Top 3 tech purchases of 2013

(Image: James Kendrick/ZDNet)

Given what I do for a living I make a lot of tech purchases. The fact I am an acknowledged tech addict plays a small, OK a large, role in the far too many gadget purchases I make. This year was no exception as many devices arrived at the manor. After careful deliberation here are my top three tech purchases of 2013, in no particular order.

iPad Air (Image: James Kendrick/ZDNet)

iPad Air. This is the most recent purchase given the late appearance but it's already made my top three list. The iPad Air is the best tablet ever made in my opinion, and it's a fantastic achievement by Apple. It meets all of my leisure, i.e. content consumption needs, and can also step in for work duty when pressed. It's expensive compared to competing tablets, but is worth it to me.

See related: iPad Air: Best tablet ever made | ZAGGkeys Folio: Perfect keyboard companion for the iPad Air (hands on) | Lure of the iPad Air | iPad Air: Color me surprised | iPad Air: No Apple keyboard needed

ThinkPad Tablet 2. This tablet by Lenovo captured my attention when I was evaluating it for ZDNet coverage, and I purchased by own early this year. I found it to be a solid Windows 8 tablet, but it really came into its own when Windows 8.1 was released. I proclaimed this the best Windows tablet I have tried once I upgraded it to Windows 8.1, and that designation still stands. It is a superb tablet that is also a PC with the keyboard accessory. It works so well it opened my eyes to the level of achievement Microsoft has reached with Windows 8.1.

ThinkPad Tablet 2 (Image: James Kendrick/ZDNet)

See related: ThinkPad Tablet 2: Best Windows tablet | 10 reasons the ThinkPad Tablet 2 is a top Windows tablet | ThinkPad Tablet 2 and accessories photo gallery | 10 advantages Windows 8 has over the iPad and Android | ThinkPad Tablet 2: Best Windows tablet | Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2: First impressions (review)

MacBook Air. Earlier this year I purchased a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a Retina Display, and it is a fine laptop. Despite making that purchase, when Apple introduced the MacBook Air with Haswell technology a few months later I jumped on it to see how well Intel's newest processor tech would fare.

MacBook Air (Image: James Kendrick/ZDNet)

The 11-inch MacBook Air I bought is the best laptop I've ever owned. The Haswell technology has the Air outperforming the Pro (without Haswell) in every way. It provides this fast performance in the lightest, smallest package available. I would not change anything about the MacBook Air, even adding a Retina Display, as it does everything I need today while getting great battery life.

See related: New MacBook Air: Haswell ups the game (review) | MacBook Air revisited: 12 weeks in | MacBook Air and Pro: No touch screen required (unlike Windows 8) | It's high time for a MacBook Air with LTE

Windows 8.1. It wouldn't be fair if I failed to mention another piece of mobile tech in this article. It's not exactly a purchase as it was dished out by Microsoft without cost, but it's an important advance. As I recently proclaimed, the Windows 8.1 update is the most significant mobile tech to appear in 2013, and I stand by that statement.

See related: Most significant mobile tech of 2013: Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 is so good, it alone put the ThinkPad Tablet 2 on this short list. It turned that good tablet into a superb one, with faster performance, and a better tablet user experience. Microsoft should be proud of this update, and especially how fast it was able to bring it to market.

This short list of mobile gadgets contains three fantastic bits of kit. Each of them is a device that serves me well for both work and play, and I switch among them regularly. I don't regret making these purchases, even though it was quite expensive when tallied up.

I don't have a favorite among these three, but in anticipation of the inevitable question, if I had to go with only one of the three it would be the MacBook Air. As stated, I believe this to be the finest laptop available, and since I put work above all other activities the MacBook Air would be my choice. Thankfully, having to choose just one gadget is not something I have to do.

Here's what Windows 9 could look like: pictures

With a new release cycle of roughly each year, Microsoft is slated to supply its next-generation version of its desktop operating system, likely named Windows 9, by fall 2014.

Recent reports suggest the software giant will slim down its line-up down from three versions — Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Phone — to two or fewer.

But one thing for sure is that Microsoft will keep dishing out its desktop operating system as it has for the past two decades. Windows 9 will likely run on desktops, notebooks, tablets, and perhaps even phones.

With little to go on and plenty of speculation and rumor, designers have mocked up a number of concepts — fitting with previous releases — to detail what they expect the upcoming software to look like.

Here are just a few examples of some of the most visually stunning and detailed designs we've found.

Credit: Jerry Jappinen/Eiskis — View larger (pop-up)

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8 reasons Lean IT now really matters to enterprises

Lean IT helps address some of the scaling issues organizations are having with Agile. 

Photo: HubSpot

That's one of the key takeaways outlined by Steve Bell, Lean IT guru and co-author of Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation, who keynoted a recent lean confab in Paris.

Agile is a beautiful thing, encouraging that the walls between developers and users be torn down and that software be something everyone has a hand in designing and can be proud of. But as Stephen Younge pointed out here at this site a couple months back, Agile doesn't scale well beyond small teams in small settings, and it is difficult to make it work in larger organizations.

Bell is bringing fresh thinking to the problem from the "Lean Startup" perspective, suggesting that Agile is scalable. Here are Bell's eight reflections on how Lean IT is helping the enterprise:

1) Technology has the potential to play a transformative role in every product, service and industry. "Everyone is looking at IT suddenly, because it's disrupt or be disrupted," says Bell. "And the enabling factor is most cases is our capability to turn IT." He cautions, however, that IT needs to "let go" of its technology-centered thinking and focus on the customer. "We're so used to thinking about what we can do with this technology, this asset that we have, and we forget to ask what does the customer want."

2)  Deliberate innovation is becoming necessary for survival. It's time to make innovation part of everyday business, not just a one-off effort that occurs in the R&D department or development shop. Consider this, Bell asks: "If someone, anyone, anywhere in your company, including your suppliers and customers has an idea, what can they do with it? What are supposed to do? Send an email? Have a phone call? Call a meeting?"

3) Uncertainty can be your friend or enemy. Don't try to control it with governance, budgeting planning or portfolio management. "The idea of planning a year in advance is absolute nonsense, and we all know it," says Bell. "It crushes innovation." IT leaders need to strike a balance between good governance and nurturing purpose-driven teams," he adds, while noting that the situation will be different for every organization.

4) The key challenge facing Agile today is how to scale the enterprise. "Where Agile breaks down, often, is when you try to do the long big waterfall projects in rapid iterations, because there are more dependencies," Bell points out. "Things get bigger. I’m not saying they’re aren’t organizations that aren’t scaling Agile, but there are not as many as you think. They are all struggling with it." Bell notes that many Agile thought leaders are focusing on the challenge, and the principles incorporated in Lean methodologies help address the scalability challenges of Agile. Lean methodologies encourage a highly integrated approach in the way IT interacts with the business, reaching beyond simple "alignment" and focusing on a partnership with the business to continuously improve and innovate business processes and management systems.

5) ERP is the elephant in the room, and it's not going away. "If ERP can become Agile, promote standardized work, reduce information waste and errors, and enable data-driven decision-making, can it add value to a lean enterprise?" Bell asks, adding, "If ERP can't do these things,  can it be a lean enterprise?  Or will it just be a really big anchor dragging behind the ship forever?" Bell believes there is "a big future in rethinking ERP." However, "the big consulting firms are not going to like it. Because it means empowering the companies to break it down into small chunks, manage and prioritize the backlog, manage change, and drive out complexity, and take control. Because most enterprises are not in control."

6) Analytics is a critical skill that must be developed intentionally. "There are people who dream in color, and those that dream in black and white, and those that dream in heat maps," says Bell. "Those people who truly dream and think in analytics are a rare breed. If you have one that is that way naturally, you have a valuable thing.  In the absence of those, any hack with Excel and a pivot table and some pieces of eye candy can fake it and you’ll never know it." He cautions that "the good analytics people are getting sucked into the big data firms, which are just cashing in." Real data-driven decision making "is a powerful thing  especially when you can visualize it, and understand it, and draw conclusions."

7) Everyone takes an ownership stake in a Lean program. While many organizations are doing a good job in grasping most of the principles of Lean: Value, flow, pull and perfection, many miss the "value stream" aspect of it. "If you miss the notion of value streams, gains will not persist because nobody knows the end to end. Who's responsible?" Bell asks. Every stakeholder should be involved in this process, because IT is not one monolithic structure -- rather, it has many "fractals."

8) Prioritize all IT activities and investments according to long-term break-through goals, and abolish “dark matter.” Bell observes how scientists are now aware that half of the matter of the universe does not reflect any light, and is essentially dark matter. "We have that situation in IT too," he adds. "Half of the demand that comes through every day and half of the work we do every day is dark matter. It's there, it has gravitational pull, it consumes capacity. It's just not visible." Abolishing the dark matter means focusing on a few vital priorities, and building trust across the organization through Lean methodologies. Ultimately, Bell says, setting priorities based on Lean values -- continuous improvement, transparency, and partnerships with the business -- will begin to supplant political motivations for IT projects.

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Rogue IT: Sad truths and unfortunate stories

Summary: A contest on BYOD, and similar, failures in the enterprise exposes rifts and missed expectations between users and IT.

Although much has been written about "bring your own device" (BYOD) and the "consumerization of IT," it is easy to forget the practical dangers that arise when business users feel ignored by technology professionals.

It's a huge problem, so I was hardly surprised when mobile document management vendor, harmon.ie, announced a contest on "Rogue IT" horror stories. The company invited six analysts, including me, to judge the entries.

Also read:
BYOD: The new battleground for CIO value

These horror stories are absurd, ironic, and outrageous; here are a few examples taken verbatim from the contest page:

"A new MacBook owner was frustrated by the lack of Wi-Fi in his office and so invested in a wireless router. The router was so simple to setup – it did not require configuration of wireless or security settings! All was fine, until a few days later, the executive noticed his internet was running slower than usual. Thinking it was just his ISP he ignored it, but after a few days with no improvement he called in a security expert to assess the situation. The expert discovered that someone was sitting in on the local network and had captured, “sniffed”, all of the wireless traffic from the portable router – including all the passwords to the company’s accounting and file server, which were being sent to a server in Asia! There was no trail, and to this day our executive isn’t sure what was taken and by whom.""The Marketing Manager used Gmail to send files home to work on it. The company email only allowed 5 MB attachments and many of the PowerPoint decks were much larger than that.""Sales staff in a financial services firm would frequently use box.net to send themselves customer information because the backend system wasn't fully mobile enabled. However, when sales staff would leave there was no method to retrieve customer information that walked out the door.""A company user downloaded a sensitive high IP design document from company's SharePoint site using his mobile device while he was connected to the company's Wi-Fi network. He accidently copied and stored this sensitive document into a Dropbox location from his mobile device, sharing it with people outside of the company who shouldn't access this document.""Federal employees brought Wi-Fi access points into their office – two were Cisco and two were Netgear. In each case, the secure secret password was left at the default setting – Tsunami. Directly across the street was an Embassy Suites hotel that apparently had bad Wi-Fi, and many of the hotel guests connected to the rogue boxes sitting inside the government networks. The issue was discovered when one hotel guest started poking around the federal network and triggered several security alarms."

Many of these situations reflect disaffected users trying to be more efficient in the face of unresponsive IT policies and governance. In every case, I am sure IT had valid reasons for denying users' requests, but these stories highlight just how bad things can get when communication breaks down between IT and business users.

Too often, debates about BYOD ignore a fundamental point: users bypass IT when their needs are not met. When I spoke with Kim Stevenson, the CIO of Intel, she explained that shadow IT can reflect a positive or negative relationship between users and IT:

The business units make those decisions because they are trying to accomplish their objectives in the way that they think is the most efficient. If they are not choosing you, there is a reason.

I never bash shadow IT because they are fulfilling a need that ultimately IT could not fulfill. Once you get your head around that principle, then you can start working to figure out how we can best fulfill it for the company.

Joanna Young, CIO at the University of New Hampshire, echoes the importance of embracing a responsive attitude toward business stakeholders and users:

Building and retaining IT relevance requires being “deeply in touch with your customers, what they are demanding, and what the value proposition is for them.”

Expert reactions. Responding to the contest, several experts tweeted their views and comments about rogue IT. Ben Haines, CIO of file-sharing company Box, highlighted the gap between IT and business users while raising a question about IT's role and accountabililty:

A related exchange among analyst Frank Scavo, Appirio co-founder Narinder Singh, and IT executive Peter Kretzman dissected the crucial need to balance governance (control) against responsiveness (flexibility). Given the nature of Twitter, these tweets present a series of connected points rather than a linear argument:

Technologies such as cloud and mobile have eliminated the natural monopoly that IT once held over hardware and software in the enterprise. Despite the humorous quality of these rogue IT stories, determining the balance between risk/efficiency and flexibility/responsiveness is one of the key technology issues facing every major enterprise today.

Disclosure: harmon.ie is an advisory consulting client

Topics: CXO, Consumerization

Michael Krigsman is an internationally recognized analyst, strategy advisor, and authority on enterprise software leadership, CIO innovation, and social business. Interact with Michael on Twitter at @mkrigsman.

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