What's the deal with Blogging, Twitter, and 25 Random Things About Me?

From the title of my blog you may assume that I'm about to go into a Jerry Seinfeld-esq comic bit about blogging and all other manner of sources of random (and often useless) bits of information that comes out of people's heads. Instead I'm going to write a bunch of stuff that may be loosely connected to highlight the problem that many of these technologies have created. The internet has improved people's lives in many ways such as providing current events immediately from around the world, real-time stock quotes, and funny videos about kittens (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtX8nswnUKU). The problem is most people use blogs and the other ilk to spew bits of information that are so trivial and in most cases stupid (my blog is included in this analysis) that it destroys the usefulness of these technologies. Why on Earth would I need to know that someone is going to the grocery store or the reason they don't like the color orange. The 25 Random Facts about you is the peak of absolute stupidity. It is reflection of our society that people feel the urge to disclose surprisingly private facts about themselves to the world.

Still thinking of a title

After reading the more current issue of The Economist online I came across an interesting article (http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13109804) about how Amazon's Kindle and competing products could rekindle (yes I did intentionally use that word) the lagging newsprint and magazine industry. To me this makes a lot of sense. I don't read the newspaper often unless I have nothing else to read. It's quite cumbersome to read a newspaper in cramped spaces and you end up getting newsprint on your hands. Ever since I've gotten a Blackberry I've been reading a lot of news and reading magazine articles while I ride the light rail. I can very easily see how a product like the Kindle or even the iPhone could help to provide major newspapers like The New York Times or Wall Street Journal a whole group of new customers. As the Economist article points out, cellphone users pay for lots of trivial extras like ring tones or wallpapers so it does make sense to me that they would pay to have magazine and news paper content on their phones as well.

Enterprise Systems

Last class we began talking about Enterprise Systems and the move to having a common database architecture for all (or most) applications used in an company. This really was quite interesting to me because at my last job one of my last projects was getting human resources data from multiple data sources to merge into one database. I worked on this project for an employer who had hundreds of thousands of employees and retirees that in many cases became part of the company as a result of acquisitions. Due to the sheer size of the employee workforce and the complexity of all of the different rules that applied to the different employee populations managing all of them in a database was extremely difficult. As a result of this complexity most of the work in estimating the costs of employee benefits was handled in Microsoft Excel. The trade off with using Excel for analysis because of complexity was that it took much more time to do almost any time of analysis.

A Day in the Life of a CIO

On Thursday the CIO of Mortenson Construction came to our class and gave a lecture on the impacts of technology on the construction industry and some insight on what a CIO actually does. One of the most interesting aspects of his lecture was on software that was able to digitize architectural blueprints and create 3D models. These models can then be used to identify conflicts with electrical wires and water pipes saving Mortenson time.

Another interesting comment that the CIO made was that Mortenson would not purchase new technology unless it solved an actual business need. This comment made a lot of sense to me because it is essentially the same premise when starting a new business. If the product or service does not solve a customer pain point then it is probably not a business worth entering.

I did have some questions regarding how Mortenson calculates ROI on new technology. Experience at my old jobs as shown that documenting actual benefits of implementing new technology is usually very difficult.