Tag: Cloud computing

Dilemma and Decision

Leaders are tasked and paid to make decisions.

Hard calls. Tie-breaking calls. Go for the Gold, or take the safe route.

Coach Joe Paterno had a lot of wins, but many were taken away from him because of one mis-step.

Pope Benedict XVI , however, did call it quit (right timing).

And Tesla–Solarcity–Space X? the jury is still out on that one risky “pal”.

No pain no gain.

One good thing about this brutal Recession: it separates the wheat from the chaff.

The wheat here might be Indie-Capitalism, sports diplomacy, soft-power influence…

We simply cannot afford full-scale hardware-driven conflicts as in years past.

First the Soviet bloc folded. And now, the US with Sequestration.

Our machine has gotten ahead of us, the cart before the horse.

If only we could disrupt ourselves, or press “reset”. One other way is to review the old play book and give it another try.

For instance, it’s quite couner-intuitive since the IT industry migrates to the Cloud away from the office, Yahoo wants its workers to head back to it.

They will probably work out of virtual stations, with wi-fi and white boards, to lunch in play room like in nearby Googleplex.

Dilemma and Decision.

Work and life balance.

Private cloud or complete virtuality.

Hybrid or plug-in EV.

Key Stone or kicking the can.

21st-century dilemma requires 21st-century leadership.

Who among us are ready and willing to step up to the plate!

He who lives in a glass house refuses to throw stones.

When looking at the game from that standpoint, executive’s high exit bonus  is not such a bad deal. It would cost more for them to stay on than to leave. Zappos learned this and paid its new employees a bonus for leaving than for sticking around. It’s the culture, stupid. Decision or dilemma.

Vietnam’s outsourcing factory

I have heard about TMA Solutions new building in Quang Trung Software Park, but I have never got a chance to stop by, until yesterday.

1,200-strong, TMA begins to look like an army of engineers (my friend and guide showed me a beehive behind the building, after we had toured their lobby where Vietnam‘s historical artifacts were on display, next to the museum of telephony).

“It is to show the stream of history, culturally and technologically, so our engineers could get a sense of where things might be going” said my friend.

I could relate to that.

Users and programmers don’t exist in a vacuum.

We live and breathe the same air as everyone else.

Honda got hit not once but twice last year, both in Fukushima and in Thailand.

While incubators and laboratories are necessary for concentration and collaboration, they still function within a larger ecosystem.

Users tend to move on to the next big thing more quickly than companies.

Two great benefits TMA could offer to prospective clients:

– its time-tested know-how

– young work force who can stay on for however long the project requires (end-to-end outsourcing).

Yes, we had a sort of working lunch and then marketing presentation.

But it’s the spirit of the group, the speed of execution and the spread of product (cloud computing) that will work in TMA’s favor.

If they grew  (at least no lay-off)  in hard times, how much more in good times.

I am afraid this is counter-intuitive. But organizations need to secure talent just as much as they secure property and product.

When all boats rise, talent can then command higher salary leveraging supply vs demand.

As engineers huddle in conference rooms and cubicles,  consumers are shopping for the greatest and latest.

In turn, these technologies (cloud, social media apps) enable new applications (e.g. Google + Search) which in turn reshape consumer expectations.

It’s the loop, of empathy, of hits and misses (Betamax) and the drive for perfection (Apple).

Outsourcing is just a phenomenon, but man’s search for meaning and connection has been around much longer.

Get to the bottom of this, you will get to the bottom line.

I like my guide’s side comment “look at Napoleon! he was so short, yet so imperial”.

I just know from seeing the beehives behind the building that worker bees are busy at work, coding and collaborating, and  in the process saving tons of money for clients. Clients who now can sit back and choose from a score of outsourcing factories. Let the game begin. Stay hungry, stay curious (Jobs’ commencement address at Standford).  Vietnamese engineers at TMA can discount the first advice and focus on being curious. This, their shrewd leader had already anticipated. He wanted to leave his legacy via the museum of  ethnology (past), and technology  (future).

Third life

As recent as 60 years ago, a businessman could let his hair down (or hat off) at home, smoke a cigarette or pipe, and watch the news

(in black and white). In fact, at the U of TX Austin museum, an exhibition is underway to show you just that: witness to a century.

Now, we spend a considerable amount of time online, commenting, following, blogging, liking and…venting.

Welcome to modernity i.e. jet plane, mobile devices, fast food and “social” sans borders.

It will either be misinformation or disinformation about us, and certainly, easy access (Snowden’s alert).

(at least, on LinkedIn, they let you reverse look up people who looked you up).

Some people even advocate cyber abstinence or cyber sabbatical.

The idea is to rearrange our priorities so face time can take precedence over screen time.

Twitter is so prescient in mobile connectivity. “Where are you now” has been one of the most asked questions in mobile conversation.

Now, with Twitter, we can proactively let “followers” know our where-about (In transit at a Korean airport, for instance).

Next and last frontier would be cloud-based computing (dropbox).

One exception: college students still prefer to haul around heavy textbooks over digital readers. Masochist?

Or just the last streak of rebellion?

In case you haven’t noticed, we now know more about Facebook friends of friends who posted regularly on-line, than our closest relatives who live far away.

So back to our businessman in the 50’s, who wore suspenders like Larry King‘s. Only now that our Happy Days dad comes home from work (first life) skips over his second life (wife, kids and supper time) to go online (third life), where he keeps taps intimate details of his “friends”, while his wife, perhaps is doing so on her mobile, while out shopping for a bargain on groupons.

And what about the kids? They have already got their daily dose of  100 SMS messages before seamlessly continue their virtual existence on multi-screen. The truth hit home to me, when, upon staying at a friend’s house last week, I discovered a stool in the toilet. Asked what it’s for. Guess what, the kids surfed the internet while using the bathroom. That stool was his lap top stand.

Welcome to our 21st century, when we not only have public and private life, as in the 50’s, but also, virtual life.

If unchecked, this technology-aided life (Third Life) will take a larger chunk of our 24-hour pie, even bathroom time. Amuse ourselves to death.

You’ve got comment!

When lunching near Dulles Airport  years ago, we ran into some Teleglobe colleagues who had gone over to AOL.

Back then, I looked at those guys with a bit of envy. After all, we were just a voice backbone.

Those guys were in their honeymoon with Time Warner, both pipe and pipe dream.

Now, this merger has now been unraveled .

One thing has changed over this decade: customers can and will talk back, even from Dell hell.

We used to laugh at “voice mail jail”. Companies cannot afford a “taxi driver’s” attitude (Are you talking to me?).

Amazon rating, feedback loop, survey, independent research, mystery shopper, disgruntled employees etc…. The old untouched “suggestion box” is as outdated as the IBM Selectric typewriter.

Wiki everything. Google everything. Twitter everything. The many “faces” on Facebook. Many lives on Second Life.

Many files on Drop Box,  Amazon’ rent-a-server or Salesforce.com CRM. Modularity and virtuality are counter-trends of our disposable society.

At Teleglobe, that’s what we did: Rent-a-switch (telecom). International entrepreneurs only had to come with a willingness, a niche market and some upfront costs. The rest, from licensing to private billing, we handled.

It worked beautifully. And I know Cloud Computing will take IT investment to the next level, freeing up companies to soar, and expand side way or upward, without attending to the flickering lights in server farm.

The post-machine age (on-prem) has finally arrived. The unbundling of MS Office and many other packaged solutions. Pay per user. Companies can now launch seasonal campaign or handle a PR crisis with speed and less cost.

Bad news tends to travel faster than good.

You’ve got comment!.

First responder to those comments can reduce damage into dent, or turn negative into positive. Customers have always been Kings. It’s just that Kings don’t get to speak too often, until now.