By Phil
20 December 2007
8:47 pm
One of the techniques I use and suggest to customers is to ask the question "so what?" to get to the true value of a suggested benefit. The concept is that when a benefit is suggested, the question "so what?" is asked. If there is an answer to the question then the true benefit has not been reached.
For example; if somone says that you should buy their product for use in your IT shop because it is easy to use, ask the question; "so what?" the progression might go like this; users can support themselves..."so what?"....there are fewer support calls..."so what?"....it requires fewer support people..."so what?"....it SAVES MONEY...so it is a COST SAVINGS. If ...
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By Phil
13 December 2007
3:41 pm
In a posting a few while back I commented on the potential of Audio IM replacing Text IM. As one of the comments, David brought up a great point I had not thoroughly considered; is text better than audio/speech because of the bandwidth savings? Is it worth the speech to text and text to speech for bandwidth for the savings in network load, especially if we have to add emotion cues and we would lose the senders actual voice.
While I responded in the comments on that posting, I thought some of you might miss the thought process this stimulated and some of the resulting analysis. I have long maintained that ...
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By Phil
6 December 2007
12:17 pm
As I discussed in a previous set of blog postings, delivering redundancy is a critical path to assuring overall system availability. For a number of years, Nortel has deployed a patented implementation called Split Multi Link Trunking (SMLT) that uses the IEEE 802 standard in a configuration that is active-active with incredibly low switchover time. When compared with traditional techniques, such as spanning tree or routing, this technique has been judged vastly superior by both our customers and by independent testing organizations such as the Tolly Group. Nortel has deployed this technology for over six years to deliver effective Switch Clustering in a number of Ethernet Switching platforms. ...
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By Phil
3 December 2007
7:56 pm
On Turkish Air....from Istanbul to Chicago - returning from A CIO Forum in Istanbul
As I once again sit on an airplane for another 20 hours portal to portal (before beginning my work day back in California) , I am reminded of the promise of communications technology to reduce travel. In fact, somewhere over the Atlantic (or maybe it was Canada), new words to the old Animals tune ..."we gotta get out of this place"... started running through my head. As an aside, there is no intended political commentary here, in this context, it is just a song.
In many ways this is not a profound message, but rather a reflection on the ...
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