The Blog of Burgher Jon

As I have mentioned before, my day job is in enterprise IT.  I work helping some of the largest companies in the world upgrade their IT to match the demands of their business.  I have argued before that there is a simply ridiculous amount of waste in corporate IT and that I expect this waste to dwindle rapidly.

I was having a discussion with a colleague the other day and a clearer way to present the waste in IT occurred to me in the form of the graph above.  The green line represents the rate at which companies are gaining access to new technologies.  The red line represents their competency in deploying these technologies.  The level of waste in IT is directly tied to the distance between the red and green lines (assuming the green line is above the red line).  When this happens, you have CIOs who are flying by the seat of their pants.  They don’t actually understand the technologies that their company is attempting to implement, so they waste money figuring it out.  They don’t know how to hire people to manage the technology once it is implemented, so they hire three people hoping one is competent.  I could keep going about how not knowing costs them, but I think you can see the point.

The good news (or bad news if you’re one of the leaches making money off the waste in IT) is that both the technology and the skill of the people managing/implementing it are changing.

• The pace of new technology is slowing.  This is particularly true in the corporate IT space.  Let’s be honest, the way you use your computer at work has not changed fundamentally in the last few years.  Neither has the way your IT department provides it.  Virtualization has had an effect, increasing the efficiencies of deployment, but this is nothing like changing from a mainframe terminal to a PC or even like changing from floppy disks and CDs to shares on network attached storage.  This is why the green line has leveled out somewhat*.  This is giving IT organizations a chance to catch up with technology.
• Those IT organizations are getting more comfortable with IT.  The CIOs that are being named today had computers in college.  The ones that will be named CIOs in 10 years will have used computers to do research as early as 5^th grade.  These CIOs will have a better understanding for what they do and don’t know about technology and will increase the slope of the red line.

The bottom line is this.  Enterprise IT budgets will not keep increasing at the rate they have in the past and enterprise IT organizations are going to be much leaner and meaner.  If your IT organization can’t keep pace with this kind of advance, you should be seeking help from your favorite cloud provider ASAP.  If you’re an IT professional and you don’t think you have a home in a leaner IT environment then you should be polishing the resume or heading back to school.  If you’re working for an IT vendor that relies on a spiffy sale pitch intended for the wasteful CIO, you better look for another company.  However, if you’re rooting for an efficient American (and international) economy that can get more done with less, you’re in luck.

*If you’re wondering why I didn’t call out the future spike in the green line that occurs at its very end, it’s because it’s not related to the point I’m making in this post.  If you’re curious why it’s there; I believe that as the techniques behind social media advance, there will be an extremely rapid advancement in what this “new” internet can do.  For more thoughts on that, see this old post.

Yesterday (and today), Google marked the 30^th anniversary of Pac Man by placing the game on its homepage.  A version of Pac Man can be played through the letters of “GOOGLE” by using the arrow keys.  This resulted in glee at my company.  The development room may as well have been an arcade for about 5 minutes.  In the grand scheme of things, not a big deal for my company.  It got me wondering though, how many people paused their day to play a little Pac Man?  How much productive time was lost?  Engage me in a little bit of (very) rough math:

• It is estimated that Google serves “several hundred million queries” per day on their website.  Let’s pick the number 400 million for the sake of argument.  Though the Pac Man game remains up today (Saturday), we’ll focus on yesterday (Friday) since it was a work day.
• Of these 400 million queries, let’s say that 65% of them are performed on the home page.  We’re now to 260 million queries.
• Of those 260 million queries, let’s assume that 50% were done during productive time; while at work or school as opposed to during free time.  Now we’re at 130 million queries.
• Since not everyone’s familiar with Pac Man and there weren’t any instructions, the only people likely to be distracted were ones that knew how to play the game.  Perhaps 50% of the people using Google are aware of the basic premise of Pac Man, we’re now at 65 million queries.
• Of that user base, we’ll assume the average person goes to Google’s site 3 times a day.  That’s  got us to 22 milion queries that could have been disrupted by the Pac Man game.
• Let’s say that of that base, 20% took an average of 2 minutes to mess around with the game.  Many people probably just moved the character a couple times and went on, others probably played for an hour or two.  That’s 293,333 hours or more then 36,666 working days or 167 working years (at 220 working days per year) of productive time lost.
• According to figures from this article the average upper middle per capita income of the world is $9,900.  This of course is a very conservative number to leverage, because only people in the wealthiest countries are likely to have computers at work to be distracted on, but we’ll use the number anyway.

The net effect?  $1.7M was wasted by Google putting Pac Man on their primary landing page.

Dear Youth of Pittsburgh,

I want to tell you about a sport that has more drama than football or hockey.  A sport where you can watch every play and see the skill of one man pitted against another.  One where you can see both individual excellence and team camaraderie displayed not once or twice a week, but 6 or 7 days a week.  You can get to know the broadcasters; one of whom is a local treasure who actually hit two holes in one in the same round.  You can do all this while only half paying attention and getting your homework done.  What is this enchanting, mystical sport?  Baseball and believe it or not, Pittsburgh has a team.

That’s right, that blue/beige building in the Heinz Field parking actually holds a third professional sports team in Pittsburgh; the Pittsburgh Pirates.  The Pirates actually predate the Penguins AND the Steelers.  I urge you to start to follow this rag-tag bunch of baseball players.  They are fun to watch, are quickly blossoming in to a good team and might inspire a lifetime love of a sport that’s easy to fall in love with.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cavell

P.S.  For related thoughts please see, Dejan Kovacevic’s thoughts at the PBC Blog.

The co-Founders of Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) have decided to take a little cash out of the equity monster that is Google.  The two currently own a combined 57,700,000 shares of the company.  They are each selling 5,000,000 of their shares.  There are business implications to this, the two will now own only 48% of the company and theoretically could be outvoted by their shareholders.  There are reasons that’s exceedingly unlikely, but those are for weekdays when I’m a businessman.  Today’s Saturday and I’m instead focused on what they might want to buy with the proceeds of their 5,000,000 shares each.  Combined that’s 10,000,000 shares with a current value of $550.01, or (as the calculation above shows, $5,500,100,000.  I have some theories on why they needed to make this little withdrawl:

1. They wanted to buy a new car or two or 3,050 Buggati Veyrons (the most expensive car in the world at $1.8 Million) or 478,000 Smart Cars.
2. They wanted to buy a new house, or the top 10 most expensive houses in the world.  Actually, if they bought all 10 houses TWICE they would still have 1 Billion left over for taxes and realtor fees.
3. They could have some friends over for dinner. If they purchased a nice steak ($10), a side ($5) and poured a glass of wine($3) they could have the entire United States population over for dinner and still have $27,000,000 left over to spend on paper plates.
4. They could buy 1 out of every 16 properties in Allegheny County, based on their assessed value.

Just for fun, what if they sold their entire stake in Google.  That’s $31,350,570,000 for 57.7 million shares.  The same metrics work out this way:

1. They could buy 17,350 Buggati Veyrons or 2.7 million smart cars.
2. They could buy the 10 most expensive houses nearly 15 times.
3. Assume they’re planning on having everyone over to Pittsburgh where the sales tax is 7%.  Let’s say they take us to McDonalds and buy a 4 piece nugget ($1.07), a Double Cheeseburger ($1.17), a McChicken ($1.07), and a small drink ($1.07).  These two billionaires could treat the ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE WORLD to lunch and still give use each a quarter to buy desert out of the gumball dispenser.
4. They could buy nearly 40% of Allegheny County (39.4%).



Image via CrunchBase

Image via Wikipedia

I posted yesterday about the book Super Freakenomics, which I just finished reading.  In a chapter on “unbelievable stories of apathy and altruism” the authors discuss one of the hallmark cases of apathy, the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.  For those who are unfamiliar with the murder, she was killed and raped in 2 separate attacks.  Both of the attacks happened (to at least some degree) in plain sight of an apartment building across the street.  The original NYT article reported that there were 38 witnesses, though it seems that may have been an exaggeration.  There is some argument over whether any of the witnesses called the police, but it’s known none of them left the building to help her.

As I was reading this section of the book, the Burghosphere and Twitsburgh were, actively trying to get aid to two Burghers trapped in Haiti with the orphans from the orphanage they run (as they still are, if you know of anyone in Port au Prince that might be able to help STOP READING THIS AND CLICK THAT LINK!).  It goes without saying that the orphans almost certainly wouldn’t have survived this mess 50, 25 or probably even 5 years ago and that the girls would have been a maybe at best.  This startling and encouraging use of the information super highway (particularly the Twitter and Blogging lanes) got me to wondering what would have happened 36 years ago if they had the same media/social networking that we have today?  After all, Twitter is supposed to be a “real time” source of information, right?

There are two scenarios to explore how it might have played out differently.  Frankly, niether of them are good.  As a technologist, I see that as leaving room for improvement within the world of social networking.  I’m excited for a time when I run these scenarios in my head and they both end up with a safe Kitty Genovese.

1. If Kitty had Twitter.  I think this would have mattered very little.  The cell phone might have helped as it seems possible that the neighbors didn’t adequately explain the urgency of the situation to the police.  Putting aside the cell phone for a moment, let’s say it was just a Twitter device.  Her tweets surely would have been found the next day by CNN or worse, gawker.  They surely would not be noticed by the police until they appeared in a newspaper article or tv news story. Implicit Technology Limitations: Twitter, though it is heralded as “real time” suffers from such a volume of messages that the really important ones don’t weasel their way to the top of the stack fast enough.  Additionally, while I could see a police force looking to a twitter account for lead or evidence, there is no way for any sort of emergency organization to understand the urgency or even read the message.
2. If the neighbors had Twitter.  I’m wondering if this might not have made things worse.  When something happens in front of us we have a natural human instinct to either find out what happened or tell someone about it.  What if Twitter satisfied that human need and everyone went back to sleep (the murder was at 3am)?  Alternatively, there is some chance it would have improved the situation.  Perhaps one of the neighbors who tweeted what he had just seen would have gotten a call from his mother saying, “You idiot, go check on her.”  However, that seems like a stretch. Implicit Technology Limitations: This one is a technical limitation that dates back to the invention of writing; communicating without talking to someone is not the same as communicating with them person to person (or at least by telephone).  If you can communicate without speaking to someone, you might choose that route.  If you do, the quality of communication is deteriorated.