPhone 13. Much like my daughter, I also see the use of the traditional office phone, hard-wired data drops, and the conventional office cubicle slowly being phased out as we approach 2020. I might even dare say that for some businesses, the office as we know it today will cease to exist. The office will truly become wherever the employee happens to be, which will surely drive InfoSec professionals crazy.

So in summary, how do I see 2020? More data. More mobility. Smaller corporate data centers. I just hope that CEOs in 2020 realize they still need CIOs.

Touched By An Angel in the ATX

Published February 22, 2013 Community , Life Leave a Comment
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I recently celebrated another birthday.  I received numerous well wishes via social media; a phone call or two from close family, a great meal followed by cake and presents with the wife and kids; and three birthday cards delivered the old fashion way via the US Postal Service.  While all of those things were meaningful, there was one of those old school birthday cards that had an extra special message.  That special birthday card was from a soup kitchen.  Yes, a soup kitchen.

The special card was sent by Angel House Soup Kitchen.  Angel House is located in downtown Austin.  Since 1990, the kitchen has been serving a hot lunch meal to the homeless and economically disadvantage seven days a week.  Today the number of people receiving this life sustaining service averages over 300 each day.

My oldest daughter and I have volunteered at the Angel House several times.  The volunteering involves assisting with the preparation of the meal, which always includes a huge pot of soup, and also serving the meal to the long line of people queued up when the doors open each morning at 11a.  A day of volunteering takes 3-4 hours; a small amount time that makes a big impact in the community.

Now back to that birthday card.  The message on the card:

Our prayer for you on this very special day –

The day that God created you in His image –

Is that it will be all that He wants for you!

A day to rejoice and be glad.  It’s your day!

 

I recently wrote about trying to be joyful each day.  Receiving a message to “rejoice and be glad” felt like a great reminder to find happiness in each day – not just on your birthday.  Receiving the card was also a good reminder that it probably time to arrange another volunteer day at the kitchen.  All too often we get caught up in our busy lives and forget that we need to find time to give back to others around us.  This birthday card made me stop and remember that we need to share our blessings with others.

If you are interested in learning more about the Angel House Soup Kitchen or want to arrange a day to volunteer or want to make a small monetary donation to a great organization, you can find out more at:  www.angelhouse-abc.com

The Day the iPad Died

Published February 14, 2013 Information Technology , Music , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music used to make me smile
And, I knew if I had my chance that I could make those people dance, and…
Maybe they’d be happy for a while
But, February made me shiver with every paper I’d deliver
Bad news on the doorstep – I couldn’t take one more step
I can’t remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride
Something touched me deep inside the day the music died

For those under the age of 40, these are the opening lyrics to Don McLean’s 1971 song about the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in 1959 – also known as “The day the music died.”  Years ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa and see the last place those rock-n-roll legends performed.  If you love rock-n-roll and find yourself in Iowa, stop by and see it.

Today’s thoughts are not about the death of music.  They are about, at least for me, the passing of a device that much like Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens had an extremely bright but short flame.

I became an “i” guy out of necessity soon after the first generation iPhone hit the market.  Our CEO at the time called me up and told me that he wanted an iPhone to use with his work email.  I attempted to explain that the iPhone would not work well with our older version of Lotus Notes and that the experience would not be one he would like.  As CEOs are apt to do, he did not want to hear that  and insisted that I go get him an iPhone and make it work.

So off I went to the Apple store to buy one and set up an ATT wireless plan.  With a few days of tweaking and testing, we were able to get mail flowing, but no calendar synching, no access to our corporate directory, no synching of his contacts, and no access to any of our internal systems.  It was a far cry from what could be done at the time with Blackberry devices.    I delivered the device to our CEO along with the long list of things it could not do within our corporate environment.

Three days later, the CEO called me and told me the iPhone was not what he expected – for all the same reasons I had tried to tell him before ever purchasing one.   He told me he was sending it back.  So there I was, with a $500+ device and a 2-yr service commitment on a personally-liable account.   So for the next two years, I carried that iPhone as my main device and dealt with the pains of Lotus Notes in an ‘I” world.    As technology progressed and we moved to a new email platform, the iPhone became a more powerful and useful device.  While I flirted with other devices – various Andriods and even a WinMobile – I stuck with the “i” world.

Towards the end of 2011, I told people that the work laptop I was currently using would be the last laptop I ever used.  As I became further immersed in the ‘i” environment, I set my sights on the iPad.  I had a vision of the iPad being the end of the Windows-based laptop.  I tried for over a year to make the iPad be THE work device for me. I bought “Office-like” apps for spreadsheets and word processing.   I leveraged cloud storage to have access to needed files.  I downloaded apps to enhance my Sharepoint experience.  I forced myself to not take my laptop on trips so that I was solely reliant on the iPad.

While I was able to survive with the iPad, I never felt completely comfortable.  The “Office-like” apps were not full featured and clunky to use.  I yearned for my Excel and my Word.  I was also apt to forget to send files to the cloud, so I was always looking for that one file that I really needed.  Yes, I felt cool carrying the iPad, but I never could pull the plug on my trusty laptop.

That all changed in mid-January.  As part of the CIO track at DellWorld, I was offered a free Dell Latitude 10 Windows 8 Professional tablet.  My first thought when I was told I would be receiving the tablet: “here’s another toy to play with for a week or two.”  I did not have any expectations that this device would be a game changer.

When my Dell account executive delivered the Latitude 10 to me, we opened up the boxes and I causally glanced at the tablet, but did not jump right in to firing it up.  Hours later, I finally turned it on and the revolution was on.  I had in my hands a one and a half pound 10” laptop in tablet form.  I had the familiar Windows operation system (once I got past the tiles), my trusty Office apps, all my files that I shamefully keep on my local drive, and a long lasting battery in the palm of my hands.  The next day I had our desktop team join the device to our domain.  Soon thereafter, our desktop management tool was pushing down apps just like it does with any other Windows based computer.  Finally, there was a tablet that could be managed with our existing tools.  It also came with a handy docking station for easy connection to a full screen monitor, mouse and keyboard.

After three days of using the tablet, I shut down my workhorse Thinkpad laptop for the final time.

A week later, I had to ask myself where I left my cool iPad.  It was right where I left it the day I got my hands on that Dell tablet.  I had gone 7 days without using the iPad – a device that previously felt like I used every 7 seconds.

For me it was “The day the iPad died.”

It’s 2013: Be Joyful

Published February 4, 2013 Leadership , Life Leave a Comment
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Joy to the world
All the boys and girls, now
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

I might be a little young for early 70s rock, but I do love me some Three Dog Night.

New Year’s Eve is a special day in the Neill house. In addition to the obvious, it is also the day we celebrate the Lovely Mrs. Neill saying “I Do” to spending a lifetime with a slightly dorky accountant back in the mid-90s. Due to this, my oldest daughter has insisted from a young age that NYE is a family occasion – not one to be celebrated without her and her sister’s presence. NYE 2012 was no exception.

Now how we celebrate each varies and in some years plans don’t gel until the day before or day of NYE. 2012 was one of those years. We had some friends over on the 30th for dinner and they mentioned they were having a little get-together the next night at their house. So the next morning, we pulled together our celebration: NYE Vigil Mass, a nice diner out, and a swing by our friend’s gathering. Well when you wait until the morning of NYE to make dinner reservations, you don’t always get the exact times you want. We ended up with a dinner reservation time that made it impossible to make it to our local parish’s Mass, but we found a time that would work at a neighboring parish.

While selecting a Mass time based on dinner reservations is probably not ideal, sometimes things just work out for the better. The priest at the parish we ended up at was the priest that had guided me through the conversion to Catholicism a decade ago. He always had a way of delivering a message in his homily that resonated with me and his NYE homily was no exception. I am not going to go into the biblical / theological aspect of his homily but his message was one that should hit close to home for most of us.

In two words the message was “Be Joyful.”

We spend too much time in our daily lives focused on the negative and worrying about the bad things going on. We are bombarded with “the negative” from all sides. Our news outlets are constantly hitting us with bad news about death and destruction. Our work days are filled with pressures to perform better on an individual and collective basis. Business leaders are faced with the demands to continually grow revenue and income less face the consequences of falling stock prices. Kids in school are faced with the daily pressures to exceed expectations in the classroom, the playing field, and in the hallway. With all these pressures and negative news, many of us find ourselves not enjoying life. We are constantly worrying about the potential negative things. We are alive, but we are not living.

The message on NYE was simply to enjoy life. Celebrate living each day. Use the talents you have been given to make the world a brighter place. Now that is certainly easier said than done, but I made a commitment right then and there to make it a priority to be thankful each day for having the opportunity to be alive. While I have no doubt that “bad” things will happen in our world and some of those things will hit close to me, my goal is to find joy in each day.

Think what our world would be like if we could all do that every day.

Robertnotbob.net: A Look Back at Year 1

Published February 2, 2013 Life Leave a Comment
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It’s been a year since I had the crazy idea to start a blog.  During the following 12 months, I cranked out 24 entries.   Not all of them were widely read, but I got something out of writing each of them.  In fact I found writing those entries to be therapeutic.  It allowed me to bring together random thoughts that were bouncing around my head.

As I approached the 1 year anniversary of RobertnotBob.net, I decided to look back at the activity on the site.  One of the most surprising statisitics was the number of different countries represented by the visitors to the site.  There were visitors from over 30 countries.  While most were from the good ole US of A, the United Kingdom, India, Belgium and Australia were also well represented.   Heck, I even had a visitor from Qatar, and I don’t even know where that is in the world.  I guess I can now legitimately say that I am an internationally known and read author.

It was also interesting to see how people ended up on the site.  While most clicked through links I posted on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; there were numerous visitors that ended up there via search engines.  The most popular search string that pointed to my site was “The Jerk” or some variation of references to that classic Steve Martin movie.  You may recall I had a post titled “Have a Little Respect: Don’t Be the Jerk.”  And somehow a handful of people reached RobertnotBob.net after searching on “Aretha Franklin.”  I am not sure how I ended up connected to Aretha, but you can’t complain about being attached to the Queen of Soul.

That brings us to which entries made a big splash and which ones failed to wow.  Out of the 24 entries, the most read was the above mentioned “Have a Little Respect:  Don’t Be the Jerk.”  I have to say that I too like that entry.  Other popular entries were:

1)      What’s Love Got to Do With It – which touched on Jesuit teachings, Conscious Capitalism, and one of my favorite CEOs  Kip Tindell of the Container Store.

2)      Lessons From the Course:  A Reflecting on Golf and Business – which tied together my time on the golf course with my daughter and the importance of planning and execution in the business world

3)      What’s in a Name? – the entry that started it all.

I also had some posts that just fell flat.  These included “The Love Train” which was a follow up to “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “Where Did You Go JFK? – a little off the wall rambling about the fifty-cent piece.  I actually liked both of these, but based on the stats it was obvious that people from over 30 countries thought differently.  I guess some thoughts might just be better off staying in my head.

I am not sure I will hit 24 entries in 2013, but I will certainly keep blogging.  It’s cheaper than seeing a therapist.  Not that I have a reason to see one and not that there is anything wrong with seeing one.

And one more thing – for all those that have read my blog, even if just once, THANK YOU!

Darrell Royal: An IT Visionary?

Published December 19, 2012 College Sports , Information Technology Leave a Comment
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I recently received a copy of DKR: A Royal Scrapbook as a gift. As you have probably figured out by now, I am a huge University of Texas fan and receiving a gift like this book is a special to me.

The book chronicles the life and coaching career of what I consider one of the greatest college football coaches of all time. It is a book I will certainly pick and read many many times. Darrell Royal was known for espousing words of wisdom and the book is full of his quotes. While the quotes were typically spoken in the context of football, many of them can be thought about in a much broader context.

During my first read through the book, I came across one particular quote that as soon as I read I knew it was the start of a blog entry.

“Climbing is a thrill. Maintaining is a bitch.”

The quote was said in the context of the thrill of building up a winning football program and the huge challenges that must be overcome to maintain that football program at a consistently high level. Recent football seasons have proven that to be the case – just look at the recent struggles of USC, Auburn and my beloved Longhorns. All three have gone from being National Champions during the past decade to having average or below average teams in the past couple of years.

However, when I read it I thought about the challenges faced everyday by IT organizations. On a frequent basis I read white papers about the percentage of an IT organization’s budget and resources that is spent on day-to-day operations versus spent on implementing new technology to improve and benefit the business. Many of these papers peg that breakdown at around 80% on “keeping the lights on” and 20% on moving the business forward. I recently heard the CIO at Dell proudly state that they run around the 70-30 mark.

When you see figures like 70-80% of IT resources being consumed on maintaining the existing environment, you can see how one could agree with the idea that “maintaining is a bitch.” I know I can relate to that idea.

Maintaining a complex IT environment is challenging. While many technologist want to ignore the existing and just focus on the thrill of rolling out the new technology, I think there is value in having staff that see the value in maintaining what is already installed. Especially when that staff takes the concept of maintaining to a different level of not just being content with the “as is” but instead look for ways to make the maintaining more efficient and more effective.

I have worked with many talented technology professionals that were consumed with just working on new stuff. They never wanted to spend time on maintaining what was built. It was build, build, build all the time. During my stint in the Big 4 Consulting world, the climbers were everywhere – me included. We were all about the thrill of the implementation.

However, as I moved out of the consulting world and into corporate IT, I started to appreciate the maintainers. This appreciation grew when the economy slowed down and then dipped, and then dipped again. While talented, many of the “I just want to work on new” employees in our IT organization were near the top of the list for staff reductions. Meanwhile the “maintainers with a twist of efficiency” types became the rock stars of IT. Even as business picks up, I still find these employees to be extremely valuable. In my eyes, employees that are finding ways to maintain the technology environment in more effective and efficient ways are not only brining stability to the business, they are also innovating. They are finding ways to reduce the cost of maintaining so that there is more capital available for pure innovation.

Now don’t get me wrong, businesses need technology climbers. The climbers take us to new heights through implementing bold new technology. However, once we reach those new heights, we need to the maintainers to keep as from tumbling back down the mountain.

Is maintaining IT a bitch? I think so. I am just happy that some people like dealing with the “bitch.”

Oh and one more thing: Hook’em Horns!!

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