Category Archives: Work

27Dinner & The Future of Work

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Wednesday evening I attended the 27Dinner and it was great to see some old faces and meet some new people Face to Face.  All in all it was a great evening of just socializing with old and new friends.  And oh the talks was great too 🙂

One of the questions I was asked over and over again when people hear I work for IBM, is what is a big corporate like IBM doing at a social event like 27Dinner.  Few people know that IBM with 400000 permanent employees is dependent in its daily work on social software, networks and communities. Each of the social tools like Twitter, Blogging, Wikis, Forums etc has an IBM equivalent inside.  Also we have social tools inside that I have not seen outside yet, but cannot say much about that.

One of my colleagues, Luis Suarez, has recorded a video on The Future of Work and the use of social networks and tools.  To give you an idea how he works – he works for IBM Netherlands, stay in the Canary Islands and report to 2 bosses in the United States.


The Future of Work by Luis Suarez from Luis Suarez on Vimeo.

The video is fairly long but gives a good idea what he thinks. In the video he also discusses the use of email – here is a blog posting from him on that subject.

Travel, travel and more travel.

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OWSunrise 4

This amazing sunrise was taken one morning about 2 weeks ago.  It looks like the whole sky was burning and had all these shades of orange and red.

image Pity about the Stormers that only managed a draw last night but taking the weather into account I think we should take what we got and move onto the next game against the Lions.

The Stormers is 4th on the log and still in the running for the semi’s. They would probably battle to get a home semi.  It would be good if the Sharks can also move up to the semi’s.

 

So back to the title of this post.  About a month ago I started working on a big new assignment with a company based in Johannesburg.  I am still with IBM and are working on the outsourcing deal between MTN and IBM.  This basically mean that I stay in Cape Town and work in Johannesburg.  I travel up beginning of week and then back to Cape Town towards the end of week.  I use to stay in hotels but that just got to me.  Now I use a guesthouse and go back to the same one each time and try to stay in the same room.  Now at least it feels like home away from home.

The travelling in airports and airplanes  is really tiring.  We have estimated that a round trip can take anything up to 10 hours if you take into account time from home to airport, picking up car and then trip from airport to destination.  On my next trip which starts 20 May I will stay longer which mean a weekend in Gauteng.  This will be a new experience since I have not really spend leisure time in Gauteng yet, so will need to find things to do.  Anyone in the area that knows me and want to meet for coffee or drinks, just let me know and we can make a plan.

Last week Thursday evening we had the Welcome event for all new IBMers that joined us from MTN.   Welcome to all the new IBMers, trust that you will enjoy your stay and work with us here at IBM.  Now some of my colleagues really let their hair down.

Next week I am off to Sun City with over 200 of my colleagues for a well deserved break and to have some fun in the sun.  Thanks to IBM GTS which had a great year last year.

New challenges and change.

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Change is the essence of life. Be willing to surrender what you are, for what you could become.

They say that change is as good as a holiday.  Things are changing in my life and with it will come new challenges.

At work I have moved on to a new role (still within IBM South Africa) which will mean that for the next couple of weeks and months, I will be staying in Cape Town and working in Johannesburg.  I will be commuting between Cape Town and Johannesburg on a weekly basis and depending on the needs of the work, I will be in Johannesburg anything between 2 and 5 days a week. I cannot say much about the work I will be doing but when things are more finalized then I will post it here.

I will get to know the inside of airports, airplanes and hotels.  Made sure that my Voyager and BA Executive Club cards are up to date and make sure I stay in the same hotel group to benefit from Frequent Guest privileges.

This should give me a chance to pop in at 27dinner in Johannesburg.  Do they have Geekdinners in Johannesburg?

This will also give me the opportunity to see my Johannesburg and Pretoria friends more often.  Hey, one cannot live on hotel food alone.  So if any of my readers from up there want to meet, then contact me and we can make a plan.

I am sure I will build up a wealth of experience of how to commute across the country for one’s job.  From time to time I will share that here – what to look out for and what to avoid.  What the quickest way through an airport is?  Experience with hotels, rental companies and airlines.  I will also appreciate any comments which any of you might have on things to avoid or look out for.

To my Cape Town friends,  I will not leave this beautiful place anytime soon so you will still see me around.

Robert X. Cringely and IBM!

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From time to time I read Robert X. Cringely’s column, and though I mostly do not agree with him, I find what he say interesting. In his latest column about his predictions for 2008, I found this interesting and since I work for IBM and Global Services, it is a bit worrying.

6) IBM will have several quarters of bad earnings, will try to sell Global Services to private equity firms who don’t really want it, then end up financing the transaction itself to save Sam Palmisano’s job.

Global Services (GS) in IBM is made up of Global Technology Services (GTS) and Global Business Services (GBS).  Now I have to wonder whether Mr Cringely is talking about the whole of GS or only GTS or GBS in particular.  As far as I know, over the past couple of quarters and years, GTS was the best performing division in IBM and in general outperformed all other divisions.  So I have to wonder why Mr Cringely makes a prediction like this?  He does not say on what he based his predictions, so to me it just looks like stabs in the dark.

As we all know, services is a growing trend in the IT industry and more and more companies turn to some form of outsourcing of their non-core business.  This is what GS does and I cannot see that IBM would ever get rid off it.  IBM is acquiring companies everyday that supports their Services business.  What will IBM do with this companies if and when they get rid of GS .. this just do not make sense.

The week that was.

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A while back I posted about Kimi that won the F1 championship or NOT.  McLaren appealed against the result of the Brazilian GP and the hearing was yesterday and McLaren’s appeal was rejected.  Kimi was then confirmed as F1 World Champion.  Congrats to Kimi and Ferrari for winning both the drivers and constructors titles.

On a personal front .. what a hectic week.  As mentioned earlier, I started a new job and what a hectic week.  I still had some stuff to handover from my previous engagement to  the person that is taking over from me so had to commute between Cape Town and Bellville a couple of times. Coming week will be more of the same and then things should start to get back to normal.  Good luck Margie with all the new stuff.  The new job is going as well as can be expected.  Attending lots of meetings and get to know a lot of new faces, names and roles.  A big plus is that it takes me now only about 10 minutes from my house to the office.

This all did not leave much time for social life.  I will try to get some relaxing time in over this weekend by going to brunch this morning to catch up with a friend.

My son is off to Stellenbosch varsity next year and he did not make it into residence so we are now frantically looking for accommodation in Stellenbosch.  If anybody know of something decent and not to expensive then please either leave a comment or contact me via my contact page.

Here is a photo I took earlier this morning from my balcony.  What an amazing place I live in.
Sunrise 2
Image:  Marius Bock taken with Nokia N80

Start of a new experience.

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Those that are following this blog and also follow me on Facebook will have seen my status messages that says:: “moving on”.  What is this all about?

For the past 30 months or so, last 11 at IBM, I was responsible for delivery of Application Development for Safmarine as a customer.  Friday was my last day doing that and today I am starting a new experience.  I am still with IBM but will be moving onto a new customer which is Sanlam.

Also I will be moving out of Application Development into managing a team that support one of the production runtime environments at Sanlam.  This is much more an infrastructure/product support environment with new challenges.

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IBM: Can one patent offshoring of work?

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Well, IBM in the US think so. Via Slashdot I found this article.  As far as I know to patent something it need to be original work and no prior art should exist.  Surely IBM was not the first to come up with this concept, whether it be offshoring the work to India and any other country for that matter.

I quote from the patent application:

A method for identifying human-resource work content to outsource offshore of an organization. The method is provided on a computer readable medium and includes the steps of identifying at least one task being performed by an organization; associating each identified task with a functional group within a plurality of functional groups related to the organization; determining information about individual human resources spent on each task; determining task information about human resources spent on the plurality of tasks, the task information based on the determined information about individual human resources spent on each task; using the determined task information to determine a value of each task; and outsourcing tasks having a value lower than a predefined limit to at least one of offshore and to a low cost supplier.

 

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Back home ….

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After a week away in sunny warm Denmark, I arrived back in South Africa early Saturday morning.  It only happens in South Africa when they have to delay the take-off of a flight to make sure that the airplane does not arrive early in Cape Town.  You see, they were working on the run-way overnight and the flight was not allowed to land before 5am.  They delayed the flight by 40 minutes in Frankfurt just for this. 

It was my first visit to Copenhagen and what an eye-opener.  No crime to talk off, actually I almost never saw the police or heard any sirens.  Once an alarm went off in a shop and within a blink of the eye a policeman arrived. 

Bicycles, this is everywhere.  No wonder since Denmark is very flat.  The highest point in Denmark is a pilar on a bridge that goes from one island to another. Since they ride on the wrong side of the road I almost took out some bicycle riders a couple of times. Getting out of the bus I always looked in the wrong direction and then just started walking just to hear some calls from my right from a couple of bicycle riders pedalling down on me. 

And nobody lock their bicycles when they get off it.  Hours later that bicycle will be just where they left it.

Talking of busses.  It is always on time, clean and get you on time where you need to be.  And cars do not drive in bus lanes.  It just does not happen.  Also if a pedestrain crossing is red nobody walks, even if there is no cars and/or  bicycles. It just does not happen.

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