Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference
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This whole conversation reminds me of a discussion between a manager and an employee. The employee wanted to go to a conference. The manager wanted a cost justification. The manager wanted the employee to tell him what they were going to learn there. The employee said I don't know what I don't know and won't know about it unless I go to the conference. If I knew about it, there would be no need to go.
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@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
Nah, sounds like he wants a crystal ball to tell what tech is coming so he's prepared.
Thanks for implying my incompetence. This is what I come here for.
LOL - I knew you or someone would take offense at that.
Seriously - I'm not sure what you're after - and from the comments, it seems like Scott can't figure it out either.
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@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
Nah, sounds like he wants a crystal ball to tell what tech is coming so he's prepared.
Thanks for implying my incompetence. This is what I come here for.
Come for the tech, stay for the shame. that's the motto.
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@Mike-Davis said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
This whole conversation reminds me of a discussion between a manager and an employee. The employee wanted to go to a conference. The manager wanted a cost justification. The manager wanted the employee to tell him what they were going to learn there. The employee said I don't know what I don't know and won't know about it unless I go to the conference. If I knew about it, there would be no need to go.
It's very true. Learning is a hard thing to define until you've learned the thing.
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@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
I'm looking for a discussion at one level higher (or so) than systems.
You mean platforms?
I'm not being specific because I don't exactly know what it is I want, I just know what it is not. In my mind a systems (very generally used) is a discussion or training on how to use a system and what goes into it. Those are great, but not what I'm looking for at this point. I want to learn about and talk to other people about how to see 5-10 years down the road and be able to position my company's systems so that we are ready to make the next leap forward.
How can you know what is coming 5-10 years when your CEO/owner can't see past 5? Shouldn't we base the demands of IT on the needs of the company/organization?
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@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
I'm not being specific because I don't exactly know what it is I want, I just know what it is not. In my mind a systems (very generally used) is a discussion or training on how to use a system and what goes into it. Those are great, but not what I'm looking for at this point. I want to learn about and talk to other people about how to see 5-10 years down the road and be able to position my company's systems so that we are ready to make the next leap forward.
5-10 years is an eternity in tech terms. That said, I look at my SMB, and very little has actually changed for us in 10 years though.
What has changed:
locally hosted LOB app moved to cloud provider
Changed from Lotus Notes to Exchange
Changed from Windows XP to Windows 10
Changed from Palm Pilots/Android/Blackberry/iPhone to Android/iPhone only
Changed from PRI to SIP
Changed from dual ring fiber to cable modem
Changed from 2003 server to 2012R2But the root of the way we do business really didn't change. My users still use an email client and a web browser 99.9% of the time. We still have network shares. Still have on prem AD.
In looking forward:
I'd like to:
move to O365
kill network shares and move to LANLess setup (SharePoint or NextCloud type solution)
use MDM style management of workstations (perhaps SALT)
Phones that can work literally anywhere (seems unlikely) -
@NerdyDad said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
How can you know what is coming 5-10 years when your CEO/owner can't see past 5? Shouldn't we base the demands of IT on the needs of the company/organization?
IT is the axis of business and tech. The business axis we need from the CEO. but the tech axis we need from the industry and from vendors. So while @Kelly can't use a conference like this to foresee a business axis, in theory he can use it for the tech axis. He still needs to get the CEO to provide info and combine the two himself to be useful to his company, but a conference, if done well and I hope that MC does this, will provide that kind of insight for the tech axis of the IT profession.
And I think things like the LANless talk, FOG computing and the State of the Art talks go down this road as to what the next decade of management looks like.
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@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
5-10 years is an eternity in tech terms. That said, I look at my SMB, and very little has actually changed for us in 10 years though.
Ten years maybe, but five years is not. And if you step away from vendor roles to just industry ones, ten years isn't that long. We have essentially nothing important today that we didn't know ten years ago. We know new things coming ten years from now, but what we have today is totally predictable from ten years ago. IT doesn't change as fast as we feel.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
And I think things like the LANless talk, FOG computing and the State of the Art talks go down this road as to what the next decade of management looks like.
can you give a preview on what State of the Art will cover?
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@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
5-10 years is an eternity in tech terms. That said, I look at my SMB, and very little has actually changed for us in 10 years though.
Ten years maybe, but five years is not. And if you step away from vendor roles to just industry ones, ten years isn't that long. We have essentially nothing important today that we didn't know ten years ago. We know new things coming ten years from now, but what we have today is totally predictable from ten years ago. IT doesn't change as fast as we feel.
True - but won't it be amazing if MS doesn't have a desktop OS in 10 years
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@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
What has changed:
locally hosted LOB app moved to cloud providerNTG was doing this in the 1990s. That this was the new paradigm was well established by then. It was 1999, 18 years ago, when Microsoft published their DNA paper on SaaS and the future of application design. That's why we say that anyone not doing that on MS tech is clueless, because MS said it was the path forward that long ago.
That's a two decade change, not a one decade. And even two decades ago, it was well established.
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@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
5-10 years is an eternity in tech terms. That said, I look at my SMB, and very little has actually changed for us in 10 years though.
Ten years maybe, but five years is not. And if you step away from vendor roles to just industry ones, ten years isn't that long. We have essentially nothing important today that we didn't know ten years ago. We know new things coming ten years from now, but what we have today is totally predictable from ten years ago. IT doesn't change as fast as we feel.
True - but won't it be amazing if MS doesn't have a desktop OS in 10 years
But they will. It might be free. It might not be important. but they will have it. There is no doubt.
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@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
And I think things like the LANless talk, FOG computing and the State of the Art talks go down this road as to what the next decade of management looks like.
can you give a preview on what State of the Art will cover?
part of the hint is in the name. The future of systems, is state.
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Let me give this another go, and see if I can be any clearer. There are people out there already doing the things that will be normal for everyone else in 5-10 years (especially SMB since it generally takes longer to filter down). I want to hear what they're doing and why. Maybe it is the State of the Art discussion, but having only one voice speaking makes it narrow because of human limitation. Maybe what I want doesn't exist.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
What has changed:
locally hosted LOB app moved to cloud providerNTG was doing this in the 1990s. That this was the new paradigm was well established by then. It was 1999, 18 years ago, when Microsoft published their DNA paper on SaaS and the future of application design. That's why we say that anyone not doing that on MS tech is clueless, because MS said it was the path forward that long ago.
That's a two decade change, not a one decade. And even two decades ago, it was well established.
Let me ask this - The application was web based, just locally hosted in our own datacenter. So, where we still so bad off? Granted, perhaps risk wise we should have been in a reputable DC, but let's look past that for this question.
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@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
Let me give this another go, and see if I can be any clearer. There are people out there already doing the things that will be normal for everyone else in 5-10 years (especially SMB since it generally takes longer to filter down). I want to hear what they're doing and why. Maybe it is the State of the Art discussion, but having only one voice speaking makes it narrow because of human limitation. Maybe what I want doesn't exist.
You mean having a single conference speaker on a topic rather than a round table type thing?
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@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
What has changed:
locally hosted LOB app moved to cloud providerNTG was doing this in the 1990s. That this was the new paradigm was well established by then. It was 1999, 18 years ago, when Microsoft published their DNA paper on SaaS and the future of application design. That's why we say that anyone not doing that on MS tech is clueless, because MS said it was the path forward that long ago.
That's a two decade change, not a one decade. And even two decades ago, it was well established.
Let me ask this - The application was web based, just locally hosted in our own datacenter. So, where we still so bad off? Granted, perhaps risk wise we should have been in a reputable DC, but let's look past that for this question.
Sounds like it was "ready" to move to hosted. NTG was doing hosted apps though, in that mode, in the 1990s.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
Let me give this another go, and see if I can be any clearer. There are people out there already doing the things that will be normal for everyone else in 5-10 years (especially SMB since it generally takes longer to filter down). I want to hear what they're doing and why. Maybe it is the State of the Art discussion, but having only one voice speaking makes it narrow because of human limitation. Maybe what I want doesn't exist.
You mean having a single conference speaker on a topic rather than a round table type thing?
Round table would be fine. I'm not biased for or against. I'd just like to hear what forward leaning organizations that see IT as a competitive advantage are doing to keep that edge. The specifics of my comment about the State of the Art is that while you are forward leaning you are one person and are thus limited in perspective.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Dashrender said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
What has changed:
locally hosted LOB app moved to cloud providerNTG was doing this in the 1990s. That this was the new paradigm was well established by then. It was 1999, 18 years ago, when Microsoft published their DNA paper on SaaS and the future of application design. That's why we say that anyone not doing that on MS tech is clueless, because MS said it was the path forward that long ago.
That's a two decade change, not a one decade. And even two decades ago, it was well established.
Let me ask this - The application was web based, just locally hosted in our own datacenter. So, where we still so bad off? Granted, perhaps risk wise we should have been in a reputable DC, but let's look past that for this question.
Sounds like it was "ready" to move to hosted. NTG was doing hosted apps though, in that mode, in the 1990s.
Hosted, not hosted, didn't change the way the application worked. So I'm not really sure where we are going in the discussion.
One reason to keep it local at the time is the amount of scanned files being sent to the system. A 10/10 meg connection suited us for the entire lifespan of that product because there was little to no file uploads that weren't onsite. We would have needed a much larger pipe if we were doing file uploads to a hosted solution.
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@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
Let me give this another go, and see if I can be any clearer. There are people out there already doing the things that will be normal for everyone else in 5-10 years (especially SMB since it generally takes longer to filter down). I want to hear what they're doing and why. Maybe it is the State of the Art discussion, but having only one voice speaking makes it narrow because of human limitation. Maybe what I want doesn't exist.
You mean having a single conference speaker on a topic rather than a round table type thing?
Round table would be fine. I'm not biased for or against. I'd just like to hear what forward leaning organizations that see IT as a competitive advantage are doing to keep that edge. The specifics of my comment about the State of the Art is that while you are forward leaning you are one person and are thus limited in perspective.
I suppose quite frankly - I too would like to hear this. I visited Dropbox in San Fran two years ago. There was very little Windows there, Mac's everywhere. Cisco IP phones everywhere.
I was told there was no MS AD. So I was wondering - what did the use for central authentication? Is central authentication even needed? Do we stop worrying about that, and only manage access at the resources themselves? OK - fine - but now you have potentially dozens of authentications to manage and maintain.
Moving on to files, Obviously they were using Dropbox to move files around, and as I mentioned, I would like to move away from file shares - but people are difficult at best to move to different ways of doing things - and NextCloud/SharePoint via a web interface are horribly inefficient compared to typical network shares. Only through integration of the applications with things like NextCloud/Sharepoint/Dropbox are you able to move away from the traditional shares, without a full on revolt and production efficiency drop.
