The Technology Nomad

As anyone who has struggled in the European no-fly zone in the last few days will declare - we are truly living in the Internet age. From the German rail operators (Bahn) to Eurostar to practically every ferry operator, you had to have a confirmed booking completed on their website to getting anything approaching assistance from the representatives on the ground. In short, unless you were technology savvy enough to overcome the constant crashing of their often-pathetic but inundated booking systems, their people didn't want to know or help you. Which is both enlightening and, on some levels, disturbing. For example, I saw a Eurostar rep in Brussels tell a stooped lady in her 80's (or maybe more.... I'm being kind!) that she should go to the hotel and book a ticket online using her online account, and then print the confirmation mail before returning to the station. I'm not certain she even knew what the internet was, let alone how to print something.

While this sort of operating model highlights the growing importance and reliance of technology to business, it does also mark the evolution of business - is this the end of the "personal touch" era? It means that to do business with those companies, I needed my laptop to talk to their servers and database which sent me an email that I printed. Clearly, they need to work on their side of the equation - Eurostar was the worst offender. It took 2 hours and about 100 attempts (no exaggeration) to get a single booking completed on their site! But while I was sitting in my Hilton room - it's good to rough it! - struggling with their sites, I was listening to my music on my iPhone. When it was all done, I watched a movie on my laptop and then checked on the progress of friends via email. Oh, and the movement of a load of ash!

In short, everything I needed was in my laptop bag for my "home" life to continue with minimal interruption. My life is now sufficiently digital that I can exist with nothing but a laptop and an Internet connection. In fact, to overcome the obstacle of buying a train and ferry ticket, these tools were essential! Which, when you consider it, makes me location independent. So, I can work equally well from a beach hut with wi-fi as I can from my home office and with this new found freedom, many opportunites open up.

It makes me wonder how many people take advantage of this situation - and how? Is it just working from a nicer location or is for tax exemption reasons? Could this be the way of the future? Or perhaps, could the drive to this model see the arrival of the next killer application? In the same way, mail and internet access have given rise to the freedom outlined above, could there be another application which will remove any remaining boundaries ?

reBlog from Pat Phelan: Pat Phelan: Bits, bytes and telecoms

Stumbled across this mention of the Groupon website today on the blog of Pat Phelan. It's a great site that seems to be going from strength to strength and I think there's a case to be made for a similar service in Europe!

Groupon is a combination of the words group and coupon. Each day, we offer an unbeatable deal on the best of Your City: restaurants, spas, sporting events, theater, and more. By promising businesses a minimum number of customers, we get discounts you won’t find anywhere else. We call it “collective buying power.”

Pat Phelan, Pat Phelan: Bits, bytes and telecoms, Apr 2010

You should read the whole article.

The Cloud - A Solution for Public Services

It rains a lot in Ireland - we all know that. But what if a cloud of a different sort was an answer for a problem we are starting to endure but will have for a long time to come? What if we could do something innovative that highlighted our nations foresight and reduced the cost running the country while alleviating the risk of a citizens privacy being invaded? I believe we can achieve all this.

When I took on my first role in a more sales orientated environment, I made a conscious effort to watch and learn from the better people I was working with. One of those people - a particularly wise man who, over time became a friend and, perhaps unknowingly, something of a mentor - once responded to a particular difficult client with a firm statement.

"Getting us to do this work (their Software Management activities) will allow you to focus on your company's core business. Right now, you're a bank who dabble in IT - why not focus on what you do best and let us do what we do best on your behalf!"

It always stuck in my mind that the core competency of company should be it's only focus. There are suppliers for practically every supporting service that will vie with one another for the business and deliver it cheaper anyway. So it is with that concept in mind that I wonder if our government departments need to review their operating model.

Right now, practically every nation is trying to reduce their "operating cost" through reduced spending in the public sector. In Ireland, we will endeavour to do this while attempting to satisfy the demands of the union tribes! I'm not aware of all of the facts but certainly the promise of a job for 4 years combined with a guaruntee of no salary reductions is not something forthcoming in the private sector!

But it is not the union squabbles that interest me but rather the opportunity that exists to reduce the IT cost. Ireland has a self-proclaimed innovative, knowledge driven workforce but I wonder if this is being used to help the nation itself. Certainly, we continue to see data-loss through the use of removable media (USB, CD, DVD, etc), portable hard drives and laptops. This is almost an inevitability in the current computing environment. But what if we had something different.

Rather than attempting to encrypt and add complexity to the working day of our public servants, we should instead be using technology to make their job's better and our private information safer. We should decouple the data from the local machines - desktops and laptops - of the public sector and centralise the data into our a cloud computing solution. By centralising the data, we create a unique opportunity to showcase Ireland as a Green conscious nation by using an environmentally friendly data centre - a good example of such is this facility in Cork. People might question the security of data in a single location, but this is a typical solution used by large corporations already and one for which the appropriate back-up methodology and technology exists. In fact, I would be surprised if a subsets of the government data  is not already in this model.

My concept goes further. I envision a scenario where data is stored once, shared by all departments and secure from any malicious users. While I would argue the applications should be virtualised and provisioned to users via a technology such as VMWare View, the location of the applications  is somewhat irrelevant if the data is stored in a single location and shared ubiquitously. Clearly, a number of challenges and obstacles exist but often the biggest prevention to change such as this is the unwillingness of people to investigate it and pursue it more. I believe this is a reasonable model that  can be achieved in a relatively short time and the savings would easily ensure the initial cost of transformation is recouped.

The implementation of solution such as this would showcase Ireland's ability to embrace new technology, highlight the expertise available within the country and put Ireland at the forefront of operating models that provide security and cost efficiency for data management. If the government are to win the battle to re-establish Ireland to the heights of the Celtic Tiger, forward thinking is a must.