New Florence. New Renaissance.

Consumer Reports – what an awesome resource

As a technology analyst I have always been impressed with the wide coverage and rigor Consumer Reports brings to its analysis of autos, home appliances and consumer tech. I scan through every monthly issue and especially the annual Top Picks and Auto issues.

It has stayed true for 75 years to its motto of being a “force for honesty and integrity in the marketplace” and is broadening its horizons. They shared their vision in their strategic plan here. 

It is one of the best nonprofits we support and would encourage others to do the same.

 

CES 2022

While many participants will still participate in person, the show is unlikely to be the kind of massive tech extravaganza that you’d find prior to the pandemic.

Still, there will be an impressive array of new and interesting products on display during the COVID-shortened show, which various companies are streaming for the public. From self-driving cars and massive new TVs to smart home gadgets, the metaverse, and NFTs, CES 2022 will feature all of the latest tech has to offer.

Yahoo

More from Digital Trends

 

2021 – Best Inventions

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one about inventions from Time magazine

“To assemble our list of 2021’s Best Inventions, we solicited nominations across a variety of categories from TIME’s editors and correspondents around the world, and through an online application process. We then evaluated each contender on a number of key factors, including originality, creativity, efficacy, ambition and impact.

The result is a list of 100 groundbreaking inventions—including vaccines for COVID-19 and malaria, an emotional support robot for hospitalized children, an environmentally friendly dye for jeans and a brand new pasta shape—that are changing how we live, work, play and think about what’s possible.”

2021 – The Year in Search

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one about trends from Google Search

Competency-based education

So, after months of discussion, the district switched to competency-based education, a form of personalized learning that emphasizes mastery of skills over time spent in class. At Northern Cass, that means that grade point averages no longer exist. In two years, neither will grade levels. Instead, K-12 students get rated on a four-point scale for each skill, receiving about two new ratings per week. In seventh-grade English, that may mean the ability to hold collaborative conversation. Those who are prepared with questions and open to other viewpoints might receive a three. Leading the conversation and keeping it from stalling out would garner a four.

“We kept coming back to the idea that you couldn’t get world class because the system itself wasn’t designed for that. The system itself was designed to sort kids, to rank kids,” says Dr. Steiner.

WSJ (sub required)

"Deal of the Century"

The results have been remarkable. Automobiles, telecommunications, energy grids, hospitals and logistics networks have all become digital businesses, producing ever-increasing reams of data that need to be managed and stored. Dell now sits at the helm of the world’s largest infrastructure provider for this activity. “The amount of data being created in the world is just astounding,” he says. “It’s doubling every seven or eight months.”

In turn, Dell Technologies, at $75 billion, is worth more than four times what it was before it went private. Because of all that leverage, Dell, Durban’s Silver Lake and co-investors have done far better, with total gains of more than $40 billion, according to Forbes’ calculations. Dell’s personal net worth has risen to $50 billion. In many ways, he was the architect of the biggest buyout coup of all time.

Forbes

Here's a recent interview with Michael Dell

Innovations highlighted in Satya Nadella's annual shareholder letter

In the Microsoft annual report, Satya Nadella identifies a handful of examples of innovation he is obviously proud of. I also found videos which provide additional perspective on each.

• NASA’s Mars mission achieved a milestone in space exploration when the small robotic helicopter Ingenuity completed the first powered flight on another planet—a feat that would not have been possible without 12,000 developers on GitHub who contributed code to the open source software that powered the flight.
  

• When a 1,300-foot ship blocked the Suez Canal and disrupted global shipping, our partner Blue Yonder used Microsoft AI technologies to help its customers find alternate sources for more than $500 million worth of products and parts affected by the delay.
  

• Team Rubicon—a nonprofit organization that responds to humanitarian crises around the world—set up 169 COVID-19 response sites across the United States in just 30 days, using Dynamics 365 to manage the deployment of thousands of volunteers.
  

• Surgeons at Mt. Sinai Health System in New York and Kyabirwa Surgical Centre in Uganda have together performed more than 500 surgeries using mixed reality technology that enables doctors in New York to provide annotated recommendations that appear in the field of vision of their Ugandan colleagues—even though they are thousands of miles apart.
  

• Anheuser-Busch InBev—the world’s largest brewer—used Azure Digital Twins to create a comprehensive digital model of its breweries and supply chain. Synchronized with its physical environment, this model replicates the complex relationships between natural ingredients and the brewing process, enabling brewmasters to make adjustments based on real-time conditions.
  

20 from 20: Mega Trends affecting IT

This is part of a series of 20 highlights from the Acrobatics during the crisis, Analyst Cam, Burning Platform and other series I launched last year.

For most of 2020, CIOs and IT teams performed heroics moving millions to work from home, scaling up or down massive volumes, helping their companies pivot to new business models. In background, massive changes have been affecting the IT landscape. Here's what I heard from multiple conversations:

Leading off is Bob Evans who authors the Cloud Wars site. He talks about every company is becoming more of a software company and what that means to tech industry. The SaaS, IaaS etc definitions of the last few years look increasingly dated as we discuss in the extended session here 

Next at 3.23 is Holger Mueller of Constellation Research. He points out that hyperscalers are pulling away with their platforms and why application vendors should refocus on next-gen business processes which take advantage of contemporary ML, IoT and other capabilities. The longer conversation is here. 

At 7.01 it is Tamas Hevizi who talks about the growth of citizen programmers and why "shadow IT" is not unhealthy, it is inevitable, especially in small businesses. The longer conversation with him about Digital Acceleration is here 

At 10.17, Brad Feld, co-founder of Foundry Group talks complex systems thinking he explores in his new book and looks at the recent crisis from that lens. The longer session is here 

At 12.37, Brett Hurt, who is the CEO and co-founder of data.world says "data is one of the least networked resources" as we explore "single source of truth" in the explosion of data streams we saw around COVID-19, polling, the census. The longer conversation is here 

At 18.30, it is Grant Halloran, CEO of Planful which describes its Continuous Planning platform as "marrying finance’s need for structured planning with the business’ need for dynamic planning," We discuss what it would take to make pandemic modeling less chaotic than what we saw in 2020. 

The Analyst Cam series

As we have moved to virtual vendor investor briefings and events I get invited to in my analyst role, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments, as part of my Analyst Cam series. I have since expanded the focus to included interesting analyst research surveys, new author briefings and other interesting conversations (with their permission)

Here are some so far:

SAP's ERP portfolio for SMEs

Sora: HR Command Center

SAP Industries: Life Sciences

SAP Industries: Retail 

SAP Industries: Utilities

Altec: Connecting ERP to Document Management

Workday: Skills Cloud

SAP Industries: Servitization

SAP Industries: Automotive

SAP Industries: Circular economy

Zoho: 2 part update on 2021 version of Zoho One

SAP Industries: Direct to Consumer

Alpine Supply Chain Solutions: Warehouse bots

Aisera: Conversational AI for workflow automation

Workday Ventures: Portfolio update

Jobcase: Trade and blue collar employment site

Cognizant: Timeline of Next webinar excerpts

Zoho: BI platform refresh

SAP: Sapphire Now - Industries perspective Part 2

SAP: Sapphire Now - Industries perspective Part 1

Salesforce: Industries Summit Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Ray Wang: Everybody wants to rule the world

Tercera: Portfolio update

Acadian Ventures: Portfolio update

Unit4 : ERPx Update

Salesforce: Vaccine Cloud

Zimit: CPQ for Enterprise Services

Unit4: Executive Briefing

Vida Health: Overview

Plex: acquisition of Kors Engineering

IFS: Cloud Launch

Otpimizely: Digital Experiences

Zoho: ZohoDay excerpts

Zoho: ZohoDay Social Hour

Supply Chain Matters: 2021 Trends

IFS: Cloud sneak preview

SAP: Industry Cloud

IFS: Rebranding

Adobe: Developers Live

Workday: Vaccine Management

Rimini Street: Investor Day

SAP: RISE with SAP

IT Central Station: Tech Buying Trends

Cella Technologies: Optimizing material handling on shop floors

C5MI: Industry 4.0

IFS: Service Management

Cognizant: State of Voice Interfaces

Suplari: Spend Intelligence Cloud

TealBook: Trusted source of supplier data

Sapient Insights Group: 2020-2021 HR Systems Survey

Workday Ventures: Portfolio overview

Rimini Street: Database Support Survey

Model N - Revenue Leakage Management

Workday - Talent Marketplace

Constellation Research - 2021 CIO Priorities survey

ASUG - Geoff Scott interview of SAP CEO Christian Klein

6 River Systems - Warehouse automation

Workday VIBE briefing - Value Inclusion, Belonging and Equity offering

Salesforce Industries - Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3

SAP SuccessFactors - Analyst session excerpts

Apple iPhone 12 - the virtual launch event

Zoom - new Zapps announced at recent Zoomtopia

Avasant Research - survey on COVID-19 impact on IT

Rimini Street - the "secret sauce" - details of their operations

Unit4 ERPx - design principles and components of the next gen product 

Zoho Workplace - Collaboration suite and a vertical application for construction industry

Rimini Street - Survey of PeopleSoft customers

Neeley Business School, TCU - Board of Advisors meeting - acrobatics rapidly moving away from campus to online courses, diversity etc.

Plex - Customer dataset showing impact of COVID-19 on manufacturing and the bounce back in N. America since

Aternity Digital Experience Management 

Workfront analyst briefing 

Utmost Total Workforce Management 

Sidetrade ML applied to customer invoices and collections 

Rootstock low code briefing 

Workfront Scenario Planning 

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer

OK, let me start off by emphasizing I am not retiring. Don't start any rumors. However, in the last couple of weeks I have had a chance to reflect on my career, and the crazy last few months.

I cry with so many who have lost friends and family to CV19. I get angry and elated and scared with others about our bipolar economy (Wall Street highs in the midst of historic unemployment), the divisive politics, the intense protests, the continued CV19 spikes. However overall, I think I have managed to stay reasonably balanced.

I have had a long, colorful career. Hundreds of wonderful clients, many a Magic Quadrant, 7 books, travels to 45 US states and 70+ countries, 12,000 + blogs, failed startups, way too much time away from family. So, how could 4 months in quarantine compete against those highs and lows?  5 things make this phase stand out

A focus on business acrobatics

Like most, I was traumatized in the middle of March - how could you not be with all the fatalities, the lockdowns, the Wall Street meltdown, the massive layoffs? But my New Florence research was also showing an amazing amount of innovation and heroics in business. I knew there would be enough material for my 8th book. However, I made a fateful decision to not wait for months it takes to produce a book. I decided to record executives on Zoom or MS Teams talking about how they were scaling up or down massively, how they were pivoting to new opportunities, how they were rapidly innovating products and services. I have done many of those sessions, nearly 50 of them are public in this series. I have fed off their stressed, but positive, energy. I have heard awesome expressions from them like "pain is real, suffering is optional". As importantly, it has helped me as an analyst. It has introduced me to how rapidly WFH technologies and related social issues are evolving. It has allowed to track how quickly the healthcare system has learned about overuse of ventilators, how to rapidly increase ICU capacity, how to handle surges with medical personnel across states, how therapies like Remdesivir and convalescent plasma are having a significant impact in acute CV19 cases. That has allowed me to be relatively calm while much of media (and social media) has been hysterical about the recent spike in positives in the Sun Belt. I have been saying - don't look at June/July positives from a February/March Italy/New York lens. I have heard how executives are rebalancing their technology, R&D and other budgets. I have participated in many vendor virtual events with that lens. Some are rapidly evolving, others are still trying to sell what they had in their bag in January. That's a semester of learning I could not have had at any university. 

Positive passions matter

I had already restarted the Passion guest series to celebrate the start of a new decade. Starting in March I accelerated the pace. Nearly 50 have contributed about their cooking, birding, charities,  I have helped guest writers with background research on how STEM has helped evolve their area of passion. Not only has that kept me and thousands of readers positive, it has given me a more nuanced perspective on how technologies are reshaping various aspects of life, play and work.

Honoring everyday workers

As most of us tech folks focus on digital acceleration, I have actually become much more appreciative of people who have allowed us to easily migrate to WFH. They work near our homes, they bring stuff to our homes, they operate stores, warehouses, plants we could not survive without. We should all be glad they don't WFH. I have been running an Instagram series honoring many of them.  As an analyst, it has made me much more aware of the need to balance our enthusiasm for digital with the continued reality of analog/physical capabilities.   

TFH - Travel from Home

My wife is a wizard at packing in a variety of activities in a day trip. Read about her passion here. Given travel restrictions we have become skilled at day trips on the FL Gulf Coast. There are so many pretty small towns we have rediscovered which allow us to safely be out and about, then return to the comfort of home. I have been posting in my "West Coast on the East Coast" series on towns like Dunedin, Sarasota, Sanibel, Tarpon Springs, Venice and many others on Instagram.

During breaks in the work week, I have also getting many of my daily 10K FitBit steps while watching the Smithsonian Aerial America 72 episodes on various US states. Between this and our weekend trips, my restless travel genes have stayed in check.

Each visit and episode has also re-introduced me to history. Our people and places have repeatedly bounced back from unbelievable adversity - no reason we will not from this one either. More positive thoughts.

Quality family time

The last time I did not get on a plane for this long was in 1982. This has meant plenty of time and meals with my lovely wife and daughter. My son is working from home in Colorado, and we have managed to play more card and other games with him virtually. We are very blessed.  

I am glad the last few miserable months have brought out my internal summer. They have made me a more rounded adviser and analyst, and a much more optimistic human.

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