White House follows Endeavour Partners’ lead

It’s nice to be a trailblazer…. Following our recent move to using Amazon’s cloud to host our information technology infrastructure, we’re delighted to see that the White House has recognized the wisdom of our choice and followed our lead:

Earlier today in a blog post on WhiteHouse.gov, federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced that Recovery.gov would be moving to the cloud. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board’s primary contractor,Smartronix, chose Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to host the site. NASA has used EC2 for testing, but this will be the first time a government website — a “.gov” — has been hosted on Amazon’s EC2.

Hiatus

We’re back; the recent hiatus arose from our migrating all of our information technology infrastructure to cloud services.

There were two motivations for this:

1. Better service for us
2. Investment in learning about the reality of working with cloud services

We will be posting about our experiences doing this, as it was very instructive. For those who are curious, we’re using WordPress and Zimbra running on Amazon.

The transition is now complete, so watch this space.

How Harrington High became Big Brother

Stryde Hax (fabulous name for a detective) has a fascinating post that everyone should read on how Harrington High exploited information technology to become Big Brother:

This investigation into the remote spying allegedly being conducted against students at Lower Merion represents an attempt to find proof of spying and a look into the toolchain used to accomplish spying.

Read it through for the updates as well, which reflect a careful and thoughtful attitude to these issues.

The Thought Leader Interview: Erik Brynjolfsson

strategy+business Thought Leaders

Some interesting observations from one of my colleagues at MIT Erik Brynjolfsson, in the MIT Center for Digital Business reflecting on the dynamics of productivity and how information technology is reshaping the economy. Their key point, which has been echoed by work by my other colleagues in the Management Innovation Lab at London Business School is the importance of the accumulation of organizational capital: improved operational processes and management practices.

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Blackberry outage was like a crazy Stephen King novel

Yesterday's Blackberry outage was eye-opening.  There are mixed reports all over the web about the extent of this outage and what caused it, but I lost email, PIN messaging, Blackberry messenger, and had intermittent problems across all other apps on my device.

I was traveling with a Blackberry-wielding colleague.  Usually this would make us feel like business Samurai, ready for anything.  Yesterday, this overconfidence caught up with us.

Emails to my travel agent never made it through, and there was no rental car waiting for me in DC.  Even at Hertz, I had one of those "not exactly" moments, and it took an interminable half hour to get a car.  In transit from the airport to meet people for dinner, neither of us could get wireless data connectivity.  No ability to search for the hotel and restaurant by name.  No ability to use Google Maps to get directions.

Also, we kept dropping calls.  Even calling to get directions was not as smooth as usual, but eventually this is the "old fashioned" way we found our destination.

Me:  "I can see the mall on my left, and the XYZ company on my right.  No, I don't know what street I'm on."

Friend/colleague on other end:  "I think I know where you are; go 1 mile, then turn left."  (Not so long ago, this would have seemed miraculously cool - like in the Matrix:  "I need an exit!" - now it seems pretty pedestrian and painful.)

This sort of event brings home how much we depend on technology on a daily basis.  And how quickly we've become spoiled by technological capabilities that are relatively new.  It reminds me of a sort of post-apocalyptic Stephen King novel, where the protagonist needs to find their way through the world using their feet and their wits, but they are suddenly bereft of all modern technology and convenience.

Without Google Maps (and frequent United flights!) I'm not sure I'd make it to Denver in The Stand.  I'd probably jog right past.  Would you make it?

Perhaps more importantly, this has me seriously questioning my loyalty to Blackberry.  From a competitive analysis perspective, this is a disaster for RIM. Two major outages in a week.  A general degradation in service over the past year.  Meanwhile, my partner is having great fun with his iPhone, and my wife's Droid Eris seems pretty darn cool.