A Cloud Warrior & CEO

I'd like to introduce my Cloud Warrior category.  This is where I will give my first person perspective, CEO (Cloud Executive Officer) examples, of how I leverage the cloud in various ways.  I'll  attempt some parallel to the business of AEC, as well as the About Cloud page, no guarantees.

For my first installment, as many of our customers know, our company strives to be 100% cloud based.  Although we have our own path to forge, it really does not matter what devices I want to use, or anyone else.  At work we have a mix of Wintel machines, Apple machines, iOS and Android devices.  All play quite nicely with the Cloud.  Personally I've been an Apple product user since I was knee high.  Today I use a Macbook Pro dual core, iPhone 4, iPad, and MobileMe cloud services to sync them all up.

I travel frequently from east to west USA, and several times a year to India and other nations to the east.  With this rig, I get everything done, with minimal busy work and maximum brain work.  I do prefer to be face to face with teams, but when I can't, I find a way to get the job done, leveraging the cloud.  Whether it's apple, or another vendor, the purpose here is to point out that you can in fact manage business lean, in the cloud, whether local or remote and in most cases remain as effective if not more so, by leveraging the cloud.

To back it up, as noted in prior posts, I'll comment on a recent trip.  Around personal and business responsibilities, my cloud warrior goal was to go for 2 weeks without requiring a piece of paper or relying on non cloud enabled processes.  After 26 hours travel,  effectively on the other side of the planet, things went pretty smooth.  Through use of Boingo and Telekom hotspots, my trusty iDevices, and cloud based discussion systems and email services, I managed to keep in the loop, drive projects, and stay up to date without any uncanny work hours.  

A few work details; Where I couldn't use a credit card, I coded the receipt, took a photo, and beamed it in route through our cloud based expense tracking system; I kept in touch with family & arranged travel; I made notes sync'd them via Mobile Me; I ran a day of meetings off an synced iPad and cloud based Office Suite; I recorded memos via SoundCloud, and finally tried to avoid drawing with pens on marker boards (my favorite thing to do) but with limited success.  My streak was broken due to some power problems and luggage that got lost in the wrong kind of cloud, but I'll keep up the effort in the future.