The NOSE

Classroom Technology Best Practice: University of Minnesota

This one should not be rocket science, but for some reason it still is.

How many of us come into a classroom having to teach or do a presentation and either the technology doesn't quite work or the user experience is not as smooth as it needs to be? Fill in the blanks.

I have seen plenty of best practices on the high-end, with organizations spending tons of money on technology and people. But until recently I hadn't come across an affordable and scalable approach that makes sense for the rest of us.

University of Minnesota has figured this out. As a starting point, they proposed the following set of challenges in designing their classroom technology environment

• provide advanced data-projection capability
• outfit 300+ classrooms
• provide easy-to-use systems
• reduce maintenance costs
• increase up-time

Their approach is described  by James Gregory in an article in Campus Technology and a presentation given at at the CUMREC conference. In a nutshell, they created an easy-to-use interface, off-the-shelf standard components, and remote management and monitoring of all devices. They seem to have hit the target with all their goals. Bravo.

New Open Source BI Tool: Openi ("open-eye")

Sandeep Giri, Project Lead for Openi.org, reports the launch of a new open source BI tool:

"We just published our BI application as an open source project called OpenI ("open-eye"). There is demo, documentation etc. on http://www.openi.org, or you can directly download the app from sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openi

I'd be interested to get your and community feedback."

I haven't tried it yet, but hope to give it a spin. What are other people's experiences with open source BI tools?

History of the Computer Industry in One Slide

As the inimitable Yogi Berra once said: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." I have been giving talks recently, including one at Harvard's Kennedy School eGovernment Executive Education Program, where I try to predict the future of IT and how firms and organizations will have to adapt radically or face extinction. A large scale industry shift is underway and its significance is likely to be far greater than people realize.

In looking at the future, it's always worthwhile to understand the past. In my talks about the future of IT, I lead with the following question:

"What paradigm shift in the computer industry brought us here?"

The audience usually provides answers such as: networking, the personal computer, TCP/IP, etc. These were all significant developments but don't get at the seismic shift that led to present state of affairs. Andy Grove in Only the Paranoid Survive not only posed the question but provided the answer.

"Going into the eighties, the old computer companies were strong, growing and vital...But by the end of the eighties, many large vertical computer ocmpanies were in the midst of layoffs and restructuring..."

What happened? In a famous diagram, Grove described the transformation of the computer industry from a set of vertically integrated silos, dominated by companies such as IBM, DEC, Sperry Univac and Wang, to a horizontal stack which made possible modular recombination of cheap components. That was the fundamental transformation in the computer industry that demolished the old computer companies, a number of them permanently. A similar transformation is underway in the computer industry and it will be equally seismic in its consequences. Stay tuned.

Acknowledgment: I came across the diagram in "Designs and Design Architecture: The Missing Link between 'Knowledge' and the 'Economy'" by Carliss W. Baldwin and Kim Clark

Steve Weber

Steve Weber, who has written the best book yet on Open Source, has started a blog on Politics and Economics. Welcome to the blogosphere!

Weber is a Professor of Political Economy at UC Berkeley and Director of the Institute of International Economics.

Federated Identity Management

Authentication is the foundation for everything on the Internet. People talk a lot of security and privacy. But unless an organization has a sound and secure authentication system in place, just about everything else is pretty much meaningless.

weimaraner puppy    copyright by seawallrunner.

But increasingly our organizations, whether it's education, government, or business, are involved in "cross-boundary" collaboration and commerce. What does the infrastructure need to look like for sharing resources and services across organizations? Fortunately, a solution is now available. The Shibboleth Project, originating from Internet2, provides the software and the mechanism for organizations to share secured online services or restricted digital content. It utilizes the local "organizational identity and access management intrastructures to authenticate individuals and then sends information about them to the resource site, enabling the resource provider to make an informed authorization decision."

Shibboleth is gaining considerable momentum in higher education and I hope that government will also begin to follow suit. In the United States, InCommon is the federation that supports the common trust fabric and infrastructure to support shib-based collaboration.