News.com has an article about HorizonOne, a company that is utilizing technology in a way that makes a difference and makes a profit.  They have created new, high-tech vending machines for schools that dispense healthy food and teach children how to eat in a more nutritious manner.

According to the article:

Software installed in the refrigerated box connects the student IDs and purchase data to Horizon’s point of sale servers, which automatically track students’ prepaid account IDs, along with information on whether a student qualifies for free or discounted lunch rates based on household income. School districts get reimbursed by the government for a fraction of the discounted cost when they sell a balanced meal–under USDA rules, three of five of a bread, protein, dairy or fruit and vegetables–to low-income students.

Finally, and this is the selling point for parents who want oversight of their child’s eating habits, parents can log onto a secure Web site, called MealPayPlus, to see what their child ate for lunch, or how they snacked on any given day. They can also add money to their child’s account directly on the Web site

This is a very, very cool idea and a true win-win-win for school districts, parents, and children.  The kind of solution that really can only be done with integrated technology and cooperation between everyone involved.  The only losers here are the existing vending industry and suppliers.  They have stubbornly insisted on delivering food that maximizes their profits and tried to lock them in with exclusive contracts and payments to schools that border on bribes.

Kudos to HorizonOne for their innovation and vision!

In the IT world, I am not sure if I should take user-driven innovation to be a sign of progress or a sad display on how difficult things have become. With all the talk about Web 2.0, wikis, social media, and the cathedral and the bazaar, I would think that any technologist who isn’t at least passingly familiar with these ideas must be on a contract, working out of a cave, typing programs on dusty green screen terminal connected to the corporate mainframe by a thick token ring cable.

However, the ‘new trend’ of allowing users actually provide feedback into the products that they are using has produced a professorship at MIT and been mentioned in the New York Times ::sigh::  IMHO, this is simply the realization that ignoring people is less effective than communicating with them, and less effective means less profitable.  I think the technology world should be embarassed that it is so disfunctional that this is at all new or interesting enough to study.

On a similar note, Ben Stein has some interesting thoughts about how to have a business conversation.  If you plan on doing anything other than pure solo work for the rest of your life it is mandatory reading.  Interestingly, it seems that the best conversationalists are the ones who are the most considerate and do the most listening.  Sounds like organizations might want to focus on having an actual conversation with their customers …

The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them.
– Samuel McChord Crothers, The Gentle Reader

Steve Hamm at Business Week has a short post about the hiring practices of Chinese IT firms, which hopefully will open the eyes of some of the leaders here in the west. Symbio is an outsourcing company that was facing a problem with not having enough qualified recruits. Their response?

[Symbio CEO Jacob] Hsu and his colleagues decided they needed a feeder program to prepare college students to work for them, so they recently established software institutes in the Harbin Institute of Technology and Shandong University, both in the coastal city of Weihai. That’s where Symbio is about to establish a new development center. Says Hsu, who grew up in San Francisco: “Other companies have university partnerships; we run the university departments.”

This isn’t something Symbio undertakes lightly. “We’re a human potential factory. We’re in the talent management business,” says Hsu. “In the next couple of years the companies that win will be the ones who manage talent the best.”

The Chinese have an abundance mentality, a positive outlook for their long-term future. Not only are they doing business successfully today, they are investing in building a generation of leaders for tomorrow. At the same time, western companies are shedding jobs and looking to outsource jobs and import labor to meet the needs of the moment. The west isn’t going to lose its edge because of quarterly profit outlooks, it is going to lose it because it lacks the vision to see the future and the audacity to put itself at the center of it!

GigaOM has an interesting article about the impact of web 2.0 on network engineers. Namely, that the maturation of the internet has made the skills of a good network person a lot less important:

I see the current state of the Internet as the ultimate success … You can deploy a wildly successful Web 2.0 application that serves millions of users and never know how a router, switch or load-balancer works. Even network security and firewalls that were making headline news not more than a few years ago are considered perfunctory. The success of these networking devices and technologies has enabled them to become part of the technology landscape that exists for all to use as they see fit, similar to the microprocessor or electricity.

It is always odd to see the once-glamorous jobs of your youth thrown onto the scrap heap of history (think about the differences in perception between the masons of the middle ages and your local bricklayer). Network Engineers were once the masters of a difficult and arcane field, literally bringing information from chaos. Now, the wizards have been trapped in tiny control panels for now, until they can be embedded in silicon for all time.

This has really got me to thinking about my own field, and its future. What specialties are going to dissapear if data becomes as reliable as electricity? For one thing, I think we would see ETL and Business Analysis become a single career path that is much more abstract and tools-based. With the advent of good BPM, I could see a lot of the scheduling and other mechanics pushed off towards the DBA’s and Systems Administrators. Also, I think that a lot of the hardware could be appliance based, or outsourced completely. Of course, this leaves a great opportunity for open source BI and for nimble players to attack the market and take advantage of the innovators dilemma.

A brave (an infinitely more useful) new world!