On my white board in my office at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), I have written down three big questions which I hope at some point during my time here to be able to answer:
Recently I was on the DorobekINSIDER LIVE show along with Sean Herron, Product Lead and Developer at 18F; and Richard Beutel, Senior Advisor and Counsel for Acquisition Policy House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The link to the show is here.
The attitude to Cloud has changed dramatically since I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation. Then, there was great reluctance from all stakeholders to even try moving applications to the Cloud. Now, there is general agreement that many applications are candidates for such a move, though there clearly are security and acquisition hurdles that need to be overcome.
One of the great things about teaching classes is how much one learns from the students.
I have been teaching a capstone graduate class at the University of Maryland University College, UMUC, http://www.umuc.edu/, about the Management of Technology and Innovation for a number of years. One of the running threads culminating in a discussion in the last session (which ended yesterday) relates to future technologies.
One of the threads this year focused on wireless technologies. One of the students linked to a product called Twine from a company called Supermechanical, http://supermechanical.com/. Twine is basically a sensor box, with some coming standard built-in and some requiring additional purchase and snap-on.Everything Without Wires
I have been spending time this afternoon working on my UMUC Contemporary Topics in Informatics class. One of the topics my students have been commenting on relates to information sharing. One of the questions I… A Passing Thought About Knowledge Management Systems
Apropos of nothing in particular and to take a brief break from grading research papers from my University of Maryland class I teach, I was again reminded of one of the problems I have with… Signature Lines on Email
I have been giving a lot of thought lately about the impact of technology being integrated into everything.
In a separate post, I will talk more about that, but until I get that written, one of my students in my Syracuse University class on CIO on “CIO’s and the Global Enterprise”, wrote an interesting discussion about Ambient Organizations.
As I understand the various phrases that use the word ambient in this context, what is being said is that we come across information all the time; conversations, books we read, news sources, and so on. Over time even when we do not realize it, we tend to process and integrate this information often in unexpected ways. This is becoming even more relevant as the number of information sources and the pervasiveness of them increases.
For a simple example, for those of us who participate in such things as twitter or facebook, it is not infrequent that we when we run into someone for the first time physically that we are connected to on one of these social networks, it is as if we already know them. Even when we didn’t notice it, we pick up on what a person is interested in and what their opinions on a variety of topics are.
Helen Patricia McKenna is one of my students in this semester’s CIO class, the class itself in fact is completely on-line; taught asynchronously – that is, no direct lectures. It is part of the on-line graduate curricula at Syracuse University’s iSchool, http://ischool.syr.edu/. She often posts very interesting comments, this one I thought was of particular interest – I will warn those who go on, that in addition to being interesting it is a bit long.
BTW, in the interests of full-disclosure, I also teach at the University of Maryland University College. I find that the “do not want to appear like an idiot” syndrome forces me to keep relatively up-to-date in the topic areas I teach – which typically range from Cyber-Security Policy to CIO Management to IT Acquisition.Ambient Knowledge