IBM Think Conference Day 2

Creating a Bespoke Design Thinking Practice in Utilities with IBM Cloud Garage​

A major utilities customer has embarked on their own design thinking journey, but to meet their unique industry and internal requirements they needed help to support the scale and speed of their design thinking practice. These choose the IBM Cloud Garage as their design and collaboration partner to help define and scale their design practice and develop an approach to support it enterprise-wide. Learn how this collaboration has led to a successful design transformation for the customer.

IBM Research Science Slam: Predicting 5 Innovations to Help Change Our Lives in the Next 5 Years

Our mission at IBM is to help our clients change the way the world works. There’s no better example of that than IBM Research’s annual “5 in 5” technology predictions. Each year, we showcase some of the biggest breakthroughs coming out of IBM Research’s global labs –five technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape business and society in the next five years. This innovation is informed by research taking place at IBM Labs, leading edge work with our clients, and trends we see in the tech/business landscape. Presented via a 'Science Slam' - our researchers will share their work and predictions through compelling, personal narratives that bring the technology out of the labs and into everyday life - in under five minutes each.

Video: Science Slam

Accelerating the Journey to AI

Organizations recognize data is what fuels digital transformation, and are looking for new ways to unlock the value of their data and accelerate their journey to AI. That is why 80% of them view AI as a strategic opportunity.  Yet, only 19% of organizations understand the data required for AI. Successful organizations apply a prescriptive approach to climbing the ladder to AI, based on a unified architecture that delivers everything they need for enterprise AI, on any cloud.  In this session, hear Chief Data Officers and Chief Innovation Officers share a behind-the-scenes look at their approach to managing the full lifecycle of AI, and the essential lessons learned on their journey to drive smarter decisions throughout the organizations.

Video: Accelerating the Journey to AI

Hybrid, Multicloud by Design. Accelerating the Enterprise Cloud Journey

Cloud is integral to virtually every enterprise digital transformation strategy. Yet less than 20% of workloads have moved to the cloud. Why? Put simply, complexity. Enterprises are struggling to modernize apps and workloads, and overcome persistent tech and data silos reinforced by vendor lock in. Agile enterprises can accommodate changing business requirements at speed. The right cloud foundation built on open standards frees workloads and data to run on the right cloud model, on or off premises, and across multiple clouds. It embraces tech and data from more sources to speed innovation. And when combined with unique industry, security and tech expertise, it can tailor the journey to cloud to your enterprise for better outcomes.

Hybrid Multicloud By Design

Transform Your Analytics with IBM Data Virtualization

Data virtualization allows customers to discover, query and control access to data across their enterprise in a scalable manner. IBM's new data virtualization technology is designed to query across data sources (IBM Db2 family, IBM Netezza, Oracle, Informix, SQL Server and many others), on-premises, on private cloud and public clouds and across geographies. The new technology provides a quantum leap in scalability over previous federation methods, with increased emphasis on governance and access control. Its primary goal is to enable central access across your data sources via a virtual data platform. This virtualization helps eliminate data silos, bringing the data closer to the business for actionable insights.

Transform Your Analytics

The Blueprint for Smart Businesses

How do you design your business for growth? Being "digital" at the edges is no longer enough. To succeed companies need to truly align the data they own towards purposeful innovation. This is the story of an insurance company who is now a risk management expert. Of a car manufacturer who found their competitive advantage in mobility. It is about an apparel retailer who is a fashion expert. But where do you start? Smarter businesses differentiate themselves from within. They have a culture of agile innovation that leverages AI and cloud on their journey to become a smart, secure and sustainable business. This is a new era for business - defined by incumbent disruptors - where companies who have a past, have the most promising future.

Video: Blueprint For Smart Buisnesses

What We've Built on IBM Quantum So Far​

Quantum computing offers theoretical speed-ups for many business applications. This includes creating new materials, calculating new markets and optimizing logistics. Accenture and IBM Research have come together in a first-of-a-kind partnership to demonstrate quantum computing’s applicability to today’s business challenges. Business application teams from over 15 different countries around the globe will be testing out their theories, by using IBM Q with the specific objective of showcasing the possibilities this new compute paradigm can bring.

IBM Think Conference Day 1

​I had the pleasure to attend the IBM Think conference in wet and chilly San Fran from Feb 11-14th of this year. 

The event overall was very interesting, thought provoking, and provocative. I'll be posting the event materials as well as some of my notes and thinking of the specific events and conference.

What's New In Dev Ops

On the first day, I didn't actually make it to this event due to traffic, but I was interested in it. Here's the material:

What's New In Dev Ops​

Core message: ​Devops is not about software development, it's about improving the economics of software delivery. Various IBM toolchains for DevOps are discussed. Worth a look, but a bit of an attempt to sell IBM tools in this space.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Designing for Today's Business Needs

This was an absolutley fantastic session, and it's unfortunate it wasn't recorded. A great demo of design thinking with developers, architects, and business folks.

New software designs start with many whiteboard sessions to sketch an idea, get insight from peers and ultimately total buy-in from stakeholders. How are you handling the likely re-architecture as you drive your cloud strategy? This can be laborious, time-consuming and often frustrating. Development teams need to agree on a new breakdown of capabilities, logical flows between services, and interaction with external services. Communicating this strategy can be complex within the team and with all stakeholders and LOBs. What's needed is a shared design space where teams modernizing applications can collaborate effectively to design and communicate an architecture as it continuously evolves.

A Picture is worth 100 words

Access the Future Today: Quantum Computing​

Quantum computing takes advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics found in nature and represents a fundamental change from classical information processing. For two years now, IBM has enabled more than 100,000 people around the globe to access quantum computers for learning, research, and tackling new problems. While still early, we believe it’s just a matter of time until we start using these devices to solve certain problems better than we can today. IBM’s Dario Gil will discuss this radically different approach to computing built on the laws of quantum mechanics and how the roadmap for mainstream adoption of this new technology is being forged today by IBM in collaboration with a global community across business, academia and research.

Video: Quantum Computing

How to Realize the Value of DevOps

I'll be honest: I didn't get a lot out of this session. There was some good encouragement that DevOps is the way to go, but little in the way of actually tackling it, or the business value it unlocks.

Join experts in a discussion about the challenges and direction of DevOps.

Speakers:

• Andrea Martinez, IBM
• Alan Shimel, Media Ops Inc (DevOps.com)
• Matthew Crabbe, QA Media
• Mick Ahmad, FannieMae
• Eitan Azoff, Ovum

IBM and SAP Cloud Platform: Agility to Intelligently Transform and Innovate Your Business

This was a pretty good discussion on leveraging good end user experience to unlock both digital transformation, but also enabling new channels for delivery.

Digital transformation demands an enticing customer experience across all channels independent of underlying data, and a flexible IT landscape that provides a comprehensive suite of integration tools. SAP Cloud Platform provides an enterprise grade business Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to help customers address those requirements. IBM GBS has enabled high-value use cases for how companies can extend and personalize their SAP S/4HANA deployments, both on-premises or in the cloud, and has built innovations side-by-side leveraging SAP Cloud Platform. Hear how IBM is providing a design-led approach with Apple iOS and is leveraging next-gen technologies like Blockchain and Watson with SAP Cloud Platform to create a unique value proposition.

Think 2019 Chairman's Address: Building Cognitive Enterprises

The linup for this event was far too long to even think about getting inside, so many of us caught the video from the restaraunt around the corner. A great networking opportunity nonetheless! Worth a look.

Join IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty and some of the world’s top CEOs and leaders as they share their journeys to the Cognitive Enterprise.

Video: Building Cognitive Enerprises​

1Q84

A sprawling, confusing, and ultimately very Japanese book. Taking place in a fictionalized 1984 (authoritarian themes there) and from the dual perspective of Aomame and Tengu.

They have been in love since they were 10, but haven't seen each other since then, and are now lost in a parallel universe where "The Little People" control the world from behind the scenes.

The writing is amazing, layered, and at some points very dense and confusing. But it pulls you in even as it confuses you. Worth a read... a very long read.

Wooden Spoons

Somewhere along the way I learned about this magic trick. It was probably from one of those “Owl” magazines you used to get for free or an episode of “Real People” or something.

What you would do is take a banana in the peel and run a needle and thread around the banana — ‘sewing’ it like you would clothing. Around the outside, pushing the needle into the peel just enough to pierce the peel but not the banana inside.

And once you go around the circumference of the banana, and then pull on the string, it would cut through the banana but leave the peel intact. And if you gave it to someone to open, they’d be surprised to open a banana that was cut in half inside the peel. Wow! What a cool magic trick.

So after doing it endlessly for Mom (who was a great sport about the whole thing, acting surprised every time) and Gramma at her house for Sunday dinner, it got old.

It was summer vacation, and things got old and boring fast. You know, no internet, no video games, and a small town you could ride your bike end to end in about 20 minutes.

So then something dawned on me. I could cut other things and fool people that way!

I even had a fancy-dancy workbench Uncle Don had made for me with a vice and real tools and everything… including a hand saw.

Now, what to saw. While Mom was away at work, I wandered around the house thinking of funny things to saw. And in the utensil drawer, I found mom’s stash of 3-4 wooden spoons. And an idea dawned on me from one of the failed magic tricks where the banana didn’t get cut all the way in half — just almost all the way. It had stuck together and you couldn’t really notice that it was cut at all until you tried to bite into it and it fell apart.

Now, Mom wasn’t big on using wooden spoons to, you know, spoon stuff. What she was big on was using them for spooning my ass when I really made her mad. And while that wasn’t very often, it was often enough for my eight year old ass.

So I picked up the wooden spoons in a heap and headed out to our garage, unloading them on the workbench. And I got to work — carefully putting each spoon into the vice to hold it steady but gentle enough not to mark the handles. And, using the little hand saw, sawed through each one near the end of the handle where it meets the spoon. Not all the way, mind you — that was the key. Only part way. Say 2/3 or 3/4 the way through. And after meticulously doing it to each one, I gleefully carried my bundle back to the utility drawer.

And then I had to think of something that would make Mom mad. Not just grounding mad, but mad enough to spank me with a wooden spoon. And I thought and I thought there at the kitchen table. Paula wandered in, and asked me what’s up.

So I told her my idea, and we thought. And then an idea occurred — Paula and I had got into another endless water gun fight the other night and I chased her into the house, squirting her with it. And that got Mom really pissed off. I didn’t get the spoon for it, but man it was close.

So, when Mom came home from work that afternoon, we staged an epic water gun fight in the back yard for exactly when she got home. She pulled her little blue car into the driveway in the back alley, and got out, curious about the commotion in the back yard. Laughing, she came in, cheering us on with our water fight like she always did. And after a few playful squirts at her, she went inside so her work clothes wouldn’t get wrecked.

And that was when we engaged the plan. 

Paula ran into the house behind her, and I grabbed the hose, turned it on, and ran into the house after her.

Using my thumb over the end of the hose, I sprayed Paula and Mom in the back entry way, getting it all the way into the kitchen. I made sure I made a good job of it, hosing down both of them and getting the walls, the floor, even the stove. 

And then the shit really hit the fan.

Now Mom didn’t get mad a lot. I mean, she had me, and I survived, right? Which was a lot to ask now that I think about it. But when she got mad, she got mad.

And this time I succeeded in making her mad… a bit too well.

She totally flipped out. Yelling, swearing, red faced, calling me “damn kid” and everything. Sweet, this was totally going to work!

I stood there, hose still running all over the floor, with a stupid grin on my face.

Mom reached into the drawer and grabbed the first spoon, and without even bothering to bend me over she whacked me in the shoulder with it. And I didn’t flinch, knowing what was about to happen.

The spoon broke perfectly. Flawlessly. Epically. The end of the spoon went spinning away on to the kitchen counter, while mom looked at the end of the handle with this shocked look on her face. I mean, it basically blew up when she hit me with it. She must’ve thought she really hit me hard, except that by this time I was bowled over laughing, dropping the still running hose onto the floor.

So she grabbed the next one, screaming, and hit me with that on my back. And the same thing happened. I was laughing hysterically, with Paula in the background laughing, too. 

I’ve never heard Mom scream so loud as she went through the next two wooden spoons, one after the other. Broken spoons littered the soaked floor.

But I made a very big tactical mistake. See, I hadn’t thought the whole plan through. 

What happens when she runs out of spoons?

Well, as it turns out, Mom could hit with her bare hands just fine. Whack! 

My ass stinging, I shot out the still open door into the backyard, jumped on my bike, and just got the hell outta dodge.

And I don’t remember exactly when I found the courage to come home, but I’m sure it was hours later.

When I would only be grounded and put on kitchen duty for a week…

Sigh. 

It was worth it.

Halloween Scare

It was a warm fall in Drayton Valley. I was in Grade 7, the year was 1983. America had just put it’s first woman in space on the shuttle Challenger, the economy was in the toilet, and Fraggle Rock debuted to great success. 

Return of the Jedi had come out that summer at the DV Drive-in, and WarGames had hit the theatres teaching me how to get free phone calls and war dial into the phone, power, and gas companies. The Police released “Every Breath You Take” and Micheal Jackson was dominating with “Beat It” and “Billie Jean.”

Cabbage Patch Kids and Glo Worms were a big deal, and Mom had already started a frantic search to get Paula one of each. That’s probably why Mom and I were at ‘The Monkey Store’ — the drug store on Main Street. We called it that because there was a robot monkey on a trapeze stuck to the ceiling that would do flips and spins, and amuse us kids.

It was at The Monkey Store that I saw the mask. It was an expensive latex rubber zombie mask, all grey and black, with blood dripping from long teeth. I was in love with it, and decided that I wanted to be a mummy that Halloween, and that would be the perfect mask to go with it. Desi and Darren had taken me to some kind of horror double feature at the drive in featuring mummies, and I thought they were super cool.

But it was too much money and we were in a hurry so she said no. I don’t remember if we found Paula’s gifts there or not that day, but I remember leaving and feeling disappointed.

That weekend, Mom had to work on Saturday like usual. She always worked her ass off to keep us afloat, and many times we’d join her down at LTV. Either to keep her company, or help tidy up, or some days I’d even help the bottom hole pump guy fix something or get to drive the forklift when Mom wasn’t in the back.

But not this Saturday. It was a glorious Saturday, probably in September. I got to sleep in, watch cartoons like Spider-Man and Rocket Robin Hood, and play with my Lego. I’m not sure where my sister was, but Mom had probably dropped her off at Grandma’s house or something.

Anyway. I’m downstairs finishing probably my third or fourth bowl of Cheerios, watching the last of the Saturday morning cartoons and trying to figure out how to build a Super Star Destroyer out of my Lego, when I hear a pounding on the back door.

Which I ignored. I mean, who would pound on the back door? If it was Mom, she would let herself in. If it wasn’t, they would probably go away and leave me to the problem I had at hand: how to build an accurate model of a 19km long Star Wars spaceship with my pile of Lego?

But the banging didn’t stop. Remember, this is small town DV where we probably didn’t have the back door locked or anything. So what the heck could the problem be?

Annoyed, I walked slowly up the stairs to the back door landing. There was nobody at the window. Shrugging my shoulders, I turned around and started to go back down the stairs. But there was another loud Bang!

So I turned around and opened the door… and nobody was there. I remember our back deck well, looking out onto the grass and the detached garage. Our rabbit hutch was there, with our one or two rabbits hopping around lazily in the sunshine. 

“That’s weird,” I thought.

And then someone jumped out at me from around the corner with a grey scary face, holding their hands up menacingly, and said “Boo!”

I was scared shitless. I fell backward, and luckily we had a low bench there to catch me. I was frozen stiff. It was a zombie!

Who pulled off the mask from The Monkey Store, and it was Mom. She got some kind of money unexpectedly, and had bought the mask for me, and thought it would be funny to scare the crap out of me.

She saw that my face was totally white, and apologized and hugged me, but I was furious with her. She had gotten me good. 

That lasted for about 10 seconds when I realized that I had the mask! I was going to be an awesome vampire that year, and wanted to start to work on my costume right away. Mom kissed me and said she had to go back to work, and left me to it.

Death Cab/ Metric show

Went to see Death Cab for Cutie and Metric this week. The bands were great, although Death Cab didn't play my favourite song of theirs - "District Sleeps Alone Tonight." And we had to leave before Metric played either "The Shade" or "Breathing Underwater."

Show just went on too long and the venue sucked. The BMO centre with it's concrete floors and general admission and terrible acoustics made it really hard to get into the show and stay. Why not play the Jube?

Anyway, it was mostly fun.

Chillin' with a xenomorph