For IT, deny-by-default is standard operating procedure. Aimed at minimizing risk, this policy has IT’s hand up to prevent end-users from installing any and all nonstandard software. From an IT security perspective, deny-by-default is sound practice. For fostering innovation? Not so much.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the tablet revolution taking place in today’s enterprise. The iPad and Apple’s curated App Store underscore IT’s need to move beyond its deny-by-default history, embrace risk, and evolve its position with respect to the business.

Everything you’ve heard about running IT is wrong. “IT/business alignment” is a frequently used buzzword (FUB) meant to encapsulate effective IT strategy. But for the most part, this FUB, if you’re of the acronym persuasion, is a poor choice of words and an even worse way of running IT. On a fundamental level, the notion of “alignment” separates IT from the rest of the business. And if alignment with the business is the best you can aspire to, you’ll soon be toast in this rapidly evolving IT landscape.

As I pointed out (ahem) more than a year ago (Hey Corporate IT, Get Out Of The Stoneage) today’s IT needs to make a double leap to get to the future. Mere alignment isn’t going to do the job. [Read more...]

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It’s coming, straight at you at a thousand miles an hour and nobody on Facebook can hide from it. If you’re one of the Facebook users who we’re ‘upset’ with last week’s round of Facebook system updates you haven’t seen anything yet.

It is without a doubt the most shattering change ever made to the social network and I expect it to cause a bit of an insurrection. I’m not talking about the new real-time “Ticker” at the top right of your profile or about the “Top Stories” that now appear at the top of the news feed — those are inconsequential compared to what’s next.

In the weeks ahead Facebook will be switching profile pages to a new format called “Timeline”. I’ll admit, as a technologist I prefer to work and play with things before they become available to (or are foisted upon) the general public, so I made the switch last week and instantly regretted it, this is the most sweeping change I’ve ever seen anyone, not just Facebook make to an existing platform. I HATED it. [Read more...]

As we once again enter the iPhone 5 breach, one would do well to keep their grains of salt at the ready, but the Business Insider reports that Sprint will be among the few carriers to sell the iPhone 5.

The news is something of a coup for Sprint, the nation’s third largest wireless service provider. If true, it could provide a stay of execution for a company that would otherwise be facing Verizon and AT&T/T-Mobile without a Cupertino trump card. Sprint’s stock has already jumped due to the news, although at last glance it seems to be returning to per-announcement levels.

Like Verizon, the backbone of Sprint’s network runs on the CDMA standard. Rather than manufacture a different iPhone for each carrier, the possibility of Sprint selling the iPhone 5 lends a bit of credence to news of the device’s dual-network nature.

Sources also report that instead of the hoped-for September release window, the iPhone 5 may instead see the light of day later in October.

Facebook’s surreptitious public relations campaign against Google shows how intense the competition has become between the two companies — and to what lengths Facebook will go to in the fight.

“There’s always been a cold war with skirmishes on varying fronts since Facebook came on the scene so big,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “They increasingly see themselves as rivals with Google for advertising dollars. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. The competition? It’ll probably go even farther. We’ll see more hard-nosed competition coming.”

Facebook admitted this week to hiring a well-known PR firm to plant anti-Google stories in the media.

Both Facebook and the PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, admitted Thursday to trying to get journalists and bloggers to write negative articles about Google’s privacy practices. While Facebook denied that it was pushing a “smear campaign,” industry analysts said the surreptitious back-stabbing is a clear indication of how heated it’s become between the two Internet behemoths. [Read more...]

Take your typical electronics store and multiply it by a million. Next, throw in quarter-mile long lines for anything food-related. Add the arrival of the adult entertainment industry, and you pretty much have a feeling for the annual gadget-fest known as the Consumer Electronics Show, (CES to geeks like me) held this week in Las Vegas.

This year’s CES will feature some 2,500 companies, launching 20,000 new products, and displaying them across 1.6 million square feet of space at the Las Vegas Convention Center, an increase of more than 10% compared to last year’s show.

So, what will basically everyone in the consumer electronics world, except Apple, which doesn’t feel the need to grace CES with its presence – be selling?  For starters, tablets. [Read more...]

Earlier this week, Internet Explorer 8 started blocking access to completely harmless sites, claiming, “This website has been reported as unsafe.”

While some good sites go bad from time to time, typically infected with subverted iFrames and bad advertisements, IE8 was blocking sites that didn’t have any ads — Visa.com, for one, as well as MoneyTreeInc.com and SalesAspects.com. It also looks like many (if not all) sites that use Telerik’s RadMenu under Microsoft’s ASP.Net were blocked.

It’s still too early to tell, but as best I can discern, all of the sites I can find that triggered IE8′s alarms were running Windows Server and IIS. [Read more...]

If you’re determined to have a last fling with a factory-installed version of Windows XP on a new PC, place your order soon. Come the end of September 2010 Dell will no longer take orders for machines loaded with the nine-year-old operating system. XP fans will still have ways to get the operating system on new machines, but not as easily.

The news shouldn’t come as a surprise to Windows shops, though it could be a jarring dose of reality for organizations that have been postponing the inevitable transition from XP, be it to Windows Vista (it could happen), Windows 7, or something else entirely. Notably, Microsoft has improved the Windows XP Mode in Windows 7, which enables the platform to run XP-centric software. [Read more...]

They’re at it again, those IT folks who live in the stone-age and use ‘security’ as a reason to resist change.

A recent Computerworld story cites unnamed analysts as giving the iPad an “F” for its security features, then quotes Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney on why iPhones shouldn’t be used in the enterprise:

Despite Apple’s updates and the inclusion of the Cisco VPN, Dulaney said Gartner concludes that the iPad is “not enterprise ready … and Apple would have no problem with Gartner saying this was not enterprise ready. … We don’t endorse use of netbooks, and the iPad is in the same category. … We don’t think it has the security and manageability capabilities for offline applications and, more importantly, the support of Apple for the enterprise.”

[Read more...]

Flipboard, the first truly social electronic magazine, is an application for content consumption. This is not your new full-functioned Twitter or Facebook client on an iPad; it’s a way to read the articles your friends think are most interesting in a format that emphasizes photos, typography, and the appeal of well-placed white space.

Flipboard is a free app, and once you have it installed and you’re logged in to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, it will scan your friends’ posts and present the links and articles that they’ve been posting to Facebook or Twitter to you in a magazine-like layout. Your Facebook friends, their shared links, photos, and videos are all arranged in a layout that looks much better than Facebook itself, and the links from the people you follow on Twitter are pre-loaded and the articles displayed in-line. [Read more...]