Economist article on cloud computing

The wife and baby are in Wisconsin this week visiting relatives while I head to EDUCAUSE in Orlando. There might be more blogging as a result.

The Economist has a piece this week on cloud computing. It's a pretty good overview of the concept for those who haven't been following it closely. Overall, however, I think it overemphasizes what I would call the raw, technical aspect of the phenomenon and under-emphasizes network-effects angle.

The idea of highly flexible computing power is a pretty cool one, and the piece cites an Amazon Web Services case study demonstrating just that. Using AWS, a Washington Post Engineer built a digital library of a massive collection of potentially newsworthy government documents about Hillary Clinton in nine hours. What a contrast to the timelines we're used to in libraries!

The most powerful aspect of the cloud computing phenomenon, in my opinion is the aggregation of data and the network effects that rise as systems get larger. The key feature of a cloud application is that it's data is part of a greater organic whole, and that it's able to do things that an isolated application can't. This is where the distinction between Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing gets fuzzy. The piece starts to touch on this concept when it brings up Tim O'Reilly

A raft of start-ups is also trying to build a business by observing its users, in effect turning them into human sensors. One is Wesabe (in which Mr O’Reilly has invested). At first sight it looks much like any personal-finance site that allows users to see their bank account and credit-card information in one place. But behind the scenes the service is also sifting through its members’ anonymised data to find patterns and to offer recommendations for future transactions based, for instance, on how much a particular customer regularly spends in a supermarket. Wireless devices, too, will increasingly become sensors that feed into the cloud and adapt to new information.

We now use Mint to track our home finances...for some reason we didn't like Wesabe. It knows how to categorize purchases on our credit card statement because it picks up on the ways other users categorize purchases with similar labels. Much nicer and easier than using Quicken used to be.

The piece brings up a concept of "industry operating systems" that will arise to allow businesses to become more modular and flexible, while relying more heavily on the services of others.

Both trends could mean that in future huge clouds—which might be called “industry operating systems”—will provide basic services for a particular sector, for instance finance or logistics. On top of these systems will sit many specialised and interconnected firms, just like applications on a computing platform.

This is interesting to contemplate. You could almost argue that Flickr fits this model. It provides the basic operating system and then so many other firms jump in and provide specialized services image service: prints, calendars, cards, etc. In this case the industry is totally virtual.

I liked this quote:

Twenty years ago, he argues, 80% of the knowledge that workers required to do their jobs resided within their company. Now it is only 20% because the world is changing ever faster.

There's a parallel here with libraries. We've seen a similar flip in terms of information residing in-house vs. outside. We're preparing students for the business world where information is also in the cloud.

I've been reading the Economist for 20 years now but I've come to realize that they are a bit technologically stodgy. Their online stories have no hyperlinks within them.

thoughts ahead of NITLE Cloud Computing Event

I'm attending the NITLE "Changes in Provisioning and Supporting Enterprise Technology Tools" event at Rollins College next week. The leader of the even t asked us to send our comments and questions ahead of time, which I have neglected to do up to now.

This event is devoted to discussing the implications of the "Big Switch" for information services at liberal arts colleges. What are some of the big issues in my mind regarding this transition?

• I see strong parallels between the challenges faced by libraries and IT departments in the move towards cloud computing. The web has allowed the aggregation of more and more content via licensed electronic resources. Along the same lines, IT departments now have increasing opportunities to purchase software as a service from companies like Google.
  
• It is questionable how much value the library and the IT department can add to these external services and content. In order to be viable, we need to demonstrate our expertise in the selection of these services and in their integration within our local environments.
  
• We also need to educate our communities. We need to work on raising expectations about what's possible with the extremely deep and powerful resources emerging on the network.
• IT operations and libraries face increasing competition from "free" consumer oriented services in the cloud that compete with institutionally provided ones: Google Docs vs MS Office, Google Scholar vs library research database, Google Books vs. library catalog, NetVibes/Voicethread/Google Groups, ____Web 2.0 app vs. of Blackboard, Flickr vs. of ContentDM, Google Research vs. DSpace, etc.
  
• With the web as the medium, it becomes that much easier to take the IT department (or the library for that matter) out of the loop when provisioning software or academic content. The HR department, the development office, or an academic department can select content or services over the Internet that meets their needs. User communities for cloud software and services can easily transcend institutional boundaries and make what used to be isolated choices seem less so. Nick Carr recently discusses how cloud computing is exerting a centripetal force throughout the web as a whole, with a trend toward centralization. In the context of an organization, it's exerting a centrifugal force: it is now much easier for a department or professor to deploy a multi-user application (eg VoiceThread, a NITLE favorite) without the participation of the IT department.
  
• In some ways, small colleges should be able to benefit from these developments, as they decrease our competitive disadvantage due to our size. With more and more resources on the network, we should be able to provide "research level" computing and library resources. In the fast changing environment, should also be nimble enough to capitalize on opportunities quickly.
• Open source projects like Moodle have worked well in the last decade, but in some respects they will have trouble competing against network level applications that feature a single, continually updated installation and benefit from the network effects of a centralized user base. Open source projects need to be reinvented to take advantage of the cloud computing model.

I have a feeling that some of the event will be devoted to discussing the practical application of some of these "cloud" applications like Google Apps for education.

As an example from the field, I would offer our library's transition to WorldCat Navigator for the Summit consortium and soon WorldCat Local for our local catalog. It's a move that moves our library catalog functionality from our local ILS server to a network level application. As I've discussed in previous post, it's as much about sharing data as it is about sharing an application.

system migration therapy

I just came across this advice in an email from Kyle Banerjee regarding the upcoming Summit Migration to WorldCat Navigator:

The stages of migration

Having been through a few major systems migrations, I think that you'll find this process easier if you're aware of certain stages people naturally go through.

The first stage consists of unfavorable comparisons of the new system to the old system. INN-Reach is good at what it does. People know its strengths and know how to get the most of it. Especially in the beginning, staff will naturally think about Nav the way they do about INN-Reach. Since Nav doesn't do some things the same and its strengths will be different, staff will quickly discover weaknesses while not being able to capitalize on the strengths. Some staff may use the system in a way that magnifies these differences. This stage is typically accompanied by nostalgic sentiments towards the old system, negative feelings for the new system, and a high level of stress.

In the second stage, people start getting used to the system. They learn how to do what they need, discover a few neat tricks, and develop workarounds for the weaknesses discovered in the first stage. During this time, people settle into a groove and things operate smoothly. Feelings towards the new and old system become more balanced as people perceive them as the different beasts that they are.

In the third stage, people figure out what the new system does best and reconfigure their workflows to maximize the system's strengths while minimizing the impact of its weaknesses. By this time, people see the migration as a positive event, and many can hardly believe the things they used to do.

Most of you have undoubtedly been through at least one migration and probably recognize the stages listed above. My point is that if you feel stressed at the beginning, it's important to recognize this is a natural part of the process. Things won't just get better -- soon enough they'll be better than they've ever been.

I wonder if Kyle offers therapy sessions for working through these stages? Seriously, though, I think he speaks the truth.

e paper

I just got back to work after taking a month off to spend with my wife and 2 1/2 month old boy. It was a some great family time involving some short jaunts around Oregon-to the coast, the high desert, and the Mt Hood area. The weather was characteristically perfect Oregon September weather. I was pretty successful in breaking away from work duties, but I probably spent too much time in front of a screen doing other things...like putting our CD collection on iTunes, following political and economic news, and otherwise futzing around.

When I got back here to Watzek, I heard that there had been a bunch of problems with the printers in our computer labs. Of course, this is a perennial problem. The library is part of a larger IT-run system for printing in which students have accounts, etc. It's pretty well designed, but always prone to failure. Something about combining the large capacities of todays digital media with the more limited capacities of a mechanical device just spells trouble.

I'm wondering if we should start trying to steer our students away from printing documents and encourage them to read documents on the screen. The Plastic Logic electronic reading device is the first device that I've seen that seems like it would work well as a substitute for printing out our PDF electronic reserve documents on paper. It's due out in the Spring.

It's got some strengths over the Kindle, in that it's as wide as a normal piece of paper and much more durable than glass case electronic devices. It's designed to be a "business" reading device rather than a recreational reading one, which might mean that it's well suited for academic type reading.

del.icio.us project linking to WorldCat.org

I just heard that the collection of site-based research resources that our Environmental Studies program has created using del.icio.us (see previous post) is linking into WorldCat.org whenever it references a book or article (when the article citation is included in WorldCat). Many of these references are examples.

In some previous iterations of this project, they had been linking to references for books and articles in RefWorks. But such a reference isn't as useful for someone who finds this reference from outside our institution. WorldCat.org provides a nice authoritative reference point for academic resources because it provides the means to acquire the resource through your own library. Amazon often fulfills this role for books, but its nice to see WorldCat step into the picture.

I'm assuming that when Summit goes live on WorldCat Navigator, it will be easy to move from a record in WorldCat.org to that delivery system.

I know that WorldCat.org has loaded lots of journal articles recently. The more, the better! Someday, perhaps, it will be an "authoritative" location for journal article citations.

talking with art historians

With a new baby in the house, I've been taking a break from work and blogging. I do occasionally get a change to hop on the laptop when the baby is hanging out in his bouncy chair. But it is a changed world.

I did come back to work for a few days at the end of July. The L&C Visual Resources Curator Margo and I got a chance to talk to L&C's team of three tenure track art historians about ways that the library's Visual Resources center could help them. It was an interesting conversation, and a few themes emerged.

The personal collections of images that they use to create lectures are of great interest to them. One of the art historians keeps his collection on the network using ARTstor, the other two keep their images in folders on a PC. They all seemed interested in services we could provide them to help build these personal collections--like scanning/metadata creation and/or training students to do so. They mentioned that sharing images between other scholars was sort of a catalyst for professional/social contact. I tried to nudge them toward Web 2.0 approaches like Flickr for organizing/sharing their personal images.

As you might expect, they don't differentiate between institutionally-licensed image collections and those freely available on the web. One of their favorite sites for acquiring images was the Web Gallery of Art. They described ARTstor as useful and a sort of "Walmart" for images and differentiated between its broad stroke approach and more niche websites that focused on more specific areas of art.

Creating physical places where students could discuss and critique art was a potential priority for them and they thought the Visual Resources space could play a role in this. They also expressed a desire for someone with expertise in "visual literacy" as this was a concept that emerged for the Art Department in the recent accreditation visit.

They asked for someone to help them navigate the technical complexities of delivering high quality images in the classroom, especially regarding configuration of computers and projectors. They also wanted help with preparing images for submission in professional publications.

In the era of slides, I would guess that art historians would be lobbying for the institution to purchase slides for the institutional collection to support their courses. Now, the institutional collection isn't as important to them. The two "collections" that are important are their personal collections and publicly-available, network-level collections. Increasingly, the library's job is to facilitate creation, use and navigation of these two types of collections, not to build an organizational collection of images akin to a slide or book collection.

We do have an institutional collection of digital images to support the curriculum on MDID; it's comprised of some licensed images and some scanned images. Likely, we'll be exposing this collection in the ARTstor platform so that it can be incorporated in the critical mass of content and functionality that resides in that network-level collection.

The two publicly available, network-level collections that we have built here are accessCeramics and L&C digital collections.

IT Consumerization

Thanks to Bryan Alexander and Liberal Education Today for pointing out this piece, which summarizes a phenomenon known as "IT Consumerization." The idea is that the best information technology now starts out in consumer hands and then works its way into the technology used by organizations. "Retail" or "business to consumer" hardware and software have created higher expectations for software run in an organizational setting.

The end result is that the office has gone from being the place where you spend time with cutting-edge technology, to a technological boneyard where you're perpetually trapped about three years in the past.

The piece also points out:

This phenomenon is also at work on the network, where users develop their sense of how networked apps (messaging, collaboration, and archival) should look and function through daily contact with the lively ecosystem of consumer-driven Web 2.0 applications. Next to something like Facebook or Google Maps, most corporate intranets have an almost Soviet-like air of decrepit futility, like they're someone's lame attempt to imitate for a captive audience what's available on the open market.

My observations:

Universities used to expose students to cutting edge information technologies; now the information systems with which students interact at school often seem antiquated when compared with consumer applications. For the last ten years, libraries have been fretting over their inability to provide users with an experience that is equivalent to Amazon and Google. These are just examples of the above phenomenon.

Is this lag temporary or permanent? Will the makers of enterprise software catch up? At the network level, it makes the most sense that the most advanced applications will be those that can target the broadest possible audience, and consumer applications fit that bill. Niche applications will always be at somewhat of a disadvantage due to scale.

To some extent, I think the problem is about IT departments making the "big switch" to software that can be delivered over the web. I can think of several organizationally oriented software apps that we use around here that meet the higher Web 2.0 expectations: Basecamp, Google Analytics, and Google Docs.

Another aspect of the article was the idea that employees will soon want to use their own devices (PCs and phones) at work instead of IT supplied and maintained machines. This seems like a kind of inevitable trend that may be driven by cost incentives as well as the general idea that devices like phones and laptops are highly personalized.