Ideas Notebook By Matthew Allard

Sometimes you find that you’ve got too many ideas.  Ever have that problem?  I do this week, and I swear I’m going to do something about  it. I’ve got blog post ideas going back several years covering things from social media to technology to life topics and so on.  It’s time I liberate these post ideas.  I’m giving them to you to take and run with, just in case you’ve run out of ideas and need some inspiration.  What better way to end the week, right? Alrightly, here we go:

1. Social Networking & The Impact On Your Personal Brand
2. Moleskine Notebooks – Going Analog For The Fun of Writing
3. How To Balance Social Network Participation In The Workplace
4. 101 Uses for Twitter
5. Why I Believe The “Smartphone” Isn’t So Smart
6. Your Blog IS Your Social Network
7. Online Communities – You Get Out Of Them Only What You Put Into Them
8. The New Social Economy
9. Social Media Is About Sociology Not Technology
10. Never Stop Experimenting To Grow Yourself Or Your Brand
11. If Words Mean Things
12. Old Media Using Social Media
13. Building A Better Branded Blog
14. Decline Of Technology In America?
15. Social Media And The IT Professional
16. Anonymity – Pros & Cons
17. Can You Connect Up To 6 people?
18. Linux: Ubuntu Or Fedora Or ?
19. The Most Powerful Social Media Tool: YOU
20. Decisions: iOS Or Android
21. Personal Branding And The IT Professional
22. 10 Reasons For A Windows Hack To Love The iPhone
23. Disengage From The Collective That Is Your Corporate Mindset
24. “Who Am I?”
25. How Can I Help People?
26. Linux Software Installers – Why Do They Suck?
27. Essential Software For The Blogger
28. The New Intellectual
29. Is the Theme/Style Of Your Blog Important To Readers?
30. Social Realities Of A New Generation
31. What Do I Do?
32. What Can I Accomplish?
33. Powerful Writing…
34. Do I Realize How Lucky I Am?
35. Social Media In The Enterprise
36. Negativity In The Workplace
37. Don’t Talk, Just Do
38. Social Media Is An Evolutionary Step
39. Tear Down This Wall (Cubicles That Is)
40. What Is A “Social Entrepreneur”?
41. Enterprise/Corporate Culture Clashes
42. Good Enough
43. Social Media Shoehorn
44. Blogging Is A Commitment, Social Networks Are A Fling
45. Making It Happen
46. Why My Blogging “Rock Stars” Are From the Z-List
47. SharePoint Can Be An Internal Enterprise Social Media Tool
48. Labeling Things And Why It’s Ok
49. Why Paper Publications Will Never Go Away
50. A Culture Without Culture
51. To Meme Or Not
52. Step Away From The Ledge – It’s Going To Be Ok
53. Help People
54. Want To Be A High-Buck Consultant?
55. Positive Growth Through Negative Feedback
56. Virtualization: For Technology Only?
57. Build Your Own Brand Armies
58. Networking For Fun And Profit
59. Fostering New Communication In The Enterprise
60. What Social Media Has Taught A Techie Geek
61. Afraid To Succeed?
62. Stodgy Or Stale Brand? 10 Sure-Fire Ways To Freshen It Up
63. Social Media Does Not Equal Marketing Or PR
64. Fearing Free (Free Rage Fears?)
65. The Problem With Technically Excellent Solutions
66. Be Your Own Editor
67. Thinkers – The Ones To Watch
68. Getting Back To Where We Came From
69. Go Where Your Forefathers Couldn’t
70. Unsung Heros: Headhunters
71. The Line In The Sand & When You Step Over It
72. Landing Pages – Why Bother?
73. Put It On paper
74. Gen Y & Why They’re different
75. Engage HR For Change
76. Friend Counts Do Mean Something
77. Anatomy Of Twitter
78. Lack Of New Examples
79. The More You Share
80. The Android Dilemma
81. Is Your Day Job Your Only Gig?
82. When Self Promotion Goes Too Far
83. The Joys Of Building Community
84. Is Social Media Respected In Corporate Environments?
85. Lets Not Screw Around
86. Why The Old Tools Don’t Work
87. Why The Old Tools STILL Work
88. Corporate Obsolesce
89. The changing Face Of Social Media
90. What’s The Big Deal About 4G?
91. What’s Next For Social Media
92. The Dark Side Of Social Media, And Why It Sucks
93. You Will Live Online
94. Why Tablet-Haters Loose In The End
95. 10 Billion Apps
96. Do What Comes Naturally
97. The Decline Of Social Media
98. Social Media Posers
99. Ongoing Standards Wars
100. Shortsightedness Of Newspaper Publishers

Well, there’s a handful of the post ideas I’ve got in my notes.  That was just from one page of a OneNote notebook of post ideas! Sometimes, you just run out of time or simply never get back to the ideas you had when you thought of the topic.  Whatever the case, I figure somebody might make use of one or two, or ten of these.  Better to set them free than keep ‘em in a dusty digital notebook right?

Empty garage late in the day after everyone else has headed for the hills.

'Toshiba Libretto 50CT' by Jon Callow

Some call it the latest ‘fad’, others point to a long history of people bringing their own technology solutions to the workplace, it’s currently referred to as BYOD.

It’s all the rage right?  After all, the ability to set your own course, control your own computing destiny, and pick the phone of your choice is our right as modern humans.  Besides, IT departments are too overbearing and controlling – they don’t understand our need to get our work done in a timely fashion.

At least, that’s what it may seem like to those hip ‘movers & shakers’ types, and may be those Millennials too. Ok, maybe I’m stereotyping with the Millennials… but experience tells me otherwise.

Costs Of Technology

Therein lies the point of the BYOD movement, too many people think it’s a great cost-saving idea.  The problem with that is the costs are simply shifted from client-side hardware procurement, to the data center.  Actually, it’s likely to increase IT costs rather than cut them.

Like most great ideas, BYOD cuts both ways.  It’s a triumph of corporate workers to have choice!  Bringing flexibility to the main tool most productivity workers use every day.

Why can’t we pick a Mac over a PC? Why wouldn’t IT let me provide my own – I’m willing to pay for the privilege! Many more would start talking about the flexibility of different solutions, like tablets and even their phones. After all, are not all these devices computers of one type or another? I know a great number of people who argue the PC hasn’t been more personal than the devices we carry in our pockets every day!

Back to the costs question though. It’s not a simple answer once you start thinking about it.  Yes, the company isn’t buying a computer, the support contract for it, the license for the operating system, the software licenses for your apps… um, if they don’t who does?

You see, there is the beginning of the complexity of simply bringing your computer to work and trying to use it in place of a company provided one. It’s not to say it can’t or shouldn’t be done, but there’s more to it than we might think. Sure, the hardware, support and client OS licensing might be eliminated. However companies need to protect their data, which means server storage for everything, which means increased storage costs, which bring increased electrical costs for the data center, and environmental systems which add more cost.

What About Software

What about software? That too needs to be maintained in a reliable, secure, and usable form. Sure, we can move lots of apps to the cloud, but lets face it – hard core spreadsheet users over in Accounting or those documentation wizards writing all sorts of material need real tools, not a web-based version of Notepad!  So IT needs to host those applications and stream them to your personal device. This adds flexibility for us as individuals, but it also means the savings on the laptop you would have gotten now goes towards server capacity to host that application. Oh, and we need to think of floor space, and the power/environmental systems again… and more costs.

As an IT Architect, I have this kind of conversation with my peers quite often, and we continue to uncover more pros and cons. Somehow they mostly seem to balance each other out. But the real impact of BYOD, in my opinion, is the third dramatic shift in computing in my IT career. This one bringing a renaissance of choice to IT’s End Users, and expanding the idea of what the IT industry is capable of providing.