We have known for some time that the video gaming industry is leading significant innovation trends in the software and hardware industry.  I stumbled upon this Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today (from January 2011)  that documents what the gaming industry has brought to defense, collaboration and even the entertainment industry.  I think that one of the biggest innovations brought to us by the video game industry that has yet to be untapped is the Microsoft Kinect.

If you have no idea what a Kinect is let me spend a few seconds bringing you up to speed.  The Kinect is basically a motion detector, voice recognition and camera all built into a device that allows for deviceless control of your xBox.  Meaning that you don’t need a remote to control a game, play a movie, etc. 

Cool I know, that’s why I bought one.  However, not for the reason you might expect.  I purchased it for the kids.  My kids are young.  Handling a controller would be impossible and I shuttered in fear at them using something like a Wii.  Although flat screens have come down in price I don’t have a desire to replace mine once a year because a controller went through the screen.  However, there are some really great educational games out there and I thought that during the 110 degree Texas heat this might be a good change up.  I must admit that I was a bit skeptical at first.  These things never work as advertised.  But it did.  And it worked well.

Fast forward six months.  As any self respecting geek I started to wonder what if.  Microsoft at the time wasn’t allowing much if any customization, but now it appears that the flood gates have opened.  People are beginning to put the device into action.  And now, you don’t need an xBox!

So what is it being used for?  The video below will give you a preview:

Cool huh?  You would be right to stop right there and imagine the possibilities.  However, I came across this next gem.  It’s six minutes long, but I assure you it’s worth your time.

This video highlights two big innovations with real commercial potential.  One is the the virtual content and integrations via a pointing device (read your iPad or phone).  Secondly was the in the last part.  The virtual partial interaction with real world objects (the desk/drawer/garbage can).

So what does this mean?  Simple, no need to carry a laptop or in some cases any device.  Because of the Kinect your apps can go with you anywhere this system is in place.  Your digital life, apps, etc are in the cloud.  Innovation and collaboration anywhere, anytime.  You now become the device.  The technology is just a platform to display it.  No need for keyboards, mice, monitors, etc.  Exciting times for sure!

If you would like to learn more, or even get funded by Microsoft for developing a great idea I would recommend checking out the Kinect Accelerator page.

I’ve been following the recent AT&T and T-Mobile merger news closely over the last few months.  Not because of my love for AT&T nor the cute T-Mobile girl.  I’ve been following it because it’s a replay of the broadband vs. dialup fight and the tiered bandwidth cap fight.  You always hear that history repeats itself and that the speed of technology innovation doubles every few years.  Here is a situation where there is a perfect storm of each factor.

Sprint, is in a unique position, so far.  They are the only major carrier that does not cap or tier it’s bandwidth usage.  AT&T and Verizon have tiered pricing for both phone and data services.  Take the iPad for instance.  AT&T has a 2 gig limit on their top plan with additional charges applied should you go over that amount.  Verizon has a 5 gig with similar terms.  Prices for these services are comparable.  Sprint has yet to offer the iPad, but I do have a contract with Sprint where for $79 I get as much as I want anytime.  It doesn’t mean I’m a sprint fan boy.  It just means that every month my bill is the same.  And there is the key.  Consistency.

During  the late 90’s the internet consuming public witnessed a race between the Telco’s based on speed.  Why use AOL dialup when you can use SW Bell DSL?  It was comparable in price and 8X faster.  Then you had the internet cap situation, which is still in play. Telco's over allocated resources and sought caps to limit large consumers of data.  Verizon was the clear winner in terms of capability and future expansion.  They spent billions to build out their network with no caps on FiOS.  I would argue that Verizon has won the battle for savvy users who really use the internet, which is most of us born after 1950.  I don’t know one person that says I have FiOS, but I wish U–Verse was available.

So, back to Sprint and the portable internet which is all the rage.  They have the network capability, the iPhone 4S, and the market share to start challenging the largest two providers in the US.  If Dan Hess takes a lesson from history I would say look to Verizon.  They’ve had great success with their FiOS implementation and I would say that the same market  that drove them will be the same that drive the wireless age.  I would also argue that the US consumer likes fixed pricing.  Whether or not I use it consumers still want a predictable price that doesn’t fluctuate based on the amount of videos you download on a rainy day.

At the end of the day, we, the consumer wins.  Whichever these models wins out it’s sure to drive speeds and price down, just like DLS vs. Dial-up did in the 90’s.

Just in case you haven’t noticed the explosion of devices and consumer based applications is beginning to challenge IT departments.  Do you allow your employees to use their own devices?  What about applications?  How do you deploy and manage security?  These are all questions that just about every IT shop in the world is having to answer.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a multi billion dollar conglomerate or supporting the local church.  The consumerization of IT is here, and I predict here to stay. 

The question of managing this phenomenon is not if you should allow it.  That battle has already been fought.  Devices and applications are being used because they are convenient or introduce efficiencies.  You cannot stop this wave.  Imagine being the head of a pager company and you just saw your first cell phone in action.  You need to start making cell phones, not scoff at the idea that cell phones will never catch on!  The real question is how do you take advantage of this movement.

Make no mistake, this is a paradigm changer and you need to think of ways to take advantage of this.  So what in the world am I talking about?  I remember when I first started working in the 90’s.  You hardly ever saw a laptop.  They were reserved for the ‘high-ups’.  They were cool and a status symbol.  Fast forward 10 years and now all you see is laptops.  They are now the standard of a productive work culture allowing people to work from anywhere, and unfortunately for this guy, at anytime of the day or night.  Laptops stopped being a status symbol and the hallmark of productivity.   They changed the paradigm. 

Today we have devices and applications that take full advantage of sleek form factors and the cloud.  Paradigm changer?  No doubt.  I, myself, own 3 laptops and two iPads.  I have the ability to work from anywhere and at anytime.  Couple that with some slick collaboration apps like Lync, Skype, Facetime and a host of other cloud based collaboration utilities there is no need for me to go into the office.  So why do we continue to build applications, corporate infrastructures and offices like it’s the 1990’s?  Do I really need a cube, an office or a desk phone?  No, what I need is a power strip. 

So what is the next model?  The next laptop transformation?  First, I think IT needs to look at how we allocate IT assets.  Why buy me a laptop?  I have three.  And they are far superior to the one you will probably provide me.  Why not give me a stipend so I can purchase my own equipment?  Why not give me a stipend for being an employee?  Chances are if you are like me you even dislike the office supplies!  I’ll buy my own pens and paper! 

Imagine how that would change the way you not only build out an office, but your approach to building business solutions!  Your external customers and internal customers become one in the same. All rely on the ability to use your product anytime and anywhere.

I’m probably one of the biggest fans of Agile.  Not because it’s one of the hottest things going on right now in the development community.  I’m big on Agile because I’ve seen what it can do for teams and organizations first hand.  Transformational would be an understatement.  Unfortunately there are plenty of shops out there not realizing the benefits that agile can bring.  They are practicing a faux pas version of it.  Let’s just call it ‘iterative’.  If you think you might be doing this type of Agile than this post is not for you.  This post is about the next level of Agile.

Those of us that have seen true Agile in practice will tell you that at the end of the day you’ll be left wanting more.  Clearly this practice can be applied to a larger audience.  Clearly every company should use Agile for everything!  Agile is more than the considerable uptick in productivity, quality and customer satisfaction!  To borrow from the extreme sports community:  Go big or go home!  I think I echo most of my colleagues when I say this.

I have news for us Agile advocates.  The business side of the house has been looking at Agile based methodologies much longer than we have.  I’ve known this for sometime, but I recently came across an article in Forbes where the author, Dan Woods, speaks about the marriage of Lean Manufacturing and Agile Development.  Agile is not Lean and Lean is not Agile.  Their approach to iterative improvement, removal of barriers and fail early- fail often approach is a best of breed. 

Woods makes an interesting statement at the end of his article:

In practice, Agile seems to be changing for the better by adopting Lean thinking in a large way. Rally says that its customers get to market 50% faster and are 25% more productive when they employ a hybrid of Lean and Agile development methods. Given the way that Agile fits in to the Lean framework, it wouldn't surprise me if before too long Agile is considered a branch of Lean practice tailored for the software industry.

I’ve written many times about the importance of business and technology coming together to create the best value.  This is by far the most common ground I’ve seen.  I agree with Wood, I look forward to the child of these two methodologies.

Agile is an incredible methodology for running IT projects.  However, at times you are asked to come up with a swag as to how much money and resources it will take to complete a project.  Modeling the complexities of resource requirements, time and expense can be difficult.  I recently put together a spreadsheet to assist in this activity.  I had every intention of moving this to an online application, but do to time constraints I have not had the time.  So I’ve decided to release this tool in, gasp!, Excel.  Please feel free to use as is, but if you beat me to creating an online tool at least put a link back to my blog!

First, a quick explanation of how the tool works:

Only edit the light blue fields

1.  
   1.  
      1. Story Points Total – Total story points the team estimated for the entire project
      2. Time Frame (Months) – Sometimes the business expects that a project needs to be completed in a timeframe.  This cell allows you to calculate that.  The warning here is that you need to be realistic.  9 pregnant women can’t have a baby in a month.  If you don’t understand that statement than you need to cease and assist the use of this tool immediately!  Advice:  Just be realistic.
      3. Blended Resource Rate – The blended rate of all available or projected resources.
      4. Contingency – This is a swag.  Enter a % of ‘play money’ to each side.
      5. Story points conversion – Agile purists hate this.  But in some situations you have to convert a story point into an hour estimation.  This field allows you to estimate time to quote.  More importantly it allows you to model scenarios.
      6. Headcount – The Dev line item is automatically calculated.   Remember, you are trying to back into the number of developers you’ll need and the amount of money you will need to complete the project.  Developers are the big unknown.  Other resources are fixed or can be calculated as a ratio (i.e. One QA professional per 3 Dev’s).   Again, this also allows you to model resources needed to manage the number of dev’s you are calculating.   Add your PM’s, Scrum Masters, QA people here.
      7. Capital Hardware – It costs money to run this new stuff.  Add your costs here.
The three columns related to cost and number of resources models out the amount of dedicated resources.  Dedication is an estimate.  Your resources will go to meetings, use the bathroom, etc.  One thing I will guarantee you, they will not be productive 100% of the time.  I’ve found that the team is productive between 80 and 70% of the time allocated.  Use these columns to provide a range.

Download the file here

I regularly get asked by people just entering or interested in the Technology field what my best advise to a budding technologist would be.  I hate that question.  There is so much to know and so many experiences to share.  How do you boil that down to one elevator pitch?  Someone queue the music: I’ve given a ton of horrible advice.

I’m pretty sure that to most of those outside of our industry pride of ownership is a good thing.  Society encourages people to buy houses, start businesses, etc. All thinking that this will lift the community because people have a ‘pride in ownership’.  In other words, because they own something they will continue to invest in it to make their property better. 

However, I believe, that pride of ownership in our industry is toxic.  I have noticed over the years that pride of ownership in technology leads to two things, terrible product delivery and stunted innovation.  Product delivery constantly fails because your developers are taking liberty with the code.  They are going to try to pay back some technical debt because they think or *know* that if they just had another ‘crack’ at that function or class they could improve it.  Stunted Innovation occurs for much the same reason.  Why look at other technologies?  Your team or yourself is completely engaged in the current paradigm.  If you change you kill your baby.

There is no doubt that the technology team plays an integral part in creating value for the organization.  As I’ve blogged before this is what IT’s value proposition is.  However, as a technologist, you need to realize that the product you created is the product of Technology, Marking, Sales and Customers coming together. Also known as business value.  The technology doesn’t belong to you.  It belongs to the organization. This is the difference between great companies and great failures.

Sounds harsh?  I mean your or your team created the product? But it didn’t.  The product was a successful implementation of the businesses needs.   To put it simply, You were the doctor in the delivery room.  There were a cast of others that had the same level of commitment and smarts to help give birth to the product.  I think I can speak for most of us when I say just be thankful that we walk out with clean shoes!

If, as an organization, you think that you have a pride of ownership issue please feel free to contact me. Once you are free it’s the most liberating and enabling existence of IT. I’m happy to evangelize. 

I’m not typically a person that takes issue with someone or some else’s post on my blog.  I’m of the opinion that blogs are there to put forth your ideas.  However, I happened across two posts today, one that references the other. One I disagree with and another I agree with and have more to add.  The one I disagree with is not out of spite, but I think it perpetuates some false assertions that, can and do, hinder the progress of something both the author and I strongly hold true.  The articles I reviewed were Introducing New Technology in Agile by Paritosh Ranjan and 5 Reasons NOT to choose a Technology by Ellyssa Kroski.

The first point that caught my eye on Ranjan’s article was the generalizations about Agile. 

Generally Agile projects are of very short durations. So, introducing new technologies in such a small time frame is always risky.

I will first start off by saying I can’t qualify what a long duration is.  My assumption is that a short duration is less than a year.  I would argue that Agile is exactly the methodology for introducing a new technology.  Agile, in principle, is setup to manage just that, risk. 

The second point Ranjan points out about Agile is that:

In Agile, the team size is pretty small, so if only one person keeps working on the new technology, then the team becomes dependent on him. While pair programming the knowledge about the new technology also distributes in the team and the team has a balanced truck number.

I don't mean to be awkward here but we are talking about two birds of the same flock.

And then there is this:

Most popular open source solutions are extremely well documented and a variety of free and commercial technical support options are available. Due to the nature of community development, documentation and instructions are often written from a variety of viewpoints - creating well-rounded information, instruction and tutorials. In addition, open source projects can't hide usage techniques, due to the free availability of the code. Free technical support is often available in the form of mailing list or newsgroup discussions; nevertheless some background research, knowledge or experience is often required.

Look, I’m a huge fan of FOSS.  And make no mistake I’m a huge M$ fanboy (Another rant for sure BTW).  However, Ranjan’s uses this reasoning to start the argument.

I really like Ellyssa Kroski post.  I wish more people thought like this.  What I would add to the post is defiantly check the availability of talent.  Regional specialties is a real concern.  For example I live in the Dallas – Ft. Worth area.  You will find more Microsoft professionals in Dallas than Ft. Worth.  In Ft. Worth you will find more java folks or specialty IT (Ft Worth is has more manufacturing and Dallas has more ‘corporate headquarters’).  A theory I’m still working on btw.  I would love to see someone produce a demand heat map by city.

I received an interesting email the other day.  The link was to a Microsoft article announcing an upcoming release of a ‘Cloud Appliance’.  I spoke about how great this would be for the world of computing in a blog post back in February 2009.  I forwarded the article to the folks I work with in Server/Network and they lost their minds.  A system fully capable of abstracting hardware and software!

As someone who works in a heavily regulated industry, and rightfully so in my opinion, this is the best thing to come along since virtualization.  There is no one in my industry that doesn’t recognize the benefits of a cloud based architecture, but new regulations in Healthcare now dictate jail time for certain violations.  I’m less willing to take advantage of the architectural benefits and cost savings if I know there is a real risk of visiting a federal institution of time outs.  Long story short, I’m excited to see Microsoft enter this space. 

More from InformationWeek…

More for Microsoft’s Website…

I came across this great presentation today talking about the challenges of Social Networking and what the next generation might look like.  The presentation is by a guy named Paul Adams who is a UX researcher at Google.

I am going out on a limb here.  Technologist are not traditionally people persons.  Please insert your own Office Space quote [here].  Technology is a profession I love.  Make no mistake.  But, we have our issues.  The issues have nothing about capability or effectiveness.  We are very good at that providing solutions to problems.  Our problem is self promotion!

When thinking of traditional Technical Evangelists I believe most people picture someone that promotes a platform or a proprietary service such as the ones Microsoft and SUN have employed.  Currently, I believe that Steve Jobs is the best known evangelist given Apple’s recent product home runs.  However, I do believe there is an opportunity for smaller shops, or even your own company, to employ the same strategies to maximize technology value to customers.

I think at face value this makes sense, but just for fun let’s examine some everyday scenarios that support an evangelist position:

• The pace of innovation is increasing.  You need to be agile in your evaluation of new technologies and how your business can leverage them to deliver a step change competitive advantage.
  
• Your leadership team probably interacts less with technology less than your IT team does.  You need to continually bring new opportunities to the forefront at every chance.  Perhaps an evangelist should even be present during board meetings?  Can you imagine; IT being a strategic business partner???  I kid of course.  It’s what we should be!!!
  
• Your customers are becoming more tech savvy.  There are no more secrets in Technology.  They have access to the same vendors and solutions that everyone else does.  You need to put someone in front of them that can inspire them.  Leave the sales transaction up to the sales team, build interest and excitement for the product up to the evangelist.
  
• Building a product and selling it is just 30% of a launch (my take on it).  You need someone to continually look for ways to promote the product on a micro-interaction level.  Be it whitepapers, speaking at local groups or even through blogging and social network sites.
  
• Customers need to be ‘connected’ to the product to build loyalty and honest feedback.  Nothing makes your IT product more replaceable than a customer feeling like they have no feedback loop or someone they can identify with.  Did you notice the recent Microsoft commercials about ‘Windows being my idea’?

So how do you position the need for a product evangelist?  Moreover, how do you convince the ‘brass’ that one is needed?  My current employer does not formally recognize the role, however I believe that each leader in the IT organization informally plays the role.  I think a large part of that is due to the fact that our IT department is viewed as a strategic partner in business decisions and efforts.  For many organizations that’s a tough road to pave.  I’m admittedly lucky.

Those of you seeking to build a case for implementing an evangelist culture I would work to tie the five points above with specific plans or actions to address them.  Building legitimacy is key.  Challenge your current status quo by continuously providing competitive analysis and how you can overcome those challenges by bringing forth new technological advancements.  It’s a small step and the culture will not change overnight.  However, it’s a step in the right direction.  Remember, overnight success usually takes 3-7 years.  Even for Google!

I would be happy to read and repost any stories on how you successfully implemented an evangelist role or culture.  I think this is an important component of IT’s growth and I’m happy to share.