As someone with children in their early twenties, it can be tough letting them make work-related decisions without imposing my own views and perceptions. The problem is that m wife and I have learnt not to be too prescriptive in our discussions with the children. A recent LinkedIn blog post warned your people about “Putting Guardrails on Your Future“:

“We’re encouraged in high school to pick a practical major in college that will lead to a solid career with a good paycheck, even though many of the jobs of tomorrow don’t even exist today. We’re urged in college to schedule each of our days down to the very last minute to be sure we graduate on time. And now as you get ready to graduate, I’m sure you’ve heard advice in recent weeks to have a plan for your career….

what you end up finding in your career, and in your life, often comes in those change encounters, those wrong turns … that you never thought would interest you”

That’s what happened to me. My plan was to be an academic, but that first job introduced me to my first programming experience. And after a few other steps, I eventually landed a job supporting software packages and then being one of two support people for the first IBM PCs at my university. In those days, software product marketing wasn’t even a recognised role.

Why not share your stories about how you got into your current job.

What became clear to me when I moved to the Nokia Lumia interface was not just that I had to learn new things, but also had to unlearn old things. So when the Forbes article refers to the issue of  the new touch-centric ‘Modern’ (previously ‘Metro-style’) user interface, it’s not just the huge training to acquire new skills, but also the support burden needed to help people with the process of changing from old ways to new ways.

According to the article, to make proper use of the Windows 8 user interface, a computer needs to have a  touch input device. This may be true, but I’ve just seen someone give a presentation on a Windows 8 machine without using a touch interface, and look quite comfortable doing it. So I don’t think the lack of a touch interface should be as big a problem as the Forbes article makes out.

However, I agree when the article notes that Windows 8 is an “all or nothing upgrade”; unlike the upgrade from Windows XP, or even Windows 2000, to Windows 7. In other words, moving to Windows 8 is similar to the move from DOS to Windows, which was over 20 years ago.

I don’t recall hearing much in the early 1990s about the big issue of moving to the first Windows versions. I think that is probably because computers in the workplace were not as ubiquitous in those days; only a relatively few people had a PC on their desk. Also, people were happier to upgrade to Windows because DOS was not considered very user friendly. That also shows how familiar people have become to a standard user interface with Windows, and that Microsoft should have considered that.

The Windows 8 upgrade experience is a salutary reminder that the world of work has changed significantly in the last 20 years. Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop created for them one of the dilemma’s of an incumbent during discontinuous change (as described by the Disruptive Innovation theory). Namely, how do you change to a new disruptive environment but keep your current hold on the old environment. In years to come, we may see the Windows 8 introduction as one of the case studies of how an existing leader tried to cope with disruptive innovation.

I wonder how long Microsoft’s good times will last?

I thought it would last much longer than it has. Microsoft is now looking distinctly less mighty and infallible than it used to, that is because it missed the new markets of smartphone operating systems and tablets until they were well established by other companies.

Now I am beginning to wonder whether Microsoft is tracing the same steps with Windows 8 as IBM did in the 1980s when it released the OS/2 operating system?

Remember, IBM brought out OS/2 to try and win back its PC operating system market share from the growing Windows operating system. By that time, IBM had also lost its dominance of the PC hardware market, and it tried to counter that by introducing the PS/2. Both these initiatives followed the tried-and-trusted IBM approach to dominate a market with its own proprietary products.

What do I see now? Microsoft losing the Windows-based PC hardware platform to tablets and smartphones running Android or iOS, and struggling to become significant in the smartphone operating system. What does Microsoft do? Bring out Windows 8 as a touch–oriented operating system, to run on PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

Some people are already writing off Windows 8 as a failure; and a respectable tech journalist has commented:

… consumers don’t appear to be warming to Windows 8 …

Recent statistics paint a stark picture of the health of the PC industry: in April, analyst firm Gartner said that 79,2m PCs were shipped in the first quarter of 2013, an 11,2% decline over the same quarter in 2012 and the first time the number had fallen below 80m since the second quarter of 2009.

The same journalist observed:

 The problem Microsoft faces is far deeper than a simple change in the formula of its software. The entire structure of the computer industry has changed.

Doesn’t that sound like the situation IBM faced in the 1980s and 1990s when the computing paradigm changed from mainframes to PCs?

As I also wrote at the time:

IBM went from being a great tech-oriented company to one run by bean counters; the more I deal as a partner with Microsoft the more I feel that way about them as well.

I believe that still to be true. However, they obviously do have some good techies as the recent Xbox One announcement has shown.

IBM managed to change its fortunes under the leadership of Lou Gerstner. I hope Microsoft do the same.

The reason why I believe global reports are a problem is that they obscure the fact that market shares for this type of technology are not globally uniform, and can be very different between regions.

It’s wrong to assume that  Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century is true. In fact, a recent article that examines Friedman’s view notes:

The world is still far from flat today, and, in many industries, it’s likely to retain its curvature for quite some time to come.

A more detailed mobile market share report shows how the market shares can vary widely by country.

It does amaze me though that US writers seem surprised that the market share patterns in their country are not followed elsewhere – even when the reasons are pointed out.

For technology companies, therefore, check what type of technology your industry is in. Is there significant regional variation? If so, do you know what the reasons are, and how can you address them?

Over the years, I have seen a number of new technology products introduced into organisations. These were introduced to improve business processes as well as access to information. The projects I have participated in include:

• starting an Information Centre (IBM’s term in the mid-1980s for …
• implementing a data warehouse
• piloting an executive information systems (EIS) solution
• various ERP and CRM projects

All of these involved a degree of innovation and dispruption to people working in the organisation. Most of them had successes, and all of them encountered problems and areas of failure.

It wasn’t the technology as such that led to the problems and failings – although in the early projects the user interface was a mainframe terminal – but rather the implementation approach and the lack of attention to people factors. In many cases, it wasn’t the technology but the people issues that led to failures.

Recently I saw two articles pointing out that the discipline of change management, so critical to the people aspects of these kinds of projects, may need to be reviewed.

One critic noted that it is management that often fails manage it properly, not taking it seriously enough and handing it over instead to someone else. The other article states that change involves four elements:

• execution
• leadership
• organizational engagement
• effective governance

Ignoring or down-playing any of these results in sub-optimal (at best) results.

I am now seeing a new wave of technology coming, in the form of enterprise social networking. If it’s seen as only a fad by management, the project will fail. People have got so used to email that getting them to adopt a new platform, like Microsoft’s Yammer, will be very difficult unless the change management elements are managed actively. I work for a technology company that is trialling Yammer, and I’ve already seen comments that indicate people don’t see the need or benefit of changing from something they are used to and happy with. So it’s interesting to see stories of large companies like ABB who are going the Yammer route. I would love to see their change management plan.

If anyone has a case study of an enterprise social network implementation that is implemented, has been adopted readily by users, and is delivering benefits, please let me know.

Microsoft has improved the user experience with features like additional background colours, and the ability to resize the tiles. They also seem to have improved the resolution on the screen so content looks clearer.

There’s a blog here that provides more details.

the levels of SOA in the early 2000’s, cloud in the late 2000’s, and social in the past few years.

Wang gives a definition of big data:

Traditionally, big data describes data that’s too large for existing systems to process

He goes on to describe the three common characteristics of big data.

Volume. This original characteristic describes the relative size of data to the processing capability … Overcoming the volume issue requires technologies that store vast amounts of data in a scalable fashion and provide distributed approaches to querying or finding that data.

Velocity. Velocity describes the frequency at which data is generated, captured, and shared. The growth in sensor data from devices, and web based click stream analysis now create requirements for greater real-time use cases.

Variety.  A proliferation of data types from social, machine to machine, and mobile sources add new data types to traditional transactional data.  Data no longer fits into neat, easy to consume structures.

I have put together my own definition from various others I have found.

• Big data are extremely large volumes, of mainly unstructured data, which are streamed (not batched), and which require real-time analysis

My issue is not that big data is incorrect, but that it is relevant to only a section of the business community at the moment. A Forrester Research blog shows the businesses using big data are the ones that have always handled lots of data in the past – e.g., banks and insurance companies, telcos, oil companies, large retailers, and the international CPG companies. An analysis by McKinsey shows those industries where big data has high value vs. those where it’s value is low; for me the interesting observation was that while big data is relatively easy to capture, it has low value for manufacturing industries.

The same McKinsey article mentions that the analysis was done for businesses with over 1000 people. If you look at the US Census bureau’s 2010 statistics for business you will see that businesses of that size make up less than 9000 (0.15%) of the total of over 5.7 million businesses in the US. Why is there so much hype about something that only a small proportion of the market can use, or is interested in using?

How relevant is big data now for most organisations?

• the majority of organisations don’t have the data sources for it – whether from customers, manufacturing plant, operations, inventory;
• most manufacturers and distributors are risk averse and cost conscious; the new and ‘bleeding edge’ technology of big data, and its cost of implementation, wouldn’t appeal to them;
• those organisations outside the McKinsey study that have large data volumes can easily handle them using existing relational database (RDBMS) software. This was born out at during an interactive survey session at the ITWeb 2013 BI conference I attended where even though 63% of attendees were from companies with over 1000 employees, 67% were still using standard RDBMS technology.

As the technology for big data matures – e.g., Microsoft’ s in-memory/big data product codenamed Hekaton – it may find a larger market, but the fact is that for most businesses, existing technologies provide the capability to manage and analyse large volumes of data without having to get into new technologies.

What could make big data become more important to the majority of businesses? There are conditions that would make big data important.

1. The information content gets above a certain critical threshold
2. Operations are instrumented to create enough of a data deluge
3. Senior management learn how to work with the new issues created

Conditions 1 and 2 could arise with the growth of the Internet of Things This refers to how more objects are becoming embedded with sensors and linked through wired and wireless networks, often communicating via the Internet. As these objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding complexity and responding to it. This could create huge volumes of data that flow to computers for analysis and could have an impact on even small manufacturers and distributors.

But until that starts becoming a reality, the big data phenomenon is really something that only a few people need to be concerned about.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 8,400 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 14 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

I mentioned before about my initial experiences of changing to a Nokia Lumia running the Windows Phone operating system. It has been a several months since my change-over and I have been adding and experimenting with several apps available from the Windows Phone Marketplace. I have even started using the Xbox game app.

You probably have to be over thirty to remember what a cell phone was like originally, and how revolutionary it was at the time. However, when the functionality of mobile phones went from being just for phoning and texting, and added camera and then music playing, the mobile phone stopped being ‘a phone’.

Nowadays people’s lives almost revolve around their phones – just look what people do when they find their phone is lost or misplaced.

The modern smartphone has, in effect, become the new Personal Information Centre (PIC). Consider what you can now do.

• For reading there are e-book reader apps like Amazon’s Kindle or Freda, as well as audio book apps like Audible.
• The storage space on modern phones allows several hours of music to be stored which can be played on a Windows Phone with an app like Xbox Music.
• Many people rely on their phones as a GPS-enabled map reader.
• With productivity apps like Office OneNote or Evernote, you can make notes on your phone.
• Most people’s diaries are on their phone, and if you are like me, you supplement that with a do-list app like Remember The Milk.

So when do you think we will stop calling them phones, and start calling them PICs?

This change in the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) was enormous. I think the last time I had to adjust to such a significant UI and UX was when I changed from a PC running DOS to one that ran Windows. You get to learn to do things a certain way, and then with the new operating system you discover that in order to learn  about the new things you have to unlearn the old ones.

It probably took me a week to get used to the new UI (keyboard etc), but longer to become familiar with the UX (e.g. how the keyboard works in different situations). However, after I got used to doing things differently, I began to appreciate the new things that I couldn’t do before. Microsoft’s integration of Windows Phone with its Internet services and Office web applications is amazing. I am referring to how you can use SkyDrive to store not only pictures you take with the phone, but also notes and reminders you can create using the web version of Windows OneNote. You can also upload Word and Excel files to SkyDrive and read them on the phone.

As a phone, Nokia have done a great design and engineering job on the Lumia. Combine that with the capabilities of Office and other Microsoft software, and the Windows Phone is the best business-oriented phone I have seen. The iPhone is great for individuals, but if you work in a business environment where Microsoft predominates, Windows Phone is far better suited for your needs.

From a social point of view, Windows Phone allows you to share photos to Facebook very easily (Microsoft’s purchase of Facebook shares probably helped that) as well as other social networks like Twitter. There is also a very useful feature in contact management – Windows Phone allows you to combine your standard contact details with other details that the same person may logged via your phone elsewhere. For example, I could combine people’s Outlook contact details with their Google email address and Twitter handle. The only major weakness though is that there is no way to easily send someone’s contact card via an SMS (text message).

Windows Phone also allows you to combine calendars; so I can see my work-related Outlook Calendar and my personal Google Calendar appointments in one phone calendar view.

There is an app store, the Market Place, where you can download free and paid-for apps. The apps I really needed – e.g. for Twitter, Evernote, RememberTheMilk – I could find on the Market Place. I also found that Amazon provide a free Kindle app for the Windows Phone, so for the first time I have started considering Kindle books.

If I was interested in games, I might be able to say something about the Xbox features on the Lumia Windows Phone, but as I am not, I won’t. The music apps – Microsoft’s Zune, and Nokia Music – work well together and I found it very easy to use. But you do have to download Zune to your PC to in order to sync the music between your PC and the phone.

In sumary, I like the Nokia Lumia and am very glad I got it. I also think Microsoft have done a great job with Windows Phone in terms of its look-and-feel and general usability.

Anyone else got some comments?