Browse by Month: 2008
Browse by Month: 2007
Browse by Month: 2006
06/14/08: “Quiet Time” and “No Email Day” pilot data is in!
Since the previous post in October there has been much interest in our two pilots aiming to reduce information overload; and I’ve responded to all of them with the quintessential engineering attitude of “we’ll have to wait until the data...
01/10/08: New Computers and Geeking with Linux
Just before the winter holidays I decided to splurge a bit and buy a new computer. I had been wanting to re-purpose my old machine for some flavour of Linux, so I felt that was a good enough excuse. And...
12/21/07: It's beginning to look a lot like Core 2 Duo
Ok…maybe the tree doesn’t look exactly like a Core 2 Duo processor, but it’s certainly got Intel Inside there somewhere, since I’m the one who decorated it…...
12/18/07: The value of the plumbing
If you really stop to consider how many layers of hardware and software it takes to make a modern company’s information technology structure, it’s amazing anyone can even get the lights on the morning, let alone have seamless processes running...
12/11/07: Let's Jam!
Last time I talked about how we were building communities within IT, more specifically, how I had built a technical community by using various social media tools like blogs, wiki’s, and forums. Near the end of the article I mentioned...
11/21/07: Being Wrong and Moving On
I was wrong about Intel and Social Media, and I’m quite happy about it. Not happy about the added practice at being wrong, as I am quite adept at that already, but because this has been an honest surprise. Both...
11/16/07: Finishing up with directory backups
Last time I talked about when to troubleshoot a failed directory server, and when to restore it. Let’s explore why, or why not, you should restore a server based on our requirement of minimizing down time....
11/12/07: Time to look at directory backups again
At Windows Connections in Las Vegas last week, a conference for IT administrators, I asked a number of admins if they backed up their directory with third party, tape-based backups. To my surprise, the majority did. Most of them don’t...
11/09/07: Next stop: The always avalable connection
I haven’t done a technology entry for a while – but events within the cellular world recently got me thinking about the cellular/WiMAX discussion – how the development of both technologies is helping connectivity evolve....
11/07/07: Building a Community within IT
Back at the beginning of the year, the managers of my organization had a dilemma and they needed someone to help solve it. Now, I’ve got 16 direct reports which is already a full time job, but their need was...
10/29/07: Do corporate blogs really matter?
It’s close to Halloween, and the moon has been waxing and waning for the last 28 days in preparation for the holiday…actually, we had a full moon a couple days ago, just barely missing the festivities. But back to blogging:...
10/17/07: Comparing your performance
Thought I would post again about the performance team I’m part of – working to put new tools in place to identify, amongst other thing what applications are impacting our client system performance and thus user productivity...
10/03/07: Social Networking Inside Your Browser
Do you stumble? For the last month or so, I’ve been using a browser plug-in from StumbleUpon. It’s a nice little toolbar (connected to its associated website), available for both Firefox* and Internet Explorer*, that creates social networking right...
10/01/07: Organize your work like the real scheduling experts! (Part II)
In my last post, I introduced the concepts of time and task management based on how modern operating systems work. Today I want to follow up with some specific guidelines based on these concepts. Individually they aren’t earth shattering, but...
10/01/07: “Quiet Time” on track – “No Email Day” is next!
A month ago I reported the http://blogs.intel.com/it/2007/08/quiettimepilothaslaunched.php our attempt to push back on the problem of incessant distractions by assigning Tuesday mornings to uninterrupted work in full “offline” mode. We are watching the pilot closely, and although our next formal...
09/27/07: Intel's Layered Approach to Information Security & Risk Management
Malcom Harkins, General Manager, Intel Risk Security, recently gave an inside look into Intel IT’s risk management philosophy during Intel IDF 2007 and spoke with Jason Lopez from Podtech....
09/24/07: Miramar 3D: The Ad Hoc "Systemery" of Innovation
Systemery is etymologically related to “truthiness”. I am not going to say systemic because it has been coopted. This is really about Miramar. Miramar was recently featured at Intel Developer Forum as part of Justin Rattner’s keynote speech, featuring key...
09/19/07: Intel IDF 2007: IT Must Have A Roadmap for Emerging Technologies
Intel CIO, John “JJ” Johnson, talked to Podtech at Intel’s IDF 2007 about the need for CIO’s to embrace, evaluate and integrate emerging technologies into their roadmap. CIO’s must take a holistic look at their environment and continuously assess their...
09/10/07: Tough on performance impact tough on the causes of performance impact
Keeping a users platform performing at top speed can be a challenge; thoughts about the tools that might do the job...
09/04/07: You have received a new friend request from Heath
Uh oh…not another one of those messages from a spam bot on myspace* or facebook*. How many of those do you get every day - none if you haven’t joined the bandwagon of social networking. Whether it’s myspace, facebook,...
09/04/07: Organize your work like the real scheduling experts! (Part I)
I’ve been especially busy recently, juggling a number of disparate projects and trying to keep them all moving forward. My organizational system has evolved over the years into a priority-based set of lists. The medium has also varied over the...
08/31/07: “Quiet Time” pilot has launched!
Our faithful readers will recall my promise to share our progress on piloting “Next Generation solutions” to the Information Overload problem, ones that go beyond training people to adopt voluntary behavior change. Well – the first pilot is underway! One...
08/30/07: Techno-Fashionista Strikes Again: E-Tailing Fox Paws
No, not cruelty to animals: fough pahs. Faux pas. False steps. The literal translation from the French works well here. In online shopping, if you don’t have a good transaction processing system, that is what you are leading your customer...
08/27/07: How do you get the message to users?
Quick trip to the US last week saw some quality time in the Heathrow departure lounge with time to think (dangerous habit) much of it I spent working on possible solutions for an issue I raised on my last blog...
08/25/07: Personal coping strategies II
OK, here is another strategy I’ve observed people use to cope with email overload: write very short messages in all-caps or all-lowercase. I mean, really short. A word. A sentence. Rarely, a very short paragraph. Interestingly, I’ve observed this primarily...
08/24/07: Telecommuning and Virtual Culture
Ah, the good old days, remember them? The days when you had to be next to someone to communicate, or at least be near a land line? The days when you had to send a whole hard drive or tape...
08/22/07: Zen and the Art of Risk Assessment - Part One
This is the first in a series of blogs where I will share key learning’s from the School of Hard Knocks on performing formal risk assessments. Since I believe risk assessment methodologies are pretty much a ‘roll your own’ decision...
08/20/07: A Chip that Talks and Sings?
That’s right folks, the processor inside has received vocal cords! Last Friday, I was privileged to be in a group of three internal and external bloggers who were given a sneak peek at the new marketing campaign that rolls out...
08/14/07: Infomania paper published – come and get it!
In my previous posts I’ve hinted often at the body of research that we’ve used to understand the impact of the Information Overload problem. We summarized all this research as a White Paper that makes a strong case for taking...
08/08/07: I meet therefore I am – right?
Looking to optimise the meeting experience for Intel employees from the tool tech fest of today...
07/26/07: The syndication barrier
We are starting to look at syndicating MSRs. That’s Monthly Status Reports, and we got lots of them cluttering our mail, some useful, some… well… What we envision is a setup where these pesky reports get published as XML feeds...
07/26/07: Employee Productivity Part 4 - Valuing Time
In my last post, Employee Productivity and Parkinson’s Law – Part 3, we looked at an approach to valuation that separately examines solutions targeting general types of workers: structured-task workers, specific-knowledge workers, and corporate-wide population. This approach is based on...
07/23/07: Intel rock music videos? Check one more sign of the apocalypse!
I think the most entertaining thing about being in the Web 2.0/Social Media cult in Intel isn’t the free matching footwear or unlimited refills at the Kool-Aid bar, it’s working with all the other kooks in this space. We all...
07/20/07: One small step for IT projects
It was 38 years ago to the day mankind made its first footprints on the moon. The achievement of thousands of people working towards one common goal – what inspirations can IT teams take?...
07/15/07: Guacamole-proof point of sale, Part II
I’ve always liked the saying, “The future will look much like today…but it will be different in some ways we can’t imagine.” You can look around you, remember what the world was like 20 years ago, compare it to today,...
07/12/07: Why can't a mobile phone just be a phone?
I remember my very first mobile phone. It was a popular brand of device that could do nothing more than place and receive phone calls. The quality of the calls wasn’t all that great; it was heavy to hold...
07/11/07: Deja 2.0
I wonder how many stupid variations I can do on Web 2.0 component names. I may have to devote an entire post to it and see if I can get this out of my system once and for all. Anyhoo,...
07/10/07: Candy bar overload?
The other day I ran, once again, into the famous estimation that “one weekday edition of today’s New York Times contains more information than the average person in 17th-century England was likely to come across in an entire lifetime”. This...
07/10/07: Employee Productivity and Parkinson’s Law – Part 3
In my last post (Employee Productivity and Parkinson’s Law – Part 2) I looked at valuing employee productivity with a focus on connecting IT-enhanced employee productivity to other business value dials that have a direct link to the bottom line...
07/09/07: RSS-P-E-C-T, Find Out What It Means To Me
I’d have to say that overall, social media adoption is fairly low among the general Intel employee base. There are plenty of MySpace and LinkedIn users after hours, but not so many who are active blog readers or create their...
07/08/07: How to say YES
Intel has been working hard to say yes to its customers; quick turnaround and agility are its motto. When was the last time your IT teams did the same?...
07/02/07: What value does Web 2.0 bring to Intel?
This question comes up a fair bit for me internally, so I’ll address it both here and in my internal blog. To be clear, I’m far from the only Web 2.0 nut inside Intel. My role is different in that...
06/29/07: If Centrino weighs the same as a duck...
Hmmm, yes. Quite an auspicious start for the Web 2.0 Design Engineer to go over a week without a blog. My excuse, such as it is, is that I’ve had so much interest crop up internally I can barely keep...
06/29/07: A look back…
Recently my co-blogger David and I have been interviewed in CIO magazine about our Infomania solution project. You never know where such a thing may lead… years ago I was similarly interviewed by Fast Company magazine, and to my amazement...
06/26/07: Personal coping strategies I
It is interesting how people cope with Email Overload. We are a resilient species, and as pressures evolve, we evolve coping strategies, which vary from person to person. Over time you are bound to sight such strategies, reflected in the...
06/21/07: You can't do that on blogs !
Many years ago there was a Canadian children’s TV program called “You Can’t Do That on Television” (wikipedia reference). On the program, if you said the wrong words like “water” or “I don’t know” you would get splattered with a...
06/18/07: Business to IT: What are you worth to me?
As IT groups come under (further) pressure to reduce costs and provide more generic flexible solutions to their businesses some thoughts on how to get to know your customer, and show them how IT is not just the fix it...
06/11/07: Tilting at Windmills 2.0
I’ve been back from sabbatical for a few weeks now, and I’ve finally finished all my mental unpacking. I had two solid months of no meetings, no conference calls, no status reports, and no PowerPoint, so coming back was a...
06/11/07: Webcasts of Great Lectures
And now for something completely different. Hopefully, I am not the last one to learn about the absolutely awesome UC Berkeley webcast site at webcast.berkeley.edu. You can watch and listen to some of the world’s authorities on a variety of...
06/09/07: For better or worse; offline content tools are here…are you ready?
Continuing with my theme of things slightly outside the true mobility realm some recent developments in the offline tools world swirling around the interweb have started me thinking about the anytime connected client. It’s certainly nothing that’s affecting strategy (panic...
06/08/07: Information Security - Not Just a Job it's an Adventure!
Hello! As this is my first blog (ever), I would like to take the opportunity to introduce myself and give you an idea of the topics I hope to cover in coming entries. So, without futher ado — My name...
06/04/07: The three Impossibilities
How many times have you approached an IT professional with a request for some software capability, and been told that “It can’t be done”? Alas, this happens to me a lot. I may have a tendency to dream up unusual...
06/01/07: How do you solve a problem like performance?
It’s been an interesting week, various meetings have started me thinking about things outside of the pure mobility realm so I thought I might put some thoughts down and see what comments we get. Performance is the name of the...
05/31/07: Goodness depends on your point of view…
Since a corporate directory service is part of a company’s critical infrastructure, it’s often compared to electricity in the building: It’s ubiquitous, everyone depends on it , and no one pays attention to it - until something goes wrong. (I...
05/23/07: What I like about Intel
I had just gotten out of an impromptu bloggers meeting, and was heading to get a diet soda from the machines when a random thought flew through my mind, ripping off roof’s, flinging cars into light posts, and sending cows...
05/23/07: It’s a wireless (cellular) world after all
So I’m back in the UK. The weather is much more my taste and even Heathrow’s low ceilings didn’t seem so bad (I got over it very quickly when I realised there is no WiFi in the arrivals hall, for...
05/20/07: More on Purse PC and Centrino Duo
Here I am, still holding my breath waiting for the Milan/Paris purse PC (see my earlier post on fashionista PC for context). Meanwhile, Seoul has come up with something....
05/18/07: Size matters...
We’re on the cusp of speccing out some new mobile platforms (aka notebook PCs or laptops), and the question comes up, what’s the right form factor for you? There are a wide array of offerings for mobility, and it is...
05/16/07: Guacamole-Proof Point Of Sale
Most people get dressed up for Mother’s day and take Mom to brunch. We donned cycling shorts and rode to a Tex-Mex restaurant at the other end of the bike trail. Nothing like a good ride to give you the...
05/16/07: Forty Shades of Green
Back home in Ireland we have a saying that no matter which direction you look you’re bound to see “Forty Shades of Green.” Famous for its rolling green hills, rich farmland and lush pastures Ireland continues to live up to...
05/16/07: Are You Addicted to WWOW?
WWOW is all many of my geek peers can talk about. It’s something they do on the weekends, evenings, and even when they travel. Most recently, one of them even told me he was WWOW’ing in the airport while waiting...
05/14/07: Flying penguins
So, I’m heading home from the US, and I fly on this Boeing 777, which is a really well-designed plane. Each seat has this touch screen in front, and every passenger can select from dozens of movies and shows, and...
05/12/07: My flexible friend the office
Telecommuting – allowing you to fit work around life…not the other way round. Sound good? Some thoughts to get you off the ground...
05/10/07: Fashionista Centrino Duo Sub-Notebook?!!!
Sign me up! Apparently I may have to wait a few weeks to get the latest Paris or Milan design wristlet notebook, but I am holding my breath. See the Powers of Smaller podcast here. I have my own take...
05/08/07: How to Tell an Invention from an Innovation and Why You Should Know
People over-use the term innovation. I know because I got “the word” from an evolutionary biologist named David Krakauer at the Santa Fe Institute Business Network meeting on Innovation in nature and in organizations in June of ’05....
05/08/07: 20,000,000 gold pieces for Gloves of Modification
I am a big fan of the role-playing game, Neverwinter Nights*. I can pretend to be a wizard, a rogue, a fighter, or even a paladin, and save the kingdom from evil with my trusty +1 Vorpal sword. The game...
05/08/07: Can IT help you get your clothes washed?
I had an unexpectedly great IT experience the other day that should make us proud to call ourselves IT pros. And this time I was on the receiving end....
05/04/07: Are you beyond the broadband reach?
So, there you are. Everything’s always connected. Or so I would have you believe in my last few posts (it also transpires that I’m paying way too much for my hotel room connectivity) Unfortunately the real world looms in the...
05/03/07: Drivin' That Train, High on Deliverables...
…”Casey Jones, you better watch your speed. Trouble ahead, trouble behind, don’t ya know that notion just crossed my mind.”* Hi, is your IT group too deliverables-driven? You heard me. Are you running after too many senseless objectives? Do you...
05/01/07: The hook of death
Another long business trip… now up above the Midwest. Trying to keep my mind off the jetlag headache (and being too tired to sleep it off), I try to get work done on my notebook. On the folding tray table....
04/29/07: So many mobile transports…what’s your money on?
Bob sits in a hotel room with his laptop; the hotel has a WiFi hotspot next door (just within range), wired broadband in the room and a phone line. The city has a WiMAX and a 3G network, oh and...
04/23/07: Work/Life, Life/Work Balance
When I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, and just starting to get interested in computers, I remember a few influences in my life that stand out the most. One was my dad, who happened to be the...
04/20/07: Be smart with your enterprise mobile connectivity
The first blogs always the hardest (I’m told) so let’s start with something obvious; how can you control your remote connectivity costs? Which mobile connectivity allocation method should you use within your enterprise?...
04/20/07: Welcome to our e-office of e-fficiency
I was browsing around our company intranet the other day and realizing just how e-fficient we’ve become. We’ve e-nabled all sorts of applications that allow employees to get their jobs done faster. Over the years we’ve e-nabled choosing your...
04/18/07: Information Overload TNG: our Next Generation solution set
A while back I wrote about our “First Generation” solutions to Infomania: those based on training people to adopt voluntary behavior change. And I told you that our experience is that their effect always lasts a year or two and...
04/17/07: The Networked Home - What's your solution?
When I was growing up, there was no such thing as wireless networking. There were no routers (cabled or wireless) in my home; in fact, there were no computers in my home until I was in my teens. At...
04/17/07: No place like 127.0.0.1
Hello world. You may have noticed the blogging team tentatively flinging the golden gates open and allowing a few more select people to wave from blogs/it window. Just let me say it’s great to be here. It’s a huge opportunity...
04/16/07: Heath Buckmaster. Blogger, Bicentennial Quarter Collector, Manager, Geek.
10 April 2007. I was sitting in my office and the call came in. Well, it was an email, but “the call” makes it sound more dramatic. I was experiencing post-lunch lethargy and it was 2:37pm. I had been at...
04/04/07: 4 - 4 for four
The play on words isn’t my strength, but today Intel’s quad core platform has been in the market for four months today, April 4, 2007. At 50W, or 12.5W/core it’s the highest performance, lowest cost per watt server ever! What...
03/31/07: Children of the Net
A recurrent Sci Fi theme is that of the upgraded children. From classic oldies like Clarke’s Childhood’s End or Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, to the modern Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear, there is the almost medieval horror of a sudden...
03/25/07: Is Intrasourcing the new Outsourcing? Part 2 of 3
Last week I described why IT is outsourcing. It is one strategy used for IT to reduce costs and make specific decisions about what areas they wanted to use: dedicated personal versus contracted commitments. In this installment, I want to...
03/22/07: The cardboard image of Mobility
The other day I was in this workshop on Digital Society, Policy and the Internet, and I bumped into a young man who turned out to work for a hi-tech investment company (bumping into people is of course half the...
03/20/07: FREEEEDDOOOOMMM!
One of the wonderful perks that Intel gives its employees (in addition to my exquisitely upholstered phone booth sized cubicle) is Sabbatical. Every seven years of employment you become eligible to take a sabbatical, which is eight weeks of paid...
03/13/07: Got wiki?
If you have ever pondered (or would consider pondering) establishing an internal corporate wiki, check out BusinessWeek Online’s CEO Guide on the topic. I’m not just shilling it because Josh Bancroft and I were quoted, but because it has an...
03/13/07: An insight from William Gibson
Just finished reading William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” (and I highly recommend it, if you’re into Gibson). Anyway, I noticed a sentence in this book that goes “Reflexively, like a slot player pulling the lever in hope of bringing down a...
03/12/07: Is Intrasourcing the new Outsourcing? Part 1 of 3
You can hardly pick up an IT magazine without reading an article, an advertisement, or a cartoon about outsourcing. It evokes strong emotion from the inside IT employee base, generally FUD. It makes CXX’s warm their hands in delight as...
03/10/07: Do Nerds Really Rule in IT?
I know nerds can find happiness in an IT department, and they are needed there, but does IT consist only of nerd-focus? I don’t think so. I remember when this whole “IT Department” thing got started back in the Middle...
03/08/07: Employee Productivity and Parkinson’s Law – Part 2
What Parkinson’s Law basically states is that work expands to fill the time allowed to get it done. Give an employee an extra 15 minutes each day and they will fritter it away with other activities; like reading this post. ...
03/06/07: Tips & Tricks from IT Data Center management
In this post I’m trying something new (for me at least). Based on some of the ideas and input I’ve had for topics, I’m now wandering around Intel conducting some interviews. The intent is to showcase some of the other...
03/04/07: Traitorous Intel employee shops for AMD... and lives!
I’m a fan of a number of online comics, which normally would be far out of bounds for this blog except for a comment I saw yesterday. At Ctrl-Alt-Del, Tim, the author/artist, made a post about being torn between two...
03/03/07: Is email really prone to misunderstanding?
How often have you read that email is of necessity conducive to misunderstandings, because of the lack of body language and voice inflection cues? That emoticons may help a little, but of course, there’s only so much they can do?...
02/28/07: Who needs a CIO?
The Long Tail has a great post titled “Who needs a CIO?”* that discusses the changing expectations of a CIO, and whether a “C” title will be needed in this role in the future. Chris talks about CIOs shifting from...
02/26/07: The Power of Quad-core
In my initial Quad-core post, I had made a fairly sweeping assertion - based on results from our virtualization tests on recently launched quad-core servers – that “the price-performance of the new quad-core the quad-core Intel Xeon processor X5355 systems...
02/19/07: Nathan’s favorite e-mail tip…
There is a tradition that articles about email overload should end with a list of coping tips. In fact, when Fast Company wrote about my activity six years ago they concluded the article with a sidebar titled “The 10 Commandments...
02/14/07: Fragmentation, windows, tasks: myths, realities, novelties
I remember the pathbreaking article Larry Tesler wrote in Byte Magazine in about 1980, discussing the absurdity of having to change “modes” in order to change applications. So you would start from a command line and choose your app and...
02/12/07: How to embrace technological change
Large enterprises hate risk. Change is inherently risky. Therefore enterprises hate change. Which would be simple, were it not for the fact that in today’s environment not changing is beyond risky; it is suicidal. Many companies solve this contradiction by...
02/03/07: Check out the Intel IT 2006 Performance Report
Every year Intel IT publishes a detailed performance report on the work we’ve done, our challenges and successes, the value we add to Mother Intel, and what we have planned for the next year. It has some fantastic metrics on...
02/02/07: What this Web 2.0 is all about…
What is Web 2.0 (for lack of a much-needed better name) all about? Most people around us have no idea; some may know that it’s “all that Blogs and Wikis stuff”, which is true but misses the point: the main...
02/01/07: Our Attorney Todd
Some people have commented on the value of our blogs as a peek inside, not just the geek mind of Jeff Moriarty, but inside of Intel IT and Intel life in general. Some express surprise that we are allowed to...
02/01/07: Intel vs. Slashdot... pull up a seat and bust out the popcorn
Ah, sweet Intel. How I love thee, and how thou driveth me bat-freaking crazy. If you want to see a textbook example of how I disagree with the way Intel communicates with people head on over to Slashdot and give...
01/29/07: iSCSI in the enterprise: Today’s Token-ring?
Before starting with this post, I’d like to reiterate that the following opinions are mine alone and do not represent Intel IT’s formal position in any way (and just as certainly, not Intel’s product groups position on iSCSI). Thanks for...
01/27/07: Video peek inside Intel's new 45nm fab
Normally I don’t like to honk the Intel horn here, as that’s why we employ a phalanx of marketing types, but Scoble posted a great video tour of our new 45nm fab and a breakdown of some of the interesting...
01/26/07: Employee Productivity and Parkinson’s Law – Part 1
Employee productivity is a hotly debated subject. Measuring employee productivity is straightforward. Valuing employee productivity is difficult. I’m going to deal with the easy part first and cover the hard one over the next few weeks....
01/25/07: Preparing to do battle...
Back from a trip to Redmond, where I participated in a wonderful workshop dedicated to Infomania. This was organized jointly by Dr. Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research, Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli of Haifa University, and yours truly. The intent was to...
01/24/07: Assume we're evil. Saves time.
OMG! Microsoft tried to pay someone to update Wikipedia! n00bz! LOLOLOL!!!!1 Yeah, whatever. First came the horrible, tragic story of Microsoft’s supposed faux pas in trying to pay someone to edit Wikipedia, then the apparent Microsoftian Offender (a.k.a. Doug) shed...
01/24/07: Laptop deployment... less exciting than you possibly imagined!
Mikael asked about which systems are commonly used by Intel employees and if they are Core 2 Duo. Here’s one of the ongoing fun topics in Intel IT. You might think “Hey, they’re Intel! They MAKE the dang chips! Their...
01/22/07: Good Day, Sun Shine!
Although I am not a bona fide geek but only a closet geek wannabe, there is nothing to be but happy about the new Sun/Intel deal from a markets and alliances point of view. It is also socially positive. From...
01/22/07: Situated Knowledge and Practical Reasoning as generalized Usage Models
As an anthropologist and researcher of work practice and behavior for 30 years I get a little concerned when usage models are boiled down to roles and personas. I do have a topic about drugs, narratives and social networks but...
01/22/07: Care for some dogfood?
First, my Paragraph Of Excuses. My most sincere apologies for the blogging gap. I got wound around some projects at the end of last year, then was distracted over the holidays, and my workload has just gone full-out bat-faced crazy...
01/17/07: The purpose of IT?
I had dinner the other night with a few of my CIO Staff peers and a senior Intel fellow*. During dinner, the conversation evolved to a a discussion of the purpose of IT. We use the term Teachable Point of...
01/14/07: Victorian digression III: The first teleconference
Another business trip, another blast from the past. This time, a serendipitous discovery. I found in a used bookstore (ah, used bookstores …) a book I’d read as a kid, Jules Verne’s “The begum’s fortune”. On browsing it, my eye...
01/10/07: IT Research is for NOW!
Researchers can get a bad rap in IT because they are seen as thinking too far into the future to matter now. A PhD degree can be a stone around your neck in IT, if people see you as having...
01/02/07: Information Overload VII: Distractions and Interruptions
Happy new year, folks! Infomania consists of Messaging Overload and Distractions. So far I’ve discussed only the former in these posts; time to look at the latter, because the productivity damage caused by Distractions and Interruptions may be less obvious...
12/27/06: Reversing the 80/20 rule for IT investments
Have you read the Information Week article about what HP is trying to accomplish in shifting their total IT spending from 20% on new capabilities to 80%? You can find the full article at this link. This is the second...
12/22/06: Quad-Core part II: Native or MCP or..?
Thanks to the comments to my first blog entry, I am relieved to find that I am not posting to a “chorus of chirping crickets” as my colleague Jeff had wondered in his initial blog. Lately there has been some...
12/20/06: Usage Models in Context
There is a lot of discussion about usage models lately; and more than one view on how to detect, elicit, construct and create them. I have been working for about 30 years in this area, though it keeps changing names....
12/17/06: Think of the children
An engineer recently told me he bought the famous Harry Potter book in e-book format in order to be able to read it to his kid at bedtime while “doing email” at the same time. No, this is not a...
12/11/06: Fixity & Control vs. Agility and Emergence
We have been through some recent self-examination and reorganization. The great philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose teachings I followed through the writings of Hubert Dreyfus, made a number of memorable statements in and amongst the dense thicket of Germanic philosophy he...
12/07/06: Quad-Core
Hello! My name is Sudip Chahal and I am the Compute and Storage architect in Intel IT and this is my first blog entry. Recently Intel launched the industry’s first high-volume quad-core processor based on the new Core 2 micro-architecture,...
12/06/06: Into the Navel
Sorry for not posting for a while, but I’ve been a little demotivated. Most of the fun things at Intel that I’d like to talk about I’m not allowed to. While posting about them anyway would generate some excitement, the...
12/05/06: What do you want?
I’ve been pondering my next post here, and I have to admit that even as an experienced blogger, I’m not quite sure what it should be about. I have “blogger block” all the time - that feeling where you’re just...
12/04/06: Wiki knowledge: can you trust the stuff?
Some years ago when my kids were teenagers, they would find stuff they wanted on the ‘net, then get me to order it (After all, I had the plastic). I remember my son’s succinct way of putting it: “I need...
11/30/06: Why should IT and the CIO care about Quad-Core?
Today, Microsoft announced their long awaited replacement for the XP operating system for enterprise / business users, code name Vista. And last week, Intel announced the worlds first (think 4 PC brains in one package) Quad-Core microprocessor. So, is this...
11/28/06: Data Centers; a "hot" topic these days!
Although processors, with their new multi and many core architectures, are now focused on performance per watt, and new low power platforms are being announced with increasing frequency by many vendors, the attendant problems surrounding data center capacity planning, design,...
11/28/06: Developing a Common Language of Business Value
In my previous post, you can measure that, I spent time talking about operational definitions and how using them is critical to objectively measuring business value. Operational definitions lay the foundation for a solid measurement strategy and spell out the...
11/27/06: Virtual Intel
This will be short, I promise. Short-ER. I already had my posts called “essays” and “novels”. Really, I am putting off writing a long paper, so I guess the rambling goes into the blog. The paper is about the 4-year...
11/27/06: Changing Intel
Hi! I’m Josh Bancroft, and I’m a geek, disruptor, technology evangelist, and blogger. I mostly post over at my own blog, www.tinyscreenfuls.com, but the nice folks who run blogs.intel.com invited me to post here, too. I’ve owed them an “introductory”...
11/26/06: The blending of time
I was on vacation last week, my first week with my whole family, in a state other than California. Like you, I work a ton of hours every week. And before we left for our week in Hawaii, my 5...
11/21/06: Information Overload VI: JIT Coaching Redux
Last week I shared with you the Intel Email Effectiveness Coach, a tool for Just in Time coaching of ill-behaved senders. Today I share an interesting derivative of this tool: eMailAdvantage Assistant. This was produced by BP’s Digital Learning group,...
11/14/06: Information Overload V: A JIT Coaching solution
A controversial question: You want to stop harmful behaviors like poor email etiquette in the organization. Can you educate your users to do what’s good for them? There are two views: If you educate them, they will do the right...
11/14/06: Web 4.0: A New Hype
Here at Intel we’re no longer the stodgy, behind the curve company your parents (or perhaps your older siblings) remember. No, we’re now hip, happening, trendy, and zippy. We’re so far out in front we can see the back of...
11/13/06: You Can’t Measure That…
I hear this all the time from IT managers. Most of the time I hear it when people just don’t want to put in the effort to determine the ROI of an IT solution. If I had a fraction of...
11/12/06: Web 2.0 and 3.0
At one point in my career at Intel, I was in the thick of Web. 1.0. In 1995 Intel “discovered’ the World Wide Web after the Intel Pentium FDIV situation woke us up to the fact that how we compute...
11/09/06: Victorian digression II: A lesson from Babbage’s obsession
Israel to California, California to Oregon, Oregon to Arizona… over the jet lag by now, and ready to acquire the worse one when I head back eastward tomorrow. Actually it was a productive (if hectic) business trip; and it brought...
11/08/06: Value and Value-for-Money
Hi , I am Martin Curley and I look forward to occasionally sharing my thoughts with you on a variety of topics related to IT. For my day job I run Intel’s IT Innovation and Research organization which consists of...
11/07/06: Dangers of the spotlight
Once you’ve become an indoctrinated Intellian, the real world is an interesting place. In addition to people assuming you’re evil, they also often assume I know something about everything Intel does. I don’t think anyone here can make that claim,...
11/02/06: Everything runs in a cycle
I’ve been traveling extensively lately, too much, but it’s that time of the year when I try to get in front of employees and customers before the year ends. I was only at home 11 nights in the month of...
11/01/06: He works for Intel... GET HIM!
Starting work at Intel is somewhat like get indoctrinated into a cult. On your first day you realize that everyone else seems to operate on a different wavelength from you. Over time you learn all the arcane lore, the weird...
11/01/06: Victorian digression: 19th century Infomania
I’m off to a hectic two week business trip to the USA, so expect short posts for a while (in fact I’m writing this one above the Atlantic, having lost hope of a decent sleep). Let me share with you...
10/30/06: Bigfoot, UFOs, and Intel Innovation?
I’ve had a bit of analysis-paralysis over what to write next here, and in which order to tackle it. I have a large pile of requested items, in addition to my own list of topics, but I’m not sure how...
10/27/06: Does IT Have A Social Problem?
This blog is soon going to turn on its designer if I lose a fourth attempt to repeat my once original idea. OK, here goes. Does IT Have a Social Problem? (I was tempted to say Social Disease and am...
10/27/06: Information Overload IV: There really is another way
A fascinating aspect of the Info Overload is the submissive attitude of many of its victims. I never quite figured this one out. I mean, if someone came into your cubicle every day at noon and punched you in the...
10/24/06: Global Collaboration (or: Why Intel Employees Always Look So Tired)
I wanted to follow up on what it is like working at Intel, and then I am going to take a detour from the IT specific discussion and talk about our values and culture. That should set me up for...
10/23/06: Got Business Value?
Got Business Value? I’ve been on vacation for 2 weeks; I mean a real vacation and left my notebook in the office. So now I’m eager to get on with discussing the business value of IT. Over the years I...
10/23/06: ITshareNet: sharing across barriers
It all started because there was a need to share stuff, and no available channel to do the sharing through. The first bit of “stuff” was the YourTime program I shared with you in my previous blog post; it was...
10/20/06: Captain Obvious discovers... Intel is a big manufacturing company!
Intel is a manufacturing company. That should be obvious, I guess, but it almost always seems to get lost when I talk to people about Intel. Someway, somehow, everything that all of us do at Intel traces back to getting...
10/19/06: Is IT the "Rodney Dangerfield" of your enterprise
“I don’t get no respect!” was the famous punch-line coined by the American comedian Rodney Dangerfield. He used it to reference the success of his relationships, his work, and his life. Sometimes IT departments feel the same way. They close...
10/18/06: Low Calorie Filler
I am on the road this week in Folsom, California to commune with the Intel IT Mothership. No matter which site you work at within Intel, if you’re in IT you regularly have to come to Folsom for a Face...
10/16/06: Information Overload III: First Generation solutions
So, in 1995 we were already deep in email overload. Having just transitioned into IT as Computing Productivity manager for our Israel site, I decided to have a go at it. For starters, I went on a data collecting binge,...
10/14/06: Read Ye, And Be Advised Of The Wisdom Of The Great Intel!
Writing this blog is not part of my internal duties, I have no official time set aside for this, and I’m in the middle of a gigantic program reset tied to all of the reorganization and “efficiency” efforts going on...
10/13/06: Part II - Panic and Rapid Organization of a Geek Mind
I am just outright stunned by anyone at all finding and reading these blogs. We did no advertising at all that I’m aware of, and we ended up linked from all sorts of places like HardOCP, Scoble, and even The...
10/12/06: Starter Blog: Social Networks 101
I have been looking at complexity science for several years as a solution source for organizational problems. One of the problems that is easily accessible to me as a social—rather than physical—scientist or mathematician/engineer, etc. is social networks. What I...
10/12/06: Unintended consequences and hording
I have an interesting job. It is rewarding, it involves interesting technology, and plenty of opportunity for innovation. But sometimes we run into situations that we had not anticipated. Has that ever happened to you? In my earlier blog, I...
10/12/06: Information Overload II: The Dark Side
Back in 1994, Intel introduced its first Windows-based e-mail system to replace the previous text-only, mainframe-based system. Almost immediately, our smart employees realized that with this tool you could easily send mail to huge distribution lists, which they proceeded to...
10/09/06: Intel IT - Confessions of a Geek Mind
Ah, what to say in the notorious First Blog Entry. Will I be posting to a ravenous horde of people craving every scrap of insight coming from the fantabulous Intel corporation? Or will I be posting out to a chorus...
10/09/06: The convocation of the IT@Intel blog
Welcome to our Blog! Ok, ok, so you are already asking, who am I and why should you care about hearing or sharing anything from or with me? My name is Marty Menard and I ‘m the director for high...
10/09/06: What is a business value program?
Most IT organizations today are viewed as cost centers; a result of this perspective is a sustained focus on total cost of ownership. This is a necessary management approach; however, when used in isolation it does nothing to demonstrate the...
10/09/06: Measuring the Business Value of Information Technology
Getting people to measure the business value of information technology is not easy; it is even harder in a high tech company. My name is David Sward and I’ve made measuring the return on investment (ROI) of IT my mission;...
10/09/06: Information Overload
What do you write about when posting to an exciting new blog for the first time? If you’re me, it’s a no-brainer: I will, today and often, write on my favorite enemy of over a decade, Information Overload. By “write”...
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