Final Blog

Well, the time has come to say goodbye. I'm not tempted in the least to continue this blog past when I have to. I'm also not tempted in the least to continue my studies into IT Management past this semester. I've simply had enough. I've been on information overload in this class for quite awhile, and even though I've managed it as well as I have any other class, my pure interest in the subject has been completely beaten down by the workload.

That brings me to an idea that is definitely under-appreciated in education. It's the idea that a class is meant to spur interest in a subject, not to try and cover everything on a subject in a few short months. That may not be so popular in a degree program that is meant to cover everything as if the life of a student depends on it. However, in an MBA program, like any other professional program, what the student needs is to be taught where to look to find answers rather than try and remember all the answers.

How much of IT Management am I going to remember six months from now, when I'm six courses and a baseball draft removed from the class? I'm guessing all I will remember is the IS triangle. While that's helpful in a way, it doesn't teach me anything. I would have paid money just to remember that simple thing. I haven't come away feeling stronger in making decisions involving IT, but rather I feel that I spent the majority of my time cramming in assignments and information that isn't helpful to me in the long run.

I understand why this class is required. I really do. I understand that the concepts behind the class are important, too, especially if you have to manage assets in a company with a larger IT infrastructure. However, since the subject is so broad, it becomes tempting to try and cover it all. The quick answer to that is that everything can't be covered. In addition, everything that is covered will be obsolete in many ways 10 years from now. I'll be the ripe old age of 33 then, and I'll have to know how to re-learn all of this information with 30+ years of working to go.

In essence, I've been disappointed that my time has been spent just powering everything into my brain in a way that I did in high school. I'm tired, and I don't want to hear anything about IT management again for quite some time. That's not how I want to feel coming away from a class. I came away from Accounting more interested in the subject of accounting than I'll feel about IT coming out of this class. And I don't really like accounting. I liked IT. I make a small living off of blogging. This class should have really interested me, but it definitely hasn't.

After my presentation today and the final, I'm going to forget everything I learned. That's too bad.

Business Relationships

Here's something I wrote last week:

"Second is a coming partnership with a well-known scouting company that will roughly triple the visits I get. They're about as well-respected and widely-read as you can get, so trying to nail down the specifics of the partnership is crucial."

Well, the deal has been concluded. You know what's so funny about how the deal was made? I've never even met them in person. I know that's not rare in business today, but it's amazing that technology can link up people across state lines and partnerships can be made without physically meeting.

I guess what I'm saying is that the old method of sealing deals with a handshake is close to becoming obsolete in some sectors. The company (which shall remain nameless until the announcement) that I've partnered with found my work online, followed it for awhile, sought contact through e-mail, then all it took was one phone conversation on an iPhone where I could look at an e-mail proposal, and the deal was done. It was that simple. Technology has really changed the way things work.

I think it has changed things for the better, but I'm not completely sure. In this situation, it has definitely worked out for the better. In the old days, when this company was only a magazine publisher with no web site, this could never have been possible. They would have never seen my work, and the odds are that I never would have started my work in the first place. Where would I have published it? I can't afford the cost of capital required to start my own magazine, so this wouldn't have even been possible 20 years ago.

However, I do sometimes wish the old business style of meeting face-to-face over dinner or in the office was still relevant. It is in a lot of contexts now, but not where I've been working with my own business. I wonder if I'll ever see that again.

It's Almost Over...

I have to admit that this class has been difficult, not in the content, but in the volume of the work. For those of you that are unaware, I'm in the midst of taking 7 classes this semester, which means a lot of short nights by itself. However, in addition to that workload, every day brings us one day closer to the day where I essentially don't sleep: draft day.

By draft day, I mean Major League Baseball's amateur draft. I've already written some about what it is I do, but there are more developments happening every day that bring me closer and closer to living life as a workaholic.

First, I've completed a transition to a professional blogging platform, and I'm now a part of the most widely-read sports blogging platform in America, Sports Blog Nation. My blog, which you can find here, is one of 35 baseball blogs on their network, and it's the only free blog nationwide that provides nationwide scouting reports. The transition took a lot of time and energy, but now it's essentially a real job in addition to going to school and being a husband, so time is short these days.

In addition to the transition to blogging full-time, I'm also working on a pair of monetizing deals related to MLB draft content. First is the MLB Draft Notebook, a PDF product that is due to be published in early June that will cover scouting reports on 750 players and all 30 baseball teams. My estimate after writing preliminary reports on all those players is that it will be north of 500 pages. Goodbye sleep. Second is a coming partnership with a well-known scouting company that will roughly triple the visits I get. They're about as well-respected and widely-read as you can get, so trying to nail down the specifics of the partnership is crucial.

I guess the main issue of this entry is that technology opens so many doors for people, yet really overextends people, as well. I'm simply tired. Once I get through these last couple weeks of the semester, I essentially don't have time to breathe. I have to be working hard on the Draft Notebook, as well as the blog, then May classes start up soon after. What happened to vacations?

Anyway, this is due to be one of the last blog posts made here, and I definitely don't see myself ever writing in this blog again once the semester is done. One full-time blog is enough. Starting June 10, the day after the draft concludes, I think I will sleep for 36 hours.

Technology's Advancement

As I've already established before, I'm a big baseball fan. I've been following baseball since before we had a computer growing up. However, when we did get our first computer, complete with Internet accessibility, I realized the potential of following baseball online.

At first, the best you could do was look up box scores online, as well as the AP recap of the game. Though that was valuable, the best it did was give me the same exact information I could find in the paper the next morning. However, I was still thrilled that I could look back and forth for different days of box score information, when the paper only had the one day's box score. With the Internet, I didn't have to save a stack of newspapers to look back at how a player did a few days ago. I could just click and go.

Over time, that technology has evolved, and now sports is on the cutting edge of technology for the real-time sports fan. Here's what I can do now to follow baseball online as a Texas Rangers fan living in Atlanta:

-I can follow the GameTracker for today's game. That GameTracker is complete with pitch-by-pitch coverage in real time, with box scores and more. The most impressive part of GameTracker is the ability to use what Major League Baseball calls PitchFX. They have technology that can track the velocity of each pitch thrown, along with its vertical and horizontal movement, then the technology can tell which pitch was thrown, whether it be a fastball, curveball, slider, etc. You can interact with a PitchFX database, looking at the average velocity for pitches, how much pitches break, etc., then compare that information across different pitchers. All online. Sites such as FanGraphs make good money doing an excellent job interpreting these numbers.
-I can listen to the game while using GameTracker, all in synchronized real-time. For only $20 a year, I can listen to every single game for the entire season across the entire league, including archives of the games. If I missed a game earlier today, I can log in to the MLB.com Multimedia site, then listen to the game.
-Even better, I can watch every single game for the entire year using MLB.TV. For $100 a year, I can watch every single game of every single team if I wanted to, giving me the capability to go beyond simply watching SportsCenter, which is what I did as a kid to catch glimpses of other teams. I was a subscriber to MLB.TV Premium for the past few years, and though there are occasional glitches, the quality is constantly improving, and the capabilities of current media are simply amazing.

This is in addition to added coverage of minor leagues, blogs, and more baseball sites than ever before. The amount of information is amazing.

I use baseball as an example, only because it's the specific subject in which I use online media the most. It's a great example of how far things have come.

I'll be interested to see where technology goes from here for the home user, as it's hard to top what you can do with technology now in terms of a sports viewer from home.

The Technology-Service Tradeoff-

On my way to school each day, I usually listen to a 30 minute snippet of the Clark Howard Show. For those of you unaware of who Clark Howard is, he's a financial expert that deals with personal finance and essentially wants to be the source of knowledge for questions from his listeners. Some people like him, some people don't, but he's not the story behind this blog. Rather, I want to take something that he refers to all the time, which is what he calls "Customer No-Service".

For him, customer service representatives are the axis of evil. They are there simply to rip you off and not help you with your problem. This got me thinking about the trade-off in such a system. When you buy something or need help, technology is great, but what really makes or breaks the experience is the person on the other side of the phone or computer.

My personal example of this is with my iPhone. As I've said in a past blog, I'm a Mac user, and I've also been an iPhone user for about a year. Things started out really well with my phone. It worked great, 3G connections were fast, and calls were high quality, especially compared to my old phone, which didn't have capability for e-mail or the Internet.

However, over the past three months, technology in the phone has come back to bite itself. I'm sure most of you are aware of AT&T's struggles to keep iPhone service at such a high level. They can only install more infrastructure at a certain rate, and the number of users on their 3G network is outrunning their installation pace. As a result, speed on the phones is way down from where it was a year ago, despite the fact that I live in an area that is much less densely populated than I did when I bought it.

This brings me back to the technology-service trade-off. When I talk to AT&T, telling them that I'm consistently losing 3G coverage altogether, and I can no longer get coverage at home, their answer is that there's nothing they could do. When I bought the phone and service plan, I wasn't signing an agreement that they'd offer 3G coverage at a 100% coverage rate, even in areas that they covered at the time. I essentially paid for the technology at the cost of the capabilities of that technology.

That doesn't make sense, but that's not how we've created customer service for technology in this country. Selling products comes first, and even though the products may actually lose value and cause harm to their own technological infrastructure, adding a new user is more important than maintaining the current user. The economics behind that are questionable, but that's how manufacturers of new technology work here.

Something will have to change, or those companies will start to fail, as customers that theoretically cost less to keep than those being recruited from other places leave altogether.

Time and Technology

One thing I read about over and over again in our cases is the time it takes to develop technology and to do things the right way.

That has led me to a question: Does technology save us time or cost us time?

I think it really depends on what you do for a living. For those that are in non-technological managerial positions, I think the answer is that technology saves time on a daily basis. However, when it comes to the grand total of time spent, how much time does technology development, implementation, and use actually save us? More importantly, how much does technology development, implementation, and use actually cost us compared to the status quo?

I know I'm going to get a slanted answer in this class, and I'm even of the opinion personally that technology has been the main driver behind economic growth in the last 70 years. That's pretty much beyond question to me, but the answers are much more complicated than that.

For example, finding a qualified candidate to fill a position is much easier now than it used to be, and that's thanks to simple things such as employment websites and the availability of quick background checks on the qualifications of applicants. However, if you're hiring someone in their early-twenties, the odds are that they simply aren't as able to work face-to-face in groups as they used to be. Technology may make the cost of business cheaper, but what about those little things that we've lost over time, since technology has become the barrier between human interaction?

I know I sound like I'm 80 years old now, but it's just something to think about in a class where we push the advantages of technology so much. We talk about the drawbacks, but we always place the blame on something other than the technology, ignoring the fringe drawbacks of the effects of using such technology.

When Internet is Lost...

Over the last week, I've come to experience life before the Internet. I don't like it.

I live in an apartment complex/campus that doubles as an educational complex, so the information technology needs are a little different than most residences. Due to the increasing volume of users on the campus, the IT department has become overloaded, and the Internet essentially slowed to a crawl over the course of a few months. That came to a head last week, when the IT group decided to add another T1 line to the campus, though that required cutting off the Internet completely on the campus. That meant that my apartment couldn't reach the Internet, which is frustrating when you don't have any control over the decisions that are made to reach that point.

Since I don't work, I thought last week would be my chance to get ahead on the work of the semester, since I'm taking 7 classes. However, without Internet, I got no work done. I couldn't do my assignment for this class over the weekend, and I couldn't do any research for anything, other than reading in textbooks.

Why has the Internet become such an important part of my life? How come I was bored and useless for a week because the Internet in my home was out?

I love the things that the Internet can bring to the table. However, like the article we read for this week, it can be the best of times and the worst of times. Would we in society be able to function if the Internet went down worldwide? I don't think so. It just wouldn't be possible. What about if power went down everywhere? No traffic lights, no MARTA, no hot water.

Losing the Internet for a week isn't the worst thing in the world. I could go down to a coffee shop a mile from my apartment and do what I needed to do. Granted, I couldn't sit there for the amount of time required to do research for school, but I could go there long enough to check some e-mail from time and time and make sure the world wasn't falling apart around me without my notice, since I can't check CNN.com.

I'm here today, because the world wasn't falling apart, but I'll always regret my week without the Internet.