Privacy and Branding

Well, it has been sometime since I blogged. Had a personal issue with my oldest son who had gone through surgery while balancing to move forward with customer engagements. These engagements have really taken a toll on me personally and these have been intrusive in my personal life do to extreme travel (10 days straight) and long travel delays (lines, bad service, unreliable everything) . Thus, I enjoy the work as it lets me be as creative as I can be to resolve customers' problems and their own challenges, and more so get to speak my mind on what matters most and what is meaningful efforts.

Working on a challenging customer whose business spans in Central America as a processor and issuer/acquirer who wants to process all mobile transactions in the region and at the same time facilitate toll-plaza payments using RFID -- they will succeed. The other customer is really difficult to work with as at time must act as the arbitrator between feuding business units and regions just to move one step further to achieve the buy-in from the rest of the executives in spite having the COO as my executive sponsor! My wife tells me I should increase the billing rate or mark-up the margin on the integration stuff (Hm! she is probably right...I'll do both!)

So off I go to Mexico (five times in one month!) then to Colombia and finally rest in Costa Rica and Guatemala to come home!

Get Done Stop Saying...Mobile Computing or Wireless Thin Computing

My challenges at many enterprises has been for many IT teams to revisit Wireless Thin Computing (-WTC) in conjunction with the lines of business (LOBs) teams who have smart Business IT people - this is an oddity! There has been more Mr. and Mrs. No's than anything else but business as usual. My reason for revisiting thin client was not only has the technology become more richly rewarding (TCO) and certainly the cost/performance blows rings around fat Windows or Linux clients, but a business policy decision to mitigate lawsuits from zealot lawyers and more fragmented consumer advocacy groups pertaining to personal and identifiable consumer data.

Logic has it that fat clients allow their fat and small peripheral friends (thumb drives, CDR's, portable drives) to carry data outside the confounds of the enterprise. Enough has been sensationalized in the media regarding Bank of America, Citibank, ChoicePoint, Dept of Justice, Dept of MV's (lots of these), blaming technology for the cause of "loss data" rather than a loss mind. Which brings me back to the point of thin client computing benefits. Thin client is a browser based LCD panel that gets its data feed from a server (old days mainframe to terminal). The data is never stored/access from a client device, but rather from a centrally managed server farm which removes the concern of data theft or clumsy employee handling of media. So no hands to touch the data, and the probability of loosing data further gets reduced. Now with the increase of bandwidth, many companies are springing into action by using disk-to-disl backup from remote locations only when the data size makes sense (Peta is still a Concern but storage technology and accompanying compression algorithm's will cometh). Hence, the additional savings from diminishing help desk support and application distribution (bye SMS) to start can really make the savings a true realistic ROI.

What does this mean to the public?

Get Vision, Get Organized, Get Going!!

Ha! The eureka moment of putting thoughts of creativity in paper (digital that is!) Started this blog to help me (and hopefully others) who throughout their lives have been great thinkers, idea generators, visionaries (you add more adjectives).

So, at times I will "blink" my thoughts and approaches to issues and challenges that get me thinking, thinking... It is not the intent of writing here to support the way I think as had enough of corporate recycled brains tell me otherwise which brings me to the book by Malcolm Gladwell (among the few thinkers who think with unstructured corporate mindsets), "Blink". I will not attempt to Cliff Notes the book (it’s not my business), though highly suggest to first read it then come back to this blog to dialogue.

My thoughts in this blog are around many issues in technology and how it affects humans who believe are in the role of consumers (antonym "wasters"). The ideal definition of Consumers is through my own definition that should have the following behavioral characteristics:

• Use a product or service with relevant value to the self or others - no evilness
• Clear and present intentions to morally gain benefit from the product or service
• Provide straight forward feedback to the makers of product and services
• Propagate the usefulness of the product or service doing kindness to others
• Respect all areas around oneself when using product or service
• Green attitude and practices to use the product or service
• Retire product and service with respect and moral commitment
  

With the above said, I write about the uses of mobile devices, alternate networks, privacy and branding. Though not ingrained in stone, I will alternate periodically what I consider exciting that motivates me to write my thoughts in this blog. So each Post will have a "headline" consisting of what I write about in technology, e.g. Mobile Devices Uses and Stupidity".