First of all, let’s get the terminology correct! Many people get confused between what the difference is between a VDU (Visual Display Unit), a monitor and DSE (Display Screen Equipment). Not to put too fine a point on it, there isn’t a difference. Each of these terms means exactly the same things – a screen which is part of a computer that shows a combination of text, numbers and graphics. To bring it completely up to date, it may also these days show video and play music!

Many people suffer ill effects simply because of the way they use their PC. These things can be alleviated by the introduction of ergonomics (see previous article on the subject).

However, any employer is responsible for carrying out certain things – BY LAW. Under the Health and Safety At Work Act 1974, employers are obliged to do certain things. Additionally, in the UK there is another law and it is called the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992. It is a bit of a mouthful but it is an important law (some small changes were made in 2002 so you may hear it referred to as that as well). In general, the obligations of an employer are as follows:

• Assess and decrease any risk from Visual Display Units
• Ensure that the workstations meet safety requirements – these rules cover screens, software, covering screens, keyboards, desks and chairs
• Make sure that the working day is planned so that there is the opportunity for people to take breaks from using their PC and do something else
• They should arrange for you to go and take an eye test if one is needed
• They must provide information on health and safety so that the employees can check that the policies are being implemented properly

Many people believe that these rules only apply if you are traveling to work every day and working in the premises of your employer. Not true! If you are working from home then your employer must ensure that things are done properly there as well – in terms of health and safety at least. If you are self-employed, however, you can ignore the above – at your peril!

Another thing that many people believe is that it is the law that you are allowed to take a ten minute break from working at a computer every hour. This is not so – there is no legal limit restricting an employer here. However, you do have the right to take breaks from using a computer and these do NOT have to be rest breaks. It is up to your employer to give you the opportunity to do different types of work while not at your workstation.

There is guidance from the Health And Safety Executive about this. For example, the HSE suggest that it is much better for health if short breaks (of five to ten minutes) are taken each hour, rather than say fifteen or twenty minutes every two hours.

For employees who are disabled, then the employer must ensure that reasonable equipment is provided for you to use. This could mean software that enlarges the content of the screen if you are visually impaired. It could mean voice recognition software or specialist keyboards.

Believe it or not, not a single study has shown that there is a link between damage to the eyes and the use of computers! It is probably because the screen is so bright that your eyes feel tired after the end of a session on your computer. This could be helped by reducing the brightness of the screen or by asking your employer to buy an anti-glare screen, although the need for these is not as great now since the introduction of liquid crystal screens.

This aside, you have the right to a FREE eye test if you are a heavy user of computers at work. There is the possibly of more free tests if that is what the optometrist recommends and your employer must purchase a basic pair of glassed for you if it is proven that you need them especially for work.

A number of people using computers in the workplace say they are stressed out. This is often not the VDU itself but the pressure of work! If an employee does not feel able to control the system in which they work or feel up to the job then technostress (see previous article on the subject) can kick in! Employers can help with this – by making sure that they give their employees the correct training. In addition, they must take responsibility for making sure that the tasks that are given match the abilities of their employees.

In January 2009 the iPad was introduced to the world, the latest product in the extremely popular range of Apple products. The iPad is a revolutionary piece of equipment. The tablet computer is hoped to be made available for public release in March 2009.

The iPad at only half an inch thin is a product which Apple had been trying to create for years. Finally on the 27th January 2009 the director of Apple Inc. Steve Jobs showcased it. The tablet runs off the iPhone OS, which allows the tablet to be compatible with over 140,000 apps currently in the iStore. The technological device uses an LED-backlight with an LCD screen; it makes use of the popular virtual keyboard to allow data entry.

The iPad allows users to experience print, photo, video, audio, internet browsing and many other multimedia functions.

It uses Safari as a method of safe and secure internet browsing for the user. The touch-screen capabilities of the device allows websites to be experienced at a whole new level, with the ability to zoom on top and scroll with a simple flick of a finger.

Image via CrunchBase

The device welcomes photo users to view their collections on a high quality screen showing crisp pictures. The software allows editing direct from the screen as well as importing pictures via the separate camera connection kit.

As expected the iPad integrates seamlessly with iTunes and thus the iStore.

The tablet is likely to come in three versions; 16GB, 32GB or the 64GB version with prices starting at $499 from Apple direct.

The device offers a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack, a microphone, speaker, a docking port and SIM capabilities with the 3G version. It also offers an Accelerometer, digital compass, an ambient light sensor and GPS capabilities with the 3G version.

The tablet is likely to revolutionise the business market due to the iPad allowing you to have a compact computer, with iPod and iPhone features built in.

Why was I disappointed? I was thinking with the webcams in many laptops, netbooks and even desktop PCs that often  go unused, a device like the iPad would be perfect for having video chats. In hind sight, perhaps holding a device with a camera while you are conversing is not such a good idea. Apple probably had great reasons for leaving the camera out; time will tell if they decide to include a webcam in future generations of the iPad. I had also hoped that the device would be closer to a laptop than the iPhone, but Apple was once again far brighter than I am on the subject. With 75,000,000 iPhone and iPod Touches shipped worldwide, that is 75,000,000 users that can already use an iPad — brilliant!

Among the pundits, are those who find the iPad a very nice device, and still others who can only complain about the device. I would like to focus on a few of the criticisms I have frequently read that make no sense to me. Ultimately, the iPad will not be for everyone — some will want to use it and others will want more from the device . I think that the two camps can peacefully coexist, but the proselytization of one camp over the other is not necessary. It’s not a holy war; it’s consumption versus production.

One of the frequent complaints I read is that the iPad does not support Adobe’s Flash software. For years, I have found Adobe Flash a hindrance to surfing the web. I have my choice of browsers, which for the most part can view all web sites equally — that’s why we have standards — but to view certain web sites, I have to use a Flash plug-in. Flash makes for another avenue of attack when viewing web pages. Granted, there are many avenues of attack without Flash, but why add another?

HTML5 is the next generation of web standards that will make things like Adobe’s Flash plug-in obsolete. Today, there are numerous browsers that can already view certain aspects of HTML5 and make web sites much more interactive without the need for plug-ins. I have begun using the new mobile Google Voice web site, which is built on HTML5 programming, on my iPhone and can tell you that it can do some amazing things. Using simple coding without the need for additional plug-ins, performance is increased, surface area of attack is maintained at a basic level, and web standards are maintained. After all, we are going to use an iPad to “hold the Internet in your hands as you surf it” (per Scott Forstall, Apple’s Senior Vice President of iPhone Software).

To me, that’s the biggest benefit of the iPad — holding it in my hands. I like to read in bed. Unfortunately for me, I like to read Internet news in bed, thereby necessitating some form of computer to surf the Internet to read news. I have been using tablet PCs for many years to accomplish this, and while functional, using a 4 pound laptop to read in bed is not very comfortable. Along came netbooks, which promised to give me a similar experience to a laptop, but in a lighter and less expensive package. Yet, you can’t fold most netbooks in a slate fashion, like I can with tablet PCs, and their weight, while about half most tablet PCs still left something to be desired.

The argument for netbooks against an iPad is that you can use the netbook to produce content, whereas, an iPad is for consuming content. So now, it’s more important to be a producer of content rather than a consumer of content? That’s the “geek” argument? There will always be more consumers than producers — that’s how a market system works. Apple was looking for a way to get into the hands of the masses, hence the iPad, a device for consuming media, and the low starting price, under $500. Steve Jobs took a jab at netbooks in his keynote address, and maybe he overtly targeted them for a reason, but the reality is, netbooks and the iPad are not similar devices.

Image via CrunchBase

As regular notebook computers continue to decline in price, the netbook market will continue to be squeezed into an ever smaller niche, whereas the iPad has created a new niche for itself with lots of room to grow. The iPad is an innovative device that may turn the computing industry on its ear, given time. For now, the iPad is a new gadget that will surely invite many computer aficionados, amateurs, novices and experts alike, to join the Apple world and surf the web from the other side.

Cover via Amazon

Executive Summary

Darkness, what does this word mean to you?  Darkness would have been our surroundings had electricity not been invented. Darkness could have been part of our daily routine had technology not advanced. Darkness is not a term of our life’s description, thanks to the innovations over the last hundred years. Nicholas Carr, gives insight into the progression of both electricity and technology in his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. The objective of the book was to compare the advancements of both utilities and give the reader an understanding of the future in technology.

Technology has evolved to a point where anyone can take advantage of the innovations created, and make use of options available. For example, Carr explains how Edison invented the light bulb and the grid system which is how the Internet is assessable today. Scientists have created computer and coding systems for these computers to operate. Today, all we have to do is use these tools that have been set for us, to innovate and make our future easier.

People like Shawn Fanning creator of Napster, Steve Jobs with Apple, Bill Gates with Microsoft, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen with YouTube, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin founders of Google have all become innovators of our time. There are many more multimillion dollar companies that began in garages, by ordinary citizens that had an idea to make a task more efficient.

Image via Wikipedia

Creating a web page is simple, and opening a business simply takes courage. Combining these ideas is the new way to become successful. Of course, hard work and dedication are always needed to have a prosperous business, but the consumer market is vast thanks to the Internet. Many businesses that operate via the Internet, need not have an actual inventory, but simply operate as median, shipping products from manufacturers to customers.

There have been questions of whether computing innovations are taking away potential jobs, but in reality, job opportunities are endless if one can simply utilize the Internet. Just recently, I have learned to program in several different languages. Programming is very simple to do, and can actually be learned by purchasing a book, and practicing. I have created two sets of software to make my studying habits easier. This simple way of thinking, enables more innovations to arise.

            In conclusion, the advances in technology have given opportunities to those with access to the Internet, it is up to the users to take advantage of it. Many scientists believe that computing will continue to surpass all expectations and become a tool, no one can live without.

The Top Ten Things to be Learned

1.      Everyone should be as innovative as possible.

2.     Understanding small businesses can succeed through the help of the Internet is useful.

3.     To become successful, one should utilize innovations and inventions of the past.

4.     The Internet is a tool for us to use, don’t be afraid to use it.

5.     Think of the future and build on it.

6.     Learn from others; allowing you to make less mistakes.

7.     When sales begin to decline, change your strategy.

8.     Average people do amazing things.

9.     Money is available; you just have to have the right idea.

10. A great education will not guarantee success, a great mind will.

Full Summary – The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

Darkness, what does this word mean to you?  Darkness would have been our surroundings had electricity not been invented. Darkness could have been part of our daily routine had technology not advanced. Darkness is not a term of our life’s description, thanks to the innovations over the last hundred years. Nicholas Carr, gives insight into the progression of both electricity and technology in his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. The objective of the book was to compare the advancements of both utilities and give the reader an understanding of the future in technology.

Many believe that electricity is an invention that stands alone; however, Carr believes that electricity is a derivative of technology. Carr claims that technology actually began its advancement when the first waterwheel was invented by Henry Burden in 1851. This waterwheel, which was stationed off of the Wynantskill River, stood about sixty foot tall, weighed nearly 250 tons and produced approximately 500 horsepower of energy. Not only did Burden invent the waterwheel, but he also invented the cultivator and later went on to invent the Burden Horseshoe Machine. This horseshoe machine turned bars of iron into finished shoes at the rate of one per second. Burden also created a design for a steamboat which reflects the ferries and cruise ships used today.

One of the most known inventors that aided the development of electricity is Thomas Edison. The strides toward Edison’s inventions began when he was camping in the summer of 1878 when he witnessed a crew of workers struggling with manual drills. Edison asked, “Why cannot the power of yonder river be transmitted to these men by electricity?” Electricity at that time had not been harnessed on anything but small scale tasks. Edison quickly turned the idea of helping the crew he saw while camping, into the idea of powering cities. Edison eventually set up the Edison Electric Light Company to provide electricity to homes and offices of New York City. He then began to fulfill this promise of lighting homes and offices across American, not by lighting each town individually, but by devising a grid that would allow all those offices and homes to be connected together.

At this point, light bulbs still had not been invented. Edison was testing electricity by using an arc lamp which worked much like today’s light bulb, by sending a naked current across a gap between two charged iron rods. The lighting produced by these arc lamps were so bright that they were not able to be used in rooms or enclosed spaces. Within two years, Edison had invented the “Edison light bulb”. Eventually, Edison had created generating stations that allowed sections of towns and plants to produce electricity which would soon span across America lighting homes and offices through the grid system.

The Internet evolved much the same as electricity did, through a grid system; therefore, computing is considered a utility just as electricity has for many years. Economists consider both electricity and the Internet GPTs or general purpose technologies, which is a platform for other tools or applications. Both utilities have enormous efficiency over a great distance using a network-like grid, and most importantly, they both achieve scale economies of central supply.

Businesses have invested trillions of dollars in technological advancements, and have housed systems on-site, in their own plants and offices and have maintained them with their own staffs of technicians. However, businesses are making a change towards connecting to the grid and taking advantage of those benefits. Instead of purchasing more hardware and software to add to their collection, they are utilizing the Internet’s capabilities.

There are many types of free software that is offered on the Internet, and these sites allow those with accounts to save their information and return to work at anytime. This allows companies the savings of not investing in additional memory devices or software, since offers on the Internet are equivalent to those which the business would purchase.  Because of this idea of Internet hosting equivalence, sales will soon be impacted for many businesses such as Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, IBM and many others as computing becomes more centralized.

Much like the inventions that led to the harness of electricity, there have been several innovations to exemplify the utility of computing. The first invention that impacted computing was by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1845, when he constructed the telegraph system that allowed information to be communicated instantaneously across great distances.

Next was Herman Hollenth’s creation of the punch card tabular in the 1880s, which responded to the imbalance between technologies processing matter and energy and processing information. 

Then, in 1959,  when America Airlines President, Cyrus Rowlett Smith, launched a project to build a system that would automate the making of flight reservations and the issuing of tickets. This system, called Sabre, used two IBM’s mainframe computers and sixteen data-storage devices along with more than 1,000 terminals for ticket agents, was built by about 200 technicians in approximately five years. The system was introduced in 1965 and processed about 40000 reservations and 20000 tickets a day.

Soon after, Bank of America unveiled the Electronic Recording Machine Accounting (ERMA) computer in 1960 and within two years had approximately thirty-two of these ERMAs processing about five million checking and savings accounts.

The innovation and movement towards hosting online came about in the 1980s when personal computer owners purchased modems and connected to phone lines to use central databases like CompuServe and Prodigy.

In the 1990s, fiber optic lines were ran and when the web was first accessible, users went and browsed to read information much like looking at a magazine as Carr put it. If those users wanted to work, they closed the web and launched programs that were on their hard drives like Word.

            These innovations helped to create business opportunities on the web. Many entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the innovations the web has to offer, and those that access the web every day. One of the first companies to lead the revolution towards the Internet was America Online when it popularized the online community soon after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in the 1990s. With the boost of web surfing, Microsoft formed the Internet Explorer browser in the 1995.

Many have heard of the company, Napster, which was created in 1999 by Shawn Fanning, an eighteen year old college dropout. Napster allowed people to share music over the Internet by scanning their hard drive for those that installed the software and allowing others to download the shared music. By 2001, Napster had over twenty-six million users that spent more than ten million hours a month exchanging music. This music sharing proved that the Internet could allow computer to communicate over a network successfully. The only problem with Napster’s music sharing was that this service was illegal.

Image via CrunchBase

Another company on the cutting edge of technological advancement is Apple. Apple introduced the iMac in Paris in 2004, which resembles a flat television. The commercial advertisement used the slogan, “Where did the computer go?” Basically, the iMac is introducing a new interface that will replace our computer in the near future. This new computer said to simply be an interface that users will use to access the Internet. A ‘personal computer’ will simply be terminal to the Internet, and users will not need the drivers that are used today. Hard drives and other input devices will be an object of the past for personal computers. All information will be available online which will increase mobility.  The functionality of the iPhone is a perfect example of what the future computer may resemble. Applications will allow users to access almost everything on the Internet at the ease of a push on the screen.

In the last 30 years, Microsoft has had sales of nearly fifty billion dollars, annual profits of nearly twelve billion, and thirty billion of cash in the bank! With many innovations of word processing to web browsing, Microsoft was an important leader in popularizing the Internet. However, on June 15, 2006, Bill Gates announced that he would be stepping down from his managerial role at Microsoft, and he retired in 2008. The book explains that this “marks a turning point in the brief but tumultuous history of computing, and the future of computing belongs to the new utilitarians.”

Another business owner, Marc Benioff founder of Salesforce.com created a site that offered software-as-a-service. In 2002, the firm’s sales reached fifty million dollars. By 2007, the sales hit a record of 500 million dollars. Salesforce.com offered companies the chance to have a no maintenance software hosting. The company simply logged onto the Internet and visited Salesforce.com to begin working. Upgrades and maintenance was performed by the site itself. The cost for companies was a mere fifty bucks a month. Today, many other companies have used Benioff’s idea of virtual business. From ordering pizza online to purchasing clothing, shopping online has grown in popularity and has coined the term convenience. For the most part, anything can be purchased online and shipped right to a consumer’s door.

The Internet has opened a chance for online communities and game development to popularize. Second Life, an online game, is a three dimensional world that uses avatars to maneuver within the society. This game is unlike any other, meaning there is no winning or losing, there just exists. The book explains that players become citizens and within the society; they do whatever they want from scrolling down the street, to flying through the air. They speak to other players, shop for clothing, take classes or business conferences, dance at nightclubs, and even have sex afterwards. This idea of living virtually has found its way into many homes across America. If an Internet user is not addicted to a game such as Second Life, he or she has at least viewed a video on the notorious site, YouTube.

A company that is continuing to lead our innovations in technology is Google. Google has taken an important position in the advancement of technology, especially in terms of the Internet. The process that Google uses to send a user’s requests to its database, acquire the request, and return the user with the appropriate information, is an intricate process. The process begins when a user enters a key word into the search engine. This key word or data is sent to a database of billions of web pages at one of Google’s many sites around the world. Once the data is received at the database facility, servers sort through these web pages and find several thousand web pages that are most relevant to the data the user requested. These web pages are arranged according to relevance and sent back to the user. This extraordinary transition is used by way of cables; however, the most amazing part of this process is the time it takes for the search to complete. This entire process is complete in a matter of seconds.

Google purchased thirty acres of land owned by a government agency along the banks of the Columbia River in The Dallas, Oregon area for nearly two million dollars. Two warehouses, each about the size of a football field, occupy the site. These warehouses are data-processing plants that hold tens of thousands of computers working together as a single machine. According to the book, “dozens of other server farms are in covert locations around the world.” Altogether, Google’s warehouses have nearly a half million computers. Each center has clusters of custom-built server computers which are homemade PCs with cheap microprocessors and hard drives that were purchased from manufacturers. These machines run a free version of the Linux operating system that Google’s engineers modified. The software that links the servers in a cluster, and the numerous clusters in all the centers has been kept secret. What is known is that in the database is a copy of practically the entire Internet, and using the spidering and creeping approach, Google updates the database link by link. If and when one microprocessor stops working, the system knows to route around the failing machine. Experts say there is no match for Google’s computing system. To add to Google’s advantage over other search engines and businesses using the Internet, Google purchased YouTube on October 9, 2006.

Image via CrunchBase

YouTube began in a garage located in Silicon Valley by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Yawad Karem. These three guys wanted to have a simple file-sharing site, where users could had a free way to store, share and view short homemade videos. A phase was ready in May 2005 where they were rewarded with a $3.5 million dollars from a venture capital firm to begin their final product. By December, YouTube site was official. Ten months later, YouTube sold to Google for approximately $1.65 billion dollars, making their sixty employees worth about 27.5 million dollars according to market value. When Google purchases YouTube, 100 million video clips were being viewed, and approximately 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day.

Not only had Google purchased assets like YouTube, but Google has many applications including Gmail, Google Documents, iGoogle, Google Earth and so much more.  Google Earth is one application that has encountered a lot of controversy.  One opposition to the idea of Google Earth is the military. In 2003, the department of defense declared an objective to “fight the net” with Information Operations Roadmap. In 2004, a war on junk email was launched to stop the robot networks or bot-nets. Spammers would use bot-net to send millions of messages simultaneously and because they funneled through email programs of average citizens, they slipped past spam filters. According to the book, 10%-25% of all computers on the Internet are infected with bot-net viruses. Zombie networks are responsible for 80% of all spam. Bot-net can embed in the hard drive and records keystrokes and gather all personal data.

In 2006, a bot-net was intercepted that contained credit card numbers and passwords for bank accounts which came from 800 personal computers over only a month. 225,000 personal computers are infected with bot-net viruses every day.

May 2, 2006, American blog publishing firm Six Apart was a victim of DDOS, distributed denial of services, within minutes of attack, servers crashed, causing the blogs of ten million of its customers to vanish from the Internet. The attack was not aimed at Six Apart but at an Israeli firm named Blue Security. Blue Security was the center of attack because it sold a service to combat spam. The bot-net got so bad that Blue Security surrendered on May 17 stating, “We cannot take the responsibility for an ever escalating cyber war through our continued operations.” They closed down their business and its CEO went into hiding.

People can be found by information they post on the Internet even if their real names are not used. The vast majority of Americans can be identified by name and address using only the zip code, birthday, and gender. This was found by the case of Thelma Arnold when AOL released its database information to the public. Each of its users was given a random number, and Thelma’s was 4417749. These numbers tracked the keywords searched in the AOL engine. Within hours of searching, Thelma’s name and address was easily linked to the number AOL had given her information.

In conclusion, the book discussed the future of computing. The main discussion was with Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, about their dream of what their search engine will do in the coming years. According to Page and Brin, artificial intelligence is the main goal of those behind the future of Google. Google wants to link the human brain with the computer to share its search engine. The author also spoke about advancements Microsoft and other Computer Scientists want for the future of computing. In 2004, Microsoft was developing technology that will turn skin into a new kind of electrical conduit or bus that can be used to connect a network of devices coupled to a single body.

According to Carr, in 2020, Google’s dream may come true. In 1961, when computer scientist were just beginning to get computers to communicate with one another, John McCarthy, an expert in networking, stated, “computing may someday be organized as a public utility, just as the telephone system is organized as a public utility.” Today, computer programmers are trying to create a new language to replace HTML to allow computer to read and see data on its own. The idea of the human brain linking to the computer may come by making the people more machines like instead of the machine more human like.

Personal Commentary

            Reading The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, made me realize how much money is being invested in computing. This book also helped me to realize the business opportunities that are available for anyone willing to take advantage of the network. These opportunities were taken by average citizens that later became multimillionaires by simply pursuing an idea. Finally, I have learned that people all over the world are utterly addicted to the Internet. People find virtual life more interesting than the life they live in. Social networking sites, dating sites, and three dimensional games are booming, because society is becoming addicted to the idea of hiding behind a computer.

            “I’ll apply what I’ve learned in this book in my career by becoming a computer scientist. I am minoring in Computer Science, but after reading this book, I have realized that computing is something I want to take advantage of. I have found a niche for programming, and I have always wanted to have my own business. Maybe I can combine these two ideas and launch a Web based business.

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Contact Info: To contact the author of this summary/review, please email Amira Makke at amira.makke@selu.edu.

David C. Wyld (dwyld@selu.edu) is the Robert Maurin Professor of Management at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is a management consultant, researcher/writer, and executive educator. His blog, Wyld About Business, can be viewed at http://wyld-business.blogspot.com/. He also has a book summary/review blog that is a collection of his students’ works at http://wyld-about-books.blogspot.com/. 

While various authors have addressed the notion of computing becoming a utility, the concept crystallized in the work of Nicholas Carr. Carr first advanced the concept in 2005 in his Sloan Management Review article, “The End of Corporate Computing.” Carr continued developing and discussing his ideas on the subject over the next three years, leading to the release in 2008 of his book on the subject, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google. All of this is not new, as companies whose business model was to sell computing instead of computers dates back to pioneers such as payroll processor ADP and to Ross Perot, who left IBM in 1962 to found EDS (Electronic Data Systems).

n of the last century. Before the rise of the electric utility, businesses and individuals had to generate their own power to run their machines. However, when large electric producers began generating power and delivering it via transmission lines into factories, buildings, and homes, self-generation of power waned due to the cost-efficiency and convenience of having reliable electricity on demand. At the turn of the century, for manufacturing plants and other large facilities to have electrical power, they had to generate their own electricity through small generators or be located near a water source that could operate a waterwheel.

Image via Wikipedia

Take, for instance a brewery operating a hundred years ago. As Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels famously put it: “They had to be experts in electricity to brew beer. Something is off there. These guys couldn’t wait to dump their own generators and start to use electricity from other companies.” So, just as turn-of-the-century manufacturers had to produce all their electricity on site, today’s organizations in the private and public sector historically have had to own all of their information technology (IT) resources-until now.

However, like electricity, IT assets are not used equally or continuously. Overall, research has shown that, as computing power has indeed grown far cheaper and more plentiful, utilization rates for IT resources have, in fact, plummeted. Nicholas Carr’s research reported that quite surprisingly, overall, corporate servers typically use less than a third of their processing capacity (and much of the time, they are simply not being used). Likewise, much of a typical organization’s storage capacity is either unused or being “wasted” by unnecessary redundancy. An IBM study showed that desktop computers in organizations were even less utilized-with an average utilization rate of just 5 percent! Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Susan Cramm argues that this under-utilization comes as a result of not properly using existing IT resources and unnecessary spending on new IT resources to ensure even more overcapacity and even greater under-utilization, compounding the problem even more.

All of this adds up to a great deal of waste-an over-investment in IT resources-and all those dollars being tied up in unnecessary hardware, software, and the manpower it takes to monitor, maintain, and constantly upgrade and update those resources which serve as a drain on not just individual firms, but the economy as a whole. For large organizations, these IT investments-both in capital costs and operating expenditures-represent a significant level of commitment to providing the computing resources necessary for operations. Yet, traditionally, IT has been viewed as a capital expense. With ready access to credit, the cost of acquiring technology could be written off over a period of years. Today however, with shrinking budgets, companies are increasingly looking to cut their IT costs-not just the up-front infrastructure costs, but also the personnel, software, and energy costs necessary to maintain and support that level of internal IT.

Many are now increasingly looking at a pay-as-you-go approach to information technology expenditures. This means not just a strategic change, but a shift in the mindset of many-from viewing IT and its infrastructure as a fixed, capital expense to seeing it as a variable cost. By only paying for the computing power they actually use, cloud computing, for most organizations, can represent a significant overall cost savings. The more organizations keep IT in-house, the more expensive-and difficult-they will find it to attract and retain qualified IT staff.

This situation is replicated, and even magnified, when it comes to the public sector. The simple fact is that IT costs not just the government, but all of us who support it through our tax dollars, much more than it should due to the inefficient structure of today’s information technology model. With all of the unused computing capacity, the stage has been set for cloud computing to develop.

Another driver toward the technology possibility of computing as a utility-and cloud computing-is to be found in the trend toward what the analyst firm Gartner labeled as the “industrialization” of information technology. There is no doubt that IT has become standardized today, with “commoditized” hardware that underpins the Internet and data centers today. Former IBM expert Irving Wladawsky-Berger believes that this standardization is key, in that, “for computing to reach a higher level,” he says, “its cells had to be commoditised (sp).” There is also far more harmonization than at any point perhaps in the history of computing, with common software, file, and document formats that no longer present the “Mac vs. PC” incompatibility issues. Some have compared the possibilities that come from such standardization to those offered when Henry Ford mastered the art of assembly-line manufacturing to provide lower-cost, standardized outputs that made cars and a whole hosts of products available at reasonable costs. Indeed, the concept of “modularity” and interchangeable parts has been around since the early days of computing, with common parts used in programming (through the use and reuse of subroutines) and standards constantly emerging. In fact, it has been said each generation rediscovers the power of interchangeable parts, making cloud computing “a 21st century version of centralized mainframe computing.”

Certainly, as with electricity, there are cost efficiencies to be gained from centralizing and industrializing IT – through better capacity utilization, economies of scale, and cost savings/sharing (akin to the cost differential of a plant having its own small electrical generator versus the giant, centralized generators operated by an electrical utility firm). Instead of buying, operating, and maintaining IT functions on their own internal servers and data centers, organizations can instead today opt to purchase this capacity and services from cloud providers-often at a far lower cost and perhaps with more capabilities than their own internal systems. They can buy these services over the Internet from companies specializing in IT – at a lower cost than running an in-house system.

Such industrialization of information technology, built upon massive economies of scale, may well revolutionize the very structure of the computer industry and how IT resources are owned and housed. Traditionally, when it comes to software, IT managers had to decide whether to “build” or “buy” what was needed for operations. In contrast today, the choice is complicated by adding two new options-whether to build with open source or to “rent” through Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.

The move to cloud computing will ultimately be a sourcing decision, and for public and private sector organizations, there will be operations that are too critical-at the heart of one’s core business-to outsource and place outside of one’s control. As Nicholas Carr recently commented, “One of the key challenges for corporate IT departments, in fact, lies in making the right decisions about what to hold onto and what to let go.”  As outsourcing grows, more and more computing functions will be shifted to outside, often outsize providers. Indeed, Intel has projected that by 2012, a quarter of all its server chip sales will be for machines to be placed in such “mega-data centers.”

There has been a long-term pendulum swinging between centralized and personalized computing. In other words, we have seen periods where computing power, data, and programs have been held on a major, centralized platform, and we have also seen periods where that power has resided on one’s desktop-or today, literally in the palm of your hand. We may well be heading, in a way, “back to the future” as the pendulum swings again. We have seen computing cycle from a highly vertical structure in the mainframe era of the 1960s and 1970s to an increasingly distributed, horizontal model of computing. This latter era began with the introduction of PCs in the 1980s through the next three decades with the explosion of the web and the proliferation of mobile devices. In the horizontal model of computing, it was important to distinguish between hardware, software, networking, and support services, and as such, entire industries grew and proliferated around each element of computing. However, under the cloud model-where we tie into the cloud-there is a move back toward a more vertical model of computing. Because as cloud computing features IT as a service, as The Economist magazine recently characterized the situation, “in a world of services it often does not make sense to think of hardware and software separately.”

Gordon Haff recently categorized the utility analogy as “an intriguing and big argument,” but one that ultimately will encounter a great deal of resistance from organizations (and their IT departments) that will have security and compliance issues which will cause them to retain computing resources and functions in house. Besides those issues, there are also other trade-offs for treating computing as a utility and moving to a more centralized computing model. Certainly, under cloud computing, while IT gains from better efficiencies, utilization, and manageability, that same centralization could inhibit the ability to innovate in the IT area by tying in users to larger and larger standardized systems.

Simply put then, when organizations can procure the same level of computing power and like-power (and compatible) software applications from outside providers as they get from their in-house resources for less (and perhaps for free), then companies and even public sector agencies will turn to the utility model and obtain more and more of their computing from the cloud. Nicholas Carr stated the cloud case very succinctly by saying that , quite simply: “It makes computing a heck of a lot less expensive.” Thus, the stage has been set for cloud computing to emerge as a new model for delivering information technology to individuals, organizations, and government agencies.

Writing in Forbes, Russ Daniels recently posited that: “The early 21st century is like the early 20th century, in that we are at the beginning of a new economic paradigm. This time, however, the engine of growth will not be manufacturing, but information.”  Yet, with this new age come new uncertainties. In her 2002 book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, Carlota Perez described the “techno-economic” paradigm of technological innovation that has occurred historically. Once a major new technology emerges-be it trains, the telephone, or electrical power-eventually these disruptive innovations become thought of as “utilities”-becoming stabilizing forces for a new order for business and the economy. What is “different” about this time and the revolution in computing that is under way is that there will likely not be a stable period coming from the disruptively innovative technology forming the model of computing as a utility. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2008, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison commented that:

“The historical pattern-disruption followed by stabilization-has itself been disrupted. A new kind of infrastructure is evolving, built on the sustained exponential pace of performance improvements in computing, storage, and bandwidth. Because the underlying technologies are developing continuously and rapidly, there is no prospect for stabilization … making equilibrium a distant memory.”

As some commentators have pointed out, past technological innovations have created far more jobs than those they have destroyed. However, as old media is being supplanted by new media, new media companies have mostly remained very small, with many being “Mom and Pop” or even one person in nature. And so, with more information technology being shifted to the cloud-and more internal IT roles being outsourced to external providers-it is likely that we will see fewer IT jobs overall. And, as Nicholas Carr recently pointed out, from a public policy perspective, this IT revolution is failing to create middle-class jobs to replace the ones that will inevitably be taken away. Further, he believes-as do others-that outsourcing IT could likely become off-shoring IT for many cloud providers, thus taking the jobs and revenue from cloud computing outside of the country entirely. For certain areas of the country, like the Pacific Northwest, cloud computing may mean a veritable economic boom, as companies from Amazon to Google to Microsoft have moved to place their mammoth cloud data centers in areas with abundant water supplies and relatively inexpensive electrical utility costs.

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David C. Wyld (dwyld@selu.edu) is the Robert Maurin Professor of Management at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is a management consultant, researcher/writer, and executive educator. His most recent work is “Moving to the Cloud: An Introduction to Cloud Computing in Government,” by David C. Wyld. It is a research monograph published by The IBM Center for the Business of Government, Washington, DC in November 2009. The complete report is available for free to download in PDF format at:   http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/WyldCloudReport.pdf.   

Looking into the immediate horizon, one can well imagine that, in five to ten years, we may not speak of “the cloud” or “cloud computing” anymore. This is because using what we now regard as cloud-based services-for applications, for storage, for e-mail, etc.-may simply become the way things are done. Just as today we no longer can tell if a phone call is from an analog or a cell phone, in the very near future-sooner than most think-we may no longer be able to know-or care-whether the program we are using or the data we are accessing resides on our desktop, our laptop, our cell phone, or somewhere in the cloud (likely a data center in Oregon or Washington State).

How will all of this unfold? How long will it take? Where can government take the lead-and where will it lag? Will cloud computing replace 10, 20, 50, 75, or 80 percent of what we typically think of as the information technology (IT) function in organizations? Many believe that this will not be an overnight transformation. With the entrenched investments, people, and ways of in-house IT, Dave Girouard, Google’s President of Enterprise Computing, put it, “It will be a draining of the pond.”  After all, as the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Henry Sienkiewicz recently stated, in government IT: “We have been good at throwing hardware and resources at things, but the ebb and flow of the cloud is a lot different for us both as providers and as users.”

It is unlikely that government agencies will move critical data sets and applications to public cloud environments anytime soon. However, there is likely to be rapid growth in cloud computing hosted in private cloud environments, with many hosted on-site for governments by vendors/service providers in hybrid cloud arrangements.

Ten Predictions for the Cloud-Enabled Future of Government Information Technology

1.     Cloud computing will take off at the local and state levels through mostly rogue, “under the radar” initiatives over the next few years.

2.     At the federal level, there will be a coordinated move to cloud computing, but with inevitable tension between agencies.

3.     There will be two to three incidents a year worldwide with potentially massive security breaches, involving much media attention and attendant calls for greater regulation and oversight of cloud providers.

4.     There will be much cooperation between private sector firms (seeking to be cloud service providers) and government agencies, with far more data and applications than expected today transitioning to the cloud over the next decade.

5.     Budget pressures will continue to drive more and more government IT to hybrid and even public clouds, as more and more former internal IT functions-and assets (hardware, software, data, and support personnel)-are outsourced, with billions in procurement dollars shifting to the cloud.

6.     There will be greater use of cloud computing, in everything from health care and education to the military and national security.

7.     Free cloud offerings-even beyond the e-mail, storage, and application functions found today-will be a significant part of IT portfolios in most governmental agencies.

8.     The spillover effect of government use of cloud computing will include faster agreements among major cloud providers on standards and cloud interoperability protocols.

9.     There will be significant legal action arising out of governmental uses of cloud computing, and legislation addressing both IT and business needs and consumer fears and protections will be a major focus over the next decade.

10. The “democratization of technology” brought about by cloud computing will impact the quality of our individual online lives, the growth of businesses, and the pace of innovation, benefiting us all.

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David C. Wyld (dwyld@selu.edu) is the Robert Maurin Professor of Management at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is a management consultant, researcher/writer, and executive educator. His most recent work is “Moving to the Cloud: An Introduction to Cloud Computing in Government,” by David C. Wyld. It is a research monograph published by The IBM Center for the Business of Government, Washington, DC in November 2009. The complete report is available for free to download in PDF format at:   http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/WyldCloudReport.pdf.   

For more information of the iPhone 3g click here

Without further adieu here we go.

Fring

This app is great, it lets you access msn, yahoo messenger, AIM, twiter and a few other IM programs all from one app. Another great thing is it lets you access skype to make calls using wifi for free anywhere in the world to other Skype users.

Shazam

Ever had this common problem, your listening to a song and you don’t know what the song is. Now with the Shazam app all you have to do is hold your iPhone up to the music and after about 15-20 seconds it will tell you what the song is. It’s remarkable accurate.

Convertbot

As you all know there are a lot of diffrent types of measurements out there. To measure mass there’s grams, grains, pounds, stones, tons, and more. And if you want a tool that can convert units then convertbot is the app for you. There are 15 diffrent catagories all with 4 to 138 units with in them. It even converts currency.

Classics

This app was once featured in an iPhone ad. It contains 23 full length classic novels to read with a book like interface. Once your selected the book you want to read you just slide your finger accross the screen like your turning a page, and well… it turns the page. Titles range from Odyssey to 20,000 leagues under the sea.

Wikiamo

Wikiamo is a easy to use wikipedia reader for the iPhone. Browse any article in any language that is offered by wikipedia. Also once your on a page you can skip to different sections with the touch of a button. (Just remember that anyone can edit wikipedia so beware what you believe, click here for funny article about wikipedia edits)

Flixter

This app lets you browse recently released movies, ratings, reviews, cast lists and much more. It also lets you view trailors and find out whats playing and where amongst you’re local theaters. A must have for any movie buff.

Paintshop Mobile

This app lets you take photos that you take on your phone and edit them with basic effects. Crop, lighten, increase contrast, soften, and add others effects such as black and white. The edited photos then can be saved back into your camera roll.

Remote

This app is just like its title, a remote. With it you can change the song playing on your itunes to anything else in your library as well as change the volume. This app uses wifi so it will work from anywhere your wifi reaches.

Looptastic

There are a few looptastic apps all done by sound trends. They all work the same way, you drag different loops onto a remix board to create your own looping soundtrack, control tempo, volume, and adjust different effects. A very fun app and a must have anyone interested in music.

AirVideo

One of my all time favorites. It solves a common problem, you have tons of movies on your computer but cant watch them on your phone because you haven’t converted them to a compatable format. After you set it up you can select what you want to watch and watch it with live conversion. This works from anywhere in the world with wifi or even 3g (although beware it could use up your 3g usage rather quickly)

Image via Wikipedia

Charles Babbage (1792 to 1871) was an English scientist, mathematician and philosopher who was born in a small house in London. The house still stands and there is a special blue plaque on the wall at the junction of the street which is awarded by English Heritage and denotes that it is a place with special historical links.

Image via Wikipedia

This mathematician drew up his plans for a fully programmable digital computer in 1834 but he never saw it completed.

Image via Wikipedia

His analytical engine was an advanced development of the adding machine which he had invented twenty years before and it was designed to be programmed by a series of punched cards and made calculations by utilising a memory store and then printed out the answers. It could operate at the speed of one addition per second which was lightening fast at the time.

Although the machines designed by Babbage were very bulky compared to today’s sleek models, the general layout was the same and the memory and data were separate and their operation was based on instruction.

The British government had invested the huge sum of seventeen thousand pounds in the engine and Charles Babbage managed to raise a further six thousand pounds to get the project off the ground, but a very high degree of precision was required to produce the component pieces needed and it turned out to be beyond the capabilities of even the best of Victorian engineers.

Image via Wikipedia

At this point (1842) everyone started to lose enthusiasm for the project and after the Astronomer Royal, George Airy, had publicly announced that the project was useless and therefore worthless, the government withdrew its support.  Babbage did struggle on in the hope of completing what he knew would be a successful design, but struggled unsuccessfully because of the lack of funds and support until his death thirty years later.

So, we all had to wait for Bill Gates to come along with his Windows operating systems before computers really became accessible and affordable for everyone to use.

Motorola Droid is the newest entrant to the smart phone battlefield. It is powered by Android, the open source operating system that has the full backing of Google™. This smart phone already has the blessings of technology pundits as the breakaway winner of smart phones. This is even before Verizon drop date, November 6.

Verizon commercials already poke fun at things that iPhone lacks. The ‘iDon’t’ blitz has attracted the attention of young population. The full-page ads on major newspapers also help. However, iPhones are not there in the Verizon network. It will pose a threat to another cutie, Blackberry, which dominate the smart phone segment of Verizon network.

Motorola Droid would spell an end Blackberry’s domination in Verizon networks. AT&T network does not have any Android phones in its network yet, but has all the iPhones in the US.

Although Verizon and Motorola would love to target iPhone users, it will be very difficult for them since AT&T customers have signed multi-year service agreements at the time they purchased an iPhone. Switching the network would attract hefty fines.

Droid boasts a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 385 minutes talktime and 270 hours standby time. Email support for IMAP and POP, Macmail, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL mail is pretty news. The display is a 3.7″ 480×854 WVGA screen, with a display resolution of 400,000 pixels. HTML5 browser, support for different audio and video formats, a 5 mega pixel camera, 16GB memory card, etc are other specifications.

If that is not enough, Motorola/Verizon Droid also supports more than 10,000 apps – to do anything and everything a smart phone is supposed to do.

Going by present trends, anyone can reasonably expect Android phones to dominate the smart phone market. Experts believe there will be as much as 40 such phones in the market before the end of 2010. Other major Android phones are:

HTC Dream
HTC Magic
HTC Hero
Huawei U8230
Samsung Galaxy
HTC Tattoo/HTC Click
Motorola CLIQ
Samsung Moment/InstinctQ

There are dozens others, rumored to hit the market in the coming months.

The analyst firm IDC estimates that roughly ten percent of the approximately $64 billion spent on business applications worldwide in 2008 was spent on cloud computing applications – being those entirely delivered on a remote basis. Many analysts, including Gartner, project growth rates for cloud computing in excess of 20% or more for years to come. The growth rate over the next few years could be as high as 30%, with analysts estimating that the global market for cloud computing services could reach $42 billion by 2012.

Why cloud – and why now? According to the results of Kelton Research’s 2009 Cloud Computing Survey, surveying over 500 IT decision-makers, the shift to cloud computing can be seen as organizations are increasingly “turning to new technologies to cut costs, rather than cutting back on their technology uptake.” Cloud computing is also by no means an “all or nothing” proposition. Indeed, it has been seen in practice that cloud involvement often starts when organizations initially use cloud resources for part of their non-mission-critical applications or as resources for test projects.

The cloud model presents three new dimensions for computing.

1. The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand, thereby eliminating the need for cloud computing users to plan far ahead for provisioning.
2. The elimination of an up-front commitment by cloud users, thereby allowing companies to start small and increase hardware resources only when there is an increase in their needs.
3. The ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed (e.g., processors by the hour and storage by the day) and release them as needed, thereby rewarding conservation by letting machines and storage go when they are no longer useful.

The Cloud and Government Information Technology Spending in the Federal Government

Many analysts believe that the present economic situation – and its resulting financial strain placed on governments – will only serve to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in the public sector. As Bernard Golden recently observed, cloud computing offers “undeniable financial payback—higher utilization, lower energy use, and better application availability. The benefits are so large that IT organizations have been willing—eager, even—to tolerate the challenges that accompany the technology.” Indeed, a July 2009 Computerworld report found that the larger the organization, the greater the likelihood that it would be engaged in using cloud computing.

The economy and the resulting tightness of all governmental budgets – on every level – may indeed speed and heighten the rise of cloud computing. Dan Israel, an executive with Google’s federal group, recently observed that: “Given that we’re in a very tight budget situation, looking to the cloud is a very cost-effective means of bringing new technologies into the government. By moving to cloud computing, we can also help government IT get out of the business of using and managing servers and focusing instead on more mission-critical technology projects in their agencies.” As such, cloud computing gives organizations greater abilities to focus on their core business. Likewise, Ron Ross, Director of Security for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, recently commented that: “In an era where there’s going to be tight resources, there will be compelling ways to do things more effectively on the IT side…(But) we have to be able to do that in an environment that is well protected.”

In this budgetary context, the forecasts for the impact of cloud computing on federal IT spending are certainly eye-opening. The public sector market analyst firm, INPUT (2009), recently projected that over the next five years, overall federal IT spending will grow at a compound annual rate of 3.5%, reaching $90 billion by 2014. INPUT forecasts that federal cloud computing-related spending will grow almost eight times as fast, with a growth rate of approximately 30% annually over the same time frame. According to INPUT’s projections, federal spending on cloud computing services will triple over the next five years, growing from $277 million in 2008 to $792 million annually by 2013. This would mean that by 2014, over $1 billion of the federal IT budget would be devoted to cloud computing. According to Market Research Media, cloud computing thus represents “a fundamental re-examination of investments in technology infrastructure.”

The fast-growth of federal spending in this area is being driven by top-level commitment to transform the federal IT infrastructure through increased adoption of cloud-based architectures, with the expectations of cost savings and efficiencies to be achieved. Analysts have observed that such spending – and the executive commitment behind it – will mean that the federal government will not lag the private sector in the shift to cloud computing. In fact, the public sector may in many ways set the pace for cloud adoption. As the Chief Information Officerof the federal government, Vivek Kundra recently stated: “The cloud computing investment in the 2010 budget reflects the administration’s desire to drive down costs, drive innovation across the federal government, and make sure we’re making available technologies to the workforce that may be available to them elsewhere.” Thus, cloud computing appears to be fundamental to the Obama Administration’s technology strategy to try to gain efficiency from and rationalization of federal IT, while expanding applications, interoperability, and communications.

In May 2009, the Obama Administration expressed its commitment to transforming the architecture of federal information technology through cloud computing in a supplement to their budget proposal for the 2010 fiscal year. In the Office of Management and Budget’s Analytical Perspectives, cloud computing was a central part of an effort to fundamentally realign the government’s information technology infrastructure and IT strategy, calling for:

The Federal Government will transform its Information Technology Infrastructure by virtualizing data centers, consolidating data centers and operations, and ultimately adopting a cloud-computing business model. Initial pilots conducted in collaboration with Federal agencies will serve as test beds to demonstrate capabilities, including appropriate security and privacy protection at or exceeding current best practices, developing standards, gathering data, and benchmarking costs and performance. The pilots will evolve into migrations of major agency capabilities from agency computing platforms to base agency IT processes and data in the cloud. Expected savings in the outyears, as more agencies reduce their costs of hosting systems in their own data centers, should be many times the original investment in this area.

The pilot categories outlined by the Office of Management and Budget in the 2010 budget proposal include the following broad areas:

•  End-user communications and computing – secure provisioning, support (help desk), and operation of end-user applications across a spectrum of devices; addressing telework and a mobile workforce.
• Secure virtualized data centers, with Government-to-Government, Government-to-Contractor, and Contractor-to-Contractor modes of service delivery.
• Portals, collaboration and messaging—secure data dissemination, citizen and other stakeholder engagement, and workforce productivity.
• Content, information, and records management – delivery of services to citizens and workforce productivity.
• Workflow and case management- delivery of services to citizens and workforce productivity.
• Data analytics, visualization, and reporting – transparency and management.
• Enterprise Software-as-a-Service – for example, in financial management.

Observers have commented that this budget commitment makes clear that the initial pilot projects and seed investments are but the “beachhead for a broader shift” in federal information technology strategy – and spending – under the Obama Administration and CIO Kundra. Cloud computing today has been termed as being in the “wonderful ‘discovery’ phase of a technology,” with great forecasts, but few guidelines on how to properly make use of the technology. What we have seen to date in the federal government are a series of small cloud computing pilot projects – as various agencies have undertaken what have been termed as “science experiments” in the use of the technology. Definitely, we are in the “early adopter” phased of the product life-cycle of cloud computing, and some have urged that the federal government, due to its market power, should help to propel the movement and become an early adopter of cloud computing. Leading cloud proponents have urged the Obama Administration to adopt “pro-cloud” policies and promote cloud computing to ensure that the U.S. remains at the forefront of this computing revolution, urging that: “It’s high time to ensure that the cloud’s promise as an opportunity for U.S. wealth generation, job creation, and business and technology leadership does not pass our country by.”

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, observed that: “Many of these governments are saddled with incredible legacy data center expenses. They’re just some of the world’s largest enterprises and they accrue a lot of legacy, often custom systems that are hard for them to maintain and also then hard for them to replace.” Cloud computing could thus represent an opportunity to break free from the costly and problematic model of managing internal legacy IT systems and operations and move to a more outsourced model of IT operations. Indeed, Michelle Warren, a Senior Analyst for Info-Tech Research, recently observed that: “We’re moving toward a world where IT is outsourced.”

Analysis

We have seen predictions that due to the cost and operational benefits of cloud computing, more and more companies will find themselves outsourcing most – if not all – of their IT to cloud providers, creating what have been termed as “server-less” companies. And this will not be true just for small enterprises, as it has been predicted that organizations of all sizes will find it beneficial to concentrate on and optimize their business processes by outsourcing the IT function. So, why not “server-less government”? Perhaps not outsourcing all of IT and all data storage/handling – that may be impossible for a governmental body – however, particularly for cities, counties, colleges and universities, and even perhaps state agencies, this may be a viable proposition, particularly as cloud offerings expand and are made more secure and reliable.

Finally, a recent Harvard Business School publication criticized IT leaders, stating that “the dirty secret of corporate IT is that its primary mission is to serve yesterday’s technology needs, even if that means strangling tomorrow’s technology solutions.” In the public sector, too often we speak in terms not just dealing with “information silos,” but a legacy of outdated systems that run in programming that is cumbersome and difficult to work with. The prime example of this is found in the federal government, with the fact that many agencies still rely on COBOL for critical applications. Cloud computing can further the application modernization movement underway to help move federal agencies away from the “COBOL world” in a fraction of the time and a far less cost than rewriting or replacing these critical applications.