Posts
March 30, 2012 12:34 pm
I am thrilled that our vision for Palo Alto as a leading digital city is a cover story today in the Palo Alto Weekly. The story does a great job of covering the highlights of our work over the past few months. We’re experimenting with new ways of delivering service in local government and it’s getting the attention of media, our community, and other cities. Mayor Yeh, City Manager Keene, and I couldn’t be more pleased with our progress. We’re ready to take this work to the next level. Links to story attached.
October 26, 2011 9:35 pm
Palo Alto, CA – [Press Release] After an extensive search for the leader of the City of Palo Alto’s Information Technology (IT) agency and the City’s technology initiatives, City Manager James Keene announced his selection of Jonathan Reichental (Ph.D), currently Chief Information Officer for O’Reilly Media, as the City’s new cabinet-level CIO. The search for a new CIO to lead the City’s restructured IT operations yielded 147 applicants. After an intense review process that involved Palo Alto technology company executives, peer CIOs and a number of City representatives, Keene selected Dr. Reichental.
October 15, 2011 3:10 pm
Over the past 10 years the web has become an increasingly ubiquitous and useful utility for hundreds of millions of people across the world. But as I discover as I ramble across the rich terrain of the web, many of its benefits come at the cost of privacy. In the following short presentation I wonder if the web has ultimately become our least private domain and whether, in fact, that may be a good thing.
September 29, 2011 9:00 am
The moment that sealed the future of human-computer interaction (HCI) for me happened just a few months ago. I was driving my car, carrying a few friends and their children. One child, an 8-year old, pointed to the small LCD screen on the dashboard and asked me whether the settings were controlled by touching the screen. They were not. The settings were controlled by a rotary button nowhere near the screen. It was placed conveniently between the driver and passenger seats. An obvious location in a car built at the tail-end of an era when humans most frequently interacted with technology through physical switches and levers.
August 24, 2011 9:00 am
The other day my IT operations leader entered my office in a state of confusion. He had just been reviewing our uptime statistics and was baffled by what he saw.
August 4, 2011 9:00 am
Whether or not you like Google+ or have yet to try it, its introduction continues the important role that a battle of ideas has in shaking-up and bringing new value to the marketplace. In the best outcome, robust competition in any business domain should have at least one benefactor: you, the consumer.
June 3, 2011 9:00 am
Over the last few years we’ve watched in giddy disbelief as a web-based social network launched from a dorm room at Harvard University unexpectedly found its way to be an enabler of a Middle East uprising. We’ve seen how new types of media have propelled people and events into the spotlight and even helped elect a U.S. president. We’ve looked in awe as mobile devices connected to a ubiquitous network have brought global commerce to the most remote parts of the developing world. We’ve seen 100-year-old businesses vanish as cocky upstarts replace their once unshaken dominance. We’ve delighted as citizens have been empowered by a new ease in which to leverage recently liberated stores of data held by governments.
May 17, 2011 2:19 am
Here’s a 40-minute presentation and interview I gave at the Center for Technology, Entertainment, and Media (CTEM) at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. The video covers a range of subjects including demographics and technology trends that will emerge over the next 5-10 years and what will be required to succeed in the workplace of the future.
April 20, 2011 9:00 am
It’s been a debate within organizations as long as I can remember: whether it’s possible to support a workforce that has the choice to use their own computers to perform their work. Recently the discussion has reached new levels of excitement as some big name organizations have initiated pilot programs. For IT leaders it’s a prospect that’s both compelling and daunting.
April 6, 2011 9:00 am
IT innovation abounds! We live in a spectacular time. Change appears to be happening rapidly. Market barriers for new entrants have come down. Got an idea? You can make it happen. But despite all the ebullience, much of our innovation still remains incremental. It’s more often evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In fact, that’s just the way it’s always been. New knowledge is created at its natural pace and new insights build upon it. Occasionally there is a ground shift and a new branch of knowledge emerges that itself spawns new products and services. In the IT business, we see this every few years.
