A while back I was thinking about the engineering curriculum of 2020. Recently, there was an article in the Communications of the ACM that was looking at the same issue. My perspectives tended to align to Stephen's view. Methodologies like ITIL and COBIT are becoming an expectation for IT organizations, and yet are not addressed by most colleges in any core sense. Enterprise architecture issues (e.g., TOGAF) are also on the curriculum periphery, if covered at all. "SOA and EDA should be owned by CS curricula as should web 2.0 and 3.0, SaaS, thin client architectures, roaming connectivity, near-real-time processing and rich converged media among other related areas." Stephen stated something I've said before "Programming will ultimately evolve to component assembly and components will be located by relatively few professionals...", and yet that does not seem to be the perspective of most university curriculum.

On the other hand, the counterpoint in the article had a ring of truth to it as well. There remains a high demand for a range of computing professionals across the world. Computing is by no means a well understood, rote task. There is still much foundational work to be completed - just in taking advantage of the new hardware architectures alone. There are likely to be radically different uses for computing as we move into an age of compute processing abundance.

It seems clear that the core of the curriculum is not diverse enough to meet the needs of the IT industry and is a bit too academic in nature. The need for a broad set of electives is also required so that the students can explore their areas of interest as well. The question remains though: Is programming the core competency in computer science or is it just a means to an end of understanding? Similar to the way the native language (e.g., English) is needed to understand all other areas of study - after all it is not training, it's foundational education. We will likely require the same level of understanding of modeling and simulation, since much of the future work will demand strength in these skills as well.

For about 10 years, I played trombone in a circus band for about a month out of every summer. One of the things I witnessed every year was the trapeze. In this act, there are catchers and flyers. Catchers catch and flyers fly. The flyer needs to let go of the bar and not focus on catching but on launching themselves into the gap, in order to achieve greatness.

EDS has historically been the catcher. In this merger with HP, EDS needs to change its mindset and become the flyer. It's not an easy thing to do. The bar may seem like a safe place, but it prevents you from reaching your potential.

There is a quote from Marilyn Ferguson that comes to mind:

"It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between we fear. There's nothing to hold on to."

From the limited interaction I have had with the folks working on the merger activities, the HP-EDS team should have an advantage. EDS transitions people into the company all the time - that comes with outsourcing. EDS is made up of people who have had to let go of the bar before. After all, catchers can only catch people who let go of the bar. The company consists of people who have flying experience. The HP-EDS team needs to seek out the "fliers", listen to their perspectives and the merger will be successful.

Everyone I've talked to views this as a great opportunity. EDS and HP have strengths in different areas, through this diversity of perspective it will be stronger than either organization would be alone.

People have been asking me why I don't comment on the merger in the blog, and that's because generally I don't think I have anything unique to say, but this is an exception.

I was in the Texas panhandle over the weekend (near Muenster) and saw this scene that seemed rather ironic. This picture shows about six oil wells pumping away and more than a dozen giant wind powered electric generators. You can tell how large they are by the fact that they are behind the trees and yet dwarf them. There are also cows milling about as well, maybe they should tap into the methane production as well.

This blog has had numerous entries in the past about green IT and its role in more efficiently generating value for the enterprise. Those articles were mostly focused on the demand side of the energy issue. This scene shows an interesting supply side perspective -- essentially using a variety of resources to address the current and future needs.

There did seem to be a bit of local resistance though. I briefly talked with one of the people in the area who was trying to sell property and complaining about the effect the wind generators had on being able to sell the land. Personally, I don't think the proximity of the wind farm has nearly as much impact as numerous other factors.

Most of us remember the flood of news stories a few years ago about how e-mails and other electronic communications harm one's IQ more than some narcotics (see BBC News, CNN, Guardian, The Stanford Daily, Times Online for examples). I don't know if the causation of the claim was ever scientifically proven, but it's a fact that we receive way too many e-mails, IMs, and text messages every day.

Tom Davenport and John Beck's book, The Attention Economy, stated that "the average U.S. office worker is spending almost half the day in message-related activity". Another example is a report in the Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge by Stever Robbins, where it was shown that the employee who actually responds to 100 emails each day (at three minutes per response) would need five hours to complete the task. There are plenty of other references about the overload of electronic messages.

I think the problem is not just the quantity of electronic messages we receive; after all, if it's work-related, then it's work. However, I believe the real harm is in the distraction that they cause. Each message takes our focus away from what we are doing, requiring some recovery time when we get back to the task. Many of us have set up rules in our e-mail clients to manage or pre-process the incoming e-mails. Now, I think we may have a better tool.

Here comes the Email Prioritizer prototype for Outlook 2007, from the folks at Microsoft Office Labs. This plug-in is intended to help us manage the flood of incoming e-mails. Based on user-defined priorities, it ‘holds' the incoming e-mails with a "Do Not Disturb" feature. It also uses a 0-3 rating system to help determine the relevance of each e-mail.

This Outlook plug-in sounds interesting and useful. If you've tried it, what do you think about it?

Two years back I wrote a blog entry about dropping my son off at college. Dropping him off was a case of telling him to tuck and roll as we slowed down the car.

Dropping my daughter off was a bit more of an involved process. One thing that was quite different was the amount of security they install on the computers on campus. There was layer upon layer of security, and I was familiar with none of the tools they were using. Since she was running the latest and greatest software, it was not always recognized as current - is there such a thing as being too current - in this case YES. We visited the computer support folks 5 (yes count them, 5) times before we had everything working correctly. I now know more about the load expectations of their sign-in process and the various ranges of error messages that can happen.

The real reason it took 5 attempts was that I forced them to track down every last issue. We could actually log in at some of the buildings all the time. We just didn't give up until we could log into all the buildings (at least that we tried it at), all the time. It was similar to a doctor being the worst patient, since I made them explain to me why some of the anomalies are "normal". Naturally, they were actually symptoms of a poorly understood problem, and we both learned something in the process. Since she is quite far away, I didn't want to get one of those weekend tech support calls that everyone in the industry is familiar with.

Hopefully I'll be able to get back into the swing of blogging soon.

The US Patent and Trademark Office made the right call in nullifying Dell's request to trademark "cloud computing". Gareth Halfacree also blogs that NetCentric tried to trademark the term back in 1998. Why it took eighteen months to process is another issue, but at least the right decision was reached. Industry buzzwords and terms are difficult enough to comprehend without the players trying to lock up basic concept terminology. The action can be found here, at the PTO website, then select the 12-Aug-2008 entry "Offc Action Outgoing".

Today I was reading an article about the current credit crisis called Learning to Say "No" by Robert N. Charette, and reflecting upon how much of what he says applies to the IT industry as well. Basically, in good time there is an air of "unbridled optimism" when things are going well, that then swings to "fear -- bordering on panic" when things go wrong.

This really resonated with me, and seems to have been a feature of many of the large ITC projects of the last few years. As an industry, we seem to not properly analyse and understand the risks around projects. Or at least, we seem to be unable to communicate with the businesses that are specifying projects in such a way that we can create a shared understanding of the value and risk of particular projects, especially where this risk is not purely of an IT nature. For me, a classic example of this is the idea that a centralized IT project can be used to force the members of a distributed organization to adopt a single business process. This is a classic anti-pattern, and almost always guarantees project failure. In fact, I believe that ITC projects more often fail due to misalignment of governance, organization and misalignment of expectations than because of the technology.

If you look back forty years ago, there were hundreds of thousands of telephone operators in the US working for AT&T alone. Now the function has been almost totally automated. Before the 1950s, "computer" was a job code (usually doing actuarial work), not a device that would be recognized by most individuals.

More recently, we've seen the shift from shirts and shoes being made by hand, to today, where they are made by machines. Even more critical and precise, activities like eye surgery and Prostatectomy are being turned over to robotics.

I believe there are changes taking place in the IT space that will push the envelope of what people can perform without assistance. Some of these are:

The move to multi-core and specialized processors (the age of abundance in computing). It is very difficult for people to write parallel code. There is quite a bit of work taking place in this area. Just as robotics help "good" surgeons do "great" work, the average programmer can use automated assistance in the assembly of great programs.

The move of the edge of the enterprise out into more finely grained data elements will require more and more interfaces to be created. Automated techniques will amplify the capabilities of the available resources to meet those new interface needs.

Modeling and simulation will increase the confidence in the experiments and changes to business processes. With the use of techniques like genetic algorithms, they'll even aid in optimizing the performance of business models. Just like in the NASA antenna design competition, they'll likely make adjustments we'd never dream of.

Although there is a Luddite tendency in us all, we must realize that betting on the machine over the long haul is a sure thing. I've blogged before (a few years back) about the ever increasing capabilities of computers and the inevitable outcome.

My July 16^th blog on How to shed 10 million cars in four years talked about the societal impacts on rising gas prices and the adjustments people and businesses will have to make in order to adjust to the new reality. Lisa Belkin's article The New Workplace Perk: Gas in the New York Times provides a good cross sectional view of how companies and individuals are accommodating the changes. One of the more interesting sections was on how pizza delivery driver behavior has changed: instead of fighting to get every possible delivery, they are fighting to avoid getting the deliveries that are farther away.

Higher gas prices are starting to cause attrition, and employers have implemented programs to retain key employees through gas cards, variable work weeks, increased communications capabilities and work at home options. Many of these programs have significant ramifications for corporate IT: network, provisioning and security, to name a few. Perhaps some more thought should be given to what happens when an employee leaves: have you recovered all of the company's assets?, including intellectual property? Have you removed all access to corporate systems?; what about third party SaaS providers like Salesforce.com?

We are seeing the economy at work every day: the gas price goes up, the cost impacts usage patterns (large vehicle usage and sales plummet, unnecessary driving is curtailed), temporarily reducing demand, which causes the prices to drop. The price point of $4 per gallon was a major inflection point in consumer awareness and behavior. Now that gas is around $3.65, we'll have to see how long we retain short-term memories and continue to do things to conserve energy, or whether we fall back into bad habits.

Anyone who sat through the opening of the Olympics had to be impressed with the use of technology and one of China's most abundant resources - its people. Over at the New Florence blog, much of the technology is described.

What impressed me was the way they used the people of China to perform some very precise activities, which were some of the best of the ceremony, like the opening drum ceremony or the block printing scene. I am sure all those people added flexibility, since they don't need to be reprogrammed and have minimal maintenance needs, but they had an astounding amount of accuracy in execution. Other than a few lights being turned on out of sync the sessions, the 2008 individual's performance was nearly flawless. What's interesting is that the lights on the people were centrally controlled, I believe. It did make me wonder what other roles technology played in triggering all these people's actions, or was it just practice, practice, practice?

Hopefully we'll be hearing more about the tools and techniques that were used and then we can speculate on their applicability to IT, since we also have a combination of technology and personnel that are used to provide highly consistent business value to organizations.

I don't know how I could have missed this little bit of technology - a spherical implementation of the Microsoft surface technology. I've not quite figured out where it would be needed (except in an alcove at the corporate offices of almost every global corporation) but now that it is here I'm sure there will be some interesting demonstrations. I'd love to see some 3D techniques applied to it like Johnny Lee's done with flat panel displays.