Stories by Anthony Doesburg

A salute to the information chief

What's in a name? If that name is the ultimate title to which an IT professional might aspire, chief information officer, there are three words, two of which have no relation to the job description, leaving one which struggles for recognition. Taking just the initials, CIO, it suggests the tired joke "career is over", which did the rounds in the late 80s and early 90s when the wearers of the title outsourced themselves into extinction.

Book gives lie to McNealy's fire

By the time most of you read this the games will be over. The athletes will have headed home from Sydney with medals and medical chests packed away. And the procession of billionaire bosses of US computer companies whom we never suspected of being sports fans will have flown home in their Lear Jets, not to be seen in this part of the world again until, well, maybe the next America's Cup. Can we wait? I think so.
As you'd expect of people playing such a pivotal role in the new economy, it wasn't all fun and games during their time downunder. Microsoft's Bill Gates and Novell's Eric Schmidt made time to attend the Melbourne meeting of economic movers and shakers on globalisation; and the real purpose of Sun boss Scott McNealy's visit, so he said, was to attend a board meeting in Sydney of General Electric.
Of course, it was purely coincidental that GE's board was gathering in the Olympic city while the games were in progress. (And by the way, McNealy says there's no substance to rumours that he might succeed the legendary Jack Welch as head of GE. I have to confess to knowing nothing of the Welch legend. I know he wrote a book about it but, to continue the confessional tone, I've never been able to make much headway with how-to-run-a-mega-corporation tomes.)
I deviated from my usual reading diet, however, during the flight back from Canberra a week ago, where I'd gone to hear McNealy speak to the Australian National Press Club. The press club address is something of an institution and the walls of the club rooms are adorned with photos of past speakers ranging from the Dalai Lama to shiny-headed Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil. About the only thing McNealy had in common with those two was similar hair length; I didn't once hear him mention Tibet during his address, and nor did he have much to say about the environment.
There was a good turn-out for what was McNealy's second appearance at the club. (He was last there four years ago.) With parliament in recess so Prime Minister John Howard could take advantage of the photo opportunities presented by the games, there clearly wasn't much else for the press corp to amuse itself with. So a couple of hundred journalists packed in under the bright lights necessary for the televising of the event. (Yes, this is the kind of material that gets aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. And I used to think I supported public service broadcasting …)
I'm only kidding, of course. McNealy's address would have been a real eye-opener for a wider audience than the IT press, who are the usual beneficiaries of the futuristic outpourings of such people. It may just have been that he was fresh from the GE meeting but one of his forecasts was of lightbulbs which one day will be monitored via the AC power network so that their manufacturer will know to replace them even before they've blown. And another was the monitoring system in your car which will broadcast to nearby petrol stations when your tank is on empty to set up an auction for the best-priced fuel. All of which will run on Sun servers.
His theme, he helpfully spelt out for us, was that the Internet, far from being overhyped, suffered from too little of it. Examples like the online lightbulbs and petrol tanks were just two of hundreds of everyday devices whose operation would be revolutionised by the Internet. Have I mentioned Java yet? Yes, Java would be the underlying software making everything work. And have we slagged off Microsoft yet? Microsoft took Java, added a few drops of poison and turned it into Windows.
McNealy says he can't help himself having a dig at the convict software company from Redmond. Nor can he resist a swipe at Hewlett-Packard, the printer company. And Sun itself? Well, if Lucent and its ilk sell dial-tone switches, Sun does Web-tone switches. What about privacy, another of McNealy's pet subjects? You have none; get over it, he says.
It was an impressive performance, living up to the billing of those who'd described McNealy as a feisty fellow. He could even claim genuine sporting credentials - a golf handicap of three and regular amateur ice hockey appearances - to explain his interest in the games. (Hates those sports that have judges, though; only likes the ones with a clear winner.)
So, as I said earlier, I broke with habit on the flight home and started to plough through "High Noon", an account of Sun's rise, handed out to us as we left the press club, thinking it might be a revealing read. It was, all right. I discovered most of what McNealy had treated us to during his address was in the book. So was a quote from Carol Bartz, a former Sun marketer, describing McNealy as a bad interview before he learned how to employ the one-liner.
I'm glad I heard him after he had the lessons. But I'll be checking the script's been reworked before making the trip for his next appearance at the press club.

Chewing the fat over telecomms inquiry

This topic tends to be the preserve of Dial Tone columnist Paul Brislen, but, with time running out before the government's telecomms inquiry reports back, I figure he'll forgive me for trespassing on his turf.

Swain cuts path through e-comm waffle

IT Minister Paul Swain probably wouldn't be too thrilled to be written about as "talking the talk" about e-commerce. He would much rather, I'm sure, be described as avoiding doing so.
"There's a lot of waffle in the area of e-commerce and it drives me mad, to be honest," Swain told a group of IDG journalists a fortnight ago. (IDG publishes Computerworld among its titles.)
The minister was giving us a briefing on his hopes for the government's November e-commerce summit, which he's insistent will be a practical affair. Its target audience is small to medium-sized organisations, whose survival depends on gearing up for doing business electronically, the minister believes.
The government's spending $200,000 on the two-day Auckland summit, which will cost $400 to attend. The idea of having no charge on the door was rejected on the ground that attendance wouldn't be valued if people weren't made to pay.
For their $400, Swain wants small businesses to be able to take away some lessons on how to apply e-commerce to their operations. An expo that will run for the duration of the event will give non-paying visitors a glimpse of the technology which will make e-commerce work.
"I want the summit to give them a feel for how they go about getting help for this."
More than half the places at the conference, which will cater for 500 attendees, will be reserved for small business representatives.
While Swain is counting on the summit imparting e-commerce lessons to the largest sector of the New Zealand economy (there are about 250,000 small businesses in the land), he describes it also as being symbolic of the difference between this government and the last.
He acknowledges that his predecessor, Maurice Williamson, was also an advocate of the application of IT to the economy, but says he was handicapped by the National-led government's hands-off approach to running the country.
"They were caught in an ideological timewarp."
The Labour-Alliance lot believe in getting more involved, which Swain claims is the hallmark of those economies that are thriving today.
"Overseas economies that are progressing are those where the private sector and government are working together."
That means joining forces to reduce the New Zealand economy's dependency on exports of primary products, which Swain says is a goal of his government. In place of commodity exports will be knowledge-based industries.
If you're getting a little tired of hearing all of this, then it's probably about time we saw some tangible results. Swain might paint himself as the practical man to deliver the goods, but that doesn't stop him resorting to that word of the moment -- "passionate" -- when talking about how communications, IT and commerce, three of his many portfolios, make him feel.
I'm glad to report, however, that despite that lapse he does seem more intent on walking the e-commerce walk than uttering earnest declarations of ardour.

Itanium Away

Eight years after Digital introduced the first of its 64-bit Alpha systems, Intel is starting to crank up the marketing machine for the release of its 64-bit Itanium processor.

Novell slips - out of view

I freely admit to being a bit naive when it comes to matters of high finance. But from all the stories being written in Computerworld and elsewhere about financial woes at US software company Novell, I take it that all is not well. So despite Novell reporting a profit in its latest quarter of about $20 million, I'm resisting breaking into applause.

A clear conflict of interest

The Telecommunications Users Association (TUANZ) has the tricky job of representing the interests of telco customers while counting among its members some of those same telcos.
How does it do that?
"With total integrity," says its chief excutive, Ernie Newman.
The issue becomes all the more intriguing as submissions are made to the government's telecommunications inquiry. TUANZ, as you'd expect from an organisation whose aim is to be "the user's champion in the knowledge economy", has been busily writing them; first, in response to the inquiry's issues paper and, again, after the three-person inquiry team released its draft report.
You'd expect TUANZ to be playing an active part in proceedings because, as it claims on its Web site, the fact that an inquiry's actually under way can be attributed in large part to its lobbying of the Labour Party in the run up to last year's election.
Clear Communications, the country's second biggest phone company, has also been beavering away, knocking out a 638-page submission following the issues paper release and 254 pages in answer to the draft report.
I mention Clear because there's an interesting connection between it and TUANZ: not only is Clear a member of the association but one of its senior staff, data services manager Jane Hindle, is a TUANZ board member and on a sub-committee responsible for putting together the user group's inquiry submissions.
I don't mean to remotely suggest any impropriety in Hindle's work on the sub-committee. Indeed, TUANZ's Newman says he's careful to ensure Clear's interests aren't being promoted and that "representation to the government through the inquiry is absolutely end-user focused". Newman also points out that Hindle's TUANZ work began before she was hired by Clear.
That's all very reassuring but I wonder whether it's good enough. It's one thing to be a member of an organisation that's lobbying for law changes affecting a competitor, but another to be a principal architect of the proposed change. It just doesn't look good.
I can anticipate some of the arguments which might be offered in support of what seems to me to be a clear (pardon the pun) conflict of interest: New Zealand has only a small community of telecomms experts and we can't afford to be fussy about connections they might have in the industry; carriers have a role to play in what's essentially a user group.
Neither of those is convincing, however. Surely TUANZ has enough members to draw from who feel sufficiently strongly about issues like local loop unbundling for someone else to have taken Hindle's place on the sub-committee? That not having been the case gives telecommunications users the right to question whether the association truly represents their interests.

Esolutions: virtually a reality

That strange esolutions entity, dreamed up a year ago by Telecom, EDS and Microsoft to cash in on the e-commerce market, today launches an application service provider (ASP) operation.

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