deal architect

The Blogney Stone

Perfectly sanitary Americans will line up, contort themselves and without availing of Handiwipes kiss the famous stone just north of Cork.

In the mean time, clean cut American lawyers are lining up, contorting legal jurisidiction and going after a blogger in Cork.

They are "tryna catch him riding dirty"

You think Charmillionaire has been to Blarney Castle a few times? He sure has earned the gift of the fastest gab around.

I notice Dennis smartly did not run his Gunning-Fog index on his lyrics..

"..My music so loud;
I'm swangin'.
They hopin'
That they gon' catch me ridin' dirty...."

Nonetheless, my suggestion to Tom Raftery. Tell the lawyers:

" Got warrants in every city except Houston
But I still ain't losin'..."

My Trademark: SOW

CMP wants credit for Web 2.0. Gartner talks about SOA 2.0. Andrew McAfee at Harvard Business School takes credit for Enterprise 2.0 (he writes "I feel I'm entitled to define it")

I want to propose the ultimate mash-up - Service Oriented Web - SOW

Charlie Wood asks here why we talk about enterprise and consumer technologies as separate worlds.

Let's take the best of both worlds - the conversation and collaboration of web 2.0 and add in (some of) the control and compliance of SOA. And hopefully take out the costs of SOA. And add the nimbleness of web 2.0.

And remember as you SOW, so shall you reap. And if you think that is lame, just remember I feel I am entitled to define it.

The Men and the Tax Man

The IRS is about to rescind excise taxes on long distance calls and issue refunds

"Short on cash to finance the Spanish-American War in 1898, Congress targeted the then new technology of telephony for some quick battle funds. It was only temporary, Congress insisted.

The war ended at a cost of $6 billion, but the excise tax lived on to become a staple of telephone taxes, which is currently a 3 percent charge on all local and long-distance services.

Since the enactment of the excise tax, Americans have shelled out $300 billion for the program."

Every little bit helps. Communication taxes are some of the highest on any utility. Now we need to get states to act similarly. And to push for reductions on other communication services.

With hosting needs growing with SaaS, with broadband needs growing with digital content, with global trade and international calls increasing, with sensors and telemetry, telecom costs are going to continue to explode. Watching over the Men of Telecom is tough enough duty. If we have to worry less about the Tax Man, would make life a little easier.

Monsieur Dobbs, Senor Dobbs, Dobbs-San

Lou Dobbs ain't alone - he has peers in several countries, all whipping up domestic passions and scaring people about global trade, as Rich Karlgaard points out. Even as they personally enjoy French wine, German cars, Cuban cigars, Japanese gadgets.

If you are one of the 40% of my readers outside the US who read my blog,  you need to challenge your own Lous. We need the best and brightest - people, products - from everywhere. They are much more likely to help the bottom of the pyramid than the populist politicians.

Detroit Redux?

I was recently talking to an ex Andersen (Accenture) consultant. In 1992, on his first project for the firm he worked on a project which had equal number of Andersen staff in the US and the Philippines. They developed around the sun. They were using the Global Delivery Model way before the offshore providers perfected it. Yet, they did not push the pedal and in fact only in the last couple of years have started using GDM seriously on their projects.

Read more at TechSpend.

Let it Lay

Lay and Skilling of Enron fame have been found guilty. The drumbeat will grow louder- about this being exactly why we need Sarbanes Oxley. Slight problem - Sarbanes Oxley has already been in place for 4 years and has already cost corporate America hundreds of billions of dollars.

As I asked before - are we better off than we were 4 years ago?

Have our watchdogs – external auditors and the SEC – retooled themselves to better deal with Chewcos (one of the more complex Enron transactions)? If SOX had been in place 4 years ago would Enron management have not attempted such transactions? Are we as individual and institutional investors any savvier about Chewcos - or similar risks in our portfolios?

The answers are No, No and No. Instead of helping us find the Lays and the Skillings, our watchdogs want our Immelts and McNealys and other good corporate citizens to continue to bear the cross for a few bad apples.

PC Nano-economics

I recently wrote about C.K. Prahalad's views about making money at the bottom of the pyramid

The PC market is poised to unleash if not nano, at least more compelling economics for emerging markets

Intel announced plans for a PC in India at 20% lower than current market prices. Less than 2% of India has PC or web access.

Microsoft has been running trials for a year in Brazil of its FlexGo pay by the hour plans and plans to roll them out in China, Hungary and other emerging markets

The MIT Media Labs is still trying to bring out a $ 100 laptop - not just desktop.

Mobile devices will increasingly provide computing and connectivity options - allowing many in those markets to bypass PCs as a platform

You think we will enjoy the benefits of all this in the west? Sure hope so. A recent peek at the Dell on-line stors showed a bare bones PC at $ 272, They just need to get their efficient model working optimized even more to make money at even lower prices. And not get in to too many high rent malls.

Gartner was generous

There was a mini-tempest last week as Ken McGee of Gartner said IT is now a "non-growth" industry. Nick Carr jumped and said - see I told you so, IT doesn't matter. 

Flat growth, what wimps! One of my CIO clients recently told me he could cut 10% each year for the next few years and not skip a beat. He would use that to fund innovation investments and not have to go with tin-cup to his CFO. He has bought his ticket to New Florence.

Want 10,  20, 30% % savings in IT budgets? Here is a list I presented at Software 2006 of top 10 IT spend items with the most "empty calories"

• Software Vendor Annual Maintenance contracts

• Outsource contracts signed more than 18 months ago

• Software “shelfware”

• Telecom “shelfware” - unused  phone, T1 etc lines

• Lack of offshore shared services  across  client specific development centers

• Telecom “fringe” services – WI-FI hotspot charges, international mobile roaming etc

• Lack of “hardware as a service”

• Everything with cheaper building blocks - x86, open source, global labor - but finished product still pricey

• Staff aligned more with Accenture and EDS thinking than with 37Signals and Google

Delight your CFO and give him 5% back for a change - and still have plenty left for innovation projects. If that is non-growth, bring it on.

No Nick, it's not the end of corporate computing. It's the dawn of a new computing paradigm.

Update: I added a few words to clarify the categories

Further update: I was delighted to read this InfoWorld series of stories about "heroic hacks" - innovations and workarounds from creative IT staff. Every CIO deserves a few - or many - such heroes.

MAD: Mutually assured xxxx?

The attached NY Times article on the US State Department suspicions of Lenovo machines made me think of the acronym from the Cold War - MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction.

But the way we are now globally intertwined, really has it not become Mutually Assured Dependence?

Cognizant interview

NY Times interviews Lakshmi Narayanan, CEO of Cognizant.

He describes his Indian competition thus  "Tata is very cost- and price-focused. Infosys tries to be very innovative. Wipro is seen as a research and development company because close to half their revenue is from working with telecom companies in chip design and software."

Now, he could have easily pointed to the comparison to the 3 chickens. But in my dealings with Cognizant, that is not their style. Modest, customer focused. Even though they have grown like a rocket.