Automation Centre

Mega Trends

We came across the presentation below on "mega trends" that impact the IT departments of every company in the world. These trends include Mobile, Social, Cloud, Apps and Big Data.

50 Powerful Statistics About Tech Mega Trends Affecting Every Business

A number of interesting items that came up, including:

• People who use phones and tablets to access the Internet will outnumber those who use personal computers within two years.
• For almost 30% of Americans, their cell phone is the first thing they look at when they wake up, and the last thing they check before they go to bed.
• YouTube reaches more US adults (from ages 18 through 34) than any cable network.
• Cloud technology will create 14 million jobs by 2015.
• Worldwide IT cloud spending will approach $100 billion by 2016.
• By 2017, 1 in 4 enterprises will have an enterprise app store.
• While the global generation of data is projected to grow 40% per year, global IT spending will only grow a paltry 5% per year.

Like any business, Automation Centre has kept an eye on trends and delivered products to the marketplace in anticipation of emerging demands. In the early 90s, when groupware technology began to coalesce, we released our first software solutions, Tracker Suite for Lotus Notes / Domino and TrackerOffice for Microsoft Outlook / Exchange. These groupware solutions leveraged email platforms in ways no competitors could match.

Like any successful business, we also leverage our experience and stick with what works. Although our current product, TrackerSuite.Net, is 100% Web based, it leverages email as well – users can even surface TrackerSuite.Net within their Microsoft Outlook or IBM Notes client. Microsoft Outlook users can also leverage features including drag-and-drop creation of project tasks, documents and support tickets from emails.

We’re staying on top of trends, as well. TrackerSuite.Net 4.1, our latest release, features specific enhancements for mobile devices, including new forms and navigation tools, that simplify workflow for expense reporting and support ticket creation and management.

Catching a Ride on the Hype Cycle

Gartner has released its “hype cycle” for 2013, with a focus on growing integration in the relationship of humans and machines.

From Gartner:

“The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report is the longest-running annual Hype Cycle, providing a cross-industry perspective on the technologies and trends that senior executives, CIOs, strategists, innovators, business developers and technology planners should consider in developing emerging-technology portfolios.”

From: Gartner's 2013 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies

The areas of human-technology interaction reviewed in this report included:

1. The augmentation of humans with technology. The first thing that may pop into your head after reading this is Matt Damon’s powered exoskeleton in the movie Elysium, but there are powerful augmentors already in the market, such as wearable technology like Google Glass.
2. Humans and machines working together. Combining the best of both worlds – the speed and efficiency of machines with the intelligence and problem-management capabilities of humans, offers incredible potential.
3. Machines assuming human operations. There are some instances were machines could be eminently more qualified that humans in executing operations.  Consider the development of driverless cars, which should be a boon to road safety. Google estimates that self-driving cars could reduce the annual road fatalities and injuries in the United States by up to 90 percent.
4. Machines understanding humans... By improving the ability of machines to interpret context as humans do, significant advances can be made in user interactions with technology, CRM and more.
5. … and vice versa. As machines increasingly take on workloads and activities, there will be an increasing premium on the trust required by human beings that the machines are capable of handling these operations. If humanity lacks confidence in the ability of machines to assume these responsibilities, progress will suffer.
6. The growing intelligence of humans and machines. The increasing capabilities of data collection and analytics, combined with cognitive computing technologies, offers both humans and machines incredible opportunities and leverage over their environment.

10 Signs You Are a Born Project Manager

While the following list is neither mandatory nor all inclusive, if you find that four or five of these traits apply to you, then a career in leading projects may be waiting for you.

1. You’re organized. You keep your information (budgets, schedules, tasks, documents and files) centralized and accessible, whether it’s in spreadsheets, or an online project management solution like ours.
2. You like working with others. No one is an island. Managing a team effectively requires a mix of camaraderie and authority. While you are a part of the team, you’re also its leader. Exercise too much control, and team members might be hesitant to move on their own without direction from you. Let things slide too much, and you risk the team, and potentially the project itself going off-course.
3. Like Hannibal and his A-Team, you love it when a plan comes together. You don’t like to dive into anything without a firm goal and a road map to get there. Planning is essential to the success of any initiative – and having the right team is key as well.
4. You enjoy the feeling of progress. As your project moves forward, from milestone to milestone, you enjoy the feeling of accomplishment, as the project slowly takes shape in its march to completion.
5. You like structure, but you’re flexible. Like some people could be classified a “Winter” or a “Summer”, some managers are Waterfall and some are Agile. But a born project manager is comfortable with different methodologies, whether the project is organized around a methodical Work Breakdown Structure, or if it is a free-form initiative driven with story points and Project Burn Up charts.
6. You enjoy risks. You enjoy managing them even more. In part it establishes the value of the project- what's worth doing if there's no risk involved? Potential risks keep you sharp and on your toes, and there's that great "home free" feeling when a risk is mitigated.
7. You don’t shirk from bad news. We’ve previously discussed the importance of communication within the project and how silence is deadly. It’s tough reporting the status of a project that has fallen off track to the Powers That Be, but you’ll tell it like it is.
8. You don’t punish the messenger, either. Sometimes you’re on the end of the bad news report. The worst mistake you can make is to take out your frustration on the people delivering the news – it accomplishes little and sets you up for a fall later if it makes team members reluctant to inform you of bad news in the future.
9. You like to win. Nobody likes to lose, but you take special joy in the success of a project, when all the planning and work pay off as you expected, and your abilities and drive are vindicated.
10. Finally, you drink coffee like it’s going out of style. Java is your lifeblood. You can’t function without it (and considering some of the health benefits linked to it, that’s not such a bad thing).

Disruptive Technologies Forecast

History has shown the impact of disruptive technologies is nothing the sniff at. Last week the McKinsey Global Institute released a report forecasting the financial effects of disruptive technologies over the next twelve years, and the results are impressive, to say the least.

These results are based on a variety of reasons. For example:

1. Mobile Internet: Through remote health monitoring, a potential cost reduction of 10-20% in the treatment of chronic diseases is possible.
2. Automation of Knowledge Work: Additional labor productivity could equal the output of 110 - 140 million full time workers.
3. Internet of Things: Could potentially drive productivity across $36 trillion in operating costs of industries including manufacturing, health care and mining.
4. Cloud: Potentially increase productivity by 15-20% across IT infrastructure, application development and packaged software.
5. Advanced Robotics: Potentially improve the lives of 50 million amputees and those with impaired mobility.
6. Autonomous or near autonomous vehicles: Could reduce traffic accident fatalities, saving 30,000 – 150,000 lives.
7. Next Generation Genomics: Extend and enhance lives through swifter disease detection and new drugs.
8. Energy Storage: From 40 - 100% of new vehicles sold in 2025 could be electric or hybrid.
9. 3-D Printing: Consumers might save 35-60% in costs per printed product, while enjoying options for customization.
10. Advanced Materials: Through nano-medicine, targeted drugs could be delivers to 20 million new cancer cases worldwide in 2025.
11. Advanced Oil and Gas Exploration and Recovery: Offers potential to supply an additional 3.6 billion – 6.2 billion oil-equivalent barrels of oil and gas annually by 2025.
12. Renewable Energy- Solar and Wind: Potential to avoid emissions of 1,00- million - 1,200 million tons of CO2 annually by 20025.

All in all, the future seems to be shaping up to be a wonderful place (potential robot overlords aside). If you'd like to learn about companies that are out to shake up the world (aside from us), take a gander at MIT's list of disruptive companies for 2013.

To the Internet and Beyond

Earlier this week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made waves with his announcement that the entire world would be online by 2020. Considering that the Internet user base grew about 400% between 2002 and 2012, his prediction isn't necessarily unrealistic.

The origin of the Internet can be traced back to the 1960s, to ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network), the world’s first operational packet switching network and the first to implement TCP/IP (the protocol used for computers to communicate with each other). The first message carried on ARPANET was “login”. It was sent from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute on October 29, 1969. However, a system error caused only the first two letters, “lo”, to be transmitted, making it the first ever Internet crash as well.

In 1991, the first website was published, Info.cern.ch, which ran on a NeXT computer at CERN. The site focused on the developing World Wide Web project, how pages could be built and how to find information on the Web. For nostalgia buffs, a copy of the original site (circa 1992) is available.

By 1995, all restrictions on the use of the Internet for commercial traffic were gone, paving the way for the Internet we know today. Of course, when the Internet first emerged, the public was a little confused about what it was for. Fortunately, there were videos like this to help out.

The Internet has come a long way since then, in the last ten years alone it's grown by over 550 million Web pages, not to mention connection speeds. Did you ever have to use a 300 baud modem? You have our sympathies.

The Automation Centre website circa 1997 (in an Internet Explorer 3 browser, no less) versus today.
A larger version is available.

What's Next?

The Internet is possibly the most disruptive technology to emerge since the printing press in 1450, and a successor of equal or greater impact is likely long in coming. But with the rapid growth of wireless infrastructure, mobile devices, applications and personalization, the relationship of the Internet and its users is changing.

The original experience was one of the user rooted at the terminal, hunting for information. Today, information is served to the user, at their convenience, through applications that deliver content based on the user's preferences, behavior and even their social relationships.

This experience will continue to change, as technology becomes more flexible and applications grow more intelligent. It's hard to imagine how the Internet could become much more adept at serving users the content they want, short of developing some sort of pro-active sentience, but how likely is that?

The Tom Sawyer of IT

"Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents."

- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

In Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, the young hero of the story manages to convince his friends to paint his Aunt Polly's fence for him, and what's more, to pay for the privilege.

A programmer at an as-yet-unnamed company apparently took a tip from Mr. Twain's juvenile delinquent and outsourced his own job to contractors in China, paying the contractors a fraction of his six-figure salary while he spent his day surfing the Web. This fellow's typical work schedule looked something like this:

• 9:00 a.m.: Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
• 11:30 a.m.: Take lunch
• 1:00 p.m.: Ebay time.
• 2:00 – ish p.m.: Social media time. Facebook and LinkedIn.
• 4:30 p.m.: End of day update e-mail to management.
• 5:00 p.m.: Go home

While he was certainly clever, he was also incredibly, dangerously irresponsible, as his yet-unnamed employer is described as an "U.S. critical infrastructure company". In order to outsource his work he provided access to his employer's VPN, even mailing his RSA key to the contractors via FedEx.

Considering that the developer's activity (or non-activity) spanned several months, it shows a surprising lack of oversight on the part of the company, particularly since it assessed him as one of their leading employees for the quality of his work.

Part of what allowed him to pull this off may have been a lack of direct supervision, if all his management asked from him was an end-of-day email recap. A more organic approach of having management touch base directly with the developer on an occasional, impromptu basis for brief explanations of his work, its status and progress, would have made it much harder for him to maintain his façade.

As well as helping managers stay on top of their teams, and keeping team members focused, this organic approach compels employees to describe their personal expectations for their work and deadlines, which they will be more invested in meeting.

As we’ve discussed before, tools can only go so far. Our own HR module offers a Web based employee directory and vacation tracking functions, but it can’t automate managers to personalize their communication with their employees. But while developing and maintaining an organic management culture isn’t easy, it can pay dividends in increased efficiencies and work quality.

Tom Sawyer's schemes led him into some perilous situations, including being stalked by a crazed murderer. The developer may have followed in the footsteps of his role model here as well. He was fired from his job, and considering the nature of his employer's services, his blithe provisioning of access to its network and databases to the Chinese contractors could have authorities breathing down his neck as well.

What Makes a Technology a Success?

The march of technology is a steady one, just look at how much the Internet has grown in ten years. But for some technologies, their time in the sun is a short period. The case in point, 3D television.

The darling of the Consumer Electronics Show in 2010 and 2011 was a practical no-show at the 2012 event. Why has 3D fizzled? Possibilities include a lack of quality 3D content (Too much “Clash of the Titans”, not enough “Avatar”), a relatively high price point for 3D capable televisions, and/or possibly the headache inducing fashion-challenging glasses users had to wear.

But the manufacturers shouldn't lose all hope. Heck, even Google fails to catch a Wave, sometimes. There’s still potential for growth and adoption, particularly as more content becomes available and the technology becomes more ubiquitous.

So, what does technology have to do to catch on? Being brand new or the only kid on the block can help, but it needs to be more than shiny and fresh to take hold. In order to succeed, a technology has to be/do three things:

1. It has to offer something meaningful. This is primarily what led 3D TV to fizzle. Right now it is more of a gimmick than a real advance in entertainment technology. This is due to the lack of content that leverages everything 3D can offer, and the implementation of the technology (the requirement to wear bulky, ugly glasses and occasional headaches and eyestrain suffered by viewers) doesn’t raise the level of entertainment enough to get people invested.
2. It has to be sticky. It has to offer something that users will keep coming back to. This is one of the reasons why Facebook stole the social media crown from MySpace (aside from an easier interface and much nicer layouts). It offered more hooks, more tools and features that members could use to participate in their online relationships.
3. There should be room for the technology to grow. This is a challenge facing 3D television, while there are ways the technology can improve in quality and polish the user experience, its ultimate function is singular, to present entertainment. Consider Facebook once again, which has grown from providing an online message board to providing targeted advertisement services, tools for finding recommendations, even helping users behind the scenes by shaping their search experience based on their relationships.

All of the above are reasons why Automation Centre has been in business for almost 20 years.

• Our products are meaningful. How much would it increase your efficiencies if you had a 100% paperless accounts payable system?
• We’re sticky. Seriously, how much easier can work be when you can manage projects in Outlook?
• Our products are always growing. Not only do our products scale with the organization, but our products are also consistently getting smarter and more integrated, both with each other and email, providing natural workflow opportunities. You can now drag-and-drop emails from your Outlook client to create tasks, project documents and support tickets in TrackerSuite.Net.

Paperless At Last

The realization of the paperless office began with the introduction of personal computers and word processors into the workplace, back in the 1980s. The benefits quickly became apparent, not only were electronic forms easier to generate and manage, but they eliminated storage issues, freed up resources and reduced costs. As time passed and technology improved, computers began to take on typical business operations, organizations began to transition to paperless accounts payable, time reporting, purchasing and more.

But the concept of the paperless office itself isn't new or even recent. Its origin can be traced all the way back to the 1940s. Like other predictions about the future, the paperless office envisioned in the pre-PC days was equal parts scientific speculation and Flash Gordon fantasy.

Dr. Vannevar Bush, the author of As We May Think in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic, described a device presciently close to the modern PC, which he called the "Memex".

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Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

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To his credit, Dr. Bush showed uncanny vision in describing the key functions and benefits that computers would offer business, even the concept of working remotely, all through a byzantine system of knobs, gears, pulleys, photoplates and microfilm that was the "Memex".

Too bad we all had to settle for these silly laptops and smartphones.

A Project Manager's Halloween

Happy Halloween! We hope you enjoy our comic.

Tracking the performance of a project portfolio to ensure that each project has the time and resources needed for success isn't easy, but our TrackerSuite.Net solution provides tools that can help you manage your project portfolio successfully, including risk profiling and tracking as well as project dashboard views, which you can surface in your preferred email client.

Saving the Spectrum

As technology creates new opportunities, it seems to create new problems as well. The rapidly expanding use of wireless broadband via smartphones, tablets and laptops is creating a strain on the capacity of the airwaves, a phenomena the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has termed “spectrum crunch". According to studies conducted by the FCC, “demand for mobile broadband service is likely to outstrip spectrum capacity in the near-term. Without action to address this spectrum crunch, service quality is likely to suffer and prices are likely to rise.”

Fortunately, a group of academic researchers appear to have discovered a solution, one which doesn’t require significant reworking or a massive infrastructure overhaul, that will at least forestall spectrum crunch for some time, by solving a common traffic-clogging problem- dropped packets.

When a packet is dropped, due to interference or traffic congestion, there isn’t just a delay in transmission, but additional back-and-forth traffic to replace the dropped packet, exacerbating speed and connectivity issues in a high-use network. The technology developed by the researchers transforms the way data is sent.

Instead of sending packets, it sends algebraic equations that describe series of packets. So if a packet goes missing, instead of asking the network to resend it, the receiving device can solve for the missing one itself. Since the equations involved are simple and linear, the processing load on a phone, router, or base station is negligible…

A Bandwidth Breakthrough, Technology Review

Researchers tested the system in several locations, including Wi-Fi networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, where 2 percent of packets are typically lost, the results were astounding. Using their new system, they found a normal bandwidth of one megabit per second was boosted to 16 megabits per second.

While this new technology is remarkable, the researchers are hesitant to label it a cure for spectrum crunch. However, it may forestall some of the issues looming with the growth of broadband, providing time for the inefficiencies in the current system to be addressed.

The tactic of maximizing the use of infrastructure has been the product strategy of Automation Centre since our start in 1994, developing solutions that leveraged email clients including Lotus Notes and Outlook for project management, time reporting, resource management and more. Considering the increasing use of email (currently 294 BILLION emails are sent each day, more than 4x the population of the entire Earth) it looks like we’re on the right track.