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PeopleWare 2.0 – High performance groupware from the Cloud

We’re helping to launch ‘UC Cloud’ events: The super sweet spot where Cloud Computing overlaps with Unified Communications.

It’s an exciting area because it channels these different camps of technologies towards a primary business benefit that every one shares and understands: High Performance Organization. Improving the effectiveness of sales teams is one example.

‘Enterprise 2.0′ is the other main concept involved, it provides the headline theme of how the corporate use of social media software is also included in this mix.

Coined by Andrew McAfee and conceptualized in this MIT Sloan Review white paper ‘Dawn of Emergent Collaboration‘, it explains how the process of “collective intelligence” can be harnessed for greatly improved knowledge management, using tools like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds et al.

MiCloud – Government Cloud Storage

Image via Wikipedia

With an annual budget of over $80 billion the US Government is the largest IT buyer in the world, and they are looking to Cloud Computing as the strategic technology to enable this cost base reduction.

The state of Michigan is an excellent example of the best practices that agencies can adopt to achieve this locally.

Read the MiCloud Case Study to see how their approach tackles

• rogue cloud sourcing,
• automates user provisioning,
• frees up staff to work on more innovative projects
• how they integrate Cloud procurement into their project management SDLC,

and how this can be used as a baseline to define ‘Government Cloud Storage‘.

CIO.gov Global Best Practices

With an annual budget of over $80 billion the US Government is the largest IT buyer in the world, so their recent decision to go “Cloud-first” on their purchasing will drive huge uptake and endorsement of Cloud Computing.

Innovation at the speed of Cloud

Image via Wikipedia

It may seem like blasphemy, but actually the ability of Cloud Computing technologies to virtualize applications and gain resulting hardware efficiencies, and thus cost-savings, is not actually the most interesting part or compelling business reason for its adoption.

Sure a ton of money is spent on under-utilized servers and storage and of course the cost savings are there to be had, but these benefits pale in comparison to those that can be enjoyed through the ability of the Cloud to accelerate application software innovation.

Building better integrated, more user-centric applications faster, is the killer Cloud use case.

Open Government Best Practices – Partners wanted

As well as Cloud Ventures, which is for development of commercial start-ups focused on Cloud Computing, I also provide a voluntary executive role for iFOSSF, a USA-based 501(c)3 non-profit.

iFOSSF has a social mission to leverage open source for repeatable solutions to achieve the UN’s Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), and it’s an exciting area where the two overlap. Cloud computing can accelerate innovation, and that can include ‘Social Innovation’.

It can also accelerate more ‘Open Government’, which is the most powerful model for re-engineering how government works, and Social Innovation can stipulate what the end result of that re-engineering should be.

Innovation Nation – Anatomy of Government Cloud Outsourcing

The most important sector for the Cloud market is Government, because they set the laws that govern it for all others too; their stamp of approval will open the floodgates.

In their Reach for the Cloud analysis, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada says that:

“it is also possible that the Government of Canada might create a “private cloud” infrastructure internally to facilitate information sharing, or even that some or all government institutions might make use of a cloud infrastructure for data processing or storage.”

The key question is how might this be sourced from external outsourcing providers, ideally in a manner that stimulates the economy?

An anatomy of the key factors involved can answer this, highlighting how a number of different trends, like open source software, Open Data standards and Cloud Computing can be combined within an entrepreneurial context to enable not only more efficient IT, but an overall national innovation program too.

Open Government Canada – Achieving the Millenium Development Goals

Image via Wikipedia

As part of launching the ‘Open Government Innovation Network‘, I have also started the process of organizing a conference for here in Toronto :

Open Government Canada – Achieving the Millenium Development Goals.

If you’re interested in participating, just reach out to me or join the Linkedin group.

Transformational policy leadership

As well as covering the main component parts of Open Government, like Cloud Computing, open source software, open data and open innovation models, it will direct these towards a headline theme of ‘Achieving the Millenium Development Goals’.

Livewire365.com – Get Lync’d in to Linkedin

Microsoft is launching Office 365, the most fundamental shift in their history because they are ‘all in for the Cloud‘.

LiveWIRE 365 is our new Cloud Venture that will enable service providers to offer value-add Cloud apps that augment 365 and help encourage more adoption of it.

It synchronizes your contact data across 365, desktop and other key applications like Linkedin.

CanadaCloud.biz – A living business plan

We like to think of Cloud Ventures as a “Do Tank” – A think tank that works as hard to make ideas a reality as it does to think them up in the first place.

One of our key project areas is to help Canada develop a significant presence in the Cloud Computing industry, and towards this end we’ve started a simple, fun and hopefully very productive site, the Canada Cloud Business Plan.

As the name suggests the idea is to bring together a team who defines a strategy for how to make this happen, and critically acts on it to realize it too. The “living” part of this is that it’s an online document, with wiki features so that any one can join and add to it, so equally the team can be as dynamic as the ideas it collects.

In the ‘Your Action Ideas‘ section any one can click ‘New Page’ to add and edit their own page of this world domination plan!