How long for the Windows PC?

Windows XP must be banished by the end of 2013 or dire things will happen.  We are doing well.  We've nearly finished our Windows 7 roll out.  Plenty are behind us on the endless treadmill that Microsoft designed so cleverly for us back in the 90s. And meanwhile, Windows 8 is upon us.

We need Windows now, as we always have, because we depend on applications that won't travel. But Gartner tells us we've passed a tipping point.  In 1996, most organisations needed Windows to run 95% of their applications.  Gradually the ground has shifted and we use more and more software that will run on any OS, often through a browser.  In 2012, the percentage for most organisations dropped below 50% for the first time.   Perhaps the treadmill does have an end? Perhaps we just completed our last major corporate roll out of a new Windows version?

Certainly, the PC is no longer the centre of the Universe. Watch the research academic in action and you'll see her juggling collections of devices, some personally owned, which are simply different ways of reaching information in different contexts and for different purposes.  The Cloud replaces the PC at the heart of this world.  Our job will be to make this easy and make it safe to bring multiple gadgets into play. Perhaps Windows 8 is destined to be just one of the many now - just one more way to run a browser.

Big Data means big opportunity for new MSc programmes

 4.4 million jobs will be created globally but only a third will be filled - easily the most striking prediction to come out of the Gartner Symposium this year.  

14% of the world's economy is now transacted on line.  There are nearly a billion people on Facebook and 5.6 billion mobile devices wondering the planet.  All this creates unimaginable quantities of data.  We are going to need a very large number of highly skilled data scientists to find the value in all of this, to help work out the next generation of business models that will change the world.  And, human nature being what it is, we'll need nearly as many security experts to help us do this safely and wisely.

My guess is that we should start selling MSc shovels to these gold miners.   

Everyone needs a Mobile App

History repeats.  Do you remember when everyone needed a Web site but few knew why?  They  knew they had to catch the bus but had neither the time nor the imagination to conceive fully of the destination. They recruited a 'Web Master' who could write HTML and throw up the first web presence.  Doesn't that title sound anachronistic now? Now we know that the Web is for everyone and every purpose.    How utterly game changing the destination turned out to be. 

We are in the same place with mobile apps.  We proudly launched our first app last week.  It’s great to see it there in the App Store.  Great too to see the tweets from students telling us that the 'find a PC on campus' feature is really handy.  Now I'm wondering if we need to recruit an 'App Master' or two to galvanise us towards the next stage.  At least I know I don't know where this particular bus is heading. 

It's sociology not technology

Wonderful talk this week from Richard Harper a sociologist from Microsoft Research Labs. As he said he would,  he "explored the use of new and old communications media – Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, phone calls and traditional letters – and suggested that one should not view the proliferation of such media as creating communication overload... a better approach is to think of our rich communication media as being the means through which a texture to human relationships and individual identity is created".

Who would have guessed that a text message could be so intimate, that some would hate voice mails - too indelible, that so much personality could be crammed into a Tweet, that an email could be so loud and aggressive, that an instant message could be so chummy?  Fascinating to see people relating through these different media in such different ways.  And the Kindle has made us rethink the meaning of print. Do I need to point out that the three people sharing a Sunday newspaper around the kitchen table in my house this morning were not really reading. They were reminding each other that all is OK with the world (apart from Syria and the euro crisis and......)    

We need Digital Tour Guides

We digital incomers exist in a foreign land. The natives - our students - leave us behind with their fluency.  How to keep an open mind and learn from them? I've just written a job description for a 'Digital Tour Guide' to help us understand this new world. I wonder if I can make this happen....

Wanted!  Recent graduate or current student. Passionate about the ways in which IT can be useful in life and learning.  An excellent communicator who can explain technology in an accessible, empathetic manner.  Be an advocate for the IT needs of students and help to improve communication and engagement between University planners and the community of students.

And here's where tact is needed......able to act as a mentor to senior staff, providing practical guidance and demonstrating the value of new technologies.

The network is the computer - new role for JANET

One of many important and succinct things that John Naughton says is his new book 'From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg' is 'the network is the computer'. I've not heard anyone call an iPad a 'dumb terminal' but that's what I had on my desk twenty something years ago, and that's what I'm using to write this post. OK so it's not so dumb, it's certainly prettier, better with pictures and music too, but it ain't that brainy.

I went to the first Advisory Board for the new JANET (UK) Brokerage this week. This is where some of the most important action is going to be. Now the cloud is real. It turns out that our staff and students didn't need to be told it was Bring Your Own Device to work day. We need to work out how to connect them from these devices to the stuff they need, and the stuff usually won't be on our campus.

JANET's job is to connect our people from wherever they happen to be to the resources they need, even if they are in a remote village with a grotty ADSL link (which I am). That's a challenge - a global one. But we want them to do much more to catalyse the cloudward shift. The new framework agreement for managed Data Centre and co-lo services is a start. Next, a co-ordinated discussion with Microsoft to help us realise the huge potential of their Office365 offering. This is the kind of help we are going to need to enable us to work with these suppliers in entirely new ways. Exciting for both sides of the relationship and plenty of space for JANET in the middle!

Goldilocks data centre

We have a data centre unworthy of the name. It's running out of power and cooling capacity.  We are blowing two kilowatts heating the atmosphere for every one that runs computers.  The occasional floods don't help. At last we have the budget to do a proper job. But here's the hard decision. How much to spend on our Goldilocks data centre - one that's not too big, not too small?

How many flops and bytes do we need on our campus now that cloud computing is real? Now that Google, Microsoft and the rest run their monster operations in forgettable places with their own power stations? Surely only a fool with a control complex runs their own data centre now? We've been round and round this one. We've done feasibility reviews and modelled scenarios. Too many variables. Eventually we will pick a number (£s, KWs) that's affordable and that isn't so obviously wrong that I get the sack!