Tag Archives: Google

Consumerisation is the elephant in the room for CIOs

I’m just putting the final touches to the summer edition of CIO Connect magazine. As usual, there’s a strong focus on IT leadership but there’s also a take on consumerisation, which will be the topic for CIO Connect’s annual conference later this year.

Entitled Power to the people?, the scene for the conference was set in the spring edition of the magazine, from which the following slice of the editorial is lifted:

Now people have access to better technology at home than in the office, it has become almost de rigueur to be able to show off a bunch of cool apps on your latest Steve Jobs device.

One CIO mentioned to me recently how his 10-strong board had been given iPads. It was, he believed, the epitome of forward thinking. Other companies have taken a similar strategy, giving devices to executives on the move.

Some IT leaders are honest enough to admit that the device is mainly used to keep their children happy playing ‘Angry Birds’. Others, however, are convinced the device provides the future of enterprise connectivity.

But there is an elephant in the room: consumerisation, which turns the traditional model of IT procurement inside out. Increasing number of users are buying their own devices and expecting the business to provide secure connectivity.

Another CIO mentioned to me recently how he was surprised that Apple seemed less concerned by enterprise than consumer concerns. But why should the technology giant’s focus be the enterprise?

A purchase order of 10 iPads for a single company looks diminutive next to global consumer tablet sales. Estimates suggest that by year-end 2010, Apple had sold somewhere near 15 million iPads.

It does not stop there. Analysts expect the technology giant to ship as many as 30 million units of its second-generation iPad during its first year of sales. In short, Apple and innovative technology peers such as Google are helping to break the traditional model of enterprise computing.

Rather than licences and devices being purchased internally, employers are picking their own technology and expecting to be able to plug and play. It is a development which creates new and rapidly emerging challenges for the CIO. Are you ready?

What makes a good headline?

In this webtastic age of search optimisation, one answer is a lot of references to stuff that will get you a high Google ranking. The basic theory goes something like ‘never mind the quality of my story on service-oriented architecture, just check out how many times the headline mentions the recession, Angelina Jolie and Twitter’. Goal.

Or is that an own goal? Back in the world of ink, paper-based headlines are usually short. There’s often a pun involved, too. I worked with a sub who thought song titles by The Smiths made the best headlines. The theory works well to some extent, such as in the case of ‘How Soon is Now?’, ‘What Difference Does it Make?’ and ‘This Charming Man’. But ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ and ‘The Queen is Dead’ have a more limited applicability.

And of course, there’s the online problem. ‘This Charming Man’ is a nice title for a magazine article on a friendly CIO. But most paper-based articles end up on the web and would you click on the article if you weren’t a fan of The Smiths? More importantly, would you be able to find it?

The end result is that puntastic magazine headlines get rewritten for the age of webtastic search optimisation. In fact, stories start to exist simply because people know they will get hits, such as ‘Top 10 tips’ articles. As journalist Andy McCue said to me the other day: “I’ll go mad if I see another ‘Top 10 tips for beating the recession’ article.” Check out Google News, my friend – there are plenty to push you over the edge.

Still, the headline and the content are no guarantee of attention anyway. I heard a woman on the train say to her friend the other day: “So, what was that story about a plane landing on a river? I missed that.”

It is difficult to understand how she could have missed the story of the US Airways plane landing on the Hudson River. Well, unless she’d sold her TV, refused to read, smashed up her radio, disconnected the computer, refused to talk to another human being and moved to Venus.

Which, I assume, she hadn’t. In short, you just can’t grab some people’s attention – even when the headline is great and the content of the story is even better. But good luck trying.

Carbon cost of electronic Christmas cards

There’s been a lot of guff about the carbon cost of Google searching during the last couple of days, with the debate prompted by research from a Harvard academic, which suggests two Google searches produces the equivalent C02 as boiling a kettle. If you’ve found this post through a Google search, I hope you’re enjoying your ‘equivalent’ of half a cup of tea.

The research doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know – in short, searching for stuff, using energy-hungry computers and data centres, eats a lot of power. So, I started thinking about stuff we’re doing that eats power – especially the stuff that is meant to be green.

Take Christmas cards, for example. No one posts Christmas cards anymore (except my wife and her Mum). People send emails, Facebook pokes and electronic cards – it’s meant to convey the same message and can be sent with a cheery: ‘I am saving the environment by not posting a paper card’.

Except you’re not, because all this electronic stuff eats carbon, too. And it’s rubbish anyway – cards are much nicer and much more personal. And I bet posting a card causes less of a drag on resources that all those tweets, emails and pokes. Long live the Christmas card!