Over the next 10 years, the world will change as much as it has in the last twenty. If you buy into that statement, then 2020, will make 2010 look like 1990. As a business owner, that rate of change is something I probably can’t fathom too well. I’m focusing on my day-to-day operations (or maybe quarter-to-quarter in a public company). I’m dealing with annual budgets, reviews, sales quotas, economic issues, and so on. On top of all that, I probably don’t consider myself a technology company so I happily run my systems, make sure I’m compliant where I need to be, stay out of the newspaper RSS feeds with data security issues, and hope my BC/DR plans are up-to-date (they’re not). I didn’t see the end of my business coming — until it was too late.

Things are changing. Rapidly. The old solutions are just that…old. It’s time we start embracing the change and tell our clients, “Sorry, you used to be an insurance/medical/financial company, but now you are a technology company – and you’re doing it wrong.”

In an area where people are gathered, either physically or vitually, the conversations and comments being made in the background, are often more prescient, and almost certainly more entertaining than than the subject matter being officially presented. Encouraging and capturing these backchannel discussions is a way to make your presentations more relevant to that specific audience and allow the speaker to morph and refine the message based on those sessions of invaluable feedback.

The Execution phase of our Agile Data Center move is where all the fun stuff happens. As a reminder from the previous entries about the project setup and preparation, we’re doing a data center move where the schedule is flexible (the client is more tolerant of time, less tolerant of risk) and the requirements [...]

About a month ago, Tom and I were brainstorming about the game-changing possibilities of Apple’s rumored tablet device and the potential feature set that would make it so. One of those “game-changing” features we discussed was giving the device a conference room phone capability – kind of like the ubiquitous “spider” phone we see on conference room tables. The other idea, was the ability for the device to project for adhoc presentations.