As much as I try to keep my blogs positive, I think I am entitled to a periodic rant once in a while. Today’s frustration is on the poor quality of what most online learning companies try to pass off as “computer-based training (CBT).”

I did a CCNA (Cisco-Certified Network Associate) self-study using CBT 10 years ago that was absolutely awesome. When I look at most of the CCNA self-study courses available today, they do not come close to the one I took a decade ago.  It is amazing that there are not more high-quality CBT programs for technology folks. While I understand that having an “expert” teaching in front of a whiteboard is the cheapest way to create CBT, the opportunity to massively increase the productivity of learning is totally missed by this approach.  More...

One of the biggest drivers of bandwidth on the network today is multimedia. While the consumer market often moves first to take advantage of new technologies in this space, there are key learnings that we can take away as we think about enterprise strategy. Web media guru Liz Shannon Miller recently asked her GigaOm audience “Is Facebook the way to go for new web originals?” My vote is yes, as the Facebook API allows content creators to know more about who their audience is than they have ever been able to before. In fact, the power of video entertainment will help those who never understood “this Facebook thing” to have their “eureka” moment. More...

Five years ago, Time Magazine named “You” as its Person of the Year. Shortly thereafter, I started writing an internal blog at Sprint called “CG’s Soapbox.” The blog’s title paid homage to the days when a person would literally grab a wooden box, plop it down on a local street corner and start speaking freely.More...

Folks in the financial industry often talk about a “perfect market.”  What they are referring to is a hypothetical, idealistic state in which both buyers and sellers know all of the information there is to be known about a product and service. In a perfect market, all financial transactions would take place at the true value of the product, service, or commodity.More...

The first post I wrote when Seamless Enterprise  began was entitled “I’m Done with Web 2.0.” That wasn’t literal; what I was saying is that I felt like I had finally found the missing pieces to understand the impact of social media as a whole, despite the fact that I had scratched my head trying to understand the value of many of the individual pieces. But now I really am done with Web 2.0, meaning my focus now is on the elusive future-state that I assume someone else has already coined “Web 3.0.” More...

Having just wrapped up the last post in my series on selling technology to executives, I took one last look at what I wrote and realized that the proper cost accounting treatment I described in one passing sentence needed to be corrected. Checking in with my truly wonderful editor, Kristine, I learned that my final post had already gone to press. Rather than adding the insight to the original article, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to prove a key point in my series: when it comes to cost accounting, nothing is ever black and white and even “us finance guys” miss a digit once in a while (especially when  trying to offer a simple explanation for what is truly a mathematically complex concept.) More...

In this post I want to dive right into another real-world example about how WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network), with its virtually free route diversity, provides an ROI to a variety of enterprises. To give you an understanding of some pretty complex cost accounting concepts that even CPAs struggle with, the retail industry offers a good model, since we all participate in it and it’s very easy to visualize even if we don’t know the business. More...

In recent blog articles, I have been focusing on “Selling Technology Investments to the ‘C’ Suite.” As regular readers know, I often talk about the “Three Pillars of Technology Investment” as a model to think in business terms about how ROI is achieved. In this series, I drilled down to talk more about hard and soft costs and benefits and about the amorphous and oft-misunderstood concept of sunk or “non-differential” costs. Now I want to turn to some real world examples of technology investment in Wireless WAN (WWAN) technology using these concepts. More...

I didn't spend much time in J-school (journalism) before I transferred to B-school (business), but I recall that it is not proper to return from a hiatus in writing without explaining why you have been away for so long. More...

There's a lot of hype about cloud computing and mobility these days. In fact, Marc Ferranti comments in Network World that the venture capital market is opening up to more investments in social networking and cloud computing. It seems like a lot of people (and the smart money folks) do indeed "get it." That said, what some still fail to see is how mobility is a key enabler and driver of all of this activity. More...