I’ve seen a great deal of comments about the FCC report this week that 19 million Americans still lack broadband access (6%). Access in this case means they have a choice available if they want it. That is a significant drop from last year.

According to the CIA World Fact Book, 82% of the population lives in urban centers (back in 2010), so that leaves about 56 Million non-urban residents. 

I am sure there are a number of reasons for the gap, but having grown up on a farm in Indiana I have little doubt that wired broadband has reached out that far. I believe there are about 1M Americas that live on farms.  The FCC did not include mobile broadband access in their assessment. That may not make all that much difference, having seen what mobile broadband access was a few weeks ago in a drive between Waco and College Station, Texas.

There are now viable satellite Internet alternatives that perform much better than those of a decade ago, so pretty much everyone in the USA can have Internet service if they are willing to pay the price.

HP recently released an e-zine focused on the healthcare and life sciences industry that has a number of articles that may be of interest. These are written by a number of people I’ve worked with over the years:

• Healthcare that matters: defining the path to better decision making - Amir Desai
• Six factors impacting industry transformation – from sick care to integrated health management – Harry Kim
• HP Labs marries creativity and technology to inspire health & life sciences solutions – Jaap Suermondt (the Services and Solutions lab director that I work for)
• The strategic race is on – is your enterprise a dynamic runner? – Larry Schmidt (one of the other fellows at HP)
• The three Cs of cloud and three big rules to get started – Larry Schmidt (as well)
• Is storing health data in the cloud the best prescription?
• Securing information in a connected, mobile world– Dan Gonos (also a fellow at HP)
• The secret handshake toward better more accurate data – Nestor Mustafa
• The big data continuum: converting information into actionable knowledge- Benjamin Novinger
• Health intelligence helps turn patient data into better outcomes
• OHCA automates enrollment with HP
• Mobility and its ecosystem, the keys to delivering personalized healthcare - Larry Schmidt

And additionally Sue Arthur provides a perspective on Why HP?

Included are numerous perspectives on issues facing the industry in nearly every corner and it addresses how the abundance of capabilities that exist in the IT space can be applied to businesses in new ways to maximize value from the resources that remain scarce.

I was talking with someone about the problems facing the CIOs of the future. With all the emphasis on consumerization and more recently Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in IT, the enterprise environment of the future could easily turn into a Bring Your Own Service (BYOS) to work (naturally when I did a Google search someone had already coined BYOS).

I mentioned a few weeks ago that a technical leader for large global services organization said that all applications will be pulled together by end users in the future – I hope he was just exaggerating by the way. He clearly sees this BYOS world as something he is planning on. His thinking though was still limited to IT.

If we even get close to this kind of environment where users create tools and relationships, then leave the organization (or even move on within the organization) and expect others to support what they built (we’ve seen before with Excel and Microsoft Access – both extremely useful tools), the IT team could easily end up being forced to support something that was done off the cuff by amateurs and then evolved into a mission critical tool. Can this happen with other parts of the business as well?

It the past I would have said that it was an enterprise governance issue. Now I wonder if it is more of an architecture issue. Can we architect flexibility into the system so that it is easier to develop, monitor and more importantly maintain these kinds of systems?  I doubt that anything that smacks of a peer review will be supported by the user community.

As IT organizations look to a future of greater service orientation, they should look for service orientation of the enterprise as a whole on not just IT. IT has cloud and SaaS as examples from its domain but service orientation techniques can be broadened to other parts of the business. In the future we may not be talking about IT devices or bringing LinkedIn information services into the enterprise but other non-core services like manufacturing, distribution, HR… depending on the organization. 

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No organization large enough to have a private cloud will likely have just HP servers in their environment, so diverse environment management is likely to be common requirement in the private cloud. Yet there don’t appear to be many products on the market that address diverse environments (Converged Cloud) well.

HP CloudSystem Matrix is available as a popular turnkey solution bundled with HP servers, but many don't realize that it is also available as HP CloudSystem Matrix software that can be used with non-HP systems, in existing environments.

As I think about the kind of management required as the automation concept moves out of IT and into business processes as a whole, a much better understanding of the integration needs of diverse environments will be required for these flexible approaches to burst out of IT. Cloud computing is just the IT implementation of a much larger automation trend.

I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar back when it came out in 1999. Over the weekend I came across this post by Poul-Henning Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar that takes a look at the current state of a small part of the Open Source movement.  I found reading made me contemplate about some of the aspects of Open Source that I hadn’t thought about in a while.

Almost every company has some Open Source software  in its environment (since it is part of the abundance of IT) and yet it really only makes sense to depend on Open Source if you contribute to its creation and maintenance, since you are essentially taking on part of the support function.

It may be a good time for organizations to assess what goes into the Open Source capabilities they are using and the licensing restrictions that may exist.

I took the plunge over the weekend and upgraded my home machine to Windows 8 (the version that was released to manufacturing). It is definitely a bit different not having a start menu. Once I got used to the fact of having a start screen instead, where I could arrange the icons based on how I work, I’ll probably be more productive. The biggest change in my behavior though is that I am now using the Windows key on my keyboard, something I have never really used that much before.

It has a myriad of uses in Windows 8. Here is a list of shortcut keys I have been working with (not all are new to Win8):

There are a couple of things I really miss though. One is Live Mesh. It is all bundled into SkyDrive, and that doesn’t have quite the same the granularity of decided what ends up on the cloud and what remains in your environment.

I use Synergy to share my mouse and keyboard between machines. Now that the side of the screen actually means something (Charms bar), I am not sure if I can use it in the same way, since with Synergy once I reach the side of the screen, I am on another computer’s screen. Windows C will bring up the Charms bar, and that capability is something you will use all the time.

The move to Windows 8 will be more frustrating to the technical support folks than to the casual user, since I am still having trouble finding all the settings and properties that I was used to change. The install (a fresh one where I cleaned off the drive) did find ALL of my drivers for my HP machine without me having to do anything special. Since I am a ham radio operator I have a few strange ones that I was shocked it found. I did have to set the driver for my network connected HP printer to Windows 7 compatibility mode for it to recognize the operating system as OK.

On the plus side IE 10 has numerous features that it has been missing when compared to other browsers (e.g. field spell checking, Do not track) and so far I’ve been very happy with it.

The one other things that took me a bit of time to figure out is the Windows 8 file backup system. The days of Windows backup are gone and now File History has taken over. I have it running, but have not validated its workings yet.

Those are a few thoughts in my first 24 hours on Windows 8.