WSJ has an article on The Secret to Fighting Infections. What got my attention is the following statement.
PETER PRONOVOST: The main barriers are the lack of collaboration and a culture that is resistant to change. There is also a lack of systems integration.
Hospitals and Data Centers have much in common from a building perspective. Location is critical. Power back-up is a given. The buildings are very expensive, but what is in them is just as expensive. They are a bunch of really smart people using the building, and with the smart people come egos that are not necessarily very collaborative. Then you add on the risk avoidance. In hospitals, malpractice/legal types of issues. In Data Centers, those who make mistakes are many times the first to be fired as fingers of blame point. Administrators who are looking to cut costs.
Here is the example of the hospital problems.
Nurses and pharmacists work for the hospital, which typically has clear lines of authority and procedures for dealing with failure to follow accepted practices. But physicians are often self-employed, have little training in teamwork and, perhaps like all of us, are often overconfident about the quality of care they provide, believing things will go right rather than wrong. Nurses are often reluctant to question them, and hospitals don't pressure physicians about teamwork for fear of jeopardizing the business they bring to the hospital.
Facility Ops and Sys admins are like the nurses and pharmacists with clear lines of authority and processes. Developers and business unit are owners are like the Physicians.
The WSJ article focuses on safety and fighting infections in the hospital.
I was able to meet with an ex-Microsoft employee Rob Howard who is founder and CTO of Telligent.
ABOUT US
Telligent is dedicated to being the most trusted and innovative enterprise collaboration and community software company. We were founded in 2004 by technology visionary Rob Howard around his fundamental beliefs that information should be independent of tools, and communities – social and business – contain vast amounts of untapped, unshared knowledge.
After I watched Rob's presentation on World Class Communities. I was thinking about this graphic. You can get a PDF of the presentation here.
And then it hit me. Almost everybody focuses on throwing resources at the participation on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc., but few think about the ownership of the community. How can you own your community when you use Facebook and Twitter?
If you think about Facebook and Twitter as your distribution channel, then you need to have something at the core of your social networking strategy. You need command and control (C2) technology.
Command and control, or C2, in a military organization can be defined as the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commanding officer over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission.[1][2]
The DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines it as "[t]he exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commander over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission. Command and control functions are performed through an arrangement of personnel, equipment, communications, facilities, and procedures employed by a commander in planning, directing, coordinating, and controlling forces and operations in the accomplishment of the mission. Also called C2." [3]
Rob has the idea of Command and Control is his paper.
To truly become world class, leaders will invest not only in the technology to run the community, but the people and resources to support the community. The community must be an integral part of the entire experience and culture of the organization.
It's so clear now. The top mistake people make in social networking is they don't have command and control technology as part of their social networking strategy.
I am looking forward to more conversations with Rob on this topic and the use of Telligent SW in social networking solutions.
If you really want to go further you think about Command and Control Intelligence and Telligent does that as well with Analytics.
Monitor key decisions and community buzz.Evaluate brand awareness, sentiment and customer loyalty to enhance your interactive marketing strategy.
Get a handle on service performance. Monitor trends and identify the most valuable people and information to deliver on your support commitments.
Understand your community network. Track what your customers and employees are thinking, how they’re connected and what they contribute to your community.
Build a sustainable community. Mine community data and assess the impact of your community via community health indicators.
Alleged Russian spy, Anna Chapman, became an instant Web sensation following the release of photos posted on the Russian social-networking Web site "Odnoklassniki," or Classmates.
Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 1, 2010
There were 11 alleged Russian agents arrested this week, under accusations that they'd been living as Americans while reporting back to the mother country.
THIS STORY
But mostly we care about the hot one.
Ever since photos of Anna Chapman began circulating online late Tuesday, the Internet at large has been foaming, frothing, fanatic for details about the reported 28-year-old secret agent/Maxim model look-alike who specialized in sultry-eyed, pouty-lipped, come-hither stares. Da, da,da!
CNET news has a post on Facebook effect and spies.
A time traveler from the 1960s would find many of today's headlines completely befuddling. Something called theiPhone? Threats from an amorphous, stateless band of terrorists? Reality television? A lot has changed, for sure.
But accused spies for the Kremlin--that's something our unstuck-in-time explorer would thoroughly recognize. Except, of course, when he heard everybody talking about foreign concepts like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Should a spy be on Facebook?
But for a young secret agent like Anna Chapman or Mikhail Semenko, the absence of a Facebook profile could trigger suspicion. If they're going to be like everybody else, of course they're going to use social networks.
Espionage is a fact of international life and always has been. The first spy manual, The Art of War, was written by Sun Tzu some 2,500 years ago. Espionage fills a vital niche; a successful operation can provide insight into intentions, plans, and human dynamics that cannot be gleaned from intercepted communications or pictures from space.
It is safe to assume that since the end of World War II there has never been a day that the Soviet Union or Russia was not spying on the United States, or vice versa. Espionage will continue, even as the United States and Russia work out a new modus vivendi.
Data Centers is a competitive industry, and as much as people try to keep things secret. With public disclosures it is not hard to piece together information. Rich Miller posted on Facebook's 60,000 server count on June 28, 2010.
Facebook Server Count: 60,000 or More
June 28th, 2010 : Rich Miller
It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes a PowerPoint slide can tell the story of thousands of servers.
That was the case with a presentation from Facebook’s Tom Cook at last week’s Velocity 2010 conference, which depicted the growth of the company’s server footprint. Designed to illustrate Facebook’s insatiable need for more servers to support its 400 million users, the chart didn’t include any numbers, seeking not to reveal the actual server count.
Dates Provide A Clue But the chart included dates, which allows us to do some math to fill in the blanks. In a presentation in November 2009, Facebook vice president of technology Jeff Rothschild disclosed that the company had more than 30,000 servers. Cook’s chart shows a brief plateau in Facebook’s server growth at about that time, followed by a sharp upward spike in the growth line through the first quarter of 2010 that effectively doubles the total number of servers.
That suggests that Facebook now has 60,000 or more servers. The sharp acceleration in Facebook’s server growth in late 2009 also helps explain the company’s move to lease large chunks of data center space in northern Virginia and Silicon Valley in March. The growth spurt occurred after Facebook announced plans to construct its own data center in Prineville, Oregon.
Putting together the pieces that are public is what I wrote about in this post.
Mar 09, 2010
A different interpretation of “Open Source” in an Intelligence Analysis scenario that defines how GreenM3 works public data
Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence.
This description fits what I have been telling others about the various data center sources of information.
“If there is a public publication of information, we are open to look at and provide feedback on the value we see in the information.”
Which is a pretty good description of how this blog has been run, commenting on public available information.
BTW, the use of social networks is not anything new. Three Days of the Condor is about a group of CIA researchers who did Open Source Intelligence - "I just read books"
Joe Turner (Robert Redford) is a CIA employee who works in a clandestine office in New York City. He is not a field agent, and indeed bristles at Agency discipline; among other things, he wonders why he can't tell people what he does for a living and notes "I trust some people ... that's a problem." His job is in the OSINT field: he has to read books, newspapers, and magazines from around the world, looking for hidden meanings and new ideas. As part of his duties, Turner files a report to CIA headquarters on a low-quality thriller novel his office has been reading, pointing out strange plot elements therein, and the unusual assortment of languages in which the book has been translated (Turkish but not French, Arabic but not Russian or German, Dutch, and Spanish).
Robert Redford's character says.
I work for the CIA. I'm not a spy. I just read books. We read everything that's published in the world, and we-- we feed the plots-- dirty tricks, codes into a computer, and the computer checks against actual CIA plans and operations. I look for leaks, new ideas. We read adventures and novels and journals. I-- I can-Who'd invent a job like that? I-- Listen! People are trying to kill me!
Here is a video clip from Three Days of the Condor.
Behind all of this is the technique of using public information with a bunch of people who are thinking of questions others don't ask. There are tons of experts in the CIA. There are tons in the data center industry. Yet can the experts anticipate the unexpected?
Taking a bunch of people who look at what is going on in the world allows you to be more creative in figuring out the questions that should be asked.
There are perils to the process. One source here said that analysts who engage in searches without masking their origin can lead to foreign governments or companies cutting off access to web sites or to people involved. The problem? Some analysts at NSA, CIA and other alphabet soup agencies forget to mask their IP addresses and the times at which they are searching. Chinese, Russian and other savvy operators can check time stamps, for example. If a search occurs during American working hours, it’s a pretty good bet that it’s an American source looking for the information. Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/10/20/open-source-intel-use-soars/#ixzz0svCx1zvG
This technique makes it easier to think of what is a green data center. Which is more than a low PUE.
Society as a whole has embraced digital as better than analog. Audio and video have been marketed that digital is better. Digital is concerned modern and more powerful. But your eyes and ears are analog devices. Your taste and smell are analog.
When I was in Tuscany I noticed the digital thinking when in the cooking class at www.tuscanwomencook.com when the other people attending would ask questions what temperature and how long to cook a dish. And, a focus on the recipe. As the class went on people would discuss what recipe they were going to try when got home. When they asked me what recipe I was going to try. Being honest, I said I don't know. Huh? How can you attend a cooking class and not be thinking about the recipe? Because I was decomposing the cook's techniques looking for what I could use. How people approach cooking was more interesting to me than the recipes. The complexity of cooking can be simplified when you see how someone makes cooking easier and more effective.
Then it hit me. When I wrote about the Apple iPhone 4 Antenna problem. Most people have lost the art of thinking in analog.
Here is an example of an awesome restaurant I ate at in Florence, Trattoria Sostanza
"IME, having Italian beef cooked beyond medium rare is not worth the price" - fodors.com ... "Don't skip dessert" -tripadvisor.com ... "The service was wonderful and the food was fantastic" - tripadvisor.com ... "the wine list is also excellent value" - tripadvisor.com ... "The food is out of this world" - tripadvisor.com ... "A true Italian experience!" - tripadvisor.com
Frommer's says.
Sostanza is popularly called "Il Troia" (The Trough) because people have been lining up at the long communal tables since 1869 to enjoy huge amounts of some of the best traditional food in the city. The primi are very simple: pasta in sauce, tortellini in brodo (meat-stuffed pasta in chicken broth), and zuppa alla paesana (peasant soup ribollita). The secondi don't steer far from Florentine traditions either, with trippa alla fiorentina or their mighty specialty petti di pollo al burro (thick chicken breasts fried in butter). It's an extremely unassuming place, so laid-back you may not realize you're meant to be ordering when the waiter wanders over to chat. They also frown on anybody trying to cheat his or her own taste buds out of a full Tuscan meal. Read more: http://www.frommers.com/destinations/florence/D34473.html#ixzz0scmTsDEq
So, here is a top restaurant cooking some of the best food in Florence. And their main cooking appliance is?
A wood fired grilling area.
In this small kitchen
Now if the chefs told you the temperatures they cooked at and how long, do you think any of that translates to what you should do when you go home?
Here is a close up of their top two dishes being cooked bistecca fiorentina and pollo al burro
Good cooks use their senses - smell, sight, sound, touch, temperature, and taste to cook. It's not digital. Cooking has turned into a digital experience for most, but good cooking is analog.
This is the same point made for Christian Belady, Mike Manos, and Chris Malone when they discuss metrics like PUE. PUE is a number, but not the end. For those who get the analog experience of running their data centers they know when things are right.
Do you think of your power and cooling systems as analog?
Your people are analog devices too. But how many of them are treated as digital components? You can replace any individual without changing the system.
Digital thinking is easier, but it is not right and it doesn't taste good.
Note: correction to Frommer's statement Il Troia in Italian is The Whore not the The Trough.
GigaOm analyzes this video of Eric Schmidt at Atmosphere.
And throws this out as summary of key issues Eric presents.
Schmidt made two specific comments about resource allocation, saying that the hardest and most pressing engineering issues facing Google today are around sharing and mobile. He was talking to the enterprise execs present but his statements were so absolute I think it’s fair to apply them more broadly.
“Companies are about sharing,” Schmidt said. “One of the new things in the last five years about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps.” He continued,
I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.
Google's Don Dodge (recently laid off by Microsoft) adds his perspective on the threat to Office.
Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch says; "Slowly but surely, Google keeps trying to chip away at Microsoft’s core Office productivity suite with Google Docs, its free online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Today, Google Drawing is being added to the mix and Google Docs and Spreadsheets is getting a major realtime update."
David Berlind at InformationWeek is much more aggressive. "Make no mistake about it. Google is going for Microsoft's jugular. The deathmatch is on and, at the very least, it's for bragging rights to what we at InformationWeek are calling the "collaborative backbone." It becomes a battle that's less about Google Docs versus Microsoft Office and much more about the collaborative infrastructure behind Google Apps versus Microsoft's SharePoint and Exchange."
And provides a graph to illustrate his point.
This competitive positioning chart illustrates where Google is coming from, and where it hopes to go in the future. It is the classic Innovators Dilemma competitive curve. Time will tell how it shakes out. The move to the cloud seems to be pretty clear. Only the slope of the curve and speed seems to be in question.
And, let's not forget the changes from Mobile.
As the mobile Internet becomes central for both consumer and corporate users, the core product questions are interoperability, security and safety, Schmidt said. “What’s important is to get the mobile experience right, because mobility will ultimately be the way you provision most of your services,” he added, saying that Google considers phones, tablets and netbooks mobile experiences.
These are all things we are thinking about as we get the GreenM3 NPO rolling, and how we will approach data center information sharing. In some ways you could contrast what we are thinking of in an Open and Transparent approach to data center innovation vs. the status quo. It is close to the comparison of Microsoft's individual authoring thinking vs. Google's team collaboration.
