Don Sheppard
I'm a veteran Blogging Idoller who also does consulting for a living. I began my career as a railway data communications engineer and also spent a considerable amount of time on ISO standards development. After working for a bank, I took up the consulting challenge, and I still find it challenging! I try to keep in touch with a lot of IT topics but I'm usually doing things that involve service management and ITIL. I use both an iPhone and a Blackberry, still print a lot of paper, and I own a green OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) but I haven't found much use for it! I got an iPAD but doubt that I'll go for iPAD2 - maybe version 3. I'm starting to get interested in networking history, so I guess I'm starting to look backwards as well as forwards!
Homepage: http://www.concon.com
Posts by Don Sheppard
Thanks to Blogging Idol …… What’s Next?
June 24, 2011 - 4:09 pm
Posted in Misc | No comments
I was quite surprised when I learned last week that I was the winner of the 2011 version of Blogging Idol. I was certainly not expecting it…..other blog postings and musings were certainly as interesting and as thought provoking as mine (in my opinion). Nevertheless, I am grateful for the recognition and can certainly use [...]
Good Luck To Everyone!
June 2, 2011 - 12:42 am
Posted in Misc | 5 comments
I hope everyone enjopyed themselves this year…..I know I did. One of these days I may just turn into a real professional blogger like Kevin and Chris……perhaps I should practice using Twitter first. See you at the after-party !
Value for Money
May 24, 2011 - 3:11 pm
Posted in 1) Why I Chose IT | 2 comments
I recently got involved in helping to prepare a workshop on enhancing Value for Money in procurement. Funny how the complexities of the topic jump out at you when you try to make a few slides – what you may have thought was a straightforward concept becomes a minefield of definitions and concepts, just like [...]
Count Down – T – 70 minutes
May 22, 2011 - 11:06 pm
Posted in 1) Why I Chose IT | 1 comment
Ok. You caught me rushing to post something/anything during a TV commercial……… Just occurred to me – who thinks that watching TV on your PC/phone/watch is better than the nice big screens we have nowadays? Everything has a purpose, don’t you think? I had a nice evening, with a friend, sitting on a balcony [...]
A Cloudy Day
May 22, 2011 - 2:25 pm
Posted in 6) Cloud Computing | No comments
Here in Toronto we had very nice early summer day yesterday, without rain and cloud-free (taking a bit of poetic licence here!). I was also cloud-free – stayed away from my computer for most of the day!! Today is another story. Its humid, dull, cloudy and seems to rain every time I head outside. It made [...]
Holiday Weekend or Blogging Throwdown?
May 20, 2011 - 4:33 pm
Tags: Blog Content, Blogging Idol, Holiday Weekend, Victoria Day
Posted in Misc | No comments
Ok. This is our last weekend of posting at Blogging Idol for 2011. Have we had fun and has it been informative? Yes indeed, at least from my perspective. Let’s see if we get a rush of last minute postings, assuming we aren’t all heading out into the rain for the holiday weekend. I’m not sure [...]
Cloud Standards Customer Council
May 19, 2011 - 10:24 pm
Tags: cloud, Cloud Customer, Cloud Standards, CSCC, OMG
Posted in 6) Cloud Computing | 1 comment
For those who haven’t run into it yet, a new organization called the Cloud Standards Customer Council has recently been formed. Following is an extract from a press release from CSCC: Quote Cloud Standards Customer Council Membership Expanding Rapidly First Virtual Meeting to be Held May 18 Needham, MA, USA – April 27, 2011 – The [...]
Do Blogs Pass Away?
May 19, 2011 - 4:01 pm
Tags: blog graveyard, Blog Idol, blogging
Posted in 4) Social Media Service, 6) Cloud Computing | 4 comments
Wow! I can hardly keep up with the recent set of BlogIdol postings. We must be the home stretch, and new horses are appearing on the track!! I’ve been wondering – is there a graveyard (or maybe a cloud) for blog posts that are “used up”?? Does a blog ever get sent to a bloggers [...]
Consumer Devices in the Enterprise
May 14, 2011 - 10:40 am
Tags: BYOT, cio, consumer, Desktop, Gartner, IBM, Rogers
Posted in 5) Bring Your Own Technology | No comments
I ran across this event when I was following an ad on the ComputerWorld website and thought it was quite relevant for our topic on BYOT: Consumer Devices in the Enterprise Agenda Event date: 05/19/2011 Welcome to the CIO Association of Canada, Ontario Chapter’s event “Consumer Devices in the Enterprise”, featuring guest panelists Bob Hafner (Gartner), [...]
Seven Deadly Sins for a Cloudy Day
May 12, 2011 - 11:36 am
Tags: 7 Layers, Cloud Security, Seven Deadly Sins
Posted in 6) Cloud Computing | 1 comment
This picture comes from Beartoons As a proponent of the old OSI Seven Layer Model for network protocols, my ears/eyes always perk up when I see anything described in terms of 7 (layers, or sections, or topics). Hence my interest when I saw an article by Shane Schick in ComputerWolrd Canada (May 2011) referencing the [...]
BYOT and Clouds – Is There a Connection?
May 11, 2011 - 2:58 pm
Posted in 1) Why I Chose IT, 3) Tablets and Mobility, 5) Bring Your Own Technology, 6) Cloud Computing | 2 comments
As part of Blogging Idol, we’ve been considering several topics that relate to IT infrastructure: new end user devices (tablets and so on), mobility, use of personal devices for business (BYOT – bring your own technology), and applications that use cloud computing. So…..are there any themes, best practices or general wisdom that can be applied to or derived from [...]
Gorilla Clouds?
May 4, 2011 - 2:33 pm
Tags: 6) Cloud Computing, Chasm, Geoffrey Moore, IaaS, Market Adoption, PaaS, SaaS, Technology Adoption, technology adoption lifecycle, Virtualization
Posted in 6) Cloud Computing | 2 comments
In Geoffrey Moore’s books (Crossing the Chasm, Gorilla Game, etc) the gorilla is the market-share leader whose position is sustained by proprietary technology that has high switching costs (Wikipedia says so!!). I’ve always said “owns the architecture” and “costs too much to change vendors” – with Cisco being one example, Intel another and Microsoft being the [...]
What is Cloud Computing?
May 3, 2011 - 2:19 pm
Posted in 1) Why I Chose IT | 6 comments
How Cloud Computing will change everything (and nothing)……that is the question for Blogidollers. This begs the related question – what is Cloud Computing anyway? People are still trying to define Cloud Computing – NIST is one of the leaders in this area and ISO/JTC1/SC38 is emerging as a standards committee that will eventually formalize definitions [...]
Giving Up Control of IT
May 3, 2011 - 10:39 am
Posted in 3) Tablets and Mobility, 4) Social Media Service, 5) Bring Your Own Technology, 6) Cloud Computing | 3 comments
Lots of discussion about news leaks and Twitter announcements of Bin Laden’s death…..and that breaking the news is uncontrollable with modern technology. What does this say about the traditional control that corporations try to have over what their employees see, do, access and use? I thought the following article from Inforworld was interesting and relevant to several [...]
Tablets and Mobility – A Personal View
April 29, 2011 - 10:48 am
Tags: blackberry, iPhone, mobility, royal wedding, Tablets, universal personal device
Posted in 3) Tablets and Mobility | 1 comment
I’ve been off-line for a week now……..I couldn’t find any way to complete a physical move from a condo to an apartment using the Internet. Got stuck with doing physical work! Thank goodness I wasn’t moving far. I also see that time is passing quickly for the Blogging Idol contest and, frankly, the last two [...]
