• 15Dec

    We Are All Librarians Now

    Digital Culture, IT management, Information Management No Comments

    Interesting discussion (podcast) between Roger Faxon, head of EMI Music Publishing and the Economist. Specifically interesting in the context of this blog is the comparison between our past collections of LPs/CDs and current music playlists.  In the past, we organized our music on a shelf, pre-packaged container by pre-packaged container.  Other than deciding (or not) on the specific physical location of a particular package (LP or CD), we did not have much to do with how our music was organized. Today, we are constantly organizing and re-organizing (or at least, have the tools to do that) our music library, consisting of a collection of digital tracks of music. Because these are basically pieces of digital information, they can also be organized within a larger library of all types of digital information. And of course, they can be linked and shared with other personal and communal libraries.

    We are all librarians now. We have direct knowledge of and experience in organizing information.

  • 08Jul

    Google vs. Microsoft

    Cloud Computing, IT management, Information Management No Comments

    Bill Gates once said, if memory serves, that Microsoft was the answer to the question “what if computing is free?” Yesterday, Google answered with its own question: “What if networking is free?”

  • 26Mar

    From ON Magazine’s Echo Chamber

    Cloud Computing, IT management, ON Magazine No Comments

    “These billions of gigabytes, however, will not join together in a monolithic cloud, providing a neat, serviceable, efficient, information-delivery infrastructure run by a few large utilities. My hunch is that the future will be as chaotic, unpredictable, inventive, and exciting as the present.

    Continue reading »

  • 09Sep

    Georgetown CIO on IT complexity

    IT management No Comments

    [ON magazine, Fall 2007]

    Complicated Environments R Us

    By Ron Bonig, CIO, George Washington University, Washington D.C.

    I’m adaptable. I like change and challenge. But lately, I feel as if I’m traveling through hyperspace in Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon.

    The list of IT advances over the last decade reads like a “good news/bad news” joke: Centrally managed, mainframe-based CICS green screens have mostly gone the way of the dinosaurs, but no one hacked green screens. When control was centralized, people using customizable workstations weren’t calling help desks complaining they couldn’t see the sign-on screen (after they’d zoomed the screen’s resolution past any reasonable bounds).

    Beyond the glass house changes, we’re also dealing with wireless computing, with handheld devices for functions that once required hard connections, and with other “innovations du jour.”

    Continue reading »

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