The Growing Importance of Technology - Avoiding Pandemics

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

The past two days has seen a flurry of media reports on the growing concerns of a global pandemic of *swine flu* (I know, terrible name, but North American Influenza just doesn't have the same ring to it).

Travel warnings abound.
Folks either are ignoring them, and planning el cheapo trips to Mexico (if they can still get flights, which are being cancelled every day), or they are looking at what impacts a virus such as this could have on their daily lives, and planning appropriately.

You can now map the incidence of the outbreak with google maps.
You can get a checklist of the supplies you may want to have on hand if the virus impacts your ability to get *out and about* to restock.
Now that Swine Flu has hit Ontario - it's beginning to become more important to pay attention to what's going on.

But my favourite, knowing that I can continue, undisturbed, working remotely - and avoiding the brunt of human contact. :-)
Teleworking, remote working, telecommuting - what ever you want to call it is one of the single best ways to avoid either sharing or being exposed to anything nasty.

swine flu, google maps, teleworking

Death By Meetings - Leveraging IT to Save Time

I stumbled across an interesting Seth Godin post on the problem with meetings. He offers up 9 suggestions on making meetings better.

The larger problem with corporate culture is the insidious issue of people not doing their job. So meetings are required to direct people in real time on what they need to do, what they need to be thinking about and what the end game should be. Gone are the days of self-initiative. Goodbye to the self starter.
Meetings are now to make sure people do what they are supposed to do. Then you meet again to make sure they've done what they said they would do.
Gaahhh!

Sure, it's good to talk about projects in real time, it's nice to be in sync. There are a plethora of IT tools that manage both of these activities much better than what can be accomplished in an hour meeting. Unfortunately there's still an underlying fear of collaboration tools, and some folks are just plain too lazy to learn and experiment with them. Hey - I'm in the lazy boat too on some activities.

My Outlook Personal folder is 2.8 GB. It's how I store stuff and stay organized. It's an admitted critical flaw of mine. I'd love to port my work and projects over to an interface that is shareable and collaborative. My company provides some fairly reasonable tools to achieve this --- but I'm spending too many hours in meetings to find any free time to embrace some of these IT initiatives ;-) We've got wikis, we've got a sharepoint server. Heck - we've even reached out and embraced blogging! Still. In the grand scheme of things, it's just easier to have a meeting ;-)


Technorati Tags: IT, Seth Godin, Outlook, Wiki, Sharepoint

itWorldCanada - Community Greening Through IT

I found this fascinating quote today:

The past few years has seen an explosion in grassroots community movements using IT to organize, grow and thrive in a world that’s now more global than grassroots. The recent economic crisis has only stressed the importance of re-localization, and community movements have never been more important. The problem: people have become too globally focused and have lost the social tools to connect locally. IT initiatives and tools are needed more than ever to rediscover local connections and community.Community Greening Through IT | Blogging Idol, Apr 2009

You should read the whole article.

The Greening of Data Centres

Much is being written lately about the havoc that regular data centres play with the environment, using excessive amounts of electricity… and the growing pressures of the internet loads are only going to increase the carbon requrements of data centres.

It’s all well and good to feel green, and think green, unless it impacts your ability to twitter and google away your day.

Companies such as ISPs or online retailers that use the data centers could have the added benefit of being able to claim that their web services are powered by clean power, which is a small but growing interest for IT firms.

Plans are afoot to drastically reduce the dirtiness of data centres…

• Google’s going to go to the ocean for power and cooling.
• In the past 5 months, TELUS has announced 2 new data centre builds - one in Quebec and one in BC that take advantage of some serious GREEN planning.

Don’t feel alone in your efforts to make your company greener. Leaders in other markets—from companies like Boeing and Toyota to government agencies such as the State of California—are making serious investments in making their operations and products more energy efficient.

California utility PG&E said it has given Internet services company NetApp a $1.43 million rebate — the largest new construction incentive the utility has awarded — for its efforts at an engineering data center in Sunnyvale, Calif.

All steps in the right direction.

:-)

Hey... That's Not in My Job Description...

Toronto high scholl teachers are threatening to strike because the schoolboard is asking them to do things that aren’t part of their union agreement…

Members of the OSSTF have been casting ballots all day to show their anger with the Board over attempts to get them to spend extra timepatrolling the hallways and doing other chores, a change in their contract that they insist is a matter of principle.

Wow.

In real life, with regular jobs, you do MANY things that aren’t part of your job description. It sort of goes hand in hand with wanting to keep your job ;-)

A few things above and beyond any job description I’ve ever had:

1. Dropping a router at a customer office.
2. Picking UP a router at a customer office.
3. Going to a customer’s home to set up their Mac for internet service.
4. Creating a 40 page custom care procedure.

What have YOU done for your job that wasn’t part of the job?