FRAMINGHAM (02/02/2000) - BEATING THE ODDS Now that the millennium date change has happened, you may think there's no more fun to be had with dates for a long time to come.
Think again!
Feb. 2, 2000, is the next banner day to mark on your calendar. Why? Because that date-2/2/2000-includes only even numbers. Big deal, you say? Well it is!
The last time that happened was 8/28/888, or Aug. 28, 888 (yes, we do mean the year eight hundred and eighty-eight).
Another important date fact: Last Nov. 19, or 11/19/1999, was the last all-odd numerical date we'll see until Jan. 1, 3111.
Who'd have thought!
CLICK-N-SNIFF THE SCENT OF A WEBSITE So long, scratch-n-sniff. Today we have the online equivalent. DigiScents Inc., an interactive media startup in Oakland, Calif., has developed iSmell, technology to bring the sense of smell to the web. iSmell, due to be released this fall, consists of both software and hardware.
The iSmell hardware, which plugs into the USB port of a PC or Mac, releases essential oils from cartridges much like ink in a printer. Once the oils are emitted, they vaporize through the air, intoxicating the user with scents that match a specific online product, music, console game or food. The software, which can be downloaded off the DigiScents "snortal" (www.digiscents.com), triggers the hardware to release the right smells at the right time. Fragrances will be sold in scent-palette cartridges that contain more than a hundred recognizable scents.
John Williams, vice president of business development for DigiScents, explains:
"Smell is the most emotionally evocative and memory-inducing sense that humans have. With smell attached to a product on the web, we could create realistic and immersive interactive experiences for consumers." iSmell will cost less than $200 for hardware and software.
With all the odorific possibilities, it's no surprise that Kraft Foods is negotiating with DigiScents to incorporate smell into its web applications, kiosks and focus groups.
EDUCATION EXERCISING OPTIONS Touch your toes! Flex those arms! Now click your mouse! If you do it right, you'll be on your way to virtual fitness and an A on your report card.
Online educational programs have been gaining popularity for years, and now even phys ed classes are jumping on the technological bandwagon. At Malone College in Canton, Ohio, instructor Charles Grimes teaches "PE 250: Fitness for Life" via the web, and he doesn't find it all that strange.
Grimes has had to alter his teaching methods a bit for this course; after all, he can't blow the whistle at students who loaf. To do well in the class, students must keep logs of their exercise and nutritional habits, take fitness tests and participate in online chats about the coursework. "I must admit this is a risk. I don't have nearly the control over what each student is doing," he says. "I rely heavily on encouragement, lots of interaction and trust. I'm much more like an online personal trainer than a college PE instructor."
Florida High School, an accredited institution whose classes exist solely online, also offers a personal fitness course for credit. The 38 students in the class, who live across the state of Florida, plan personal training programs, submit workout logs and communicate with instructor Jennifer Jackson at least twice a week.
Jackson taught this course for four years in the usual, nonvirtual way, and she says the online version actually works better for students who aren't particularly drawn to more traditional offerings like volleyball, basketball and flag football. "Students get to choose the activities they want," she says.
"If they don't like to run laps, they can Rollerblade, ice skate or surf. This is a really important advantage, in my opinion, because my goal is for them to find a physical activity that they will continue to do long after this course is over." -Sara Shay SUPPLY CHAIN BEST PRACTICES 1. Delivery performance to request. Implement order-tracking systems that can compare requested versus actual dates at the line-item level. Use these tracking systems to give customers a better view of inbound orders, possibly as an e-commerce service.
2. Cash-to-cash cycle time. "We find this metric of great value, and we emphasize it," says Todd Ackerman, director of The Performance Management Group (PMG). "I estimate that only one-third of the companies I encounter have any notion of it at all. The CIO can help create a dashboard, a series of metrics, that drives the organizational behavior required to optimize the business model. These processes are cross-functional by nature, and many IT systems are not designed to measure in that way."
3. Online purchasing. Implement online purchasing and EDI to reduce the time and overhead needed to process paperwork. A "pay on receipt" approach for selected products can minimize time-consuming matching and reconciliation of customer invoices.
SECURITY OPEN SESAME In this Computerized, security-conscious era, it's not too big a stretch to say that passwords practically run our lives. We have passwords for our computers, for individual software programs, for websites, for voice mail, for banking...and it doesn't stop there. Keeping track of them all is becoming a daunting challenge.
Well at last, there's help for the password-weary. EmmaSoft's Darn! Passwords! is a Windows utility that remembers all your computer passwords for you. You remember just one password, and that lets you in to the Darn! Passwords!
"safe," in which all the others are securely stored. When you want to open a protected program or website, Darn! Passwords! supplies the correct password to get you in.
Priced at $14.95, Darn! Passwords! can also be accessed used by multiple users.
For more information, visit www.emmasoft.com.
THE ENVIRONMENT WHAT A WASTE By Sara Shay Reduce, reuse, recycle. Schoolchildren are familiar with this environmentally conscious motto, but much of corporate America still doesn't get it. Peter Senge, author of the best-selling book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday, 1990), is the chair of the nonprofit Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), which recently started a sustainability consortium to address the issue of environmental responsibility in industry. We asked him why sustainability is such a big issue and what members of the consortium are doing to promote it.
Q: HOW CONSCIOUS ARE WE OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INDUSTRY AND THE ENVIRONMENT? A: The Industrial Age as a whole has been a process of harvesting natural capital and social capital to produce financial capital. We really pay no attention to a whole set of consequences. Waste is an artifact of the Industrial Age. Nature produces no waste whatsoever-everything that is a byproduct of one thing is a nutrient to something else. Nature is completely efficient in that way. In America, 200 times each person's body weight per day is extracted from the earth to make products. Ninety-nine percent of that, by weight, will end up as waste. We have this incredibly ironical industrial world where everybody is going crazy measuring productivity and efficiency by output per man hour and return on investment, and we run the most inefficient system that humankind has ever conceived of in terms of the natural environment: 1 percent efficiency.
WHAT IS THE GOAL OF THE SOL CONSORTIUM? The basic idea is to foster deep collaboration among different organizations on what are really transcendent issues. [The consortium] gets companies together who have already begun to see environmental sustainability as a cornerstone of their business strategy.
HOW ARE THESE COMPANIES ADJUSTING THEIR STRATEGIES TO BENEFIT THE ENVIRONMENT?
Interface, for example, is a leading manufacturer of commercial carpeting.
Their business vision is to never sell another carpet. They want only to rent carpet and achieve 100 percent recycleability. When you're through with the carpet, they will come and pull it up and give you a new one. The old one, meanwhile, gets recycled. The conceptual breakthrough is that you don't care about having a bunch of nylon on your floor, you want warmth, aesthetics, acoustics-you want services, not products. They're no longer selling you a thing, they're renting you a thing that produces the service. This is a transformation of the industrial business model.
For more information about SoL, visit www.sol-ne.org.
MOVERS & SHAKERS by Tom Field
Deasy Switches Trains from GM to Siemens... Dana Scott Deasy, formerly CIO of General Motors Locomotive Group (GMLG), recently was named vice president and CIO of Siemens Corp.'s U.S. operations.
At GMLG in La Grange, Ill., Deasy was one of 22 divisional CIOs under the leadership of GM corporate CIO Ralph Szygenda. He made news in 1998 as the first of GM's divisional CIOs to break the company's long-standing outsourcing relationship with Electronic Data Systems (see "Shop Talk," CIO, Aug. 1, 1998).
Now at Siemens in New York City, Deasy is the first-ever corporate U.S. CIO, and he is in charge of a combination of 25 divisional and regional CIOs throughout the Americas. The challenges, says Deasy, who started the new job last October, arise from the size of the company and the scope of the work.
"Siemens encompasses everything from medicine to automotive to financial services...there are over 20 different Siemens operating companies in North America alone," he says. "And each of them has a CIO." Which leads to Deasy's other challenge: coordinating the efforts of all these IT chiefs. "How do we leverage our size?" he says. "How do we find common ground?"
So far, Deasy has spent 75 percent of his time traveling to meet all those CIOs, CFOs and CEOs as well as laying the groundwork for his two initial projects: develop a common e-commerce business transaction platform for all of Siemens' business units and start negotiating enterprisewide contracts with IT product and services vendors. "Every [division] has been doing its own thing, but we want to start to take advantage of our [corporate] size in leveraging deals with suppliers and outsourcing arrangements," Deasy says.
Prior to joining GMLG, Deasy was director of IS at Invetech Co. in Michigan; before that, he was director of information management at Rockwell International in California. He has a BS in business administration from the University of Southern California and an MBA from National University in San Diego.
Siemens Corp. is the holding company for the Siemens operating companies, subsidiaries and other legal independent entities in the United States. Siemens U.S. companies had sales of over $10 billion and employed 65,000 people in 1998. Based in Munich, Germany, Siemens AG operates in over 190 countries, employs 400,000 and had 1998 sales of nearly $70 billion.
CIOs on the Go... John Buckman Cysive spent 32 years managing IT in federal government; plans to establish a scalable network and manage data flow for the Reston, Va.-based e-commerce vendor.
Michael P. Cody Mobile
America
Fresh from a consulting engagement at First Floridian Auto and Home Insurance Co. in Florida, Cody joins Mobile America as CIO for the insurance company and its subsidiaries.
David Henke AltaVista
Formerly CIO at AltaVista's Zip2 Local Portal Services division, Henke has been promoted to CIO of all of AltaVista; he directs production and internal operational infrastructure.
B. Lee Landers Jr. Aaron
Rents
Formerly manager of customer service systems for the Southern Co. in Atlanta, joins as the furniture/appliance company's first-ever CIO.
Nicholas L. Loli Jr. A&P
A 25-year IT veteran, has traded in his CIO position at Citizen Utilities for a similar role at A&P in Montvale, N.J.; Loli will help business leaders develop and implement the retailer's IT strategy.
Terence V. Milholland EDS
Ex-CIO of Boeing, is now senior vice president and CIO for EDS in Plano, Texas; he replaces acting CIO Dan Leffel; Milholland will be charged primarily with implementing a new enterprisewide information system.
John L. Puckett Toysmart.com
Leaves GTE Internetworking Services, where he was CIO, to be CIO of online startup company Toysmart.com; Puckett directs the entire technology operation at the new Waltham, Mass.-based toy retailer.
HOT TOPIC E-COMMERCE PATENTS FOR SALE By Sari Kalin Like many inventors, Nir Kossovsky and Alex Arrow want to build a better mousetrap. The difference is that their mousetrap aims to make it easier for companies to buy and sell the rights to each other's mousetraps.
Kossovsky and Arrow, along with Bear Brandegee, are founders of The Patent & License Exchange (Pl-x.com), an online exchange for intellectual property based in Pasadena, Calif. The exchange offers a secure, anonymous, neutral forum to buy, sell, license or resell the rights to patents around the world. "This is a business that, absent the web, could not exist," says Kossovsky, the exchange's chairman and CEO.
Traditionally, Kossovsky explains, buying or selling intellectual property has been an inefficient endeavor. In a typical deal, a seller might be a small biotech company that has patented a technology but doesn't have the resources to develop it; a buyer might be a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical giant seeking access to new technology from outside its own R&D labs. Buyer and seller would try to find each other through a patent broker, who facilitates technology transfer in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. But the marketplace is fragmented, and a given patent broker may complete only a few deals a year. At Pl-x.com, Kossovsky aims to aggregate buyers and sellers around the globe into a searchable database.
The difference between Pl-x.com and other web-based searchable patent licensing databases is that Pl-x.com can actually process transactions, says Arrow, Pl-x.com's vice president of financial operations. It also offers tools to facilitate the transaction and cut down on risk, including patent validity insurance, escrow services and a suggested pricing system. These services will turn intellectual property into a liquid asset, he says, much the same way the Chicago Board of Trade turned wheat, rice, corn and other commodities into financial instruments.
Pl-x.com charges nothing to list technology; when transactions close, it takes a fee of 5 to 12 percent of the transaction value, based on the size of the transaction. (That's similar to the revenue model used by other business-to-business marketplaces.) For now, those fees are what is stopping Katharine Ku, director of Stanford University's Office of Technology Licensing, from using the service. But, "if Pl-x.com proved to be a really effective means of transferring technology, we would consider it," says Ku, whose office maintains a searchable database of its own licensable technologies on its website. Other buyers and sellers have apparently not had such hesitations-by last November, Arrow says, more than 100 companies had already agreed to sign up for the exchange.
INNOVATION IT'S A LEAN, MEAN INVENTING MACHINE If your R&D department has been a little behind developing new ideas, and the continuous supply of fresh doughnuts and Starbucks coffee isn't helping, you might want to check out some software from Boston-based Invention Machine Corp. The company's knowledge-based innovation tools target product development in the engineering, scientific and R&D areas. The brainchild of Invention Machine Chairman and CEO Valery Tsourikov, the company's flagship software, CoBrain, addresses the problem inherent in today's exhaustive process of innovation: the difficulty of finding and extracting technical knowledge from multiple and expanding information sources like the internet and company databases.
"Access to high quality knowledge is a pain," says Tsourikov, who has worked on semantic processing for nearly 20 years and received a patent on his innovative algorithm. "We have a pain killer."
At first glance, CoBrain might sound like a souped-up search engine. But CoBrain doesn't search at all. Instead, it uses semantic processing technology to extract key concepts from company databases, intranets and the internet. The software reads the content, creates a problem-solution tree and delivers an abstract listing the technical content in relevant documents. The web-based software runs on a company's server; users access it right from their web browsers. So, for example, a researcher looking for help in fighting noise might find that rear suspension, foam rubber and gas bubbles all absorb noise.
From there, she can go get whatever data she thinks will best help her.
Pricing for CoBrain starts at $250,000. For more information, call 617 305-9250 or visit www.invention-machine.com.
HOT TOPIC LEADERSHIP TIME CRUNCH By Polly Schneider Being a good leader depends not just on skills and techniques, it also requires time. Without that, it's hard to be effective at much of anything.
Personal productivity consultant David Allen, based in Ojai, Calif., has helped companies and individuals be more efficient for the last 20 years. He shares a few thoughts on how to reduce the stress of information overload.
Q: IS THE PROBLEM OF TIME MANAGEMENT GETTING WORSE? A: Fifteen years ago it was more self-evident when work was done and people could go home. It's incrementally getting worse, and that's why the simpler models haven't worked.
I can fill a big landfill with all the partially used PalmPilots, day runners and Franklin planners I've uncovered in people's desks. Most people don't know how to use these tools.
IS THE SPREAD OF TECHNOLOGY-E-MAIL AND THE INTERNET-THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM?
What technology has done is grease the skids. IT is just increasing the bandwidth and the speed of information. What we don't have is people trained to define the edges of their job and how to process information rapidly.
WHAT'S A COMMON MISTAKE? Emergency scanning the e-mail and not making any decisions. As soon as the inbox gets to be more than a screenful, you need to file it, print it or delete it. Most people keep looking at it and thinking about it and shuffling the stuff around. People are doing a lot of thinking about what they ought to be thinking about and feeling bad. It's not so much time as it is mental distraction and stress. A lot of what I teach is the thinking process-the intense 15 to 20 seconds you need to spend on an e-mail to decide what it is: Is it something I need to act on, and, if so, what's that action?
SO WHAT ARE SOME FIRST STEPS TO GET ORGANIZED? First, write everything down-every open loop-and throw it in your in basket. If it's in your head, it's in the wrong place. Second, don't just leave it there. Go back and ask yourself what you need to do about it. Then put the results into some system that you trust and that you review regularly. Learning to train yourself in processing time is part of your work.
For more information, visit www.davidco.com.
ADAPTIVE TECHNOLOGY SEEING IT THEIR WAY As technology advances, companies need to make sure their own progress doesn't stand in the way of the visually impaired. Otherwise they can expect to be hauled into court. Recent proof: The National Federation of the Blind's suit against AOL, filed last November, claiming that the company violates the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1993 (ADA), because its services are not compatible with programs that convert text into speech or braille.
To make ADA compliance a little easier-and to help the visually impaired participate more fully in technology-related careers-some companies are designing specialized products. Richmond Hill, Ontario-based Adaptive Innovations, a division of Trango Software, for example, recently launched BrailleStream, software that communicates call center data to sighted and visually impaired agents simultaneously. The visually impaired agents receive messages and statistics via an integrated voice synthesizer or braille display, in real-time. With this technology, call center agents with vision problems can operate as efficiently as their sighted counterparts. The software can be integrated with existing call center applications. Find out more at www.adaptiveinno.com.
To make sure that the visually impaired can withdraw the money they earn, two financial institutions are beginning to invest in automated teller machines that don't require users to read the screen. Though most machines have braille instructions, fewer than 10 percent of the legally blind in the United States read braille. After being approached by the California Council of the Blind, Wells Fargo and Citibank have begun supplying talking ATMs on a pilot basis in California. Wells Fargo installed 20 talking ATMs in the Bay Area, and in Los Angeles and San Diego counties last summer, and plans to add more than 1,500 across the state in the next three years. The machines give voice instructions to users via audio jacks and headsets so that transactions can't be overheard.
Citibank's machines, five of which debuted in October in San Francisco and Los Angeles, offer touch screens and audible instructions. -Sara Shay E-COMMERCE ARE YOU READY FOR VD2K? Valentine's Day 2000-also known as VD2K among those in the technological know-is right around the corner. Are you prepared?
You could shower your loved one with chocolates or flowers, but how original is that? Heck, this is a new millennium!
How about an online video card? At CardsAlive.com, a new, online greeting card site created by Cresta Systems in San Jose, Calif., you can create and star in just such a card. All you need is a digital camera: Download the free CardsAlive technology, shoot your video clip, upload it to the CardsAlive.com site and begin to build the card. Once your card is complete, enter your loved one's e-mail address; the site will send him or her a message with instructions on where to find the greeting card. If you don't have a digital camera, CardsAlive.com has a library of more than 100 ready-made video clips, free of charge, to choose from instead.
The video card technology converts heavy bandwidth formats to a small, self-executable object 100KB to 150KB in size. Since the bandwidth shrinks, anyone can execute the video greeting card on a desktop without plug-ins or special software.
CardsAlive.com provides more than 25 different greeting card categories. To use your own personal videos, a fee of $9.95 buys a one-year membership, but the company also offers a free trial membership for the first 30 days. For more information, visit www.cardsalive.com.
TECHNOLOGY
"The machines may be smarter, but we're still as crazy as bedbugs." -Paul Saffo, director, the Institute for the Future, during an executive education course called Reinventing Commerce at Net Speed.
"We're seeing smaller companies moving to XML-based technologies for online purchasing. These tools are sufficiently simple to provide a rapid time-to-implement and immediate benefit. The CIO has to educate his or her organization as to what these technologies are capable of doing." -Todd Ackerman, PMG FUTURE TENSE "Rather than the march of technology, a better description might be the flat-out, adrenaline-pumped, anaerobic sprint of technology." -Carly Fiorina, now president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, speaking before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in July as group president of Lucent Technologies.