The British Computer Society/Chartered Institute for IT has posted an interview with the Metropolitan Police’s Director of IT, Stephen Whatson, who’s been tasked with the IT infrastructure for the Olympics this year.  Includes some interesting comments about the preparation and decisions made. Video embedded below (Flash player required).

Source: BCS – Video interview: Olympic IT, Apr 2012

Microsoft UK recently posted an ‘Office 365 vs Google Apps‘ presentation to SlideShare, positioned as a day in the life of an IT professional.

Well…

We don’t entirely agree with all of the points made. And as we happen to be a subscribing customer of both Office 365 and Google Apps, we thought we’d add our own comments based on actual experiences.

The modified presentation is embedded below.

Personally, I think the presentation is weak and damages Microsoft’s credibility. Far better arguments could have been easily made to show where Office 365 is superior to Google Apps for business activities.

Related blog posts

• SharePoint and Office Web Apps – July 2010
• Rethinking Office – April 2008

A great article on Fast Company highlights the need for both business and design skills when faced with tough business challenges: What Both MBAs And MFAs Get Wrong About Solving Business Problems, by Melissa Quinn.

Article outline: Numbers and bullet points aren’t the only things driving executive decision making. And pretty pictures won’t get you there either. Both designers and MBAs have a lot to learn.

Toronto University’s Rotman School of Management has run a design challenge geared at exposing MBA students to the value of design methods in business problem solving. For the past 2 years, the MBAs (Masters of Business Administration) have been trounced by the MFAs (Masters of Fine Arts). How?

With only 15 minutes to convince a skeptical panel of experienced professionals about a new idea that doesn’t exist in the world today, [MFAs] fared significantly better than their MBA counterparts. Why? Because they shared real user insights to engage us emotionally, used narrative and stories to compel us, drew sketches and visualizations to inspire us, and simplified the complex to focus us. It’s proof positive that numbers and bullet points, while important, aren’t necessarily what drive executive decision making

The key message – don’t assume you can teach MBAs to do this stuff well by chucking in a couple of modules as part of their course. Don’t dismiss the years of study that designers undertake to develop these skills.

That said, it wasn’t an entirely happy ending for the MFAs either.

While design students fared much better than their MBA counterparts that Saturday afternoon, I should point out that only the winning team from the Institute of Design at IIT actually charged a fee for the service they developed (a fact that was not overlooked by my final-round co-judge Ray Chun, the senior vice president of retail banking at TD). Some competitors were able to offer a vague notion that their ideas would generally create economic value, but crisp articulations of a profit model and underlying assumptions were hard to come by.

A great article, worth a read. Particularly if you tend to rely on bullet points more than visuals in PowerPoint to explain something you want people to remember. (Side note: but does depend on the type and purpose of presentation. If teaching a technical topic, screenshots and bullet points are usually quite helpful after the event.)

p.s. The image at the top? A book shelf in my home office, containing some of the books that continue to help develop presentations. Story boarding for films has been the latest new topic of study. (Half of those books are in Kindle-only format… times change.)

As a good mentor Nicholas Bate likes to say – ‘Always be learning’.

I recently presented at the International SharePoint conference in London. This year, the conference held a new business-focused track and I was asked to present a session titled ‘From Business Requirements to Technical Scope’.  It was third in a series of connected presentations. A modified version of the talk is embedded below. (As usual, the original contained media animations and not many words so doesn’t really stand on its own.  Soundbite notes have been added into the slide deck.)

I confess, I was convinced I would be presenting to an audience of about 5 people as I had always assumed this to be a very technical-focused conference. I was wrong. The room was packed and the feedback received was great.

The emphasis of the session was on how to tease out the dependencies that should be aligned and prioritised as part of any SharePoint project, to help ensure that desired outcomes can be achieved. It is always about much more than just the technology. To visualise, I used a very simplified causal loop diagram. I may do a follow-up with the more detailed original from which it was taken.

Short version: It’s easier to comprehend why Facebook bought Instagram for crazy money if you ignore the social networking and instead focus on the value in automatic location updates via Internet-connected mobile devices. That’s a place where Facebook can build a serious business model.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” – George Box, Statistician, circa 1978

“All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.” – Peter Norvig, Google, 2008

One of the reasons the technology sector is in the news so much at the moment is the emergence of five connected trends disrupting so many traditional industries: massive online social networks, social media tools, internet-connected mobile devices, cloud computing and ‘big data’ analytics.  The social networks enable us to connect with anyone globally, social media tools have made it easy to share thoughts and opinions with those connections, internet-connected devices enable us to post updates instantly and from any location – no more waiting ’til you get home and login to your computer.  Cloud computing enables all this information to be stored and accessed over the Internet.  And accessing massive amounts of data, updating in real-time, enables new forms of analytics not previously possible.

An early new market is the world of social media analytics – providing feedback in real-time about what people are saying about your organisation or product/service. Sentiment analysis adds emotion – are people using words that are positive or negative, happy or sad, loving or hating.  Mining Internet data such as Tweets and other status updates is far more effective than standing on a street corner trying to conduct a market survey.

But who gets to access all of this data? We share it freely and lose ownership in the process.

In February, the New York Times published an interview ‘Just the facts? Yes, all of them’ with Gil Elbaz. His first company, Applied Semantics, was acquired by Google and formed the basis of Adsense, Google’s business model. Gil’s latest venture – Factual – is focused on acquiring massive data sets, and then selling access to them.  Current storage is running at 500 Terabytes:

FACTUAL sells data to corporations and independent software developers on a sliding scale, based on how much the information is used. Small data feeds for things like prototypes are free; contracts with its biggest customers run into the millions. Sometimes, Factual trades data with other companies, building its resources.

Factual’s plan is to build the world’s chief reference point for thousands of interconnected supercomputing clouds.

And now this month (via Techmeme) Forbes has an article  asking ‘Will Data Monopolies Paralyze the Internet?’. Is it the end of Web 2.0 as blogs and status updates become locked inside password-protected social networks?  They think not because more data lies outside them and if it can be mined, any entrepreneur can do it given sufficient resources.

But not all data is open to mine.  The Forbes article highlights a new area of focus and I disagree with their position (emphasis mine):

Some very promising data hasn’t been collected on a large scale yet and might be less susceptible to monopolization than things like status updates. Lots of people I spoke with at the Where conference last week were excited about new ways to approach ambient data. …[collecting] the little specks of data that we’re constantly releasing–our movements, via smart phone sensors; our thoughts, via Twitter feeds–and turn them into substantial data sets from which useful conclusions can be inferred. The result can be more valuable than what you might call deliberate data because ambient data can be collected consistently and without relying on humans to supply data on a regular basis by, say, checking in at favorite restaurants. It also offers great context because constant measurements make it easier to understand changes in behavior.

The article is right to emphasise the value of automatic updates over manual ones – a phone automatically registering your location versus you manually ‘checking in’ to a location is both easier and more reliable. (Hence why Instagram is potentially more valuable than Foursquare).  But it also highlights just how important mobile devices are in this equation.

Who gets to own or access those updates captured by a mobile device’s sensors?  Simple. The device manufacturer (e.g. Apple), the network operator transmitting the data (e.g. AT&T), and/or the app you granted access to record the data (e.g. Instagram – automatically geo-tagging your photos for you).  Sure, the social network gets a look in if you allow the app to share. But it’s far lower down the chain compared to the app installed on the mobile device.  And top of the queue is the device itself. You can connect those dots for yourself.  Small wonder there are constant rumours that Facebook and Google are building/buying their own mobile devices. Presumably Microsoft too (well they’ll probably buy Nokia)…

In that context, Instagram is valuable to Facebook way beyond its benefits as a social network.  Those location updates originating from Apple and Android devices are a large, accurate and valuable dataset that Facebook now owns.

Related blog posts

• Lies, damn lies and statistics – Feb 2012
• Thinking in reverse – July 2008
• Zillionics change perspective – April 2008

References

• Will data monopolies paralyze the Internet? – Forbes, Apr 2012
• Just the facts. Yes all of them – New York Times, Mar 2012

There are two different scenarios people should consider before sharing personal information:

1. Would I mind if a complete stranger knew that information?
2. Do I mind what any of my ‘friends’ do with the information?

If the answer is Yes to either question think twice before putting that personal information online at all. That’s not to say sharing is inherently good or bad. But once you have shared information with anyone, you have lost control of it. If you answered ‘No’ to question two above, you answered ‘No’ to both.

Here is a simple scenario using Facebook. In the image above, the green buddy is you. The blue buddies are your ‘friends’. The red buddies represent everyone else with Internet access.

You set up your privacy settings so that only friends can see your personal information. Anyone who is on Facebook but not a friend will only see your name, nothing else. That’s your decision.  Sounds sensible. Sounds under control.

But if one of your friends decides to share information with their friends or third party applications, they may handover your personal information as well. It can be done in complete innocence and for good intentions – ‘I want to send birthday cards to my friends’, ‘Are any of my friends nearby to meet up with?’, ‘I’m interested in this group, I’ll add my friends to it as well’, ‘Has anybody in my network bought this <insert name of any item>?’ In the right context, all great stuff. But information about you has now been handed over to and stored somewhere beyond your control. The same applies to every application or web site that you allow to connect to your Facebook profile. Do you read all the terms and conditions, the notes about agreeing to data being stored indefinitely or granting access to other third parties?

It is not just you who decides how secure your personal information is. If you decide to share it with them, all your friends get to decide too. As do all the apps and web sites you connect to. And if you’re one of Facebook’s social butterflies, everyone gets to decide.

This doesn’t mean you should head straight to Facebook and switch everything off (too late for existing content anyway) but if you are going to participate in online social networks and care about what happens to your personal data, it’s a good idea to keep track of privacy settings and changes to policies.

If you’re not paying for a product, you’re not the customer, you are the product being sold. – Andrew Lewis

For Facebook and every application/advertising tool that uses it, it is in their best interests to get you to share your personal information. They will make it as easy and seamless to do as possible. And many will make it difficult or inconvenient to change those default settings to be more private. So think long and hard about what you want to share with anyone. And question whether having different privacy policies for everyone versus ‘friends’ actually means anything. A simpler (and more reliable) approach is to either share something with nobody or share with everybody.

A hassle, yes. But massive online social networks are still a young concept on the Internet meaning lessons will be learned the hard way. And everyone with a Facebook account can count themselves as one of the testers.

References

• Selling you on Facebook – Wall Street Journal, Apr 2012
• Selling digital fear – TechCrunch, Apr 2012 (response to WSJ article)
• This creepy app is a wakeup call for Facebook privacy – Cult of Mac, Apr 2012
• Facebook: Tracking your web activity even after you log out? – PCMag, Sep 2011