Author Archives: Alan Street

About Alan Street

I work at IBM.

What is Crowdsourcing?

This entry is part 15 of 31 in the series Defining words

I have kept crowdsourcing on the shelf over the years as a “plan B” should I ever need an alternative way to make a living.

I explored it further when brainstorming ways to gather information about authenticated digital services in various countries.  I was considering whether to engage a private crowd within IBM using a micro-task marketplace such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turks.

Crowdsourcing is huge and diverse and includes micro-tasking, macro-tasking, crowd contests, crowd funding and self-organizing crowds.  In my usual fashion I will refer you to a book that explains it all better than I can here:  Crowdsourcing for Dummies.

9781119940401I decided to use an IBM social media tool for my study instead of a market place because I wanted to keep my work in a private crowd.  The “crowd” is a large part of the value of a market place and I doubt I can reach my intended crowd that way.  I am going to need to need to find my contributors manually.  I still found the book helpful in understanding how to organize the micro-tasks, provide instructions, and use gamification techniques to motivate participation.

The reason why I talk about it here is because I think that crowdsourcing is going to become more important in the future and should be one of the key technology trends impacting business strategies and digital services.

What is Gamification?

This entry is part 14 of 31 in the series Defining words

Gamification is another one of those words that I have been scolded for using in meetings.  Folks, this is one worth looking up, understanding, and shoehorning into your vocab.

Gamification is the use of game mechanics to influence people.  Game mechanics are becoming one of the most important means of influencing people with technology.  Hmm, now that sounds important!

Click on the picture below to get started.  This TED talk is a bit dated but it still a good place to start.

See SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck.

You can also Google “Game Dynamics” and “Game Mechanics”.

Also refer to Gartner’s “Gamification Is Not Just for Fun; It Can Personalize Customer Engagement With Bank Products and Services Published: 3 December 2012“.

 

 

According to Digital Bank, Poland’s mBank revamped its mobile banking services to, among other things, leverage gamification to encourage sensible spending and saving.

Eminence & Excellence Award from IBM

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Congratulations, ALAN STREET! You have earned a GBS Eminence and Excellence Cash Award Card for demonstrating the Practice: Dare to Create Original Ideas.

Thank you for demonstrating IBM’s Values and your contribution to our business.

From ELIZABETH RAMASCO on March 04, 2014.

Category: Me

Breaking the glass ceiling for Architects

With technology top-of-mind in the C-Suite, I can not think of a profession that is growing in importance more quickly than architecture.  By that I mean enterprise and IT architecture.  Architects provide the technology leadership for an enterprise.  Yet, architects too often get stuck together into an “architecture” organization which over time becomes less relevant to the enterprise.  It is as if the important people in the enterprise want to insulate themselves from these architects.  One has to wonder:  Is it because the architecture team is not trusted as the most competent source of technology leadership for the enterprise, or is it because they have failed to prove that they know how to apply their vast knowledge of technology to its benefit?  Whatever it is, it is a problem both for the architects and the enterprise.  Why does this happen and how do we fix it?

I assume that you are an architect and I want to give you an answer that you can act on.  So I am not going to bother you with ideas like “assign every architect to a cross-functional team”.  I want to give you answers that you can act on immediately.

Furthermore, I will give you the benefit of the doubt:  I will assume that you are competent on the areas of business and IT that are most critical to the leaders of the enterprise where you work.

What’s left is communication.  I strongly believe that communication has been a limiting factor for me for most of my career.  I am still working hard to improve my communications skills.  Read on if you think it is also of importance to you.  I will give a hint on two main points and expand on them more in future posts and revisions to this post.  All I want to give you today are the short version of the answers and the source where you can learn more about the answers yourself.

The first point is that every communication needs to be relevant to the reader.  If your reader cares a lot about the “why” of something and you always seem to focus on the “what” then that breaks the first rule of a good communication–providing an answer to a question that is already on their mind.   The second point is to structure your communications so that, once you have the reader’s attention, the reader can easily comprehend your message.

The Pyramid Principle is a book that was recommended to me by a mentor.   As I read it I see that it addresses both of the above points about communication.  There are two versions of the book (both by Barbara Minto) and I honestly do not know which one is better:

I happened upon the latter in a bookstore here in Kuala Lumpur so that is the one I am reading now.

What is Cloud Computing?

This entry is part 12 of 31 in the series Defining words

 

Even if you already know about cloud you should watch this video by Stephen Fry!

StephenFryOnCloudComputing

 

 

 

 

Cloud is a broad topic about new ways to gain significant business advantage by reorganizing computing infrastructure, tools, applications and processes in a way to increase business agility and lower costs.  Traditional IT infrastructure and software services are formalized and provided in a more mechanized and efficient manner.  Cloud Computing is also an important trend.

The primary sub-topics are:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Hardware such as raw compute power and storage, virtual machines, operating systems, execution platforms such as Java application servers, database management systems, etc.  Read more about IBM IaaS here.
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) – Primarily a service for IT and especially for software developers.  Provides the ability to quickly build and compose software components.  This is where DevOps sits.  Read more about IBM BlueMix and Cloud MarketPlace.
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) – Applications in the cloud such as CRM, email, games,
  • Process as a Service (PBaaS) – Ranges from providing Business Process Manager (BPM) software as a service to end-to-end enablement of a business process such as account opening.

IBM cloud computing reference architecture (simplified)

Cloud service may be provided internally, externally or both (hybrid).  A large organization such as a bank might want to manage its own cloud if it believes that it can better provide for security and disaster recovery.

IBM’s view on cloud computing is captured in its Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA).

Another important area of cloud computing is cloud standards.