A few years ago, a product came out that could have - and should have - revolutionized much of the way that business information is presented. Called the “Ambient Orb,” the product was simply a sphere that glowed, usually with the stock market. Green was up - the brighter, the higher; red was down, the brighter the lower; and yellow was in the middle. The underlying goal was (and is) to create “glanceable” information - useful information that can be known without focusing on the subject matter at hand.

I’ve always thought that the Orb (or technology like it) would be useful for outsourcing governance. Perhaps an Orb that would glow green when “all systems were go,” yellow if there was a slowdown or minor problem, and red in the event of an outage. Simple, no?

I’ve suggested this approach to a number of folks in the outsourcing world and, after the perplexed look I get, the usual response is that people need to see more information. I agree - to a certain extent. Properly configured, an Orb in the C-Suite could provide a CIO/CTO/COO with an instantaneous status of what’s going on in their shop, without having to dig through numbers - or wait for analysis. It would simply be there, in the corner, glowing.

I think that the answer - more detail - is one of the problems with governance. People always want more information - whether or not its relevant. We drown in metrics, metrics that individually don’t accurately characterize how one’s operation is working. Certainly, statistics are important - and drill-downs must be available - but how much time and energy could it save to have simple, ambient devices provide us real-time information about the 50,000 foot status of our projects?