Dear IT Leadership: Please Lead

The twittersphere just tweeted an interesting blogpost to me, a cry for thoughtleadership and IT Governance by Reid Carlberg on the Model Metrics blog

Dear IT Leadership,

Today, your business needs you more than ever. The economy is weakening. Competition is intense.. You’ve helped it navigate technologies for years. But the business has immensely complex new challenges today. It needs your help to operate more efficiently. It needs your help to innovate in new ways.

In short – they need you to lead – but they need you to lead differently. They need you to lead them through radical change. What do I mean?

What does Reid Carlberg mean? Read the full article here.

Oriental Dispatch:CYBER TOKKU(Cyber District)

MIC, The Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, has announced to start "CYBER-TOKKU" (which means "CYBER DISTRICT").　

This virtual space will be operated in a closed community with a real User's name, and will experiment things, for example, the impact & circumstances on freeing a copyright.

MIC is accepting a research topics for "CYBER-TOKKU".

1. Merging virtual net space and reality.
2. Communication of secret and Personal information.
3. Contents distribution.
4. IT use for public services field.

Research topics that are related to these are wanted. MIC is accepting Research topics until March 6.These results of experiments will be used for future law making and maintenances.

I don't know "CYBER-TOKKU" will be similar to "CRD - China Recreation District" or not. But I am carefully watching about what "CYBER-TOKKU" will be.


via Cnet Japan

Linden gets a light

One of the funny things of taking a 1-week holiday is that it seem like you've got a year of catching up to do once you get back. One of last weeks noteworthy tidbits is a post in the Boston Globe that Linden Labs purchased Windward Mark Interactive LLC, a Waltham company founded in 2003 by five Harvard University students.

So what do the windward souls do? They're in the business of creating highly realistic three-dimensional environments for use in computer games and flight simulators, and lighting is one of their strong points.

There are people out there that look down on Second Life as a "game with bad graphics", and true enough, it's not as slick as World of Warcraft and Cory Ondrejka, Linden's CTO believes that making the environment more visually realistic will attract and hold more users.

However, there are serious points to validate a "crude" graphic engine. Linden's USP is that Second Life is a world with easy tooling, generating vast amounts of user generated content. Sculpted prims and enhanced graphics may 'beautify' the world, but it will require more skills and perhaps even put more stress on datatraffic.

And then there's the Project Open Letter to remember. Linden's key focuspoint should be scaling, stability and adding test strategy and release management before getting into introducing all kinds of new slick things.

At youTube there's a vid of a new Second Life sky to demonstrate the power of Windward.

Virtual World, Real life Governance

Project Open Letter update

This weeks Town Hall meeting waspretty much all about the Project Open Letter. The POL has been signed by many respected virtual residents and is about one of the first complaints that's been taking serious by Linden Labs. The wrap up is that we're worried, and they're worried.

The POL names a few problems that need to be fixed and Linden addressed a few problems (here's A detailed response to the open letter ). They're gonna sort out the Inventory backup issue and devote 3/4 of their DEVmembers to scaling and stability.

The thing that bothers me is we're talking about issues, Linden is talking about bug fixes and patches (which don't always work - Perhaps Linden should call us for a little advice on how to perform structured testing (TMAP)) but no one is talking IT Governance here. Have we rooted out the source of these nuisances and is there an alternative to patching?

Some new and noteworthy tidbits are that Linden is considering opening up a server park somewhere in Europe to spread the residential load and segragation between basic and premium account members.