A Blog of Her Own

First session for the day… We have representation from Axia, IBM, and the UofA.

Katrina Ashmore, Axia

I’m a little late arriving due to discussions with folks in the vendor showcase. Katrina is talking about why to use eBusiness and already I have a comment…she’s suggested that eBusiness allows you to trade 24/7 (no longer restricted to normal business hours). The flip side is you need to be up 24/7 - I’m thinking just about network/infrastructure operations need to be up and running, but you also have a need to provide service 24/7 or at least within a fast time frame.

I think back to my first experience streaming audio of the Alberta Legislature - we came in one morning to email that asked why they couldn’t access the session. It turns out that the person asking was in Denmark and they sent their email at 5am my time (we learned to post the time zone for session - oops). But we also learned that people around the world were accessing our site - that there was the potential to need to deal with system outages 24/7 because we had customers around the world. (Of course, at the Legislature we defined our primary customers to be people actually in Alberta and focused on service at home only.)

Kim Devooght, IBM Canada

“Innovation that Matters”

IBM claims that they coined the term eBusiness but they no longer use it. eBusiness is just business.

Sustainability is one of the issues when putting infrastructure such as SuperNet in place. How do you ensure that it pays for itself (anchor tenants, for example).

CEOs believe that a lot of their products are bein commoditized, competiton is coming from all directions, there is global volatility (safety, oil prices, natural disasters), competing business models. If you add this up, 85% say they are facing some fundamental change. The action is in the emerging world; while US is currently our largest trading partner, this is shifting. Emerging economies are the new marketplaces. 83% of cEOs think someone will come along and fundamentally change their business model. (I don’t think any of those 83% are recording industry execs - they’ve decided to fight change instead of adapting).

“the connectedness of everything” I just like that phrase.

Select statistics from the presentation:

• In 2006 will surpass the US in the number of broadband subscribers.
• In 2007, Slovenia will surpass the US in percentage of households with broadband connections.
• Email volume, in 2000 5.1 billion messages a day, by 2005 it had ballooned to 135 billion. Wonder how much is spam.
• Ooh, a new blog gets created every second. Cool.

Best practices examples are in a public innovators report available through IBM. The slides may be posted at the SuperNet Opportunities Conference site. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (low-cost imagery to support rescue workers and the public), One Community (Cleveland, services to try to differentiate the city from other communities and attract people/business), World Urban Forum and HabitatJam (3-day online conversation to prepare for the Forum in June. 65,000 participants in the conversation, more than blog or online forum - tools to analyse the conversations (datamining). Called ‘Jam’ by IBM. Stories of long lines in less connected parts of the world so they could access computers to have their ideas/comments heard by the Forum), Grid examples (Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Harvard Department of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Healthcare practices, World Community Grid…), and on and on and on.

Marketplace dynamics are driving innovation and adoptions of new solutions. SuperNet provides capacity.

Dr. Paul Messinger (UofA)

Discussion of Service beginning with a service interaction cycle. And some additional ‘problems’ being researched - eAuctions, Algorithms for services, behavioural studies (how consumers interact/navigate websites), etc. Really, a look at emerging questions, research, problems, etc. surrounding increased eBusiness.

Q&A observation - I’m glad I have my MBA. The references to Friedman (”everyone’s read Friedman’s book”) and Smith (”smith always wins”) and even ‘barriers to entry’ are not foreign language to me. But what about the others in the room? They’re not all academics or economists. So how did they feel about the discussion? Hmm. (OK, for those reading the blog who aren’t academics or economists or other and don’t know the references…Friedman’s book is ‘The World is Flat,’ Smith is Adam Smith who really laid down the foundations of economic thought, and finally, ‘barriers to entry’ is from Porter and is one of the forces that affects industry competition (oh, just Google Porter and “five forces”).)