Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

The Transforming Enterprise

Things have been a tad busy of late, and I've been neglecting my blogging duties - Sorry for that. If it's any excuse, I've been working all-out with a very talented bunch of folks to help deliver this, this and this. Which reminds, with this now in the past, I really have to start working on my presentation for this.

If you haven't been following, EMC, Cisco and VMware today announced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition. The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity, and have given me an opportunity to witness firsthand the transformation of the traditional enterprise.

Many definitions of Enterprise 2.0 focus on the software that enables extended collaboration within the corporate world. For me, it's as much about the re-engineering of traditional business processes as it is the enabling tools. The notion of opening traditional walls and enabling greater collaboration with customers, partners and prospects alike is among the most fascinating aspects to me.

I got the chance to witness this firsthand and it was fantastic.

Groups working together across different companies is not a new thing... But this whole effort felt very different. As I began working with new friends from Cisco and VMware, I realized that we weren't simply a bunch of independent teams plugging along to a project plan. Rather, it felt like one big passionate team firing on all cylinders. While we sat in varying facilities all over the world and had different logos on our badges, that's where the differences ended.

It was a really cool experience - watching legions of people put aside traditional thinking and processes in support of a common goal - to do right by the customer while transforming an industry.

It was certainly among the more humbling experiences of my career - and I applaud the brands for thinking different - and thinking big. It's exciting stuff.

I'll share a bit more in the coming days about this whole experience... Including the absolute disaster that happened midstream. But - you'll have to check back for that ;). 

Changing Behaviors

Can you teach Social Media skills? There's a great blog post and subsequent discussion happening over at Adam Cohen's blog.

I land squarely in the 'absolutely yes' camp - But perhaps with a bit of a twist.

I believe we have two crowds in the workforce today. Those who have grown up online, and consider communicating via text messages as routine as eating food, and those who haven't. For the latter, the notion of sharing and collaborating to the degree we do online often seems foreign and perhaps even ludicrous.

From a business perspective, there is one common denominator. You have to set the ground rules.

Regardless if you're a power blogger or if you're first Tweet was a lifetime event for you, there needs to be common rules of the road. First and foremost, establish your over-arching guidelines for acceptable and desired behavior.

So back to training... In a business environment, I'm all about establishing proficiency across the employee population.

I see this as different from training around Social Media (hence the twist). Yes there is a need to understand the tools at hand and how to leverage... To me, it's more about the fundamental shift in the way we were taught to operate. I compare the business world today to that of the mid 90's - It's a completely different playing field.

As we go through our journey at EMC embracing E2.0, I see walls breaking down. I see dramatic shifts in the way we communicate internally and externally. I see new management styles being employed - with far more matrixed collaboration than ever before... The list goes on and on.

We are operating in a fundamentally different way than we have in years past - and have only scratched the surface.

To expedite and get the most of this transformation, I believe foundational training in enterprise 2.0 techniques and behaviors is absolutely crucial. I see Social Media training as a component of this, but would want to re-introduce employees to the new ways to engage and interact behaviorally in a 2.0 world first.

Thanks Adam, for spinning up this discussion. I'd like to think that some type of E2.0 education will be common place in the business world in the very near future.

The Digital Universe set for its own Big Bang

Greetings from EMC World. Things are in full swing here in Orlando, FLA... An amazing show last night from the Gin Blossoms, our bloggers lounge is full of activity and Joe is about to take the stage to formally kick off the week.

No doubt you'll be seeing plenty of activity coming out of EMC World this week, but I couldn't resist mentioning this IDC white paper on the Digital Universe. It's an update to a similar piece from last year, but the numbers this go are all the more staggering.

Some highlights :

• 487 billion gigabytes of information were added to the Digital Universe in 2008.
• In 2012, there will be five times as many bits created or captured and added to the Digital Universe as in 2008.
• For all the information we create as individuals - taking pictures, updating our Facebook profile, sending emails, watching HDTV programs - an amount greater than that is created or captured about us in the Digital Universe.

I found the paper numbing. It talks about the impact of the economic crisis on the growth of the Digital Universe. Turns out - there hasn't been one. By that, even more information was generated in 2008 than predicted (by a factor of 3%).

While the Digital Universe is expected to grow by a factor of almost 5 during the next four years, IT budgets are only expected to grow by a factor of 1.2. (Note - warning flag should go up here...)

So, we're generating tons of information - and ease of producing and publishing information becomes easier each and every day.

The need for security and information management techniques will be key to organizing, managing and CONSUMING all of this information in the days to come, and the demand put on IT organizations will be enormous.

It's a provocative and well written piece... Definitely take some time to give it a read. And don't forget, you can monitor your own contributions to the Digital Universe with this nifty Digital Footprint Calculator.

That's all for now. Standby as we'll be doing our part to contribute to the growth of the Digital Universe from down here at EMC World.

The Blurring Lines of Work and Life

Here's a simple question that I've been pondering a bit of late...

When you participate in the social realm - such as a comment on Twitter or updating your Facebook status - Who do you represent? Yourself? Your employer? Both?

I'm always cautious about what I post. Perhaps to a fault. I'll consider all sorts of angles from potential audience to potential misinterpretation. There's no doubt that my contributions in public forum are influenced by my affiliation with EMC. I'm not suggesting this is right or wrong - it's how I'm wired.

Let me give you an example. I'll make it fictitious to cover myself (see, there I go again).

EMC's Innovation Conference

There's no shortage of innovation within EMC. I've previously suggested it to be one of the key elements that keeps me so engaged here.

Our annual Innovation Conference is being held in Franklin, MA. this week... While innovation is part of the very fabric of EMC culture, this two-day event helps celebrate by bringing together a group of global employees to discuss, debate and consider new areas of investment and focus.

Leading up to the event, teams of employees collaborate on new ideas for consideration, and submit for review. Last year, there were 300 such submissions. This year - 984 (see - EMC'ers really like this stuff). Ideas are voted on by the community, and ultimately 30 or so are selected as finalists. These finalists make up the very core of this event - and much of day two is spent reviewing their submissions.

Last year, there were 300 attendees. This year, over a thousand. In fact, to help scale the event and in the interest of being responsible global citizens, the team has added an interactive broadcast component. Having tuned in to the early introductions, I see over 15 broadcast points spread across the globe, enabling remote employees to get together and participate without jumping on a plane. Of course, ample opportunities to interact with a video broadcast and live Q&A mechanism.

I'll share some of the highlights where appropriate over the next two days. I also spotted Barry B and Mark T in the audience and would suspect they'll be sharing perspective during the week.

Oh right - and did I mention EMC ONE was at the very center of this event? Yeah... that makes me feel pretty good   ;)

Some pictures of the early on...

   

Jeff Nick, EMC SVP and CTO, opens the day

Last years winners, and who's that in the crowd?

Update - The team is using EMC ONE as the voting mechanism for the 30 finalists... Nice little surprise for me as I didn't know this was in plan.

Also, interesting to note that Yammer has become a rather important back channel for the event... Enabling the invaluable hallways conversations often missed by virtual attendance.

A Shiny New OS?

Much buzz in the sphere around Google's new browser Chrome (download). Things have come a long way since the good old days of Mosaic Alpha 7, eh?

IE is still the big gorilla in the room, with approximately 50% market share in August - Followed closely by Firefox. I'm surprised to see that Safari is only at about 2.6%. With Apple grabbing so much market share of late, I would have expected this to bump up a bit more. I also wonder if that 2.6% includes iPhone traffic...

Anyways, the news here is less about another player in the browser market and more about the long term potential. As with Google Docs, more and more apps are moving online. Thin Clients are becoming more of a reality - and the trend continues as Cloud Computing remains a major area of focus.

The trend is promising... Tomorrows OS will likely evolve from a big and bloated piece of software and become more of a bare bones system - helping a device basically power up and connect to the Internet where you'll access all of your applications. This has huge benefits from a portability perspective - something we've been struggling with for years. The impact to software developers and distributors is also significant...

Some interesting reading on this topic :

Yahoo Finance: Google Launches Cloud Operating System, Calls It a Browser
TechCrunch: Meet Chrome, Google's Windows Killer

New Bloggers in the 'Sphere

Well, not new per se, but new to me anyways. It looks as though these guys have been part of the conversation for some time...

I recently came across Chad Sakak's blog - Virtual Geek. Chad's the Sr Director of our VMWare strategic alliance. On his blog, Chad discusses all things virtual. A good read - although in full disclosure, some of it's a bit hardcore... Trying to follow a couple of Chads posts gave me one of those 'ice cream headaches'... Man they can hurt.

Also of note, Craig Randall is sharing his thoughts over at Craig's Musings. Craig is a Software Architect within our CMA division and blogs about software services, service-oriented architecture and all sorts of neat things ECM.

Two great blogs from fellow EMC'ers. Be sure to stop by and say hello. Of course, you can check more of our provocative and awe-inspiring bloggers here.

Twitter as a Business Tool?

From past posts, you may know that we've been exploring different ways to leverage Twitter as a business Tool. We've set up Tweet accounts for EMCCorp, EMCWorld and a few others. We used Twitter as a tool to communicate with attendees at our recent EMC World event. As recently as this morning, I was discussing the validity of Twitter as a business tool with one of our senior executives.

I can certainly appreciate the complexities of introducing new tools, especially when adoption of said tool is quite high - perhaps beyond expectations. However, I've been experiencing more and more issues of late. Yes, I've been following the Twitter blog - and I know the team is working it. However, it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to tout Twitter as a relevant and legitimate tool while such issues continue to plague. I've seen the infamous 'over capacity' screen at least 5 times this morning.

Our EMC World experiment with Twitter was a good one. Twitter adoption among attendees wasn't as high as I would have expected, but there were enough to make the experiment interesting. We were fortunate not to experience any major issues during the week long event... But, if things had been as unstable as they seem to have been in recent days, I'd have considerable egg on face and would be backing away from my attempts to legitimize the tool in the enterprise.

The current state of the state may be fine for casual users... But really needs to tighten up if enterprise adoption is a desirable outcome for the team.

 

What's Your Digital Footprint?

My therapist has really helped me bury the anxiety from the last leg of the .COM project. Enough so that I'm finally able to start talking about the project again. If you've poked around the site, you already know there are some cool things like EMC's Innovation Timeline and the Worldwide Information Growth ticker.

A new gadget was posted up today. Something I thought you might like. It's a widget that allows you to measure / track your Digital Footprint.

Mine's 11.7MB... What's yours?

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet...

I do enjoy the cool new technology... Generally my budget insists that I focus more on consumer-level gadgets. After all, while I'd love a Symmetrix for my digital library, it's just a tad out of my reach. Not to mention my better half has made abundantly clear that there'll be no new toys unless they come in stainless steel or brushed metal exteriors...

EMC announced something big today, and I'm really excited about it. Flash based, enterprise class storage. Think about it - no more spinning disks. The impact to speed, power and data center footprint is enormous.

From the press release -

"Storage systems with enterprise-class flash drives can deliver single-millisecond application response times, up to 10 times faster than those with traditional 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives."

"It would take 30 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives to deliver the same performance as a single flash drive, which translates into a dramatic 98 percent reduction in power consumption in a transaction-per-second comparison."

This is a big deal that will revolutionize the storage industry. It was a matter of time before someone brought this to market - it's just nice to be a part of the company that did.

Update - interesting perspective on the launch from Chuck, the Storage Anarchist and  Storagezilla.