Dallas makes list of top 10 best places to work in IT

Dallas is ranked 5th.

Gartner predicts a rise in computer sales

Gartner had already predicted a 13% increase in PC shipments in December, but they have significantly revised that number up to almost a 20% increase.

Coupled with the recent prediction of an increase in IT jobs of 13,000 in January, it is reasonable to say that at least in IT, we can see a modest economic recovery.

According to Antone Gonsalves at Information Week:

Mobile PCs will dominate the market, driving 90% of growth over the next three years, Gartner said. By 2012, mobile PCs are expected to account for nearly 70% of shipments, compared to 55% last year.

Mutt Technology

I've been having an ongoing argument with a friend who is an enterprise architect. He is trying to re-engineer many of the systems in his company so that they are more standardized. His argument is that by standardizing on a small number of platforms, he can reduce costs and increase his flexibility. I've heard this argument before . . . in fact, it is the standard argument of many enterprise architects and consultants. If we could just reduce all the diverse platforms in our organization and have a more homogeneous set of standards, we'd be in better shape. It could be right.

But it got me thinking, in what other complex environment does homogeneity produce better results?

In cities, we know that the original attempts to standardize house sizes, lot sizes, types of dwellings, etc. have led to some pretty bad unintended consequences for many neighborhoods. Today, the trend in housing development is to allow much more flexibility in creating mixed use developments. These allow people to live near where they work, shop and eat and is the primary approach now taken to most major metropolitan downtowns. It seems to be working much better than the older, more homogenous approach.

In gardening, expert gardeners know that planting diversity makes for a more resilient garden. A garden with all different types of plants is more likely to be sustainable and require less effort. This is why vast seas of grass are so expensive and difficult to maintain. Again, homogeneity causes problems in this kind of complex environment.

And, that leads to my final example: my dog. She is a complete mutt: probably some mix of lab, border collie, chow and (based on the way she hops when she is excited) rabbit. She is an excellent dog, but she wasn't designed. In fact, she is an excellent dog because she was NOT designed. We all know the kinds of problems that dogs who have been purified and re-bred to remove diversity in the lineage encounter. They can be wonderful dogs, but they come with breed-specific health problems (and in some breeds-personality problems.) My mutt is very healthy, mild mannered and has none of the noticeable problems sometimes associated with pure-breeds.

I can't help but wonder: as we mature in our thinking about technology, will we come to think of the diversity of applications in our organizations as a strength rather than as a weakness? Will we come to appreciate the variety? Will we come to love our IT Mutts?

IT gains jobs in January

I'm always amazed at how people get trapped by mental models. The most prevalent model for IT jobs from the "lessons" of the first financial bust on this millennium was that recovery for IT jobs lag the rest of the economy (they certainly did last time). But Computerworld points out that we gained 13,000 jobs in January which is actually ahead of job creation in the rest of the economy.

Further, unemployment in software engineers is hovering around 5% (or a little lower) which is about half the rate of unemployment in the rest of the economy. IT remains a great place to work despite outsourcing, offshoring, Software as a Service and all the other things we're told we should fret over.

Why no one will buy the laptop

In the spirit of many of the attacks on the iPAD, I thought I'd explore some of the reasons that no one will ever buy a laptop (with a little sarcasm.)

First, there is no 3G connection on laptops. Of course, you can buy a special "air card" but it isn't built in and the connection costs are significant. Who is going to buy a device that doesn't even come with the option of built in 3G?

You can't even touch the screen. You can't draw on it or type on it. You must always haul around a keyboard that is permanently attached to the screen. Then, you have to use some kind of "pointer" device like a touchpad or mouse to move a cursor around on a screen. Can you imagine drawing or working in PowerPoint without being able to touch the screen?

There is no camera on most laptops unless you really spend alot of money.

There is no phone on most laptops. Why would anyone get a machine without the ability to dial a phone number?

Why would anyone buy a laptop?

Are you kidding, its going to be huge?

I've been talking with alot of people about the new iPad. Most people seem to feel underwhelmed by the device. "Why would anyone want just a screen?" I'm not so sure.

Try this thought experiment. Sit in front of your computer with your iPhone next to you. Now, go through all the major functions you use a computer for and try to imagine them on the iPad. It helps if you have the iPad pages from Apple up in your browser. I got so into this thought experiment yesterday that I wasted at least an hour or so and here is my assessment:

Function	Rating	Comments
Watching Video	Much Better	One of the worst things about video on a computer is the keyboard. Try walking around with your computer to another room, its very awkward. Sitting on the couch to watch a TV show on your computer is uncomfortable (and hot on your legs) with a standard computer. The absence of a keyboard here will help tremendously.
Browsing the Web	Much Better	The mouse is the primary way we interact with the Web today (or some kind of integrated clicker on a laptop keyboard.) This is relatively artificial and only exists because we can’t actually touch the screen. Being able to click directly on items is one of the best things about the iPhone and now being able to do that with an almost full size screen will be even better.
Writing/Reading email	Better (probably)	I don’t write long emails, so the keyboard isn’t going to be much of an issue for me . . . in fact, I do about 75% of my email from my iPhone. The browsing capability of email on the iPad looks fantastic. I suspect it will be the best email device.
Playing games	Better	For those of us who are “casual” gamers, this might end up being the best gaming device out there. The screen is amazing and while I won’t be able to have the flexibility of an Xbox or a Wii, I don’t really play those game systems anymore anyway . . . but I have about a dozen iPhone games which will be even better on the iPad.
Slide Arranging	Much Better	I live in PowerPoint and the worst part about it is moving items around on a screen. You can never quite get them to line up correctly. You can’t quite select what you want. The new version of Keynote looks fantastic for slide creation. If it exports well to PowerPoint, then the iPad could take the place of the computer as the dominant slide creation tool.
Drawing	Much Better	Come on, this one is obvious. Drawing and whiteboarding will be much better on this thing. When developers start making applications that allow multiple people with multiple iPads to “whiteboard” together at the same time, there will be even fewer reasons to hop on airplanes for meetings.
Document editing	Even	I don’t think writing long emails, articles, blogs or books will likely transfer to the iPad, but what about editing? I spend a good deal of time editing documents and it may be that the ability to point and type in short comments beats the laptop. We’ll see.
Voice	Worse	But not much worse. Skype will almost certainly come to the iPad. Could it be that Apple is betting on not needing a phone number because audio conversations can be carried through the network?
Video	Much Worse	There is no ability to video conference on this device. For me, this seems to be the biggest gap, but one that I’m sure will be replaced in a future version.

The cost of mistakes

Over the holidays, I was playing with my niece. Like all the nieces and nephews of geeks, we were drawing pictures on my iPhone. We probably drew about 30 different pictures and didn't wear down any crayons or waste any paper (which was really a good thing since we were in the lobby of a very fancy hotel.) Ten minutes prior, we snapped about 50 pictures on a couple of different cameras. Most of the shots are terrible, but we didn't seem to care. There is almost no cost to these mistakes. There is almost no waste (except of course for some electricity.)

Technology is reducing waste in more areas than just in entertaining children . . . computers now design their successors and reduce the likelihood of expensive engineering mistakes, simulations are built of buildings to find architectural flaws before they are ever built, blog posts (like this one) allow people to write small snippets of thoughts that can be thrown away later if they don't measure up to later thinking.

In so many areas, the cost of making mistakes is going down due to the increasing infiltration of technology. And, of course, as the cost of mistakes decreases, the cost of innovation also decreases. Innovation is, after all, a series of testing out ideas and throwing out the bad ones. As the costs decrease, innovation in many areas of our lives is likely to pick up. While some of us are excited about this development, innovation necessarily means an increase in the rate of change in our organizations and in society at large. This reduced cost of mistakes is one of the many things increasing the rate of change . . . and increasing entertainment options for three year olds.

Is crowd sourcing really about the crowd?

Crowd sourcing is another one of those metaphors adopted by the gurus of information technology that has some problems. While this metaphor isn't quite as bad as the cloud metaphor, it still misses the point. The primary problem is that, at least to my mind, the defining characteristic of a "crowd" is that they are not in direct communication with each other. For example, if you are part of a crowd watching a concert, you aren't communicating with the majority of the other people there. If you are part of the crowd watching American Idol, you don't communicate with the other millions of people watching at the same time.

However, you do communicate with a variety of communities. Perhaps you have friends at the concert and you might send them a text message. Or you might sit with a community of friends to watch the latest TV episode. It is communities--networks of friends, families, neighbors, business associates, etc -- that really come together on the web. And yes, these communities can be used to do work. When we built the logo for our new website, we used LogoTournament.com which harnesses a community of graphic designers to create logos. (We loved it by the way . . . if you hop over to our website, can you spot the subtle musical theme in the logo?)

But the reason that these sources work so well is because the people can communicate with each other--they are a community, not a crowd. If we called this trend "Community Sourcing" it would much more accurately represent what is going on, but since it doesn't sound as sexy, I doubt the gurus will adopt it.

iPhone on SNL

Threats of customer disloyalty and even a much ballyhooed user uprising last week don't seem to have done much to sway AT&T to work quickly enough to solve its iPhone driven network problems. Maybe a few jokes from SNL will help?

130 Blogs

One of the things we setup early at Thought Ensemble was contributing to the technology and strategy community in which we work. We try to do that in a variety of ways including participating in local charities and professional organizations, but one of the most important is through our blogs. Early on, we set up a rule that we would average at least 1 blog per week per person. So, this year, between the three full time employees at our startup, we've created over 130 blog entries.

Some of these entries are simply some humor from the day or a link to an interesting post, but some of them are pretty substantial. My favorite from Lisa this year targeted IT Performance Measurement. In it, she re-purposes ideas from Kaplan and Norton and thinks strategically on how to apply them for IT groups. This idea comes from real client work that she conducted with real results.

We also produced a great blog on the financial impacts of doing Agile Development. John cuts through alot of the theoretical debate surrounding these practices and explores the financial impacts. I find the argument pretty compelling and wonder how so many groups refuse to adopt these modern practices considering the strong arguments for their adoption.

My own favorite post was inspired by Deloitte's Shift Index. They point out that whatever it is that management is currently doing in the U.S., it clearly isn't working. Return On Assets has dropped steadily over the last 40 years of so. That inspired a series of blog postings on some of the problems I see in many companies: Tight Ass Management.

So, as this year wraps up, I'm really proud of the company we've started. But mostly, I'm proud because we are participating in the community working to advance the use of technology in the best way possible in our organizations. We've chosen to take a different path in the consulting world: we don't lock up our knowledge, we don't hide it and keep it for ourselves. We believe that contributing to the world is not only the right thing to do, but in the end it will yield better financial results.