By Steve Harriman
NetQoS VP Steve Harriman is attending the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit this week in Las Vegas. It’s the first time for the event since the industry downturn in 2001 and NetQoS is exhibiting there because we feel that the role of Networking has been elevated in importance to the point at which it warrants an executive focused event. And, Gartner events are always very educational and well-attended. It’s the right place to be.
The speaker for the second day’s keynote speech was Dr. Thomas Malone, Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management.
I noticed that a surprisingly large number of hands went up when he asked attendees if they had corporate blogs and if their organizations allowed individuals to have their own.
He discussed organization models and how organizations are becoming more distributed, both physically and in how they operate – more distributed decision making. Successful organizations have found the way to fully leverage the intelligence and creativity their employees have.
Employees who are empowered to use their capabilities to the fullest have more fun and are more productive. The networking tie-in here is that the network is the enabler of organizational empowerment.
Here is another example of how ‘crowd think’ can be leveraged to great benefit. Businesses are beginning to use prediction markets [PDF] to predict outcomes. HP used this technique to forecast its quarterly sales of printers. They invited HP employees (most participants were in sales) to forecast the volume of company-wide printer sales. Of the thousands of participants, those that were within a small margin of the actual sales at the end of the quarter were rewarded with a dollar; those that weren’t received no reward. Using this prediction market, HP was able to forecast much more accurately than using its conventional forecasting method. In other words, the collective wisdom/knowledge of the HP employees was harvested to produce a superior result, and this was all enabled by ubiquitous network connectivity.
Dr. Malone discussed a few counterintuitive ideas as well:
The Paradox of Standards:
Rigid standards in the right place of a system can enable much more flexibility and decentralization in other parts of the system. For example, the Internet is enabled by the IP protocol.
The Paradox of Power:
Sometimes the best way to gain power is to give power away. For example, Ebay gives a great deal of power to its sellers, but no one would suggest that Ebay isn’t a powerful company and brand.
Some of the most important innovations in enterprise networking over the next decade won’t be technological but organizational. Companies will look for ways to harvest the collective intelligence and creativity of its far-flung employees and enable better, faster decision making for great agility, effectiveness, and happier employees. Examples of the power of harvesting collective intelligence are Google, Wikipedia (and other Wikis,) eBay, and prediction markets.
Dr. Malone posed the question: How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they can act more intelligently than any person, group or computer has ever done before?
He was asked a question about the impact on society of these changes. He asserted that changes will be required, and soon. Labor law is one example; patent law another.
NetQoS Solution Provider Session
During day two of the summit, NetQoS Product Manager Ben Erwin delivered a very compelling presentation on the performance-first approach to network performance management to a packed audience. He gave examples of how this approach has enabled NetQoS customers to mitigate the risk from changes to the network infrastructure such as MPLS migrations, to provide more consistent application delivery, to make more informed infrastructure decisions, to improve staff efficiency, and to avoid unnecessary WAN costs.
He was followed by Bob Miller, former EDS Global Program Manager who described why and how EDS deployed NetQoS products globally on behalf of its largest client to monitor service level compliance for hundreds of the client’s applications. He provided insight to the business drivers, the organizational issues that had to be overcome, and the impact and results of the project. He finished by stating that NetQoS products are now a standard component of the EDS management platform.
Steve Harriman is the VP of Marketing for NetQoS
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