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 | Survey on Internet of Things: Please Respond
| The next issue of the Cutter Benchmark Review will be about the Internet of Things. Please participate in the survey, which is fairly short but asks important questions about the drivers, adoption trends, and challenges presented by IoT. In addition to the raw survey results, the Benchmark Review will feature analyses of the results by Drs. Joseph Feller and Simon Woodworth (University College Cork), Claude Baudoin (c�b�) and Matt Ganis (IBM).
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| Last Minute Opportunity: Cloud Summit
| If you happen to be near Austin, Texas on Sep. 18, c�b� can get you a free pass to attend the Cloud Summit held on that day by the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC). Please contact us. The theme of the Summit is "Preparing for the post-IaaS* phase of cloud adoption." On the agenda:
- a keynote by Donald Ferguson, CTO of Dell
- a talk by the COO of the Texas Dept. of Information Resources
- talks and a panel about PaaS* standards
- an "industry perspective" talk on DevOps by IBM
- a panel on "overcoming cloud transformation challenges"
- a discussion of the CSCC roadmap
* IaaS = Infrastructure as a Service. PaaS = Platform as a Service.
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| Reminder: KM and IT Innovation Courses
| The 4-day course by Claude Baudoin on Knowledge Management (with some emphasis on the Oil & Gas industry, but it is entirely applicable to others and will be tuned in real time to the concerns of the audience) is currently planned:
- in Houston (Galleria area) on Sep. 30 to Oct. 3, 2014
- in Calgary (downtown) on Oct. 20-23
The 3-day course on "Advances in IT for the Oil & Gas Industry" is planned for Oct. 7-9 in Houston. More information and registration for all courses are available on the NExT web site.
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| Visualizing Expert Networks
| The University of Michigan's "Michigan Experts" Web site is an innovative way to display the connections between researchers, based on papers jointly written. The above link goes to one of the pages (there is a page per university department/center). Click on a name, and you can see that researchers' "fingerprints" (what topics they wrote about over the years) and their network of co-authors. The same concept could be applied elsewhere as long as the information would not just come from research papers, but would include other evidence of people's interests, such as e-mail and discussion forum subjects.
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| IoT Infographic
| Postscapes and Harbor Research have produced an excellent Infographic about the Internet of Things, describing its applications and potential market size. Thanks to Vincent Finet for alerting us to it.
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| Measuring under the Lamppost
| In a classic joke, a man is looking for his lost keys under a lamppost, even though he knows that this is not where he lost them, but "because that's where there is light."
Some IT metrics are collected "because that's where these is light" even if that's not really what we need. We just saw an organization that measures over 500 IT operations parameters, and where multiple people spend half of their time analyzing and rendering these metrics into monthly management reports (in PowerPoint, of course). None of these measures is about user satisfaction, even though we have experience, as consumers, with sites that ask for feedback in a quick and simple way, such as the star rating you're asked to give at the end of a Skype call or after buying a product on Amazon.
Objective measures of IT performance, collected by automatic tools, are important, including for predictive maintenance, but do not quite tell if the results meet the needs of the business and the users. User-focused approaches like the "Perception Analysis Methodology" from Perception Management Inc. need to be added to the mix.
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"A user interface is like a joke: if you have to explain it, it's not that good."
-- Anonymous, seen on Facebook
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