Definition

Big fish eating little fish

2009-06-24T15:23:00.007+12:00

Much has been told of the massive amount of value that is lost in the ever changing world of mergers and acquisitions - 75% failure is what I have seen reported. But when it happens to a supplier of your technology it can be quite devastating.

A story was released today in The Register that demonstrates the ugly side of the coin. A month ago Oracle purchased a company called "Virtual Iron" who were a lean and mean competitor to the VMware juggernaut and whose products were available in New Zealand. The usual fanfare was pushed out through the PR channels - "With the addition of Virtual Iron, Oracle expects to enable customers to more dynamically manage their server capacity and optimize their power consumption."

I can just see the warm and fuzzy messages going out through the channel ensuring that customers' investments were safe......and then Oracle pull the plug. OK so there are promises to consolidate the customers into their virtualisation solutions in the future but that'll take time and no doubt require a really scary upgrade.

Another set of IT users left high and dry on the sand bank of M&A!

This tale has a bigger impact on the industry than we think because if you are the person making the decision you have to consider the risk of committing to a smaller player in the market and their ability to support you in the future.

Sadly, if you follow this through to it's eventual conclusion you end back at....."Nobody got fired for buying IBM."....again!

Now let me just check has Oracle acquired another company recently........?

One of my favourite words....

2009-06-19T16:35:00.003+12:00

Ah yes hubris. I discovered this word while I was working for the world's largest silicon chip manufacturer - funny that. The freedictionary describes it as: "Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance" but it is usually assigned to the view of the world taken by corporations. And what better demonstrators of this than companies in the IT world.

A really good example of hubris is the "new and exciting" launch of Telecom's XT network here in New Zealand. This product has hit the streets here with a fabulously expensive advertising campaign using a rather weird looking Hamster from Top Gear.

What I love about these campaigns is their outright assumption that the services they are delivering with their "new" product are unique.

We've been roaming around the world seamlessly with one phone for a number of years, we've been using high speed networks for a few, in fact TC's early CDMA network was pretty fast anyway. We've been able to choose the latest phones from all the manufacturers in the world and, more importantly, we haven't had to add our contacts in every time we get a new handset.

So why all the fanfare for something we already have.....because their arrogance presumes that we have never seen it before.

Makes you wonder eh?

This is why you should never trust brochures, the reason somebody is telling you that they have a unique service is because you are the only person listening. If you're looking for something new it is your duty to challenge that statement and look beyond - you may be pleasantly surprised.

If you want a shock start looking around at open source software software or cloud computing services - a wild and wonderful world!

Now where was I?

2009-06-19T15:08:00.000+12:00

Well I'm back...the mission was nowhere near accomplished "House of Cards" is a big book but such a good read I bought a copy. Who said libraries were bad for book sales?

.....

It might get quiet around here for the next four weeks!

2009-06-04T12:48:00.003+12:00

Just a quick apology to all my smiling readers, that my blogging may come to a temporary halt.

Auckland library have just delivered me a brand new copy of "House of Cards - How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism" by William D. Cohan. It's 450 pages of close typed wonderment describing the recent collapse of society as we know it.

Putting the link in I noticed that the American tag line is "A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" I assume a less anarchic version for our friends on the other side of the Pacific. Hubris is one of my favourite words and seems to be a watchword for the corporations that we deal with in our industry.

Anyway it is very interesting reading so I'm storing up things to write about and will be back soon.

Bandwidth's poor relation

2009-05-29T18:00:00.003+12:00

On the day Telecom NZ announces it's "brand new network" - doesn't look too new to me to be honest - I thought I might touch on the subject of mobile applications and one reason why they don't work!

Most IT solutions struggle to perform when delivered on an internal corporate network where the servers that the application run on are two floors away from the users that are using it. The connectivity issues that arise in this scenario are pretty slim and usually completely discarded in the risk register of a project. The project has far worse things to worry about.

However when you start pushing that interaction across another kind of network it can all start getting a bit difficult. For solutions to work well they need to function from end to end and if one of those ends is a lot further away than normal things can get nasty.

The problem tends to stem from the poor relation of Mr Bandwidth. Mr Bandwidth is the guy who is the shining star and gets all the press coverage. He is constantly seen as our salvation in the shiny new world of broadband nirvana. But he has a poor relation - Ms Latency. Few people have heard of her and even fewer understand what she's about.

Let me explain, when you look at the performance of systems the easiest analogy to explain what is going is a comparison with roads.

Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway, that's easy eh? The more lanes you have the more cars that can travel down the road so bandwidth is really simple to manage...isn't it? Well it is if we all drive Ferrari's at 240kph. But what happens if we only have clapped out old Morris Minors?

There's the highway laid out before us and all we can do is 30kph. When we're stood at the other end of the road the same number of vehicles are going by but they've taken 8 times longer to get here (30/240 for those mathematically challenged of you!).

That difference in speed is latency. The real problem, that's kept quiet (especially by the mobile networks) is that bandwidth is generally really easy, and cheap to increase, but latency is really expensive and very costly to reduce. And when it comes to mobile networks that problem just gets worse.

Now if your application, that has been developed for you on your network, is not aware of that change in latency there's a good chance it will never work. Not unless you can "change the laws of physics".

So be careful, just because you can drive to the dairy doesn't mean that you can get to Sydney in your car! :-)

Reading about complexity

2009-05-26T15:58:00.003+12:00

Last year I read a very interesting book by Nick Davies called Flat Earth News that described in gory detail the demise of the journalistic profession.

Sadly technology was one of the major reasons for this loss of integrity. The relentless need for speed has been caused by the pressures of the Internet. We see evidence of this constantly in our daily doses of media.

What Nick explains is why we have arrived at this place. Publications still have an insatiable desire for copy (and the attendant advertising) but this is massively outweighed by a total lack of time for journalists to prepare anything. The only option is to turn to the complexity generators who are churning out the copy by the train load.

There is no better example of this than the IT press. Almost all information we receive is based on the result of some company's press release about their new product. Most commentators column inches are the result of either a product launch or visit to....

Those words Dave Smith's trip to....were paid for by.....are always a bit of a give away.

Added to this the quality of journalism has been plummeting, a fact that is pretty obvious when you first sit down with one and try and explain your message. And let's face it how can we expect anybody to have a full working knowledge of the labyrinthine number of technologies that fall beneath the IT banner.

All we end up with is endless "gadget reviews" and needless to say they are all "so simple to use"!

The lack of informed comment in the IT press adds to the desire to "keep up with the latest technology" and contributes to the ever expanding complexity we experience in our daily lives.

The really hard thing to do is ignore all this rhetoric and focus on what are the real issues affecting the delivery of IT services.

Picture for the week...

2009-05-22T13:37:00.003+12:00

That week went by with few words of wisdom added - sorry.

But here's a picture to leave the week with...

...I thought the title should be "NO!"

The irony stretches further in that this was taken right outside Tower Insurance's head office in Auckland - where better to do it I guess? No need to take a picture, just tell them to look out the window. :-)

It also raises another issue that irks me. All that spray painting over the pavement to tell the guys with diggers where everything is - why? Surely we have got to the stage where our huge investment in GIS systems has allowed us to ensure our sub-terranian real estate is mapped out to a level that precludes the need for this hideous graffiti? I know the answer to that one - don't call me Shirley!

The demon in me wants to run around with a can of paint and add spurious confusing additions to these marks just to really confuse them! I'd love to see the fall-out from that little piece of contributory vandalism!

Anyway have a good weekend all and next week I'll have another go at my ever growing list of technology gripes! See ya....

Ironic eh?

2009-05-15T12:30:00.001+12:00

Hope you got the irony of the typos in my post on understanding detail? ;-)

"A suite of products fully integrated...

2009-05-14T11:42:00.008+12:00

....at the brochure level"

Here’s another one of my favourite sayings....and is a reflection of the way software companies sell their portfolio of products. I think this one came from a very sensible man in the storage and security world Jon William Toigo.

Software companies start with a product and, if successful, usually one of two things happen:

They get bought by a company that likes the look of their product and see it as a complimentary offering.

...or....

They start buying companies that sell products that they see as complimentary offerings.

Both strategies obviously have exactly the same outcome - a set of products that may look like they are similar but in fact are far from that.

To solve the problem the parent company deconstructs the purchased product and then redevelops the solution into its enterprise application framework and quickly delivers a solution that is fully integrated at all levels.

Oh hang on a minute....that’s wrong....what they actually do is.....

Get the marketing guys in to re-brand the product and ensure that all collateral is consistent with the other products they own. “Thus integrating at the brochure level.”

Once engineering have a good look at the product they usually decide to leave it alone and you then start hearing about consolidation and integration being available in the next version....whenever that might be....

There have been some great stories of products being purchased, and once their design is understood they are then completely re-developed, from the ground up, in order for them to continue providing value for their new owners.

One example that springs to mind would undermine the kudos of a famous kiwi tech entrepreneur so I better not mention him. Especially as I own shares in his company!

Some of the giants of our industry have made millions out of their customers by selling brochure integration, Tivoli and Unicentre are two of the greatest but no area of software is spared from this scourge.

The counter to this is companies who develop fully integrated products from the start and architect them with this in mind. Obviously the problem with this strategy is the need for that rare commodity – strategic vision! There are a few who have done this and they always struggle to sell against the brochure-warers, they become the victims of feature ticking solution selections – not easy!

So when you’re faced with a solution purchase - check out the history of the product and please dig a bit deeper than the brochure!

Architects fly with angels but the devil is in the detail!

2009-05-13T12:56:00.004+12:00

I’m not sure where I got this quote from (Google tells me to take the parentheses off so I now have a unique entry in Google!) but it so impressed me I put it in my CV. Fat help that was.....but you don’t care about that do you?

I think this sentence goes a long way to summing up why we go wrong so often with the delivery of solutions and it is one of the cornerstones of IT project failure. I’m going to follow this thread in the next few posts.

Architecture is one of the those words that is overused and under defined (top of my list is SIMPLE) and the thing that really gets my goat is that many people who profess to be architects rarely have any interest in the real implications of their decisions.

This happens because there is generally too much detail to understand. And if you want to maintain your kudos in our world of technology the last thing you want to do is call on others to help you understand the detail.

So we ignore it. We hatch grandiose plans designed to ensure “executive buy-in” and “business approval” and toss them over the wall for the projects to deliver.

I was involved with a project a few years ago. It kicked off with a meeting which included all the technology providers. The Architect of the solution walked in and proudly stated that $5 million dollars worth of hardware was on its way and it was our job to build it into a functioning system. When asked exactly what was required of the solution he stated sternly the two primary objectives. As he said this there were furtive glances around the room from those who understood the technology and I gingerly spoke up and said “You realise that those two requirements are mutually exclusive for the platform you have chosen?” He looked startled, replied with “That’s not my problem it’s up to you guys to sort it out!” and promptly left the room.....

From that point on the “solution” compromises began and what they ended up with provided nowhere near the resilience they had required at the start.

I really worry that there are not many people in the world who can take a high level view of complex IT systems and yet also have the skill and fortitude to drill down into a level of detail that can preclude failure. When this happens in a project one of two things:

Plans are hatched at a high level and then when they are delivered they expose layers and layers of unthought-of implications. Outcome – under resourced projects failing to deliver.
Plans are hatched at a low level and when delivered they expose layers and layers of unthought-of implications. Outcome – under resourced projects failing to deliver.

Oh hang on......

Getting rid of the Start Bar

2009-05-08T12:55:00.006+12:00

I always thought that reducing the complexity of business applications within an organisation was kinda simple. But maybe first I should take you on a little history lesson.

Many years ago while working for the leading PC server manufacturer (sure you know who that was?) we heard wind of a new technology that was coming our way. It was called "client server technology" and was destined to revolutionise the delivery of business applications.

What happened was really weird.

Being PC guys we thought this technology would move the applications away from PC's - because that was already looking like it didn't scale and was hard to manage - by moving the processing to servers.

Unbeknown to us though on the other side of the computing world the mainframers were saying “At last we have a way of shedding customisation away from our lumbering servers. Let's build all that stuff into a PC client and then we can save time customising our loping applications.”

So when these wonderful new client server applications arrived, I was expecting things to get easier and they just got harder. I remember being exasperated to discover that the new ERP client that was being rolled out in the company required a doubling of PC memory and maybe even new PC's to cope with the processing requirements. What was that all about!

This trend has continued and the need for client side PC applications to front-end server applications continues to be the easiest cop-out for software companies. Allowing them to solve the problems of customisation and application flexibility.

How does this affect the complexity of our environments? Well what it does is guarantee that our friends in Redmond are a crucial part of application delivery. They're not daft are they?

The promise of web applications has also faltered in the corporate world. Software companies tried to use funky bits of technology delivered with specific browsers which have since been dropped. Talk at a recent seminar on “our friends” new Version 7 OS explained that it was going to be possible now to run older versions of their browser in an isolated environment to protect customers with legacy browser applications. Not sure about you but that whole sentence just makes my skin creep!

I always thought that if we could remove the need for a Start Bar (or any hook to legacy PC environments) to deliver our business applications then we have far more options to rationalise delivery to clients – and that means simpler and cheaper. Even though current web application technologies allow us to do everything we need, those PC lock-ins still proliferate.

So next time your choosing a server based application add the "must be accessible through any web browser" to your requirements list and just watch those responses drop away!

Pilot's into Production

2009-05-05T19:16:00.004+12:00

I spoke a few day's ago about the demise of the proof of concept and how it affects the delivery of robust solutions.

Well what about pilot's?

The pilot phase used to be where we would design and build a replica of the new solution's production system and test it. This testing would not only prove that the ideas we had in the design phase were feasible and scalable but also ensure that the users of our system could test it, get to know it and understand what they were in for. Of course this was a valuable early feedback loop to make sure we actually were delivering something that was useful.

At the end of the successful pilot this system would usually be downgraded and used as one of the build platforms for the eventual production environment. Once all the learnings were gathered and assessed the production build process would begin and we would construct the shiny gleaming new system.

Of course this only worked if we did a good job, just because this process was followed it didn't guarantee a success - there is no replacement for well engineered design!

Now I remember seeing all this excess as a youth and considered it enormously slow and wasteful. But what I didn't realise was the huge amounts of money that were at risk never mind the reputations of the staff who were building it.

Mmmmmm?

So what has happened since those heady days of planned and prepared projects - and those reputations?

What we do now is lash together an idea, give it a go and if it works we leave it. Admit it - how many pilot systems have you seen creep, usually by osmosis, into production. And of course once they are in and users are using them it's nigh on impossible to replace them with a proper system.

The only hope we have is that it becomes massively over subscribed and needs a rapid upgrade. Or more probably it never really worked how we, or they, wanted it to and it gradually falls out of use before it dies a sad and lonely death at the bottom of rack number 17.

There is another issue at work here and that is the ability systems have to exist in the complex worlds we have built.

If you're building a system today it rarely exists in isolation (wow what a thought that is?) and it is therefore forced to communicate effectively with the other production systems. Without this there would be no real testing. So once committed to the "real world" we might as well leave it there.

I would be interested to see how many organisations have the ability to carry a full version of their production environment in a lab as they did 20 years ago - even with the development nirvana now possible with virtual machines.

I guess another issue is who the hell would we get to administer it?

Isn't it time we left everyone else alone...

2009-05-02T12:23:00.004+12:00

....and started automating our industry?

As time has passed by I have become to lament our industry's inability to automate itself. There we are walking the corridors of our businesses telling them that our technologies can remove the drudgery from everyday working life.

When we get back to the office our next worry is, taking into consideration the skills shortage, how we're going to fill those 5 vacancies for help desk staff who spend all day re-setting passwords and unlocking domain accounts - there seems a certain irony to this picture that few of us have noticed.

To solve this we outsource the help desk - but all that does is move those staff off our site and the need to worry.

What we never consider is how can we make our computer systems self managing and allow our users to manage their own computing resources. "Can't trust them to do that" can we?

Well I think we can! I was involved in a project a few years ago that planned to do just that. The rules were very simple:

Provide automated systems that would remove the need for users to "call the help desk"
Ensure that web, email and chat communication was dealt with faster than telephone calls
Turn the support teams on their heads and make sure first line contact staff were knowledgeable and able to deal or redirect calls effectively - the upshot of that was to get rid of level 1 - do we really still need call loggers?
Simplify the help desk systems and publish them to the users using their language not the language of IT (or ITIL!)
Ensure all actions by support staff are fully transparent to users - keep them involved!
Provide a service that could be published to users around the world via either web or email - wherever they were.

I wonder how many companies in the world have really thought about how they deliver service to their users in a way that engages them rather than alienates them.

One product we did use was from the very clever fingers of Shaun Blackmore who has left New Zealand and started to push Activate up a very big hill in America - a brave man with a fabulous vision. Good on ya mate!

The interesting thing I saw was that the primary nay sayers in this project were the IT managers who gradually began to realise that they were loosing their "power" in the organisation. Doesn't that sound just like those hand weavers when the spinning jenny's were being assembled?

I've always thought there are two reasons people don't ring help desks:

Everything is working
Everything is broken but - "There is no point because nothing happens when I ring anyway!"

Maybe automation might allow us to move our users from category 2 to 1?

2009-04-29T16:14:00.002+12:00

Nicholas Timmins of the Financial Times released a story about "UK Government issues ultimatum to NHS IT suppliers" .

Another tale of IT woe. There are some terrifying statements in there - where do I start?

Probably best I just leave you to read it and ponder when we can get off this train?

Ponzi Scheme Run on Legacy Machine!

2009-04-28T12:37:00.005+12:00

Fortune magazine ran a comprehensive article on the Madoff affair. Find it here. It was interesting as it is related to my post on computer systems being the real reason for the current financial collapse around the world.

The piece that made me smile was this:

"The IBM server, for instance, an AS/400 that dated from the 1980s, was so old that some data had to be keyed in by hand, yet Madoff refused to replace it. The machine -- which has been autopsied by the government -- was the nerve center of the fraud. The thousands of pages of statements printed out from it showed trades that were never made. "

There we go - the ponzi scheme was the ultimate tribute to the shortcomings of legacy systems. It conjures up images of fingers hovering over keys with dread wondering what may happen next. It's just a shame that the outcome seems to have affected so many people...but that's off subject.

What it does highlight is the widely held misnomer that IT is an enabling technology in a business. If managed well and funded properly there is no doubt that this is the case, but generally that is a long way away from what actually happens.

What does happen with IT systems is that they are usually so expensive to install and maintain that it is assumed by management that they are a long term investment. Once they are in they are in! The only problem with this view is that the systems then entrench the business rules and processes that are within them and they become fixed.

Worse, and this is the problem that most "legacy systems" have is that this knowledge becomes lost after implementation. 10 years on nobody really knows what's going on.

I'm being frivolous with the Maddof system but it is a logical extension of what is happening in banks, insurance companies, airlines and government departments around the world.

I wonder how many of these organisations have had stalled "legacy system replacement projects" canned once the budget estimations start looking silly.

So how is this going to be fixed? I'm not sure, sorry, but what worries me is that the only path these companies will eventually have is to be marginalised by competitors who don't have those systems.

The airline industry is probably the greatest example of this at the moment, the old airlines using their aging mainframe systems - all of which assume that their most important asset is a seat on a plane - are slowly being eclipsed by the young guns who are built on moving customers through airports.

Legacy IT systems are our curse and a manifestation of what is fundamentally wrong with our industry rather than an embarrassing mishap.

Data, data everywhere but not a drop to drink

2009-04-27T16:56:00.003+12:00

I spoke a while ago about the curse of email as a chaotic repository for corporate information. Although the use of email in organisations is woeful and counter-productive it pales into insignificance compared to the original curse of the networked PC – the file server!

We’ve been dumping things in our H colons and I colons for many years now and the ability to use those things effectively in the future is nigh on impossible. The lack of structure and random use of file servers is sad testament to our ability, as a race, to classify information effectively. This poor usage has also meant that most attempts to formalise this process fail miserably. I’ve always seen “document management” projects as one of the great IT graveyards where money is poured into a solution that never really works. Reason being is that their imposition usually means that users have to change what they do – which is usually nothing – and start doing things when they save documents – adding meta tags etc.

I was once involved with a project that was required to define the owners of the data on the corporate file servers. Now this sounds like a pretty innocuous task doesn’t it? It wasn’t – drilling down into those file systems is like looking back into time but with no reference to a clock or calendar! Having to trawl through the sub-directories, guess where they came from and then approach the various business managers was a woeful task. Those business managers hardly have time to keep up with what’s going on today never mind worry about what their predecessors were doing 5 years ago. Of course this lack of concern in no way means that you can delete it - "We might need it some day"!

Why does this happen? Well most organisations of a decent size (say over 500 people) are useless at maintaining a map of their organisation. OK there may be up to date org charts in HR but as for pushing this structure into the file systems there is little hope. Most have been mapping access to files in their file servers by users not groups so when an organisation changes structure their data doesn’t automatically go with them.

If you’ve ever joined a company and been asked who in the current organisation your role matches then trust me there is no structure to the file server data. The reason the admin staff copy users is because they have no idea what file locations people have access to and therefore copying somebody who already works there is the easiest option.

The sad thing is it’s really easy to map an organisation within a directory merely by updating the field in the users record which says “Reports To”. If this field is correct for everyone then an automatic structure is built within the directory. By the way you are in an company that has done this I bet that the CEO reports to his secretary! ;-)

Once we have that structure the groups and owners would be really easy to track and our data would have more meaning. The fact that most organisations haven’t been doing it means that they have a project time bomb ticking quietly in the background. That project is either the file server consolidation or worse the automated administration project – I’ll talk about that next.

Remember the days of Proof of Concepts?

2009-04-22T16:21:00.002+12:00

I mentioned proof of concepts last week and got to wondering where they went?

I think they have disappeared into the annals of history along with all the other things we used to do to make sure things worked before they were installed.

"So what is a proof of concept?" I hear you in-touch Gen Y'ers cry. Well the idea was that if there was a solution that was thought to be able to add value to an organisation it was tried out in controlled circumstances. What that meant was carrying out a defined piece of work to discover the following:

Does the solution work?
What impact does the solution have on the current environment?
Do the users of the system like it? (Hey that's a scary concept!)
What will it take to deliver this solution into production?
How much will it really cost to deploy?

I always thought the most important outcome was that if something either didn't work or was unfeasible this was a valid outcome.

In other words "let's not do it" is a valuable result. Primarily because we would have only spent a few thousand dollars proving it!

The PoC was always a really strategic component of the "design phase" which was where clever people sat around with bits of paper and whiteboards working through what the final solution was going to look like and mapping out how it was arrived at.

Of course there's no need for that kind of stuff today is there - or is there?

So what happens now?

Well there is always a lemming-like assumption that whatever has been proposed WILL work, otherwise why would we do it? So we don't need to test its ability to be installed - that's a given!The most important thing lost is an ability to truly understand the potential cost of implementing a solution.

By testing it in a PoC the ability to determine what will need to be dealt with is far more tangible.Without that we are left dealing with a process that is one stop up from licking your finger and holding up in the wind.

And of course once that multi-million dollar leviathan has set off there isn't any stopping it is there?

Mystery Project?

2009-04-17T12:10:00.003+12:00

OK, so first things first, in order to explain this photo I need to say that I bought my SE K800i mobile phone because it has a fabulous camera. In fact it's such a nice phone when my first one disintegrated I broke all the rules of gadgetry and bought another one - no upgrade - eeek! What I like is that I always have a camera on me - you just never know what you might come across.

So here is this weeks farewell post with a picture that, as usual made me smile. I have no idea what was going on, well I do but that wouldn't be very funny would it, all I found was a whole load of Ethernet cables in the office toilet. My mind was whizzing with ideas as to what the next new cost cutting technology was going to be installed. Any ideas? I thought it might be part of a Voice over (Where) I pee project? :-)

Have a good weekend.

Applying engineering principles to IT projects

2009-04-16T20:56:00.003+12:00

I have spent a small part of my career in the utility world - power, telephones, water and even TV - and one of the interesting splits that you see in these organisations is the way different ways computers are used.

The IT department is usually, until quite recently, flush with cash and are like any other commercial IT department. (You can work that out from reading all my previous posts!)

The engineers, however, who are keeping the revenue earning services running do things a different way. They generally have no money to invest in flash computer rooms and expensive software. They lash PC's together; get them working and bury them in the nearest cupboard or under the largest desk where they whir away for years delivering the service required. The upshot is that they are completely fit for purpose, work and never, and I mean never, go wrong.

This different views of the same world always creates enormous rifts between the two groups and I always feel sorry for those CIO's who have managed to combine ownership of these two warring groups.

So what is the difference, I think fundamentally its caused by the IT worlds' continuing inability to impose any structure to what it does and embrace simple engineering principles for its projects. We rarely design solutions in the same way an architect builds houses or a civil engineer builds bridges - thank god!

When designing a solution:

we ignore the complexity of the environments we install into
we scope solutions badly
and if we do we allow the scope to creep
if we do change the design we never return and challenge the initial design assumptions
we rarely fully qualify assumptions made about the solution
we never prototype and if we do it's just with pictures
we always make sure proofs of concept work - at all costs
we put development systems into production
we never design for the future, only the present

...OK I'll stop now

Now I'm not suggesting we should be running our IT systems on PC's under desks, although if we commit to cloud computing we might be - see my earlier posts - but we should be imposing a more rigid framework around the project work that we do. I know that our "users" and more importantly our project sponsors generally "don't see the value" but I think that's an attitude we have bred because we've been far too lazy at explaining the issues.

A fine example of this is the relentless move to VOIP telephony. The analogue technology required to provide "always on ring tone" was a glorious tribute to the power of early 20th century engineering and was carried through into the digital telephony world. But with VOIP now we see the computerisation of telephony - and I guarantee out goes all that resilience!

Next time you're talking to the guy who is selling you the VOIP solution ask him whether he can guarantee "always on ring tone" with his solution. He'll look a bit sheepish, walk away and come back with a quote that is 2 or 3 times the size of the one he first gave you. All of a sudden that business case doesn't look quite so compelling.

Selecting Products in a Complex World

2009-04-14T18:04:00.003+12:00

I have always been dismayed by the way organisations choose products when they embark on IT projects. The way that they do it rarely takes into account the complexity of the company or its IT environment.

I was once involved in a project that delivered a solution to a major customer and the requirements were really simple. They wanted a very cheap solution that could be delivered through a simple web browser but the key was we were allowed to change business processes to adapt to the chosen software. The second part meant that the first part was feasible. What you rarely achieve is both!

One day I returned to the office and was approached by a senior manager who said “Could we use that solution that you have just installed here?” My answer was very simple - firstly I qualified her statement. “Do you want to replace the software you have today, or do you want to change the way you do things?” Sadly her answer was she wanted a replacement. I then said, quite fortuitously “No, and there are only 3 products in the world that you can use and your budget for implementation will be NZ$5 million.” She laughed and said there was no way she could afford that and disappeared off down the corridor.

The really sad thing is that they ended up choosing one of those 3 products and the project when I last heard had spent well over 5 times my initial guess! If only I could make money out of that kind of forethought! Perhaps short selling on IT projects could be introduced?

They started their project with a “market review” and this process seems to fail every time! I'm sure you've seen it (grossly simplified for increased comedic impact):

A bunch of interested parties are assembled to brainstorm what features are required for the solution – sometimes masquerading as “getting the user’s requirements”.
This list of features are sent to the various vendors who provide solutions.
The vendors respond with a list of yes’s and no’s.
The responses are received and compared and whoever has the most yes’s wins.

This simplistic approach to product selection is rife in our complex world and I think completely useless. No vendor in his right mind is going to tick a NO if he knows his competitors will be ticking YES.

It reminds me of a shonky friend of mine who used to sell shelving to warehouse owners. He only sold black shelving. But if asked to supply any other colour he would tell the customer he could. When it got delivered and the angry customer rang up he’d offer them 10% discount, they would accept it and he’d nailed another deal. Of course when he sold to a non-black customer he always made sure he had an extra 10% in his margin – a very simple equation!

I sometimes wonder whether software companies start off by selling black shelving?

The upshot is that once the implementation project begins and the true capability - or lack thereof – is discovered the solution begins its dismal path of compromise.

There are better ways to do it!

My PC?

2009-04-13T15:14:00.003+12:00

I often wonder whether the glorious “PC Revolution” has left us with more bad habits than good. There is no doubt its introduction of freedom into the world of computing has taken us on a marvellous world of discovery which has expanded into places we would never have gone if they hadn’t existed. But, I always worry about the other side of “progress”.

In the world of corporate IT we have spent many years reigning in the "freedom" of the PC in order to regain fiscal control of a distributed PC environment. Any attempts at doing this has tended to be met by walls of descent from PC users who love that they can do what the hell they like when they like.

Many years ago I came up with a mantra which I used as I led a very thorny roll-out of a “managed PC environment” across a struggling Ozzy airline. The shock of this new regime was needed to reduce their astronomic management costs.

The mantra was:

“My PC is a business tool, supplied by and paid for by my employer – it is not an extension of my personality.”

Now I'm not sure if I stole this from someone else (wouldn’t surprise me!), but I think it should be one of the major battle cries of our industry. It would make things far simpler and maybe help explain that there does need to be a level of compromise between what you do with a PC at home - your problem, and what you do at work – our problem.

There has never been a better place to see this in action than in the ranks of senior management. They continue to demand special rights to exceptions over the rules they demand of their workforce (reduce costs!). How many times have I seen senior executives demanding that they have laptops that exceed the company standard – if they had heard the mantra maybe they wouldn’t be so pushy – or would they?

Apologies....

2009-04-11T12:00:00.001+12:00

It’s gone a bit quiet around here recently hasn’t it?

Sorry about that but my circumstances have changed - I’ve just got myself a full time job. Shame really, from a blogging point of view, ‘cos I was slipping into the cozy journalistic habit of punching in the day’s words over that first coffee in the morning. But now I have to find time in the day to “fit it in”.

However, fear not dear reader, my job here is not finished so I promise I shall continue to ask questions of our modern world. Just may not be as regular as it was.

I have been heartened by the words of encouragement from friends about the things I have written so far and if there is anything out there that confuses you or that you'd like to get off your chest (and mine) then either leave a comment here or send me an email - the address is in my profile.

And, of course, the views reflected here in no way……you know the rest. ;-)

To work……

De-comlexing – A Real World Example

2009-04-07T18:39:00.002+12:00

I know I’ve been banging on about complexity and have been focusing on the world of corporate IT but the problem is just as rife in the retail world. I experienced a recent example when, after returning from a trip to the UK my mother-in-law decided that she wanted to start emailing her family in the old country.

Of course as her daughter and son-in-law “are in computers” she realised that this was no problem – and as usual we felt obliged to help her. Now she is no slouch in this modern world but she has successfully avoided the need for a computer for a few score years and ten. We therefore had our work cut out. In fact her chosen career was one of those that had been destroyed by IT – a printing compositor – she was kerning before you guys were even born!

So the project was kicked off - budgets set, no more than NZ$500, and timelines approved – be quick! Obviously it was going to be hard to provide her with a solution that she could use safely and simply without too much “shock of the new”. In fact the use of the word SIMPLE is something that really annoys me. It has been plagiarized by the world of technology and now used as a threat to one’s own self esteem. How many times have you seen it used to describe a product and then battled for days with the intricacies of setup? Some people find that fun (especially engineers on a fixed price project!), but trust me most don’t!

So the Tosh was bought – nice big screen for fading eyes – and then began the week long dumming down of Vista to allow it to be used. Removing auto-updates – she’s using dial-up – getting rid of icons – tightening firewall rules – installing AVG virus protection – automating dial-up settings – automating start-up and shut-down procedures – the list seemed endless. We set up a Yahoo mail account - shunning Outlook Express like the plague, we all know how dangerous that is – to avoid spam and virus problems.

My wife set about preparing detailed sets of procedures, awash with screen shots, for mum to access her emails and festooned stickers all over the keyboard to explain the various names for the keys. It’s a good job her daughter ended up being a business process analyst.

Finally the day of handover came and she was guided carefully through the various actions needed to converse with her family. It was tough but we did it in the end. Now she has a laptop that she can turn on, connect to her email and turn off without having to call her tech support team - me.

We also gave her strict instructions not to let anybody change anything on the computer and answer the question “You don’t want to do it like that – here I’ll show you” with “No it’s OK I am quite happy with the way I do it - please don’t change anything”.

At the end of this long road we have a very happy user doing exactly what she wanted with confidence, she doesn’t ring anymore she’s just getting on with it.

This is a classic metaphor for what’s wrong with our world, in order to provide simple solutions for our users we generally have to wrap up enormous levels of sophistication to hide endless levels of complexity.

Why could it not just be simple to start with?

PS Late update! She had problems today - a friend on ADSL changed something that screwed up her dial-up settings - it's an endless battle!

Factory failures?

2009-04-03T13:03:00.002+13:00

Here's a lovely example of a factory failure I saw last year at Wellington Airport. Not the first time I've seen a Windows error message on a public information screen - always brings a smile to my face! ;-)

Complex Factories

2009-04-03T12:49:00.003+13:00

I spoke earlier about the perception the world has about our world of IT – it’s just one big confusing “technology” mess that is impossible to understand. (Am I being too extreme?)

But there is an enormous divide and, from the outside, it is quite confusing. The split is between infrastructure and business application. I'll talk about this split and it's future later.

However, infrastructure consists of the building blocks of any corporate IT environment – PC’s, servers, storage, LAN’s, WAN’s, firewalls etc. These components and their management should be viewed as a commodity based service that should always be undergoing cost cutting initiatives.

In the world of infrastructure the game is generally to “keep the factory running” so a quest for resilience and stability should be the primary drivers.

In most large IT departments this is done by what most outsiders would consider to be an anal approach to project work. Applying rudimentary engineering principles to any changes like proof of concepts, prototyping, detailed research and up front design with careful and rapid roll-back planning and, unfortunately, migrations that are carried out over weekends or holiday periods.

The reason for this level of diligence is that getting an infrastructure project wrong generally means if it fails nobody can do anything and I mean anything. Ever tried logging on when AD has become corrupted or the core switch is down?

These disciplines are generally at odds with the project sponsors who see no need for this level of diligence. “After all it should just work eh?” At least that’s what the salesmen told them.

The problems are always caused by the complexity of the data that is held in the components of the infrastructure and how hard it is to migrate it from one platform to another. It’s pretty easy to understand what I’m talking about if you’re moving data from one disk system to another but the problems can be just as complex moving firewall rules or routing tables across to a new box.

This migration complexity is a massive hand break on any opportunity an organization has to upgrade or shift platforms and can lead to product entrenchment way beyond any reasonable expectations.

I wonder how many organizations made a decision on their new $5 million SAN 7 years ago based primarily on a juvenile analysis of cost/byte and bytes per second and are now wondering why they have to fork out another $5 million to move to a new one today.

When considering investment in core infrastructure it’s important to understand what it will take to get into it but more important is to consider what it will take to get out of it in the future. Planning for the long term is generally at odds with the pressures of our industry but when it comes to ”factory design” it is of up most importance!

Don't We Have Anything Else To Learn About?

2009-04-01T07:55:00.006+13:00

I took this picture a while ago.....

....and it saddened me. I wondered why, bearing in mind all the fabulous things to learn in the modern world a high school's night classes had been hijacked by the computer industry.

Is it because this is what everybody wants to learn or that it's all so hard we need to be trained in it before we can use it?

Selecting the Right Technical Staff

2009-03-31T09:45:00.004+13:00

I have always been concerned by the way organizations select their technical IT staff. In my experience almost all rely on three factors - qualifications, an interview and references. What worries me is there is no test in this process for technical and practical ability, just a hope that exams, conversation and stilted discussions with past employers will unearth any technical or professional shortcomings.

What could be done?

I once applied for a job in a PC support group for a central London council and was astonished to see that the “interview” was planned to take almost an entire day. When I arrived I was given a timetable and the day consisted of the following:

A Practical Test. We were given a PC and an expansion card with all the manuals and tools needed to fit it. We had to fit the card, re-assemble the PC, install the drivers and ensure all was working OK.

An Application Test. For me this was setting up a spreadsheet with various formulas to calculate the answer to a specific problem.

A Written Report – We were given press releases on two similar products, asked to write a comparative report and then come up with a recommendation to buy with reasons.

An Interview – The usual format.

By the end of the day I was exhausted – most unlike a day working for the council!

Of course I have always thought this was a great process because I was selected! But it goes further than that, every time we had another selection day it was us, the potential employee’s peers, who were running those tests. This gave us the chance to comment on each of the applicants and be part of the team building process.

There was one time when I tested two people, one guy who looked great on paper - good experience and qualifications - but when asked to do the practical test he said he refused to do “manual work”. He was followed by a girl who I am sure had never before seen a screwdriver. She asked some really good questions (which I was allowed to answer) and after a valiant effort completed the task.

Needless to say by the end of the day Mr. Smooth was rejected (Condescending attitude, no team player, unwilling to get stuck in) and Miss Valiant (Good attitude, willing to take on challenges, good enquiring mind) was accepted.

It was impossible for anyone to have bluffed your way through the day and we were blessed with a great bunch of people to work with who, on the day they arrived, were already part of the team.

OK on that one day it was a bit of a drain on resources but this paled into insignificance compared to the drain that could be caused by hiring poor staff!

In almost 30 years in this industry it was the only time I had ever seen anything as efficient at selecting good staff. Where did we go wrong? Perhaps if we spent more time considering the strategic benefits of a good selection process rather than wasting time on managing poor staff we might be able to make things better?

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has seen a similar system of selection?

Comment on Green IT

2009-03-27T15:29:00.005+13:00

Miss B from greenitstrategy.com commented on my Green IT post. I agree with it so much that I'll post here.

Thanks B - respect.

"Miss B said...

"My dear Alan, I'll take up your offer and post a comment on this one since it’s my favourite subject but you’ll have to forgive the length of my reply :)

Although I agree partially with your comments (yes I think some vendors & suppliers are using 'Green IT' as a way of selling more kit & it is an interesting proposition to stop buying new kit...although that probably won't help the economy!) I think Green IT extends far far beyond just energy savings in the IT data centre.

But before I get to that I just want to say that regardless of Green IT being the ‘in’ thing right now, environmental legislation (such as carbon credits) & natural technological advancement will dictate that technology will both help solve environmental issues (such as computer modelling of climate change) and become more environmentally aware (such as more energy efficient, using less toxins in manufacture, improvement in the recycling of computing components etc).

People sometimes say to me that they don’t believe in climate change or that IT can’t really be green, but it really doesn’t matter if we believe it is true, because governments are creating legislation to reduce carbon/water/ewaste, companies are developing policies outside IT to dictate improved environmental impacts (and IT is being called upon to help deliver!), investors are considering business’ environmental credentials, people are looking to work for businesses that have corporate social responsibility, and research grants & bank loans are cross-checked by environmental elements. And of course IT is just one component of a business, which we sometimes forget I think.

My motto when it comes to Green IT is 'gain knowledge & create balance’. If there was one thing that was hammered home when I studied environmental science it is that one change to the environment has an impact on something else. In IT terms, changing your servers to more energy efficient ones without a set of solid business reasons simply creates additional eWaste - so you are trading direct energy use for indirect energy use & waste creation. Did you know it takes 240kg of fossil fuels to make a single computer (10x its own weight – far more than any other whitegoods or electronics, which typically have a 1:1 ratio), 22kg of chemicals & 680kg water? And when these materials are dug up from the earth & manufactured they dramatically (negatively) change the surrounding environment. Then when we are finished with them, they are often shipped to & dumped in some third world country to pollute the land & water streams with the reasoning they are allowing poor people to earn an income on the recovery of materials (on this point I highly recommend reading “High Tech Trash” by Elizabeth Grossman & going to www.ban.org to see this situation for yourself).

So its all comes down to balance & knowledge. And although many IT vendors are currently plying their 'green' wares & they seem to be the loudest voices currently, I also trust that people will not be glamoured & will take the time to consider all benefits, impacts, issues & risks specific to their situation when they consider Green IT solutions; and I do hope that the IT industry will see value in contributing to environmental research & develop software to support it."

Cheerio,

Miss B

www.greenitstrategy.com"

Technology Bravado

2009-03-27T11:09:00.004+13:00

The world of corporate IT is incredibly complex and yet there are vast numbers of people involved in the industry who have no idea, nor interest, in how things work or don’t work.

Unfortunately as you get away from the coal-face the ability to understand the technicalities is difficult. If you’re managing a team of 50 people you haven’t the time to worry about the details of this weeks security patches. In fact I think a lot of people in IT have “risen” in the ranks in order to escape from the relentless technicalities – it’s all too much for them.

It’s beyond most people’s ability to fully understand the big picture, so how can we expect those non-technical people to understand it.

In order to understand this complexity most organisations have hired legions of specialists to manage their environments. For this to work there must be good channels of communication. To senior staff highlighting any issues and concerns, and at the same time this information should be listened to and actioned upon by those senior managers.

There is a problem though and I call it “technology bravado”. You may have been victim of it, here are some symptoms:

Have you asked a “Techie” a question, received an answer, acted upon it and then when it’s gone wrong been told that “it’s not my area of knowledge”. (The “Should Syndrome”)

Have you ever questioned a “Techie” and found out later that the information you wanted was never received because “You didn’t ask the right question”?

Have you ever asked a “Techie” a question and received a scorning sneer back, making you feel inadequate and scared to ask further questions?

Have you ever offered up a plan of action and received “that’s one way of doing it” as the answer? Then spent the next few hours clawing out the alternative plan from the mind of the nay-sayer.

Have you ever asked for updates on progress and never received any communication at all?

…and the list goes on…..

Now this infuriates me. The condescending view towards those “not in the know” only exacerbates the problems that our industry faces. If we want to start solving the problem of complexity we have to stop hiding behind it in order to prove to the world how clever we are. If we can’t share our knowledge and communicate effectively with our colleagues (and users) we will never add value to our businesses.

Let’s start making things simpler rather than defending the complexity for our own self-aggrandisement!

Green IT – next year maybe purple?

2009-03-26T13:01:00.003+13:00

This was the thought I came away with after an IDC conference I attended last year. It was dedicated to the new, and commendable, focus for the IT industry – saving the planet.

Before I go any further I want to make it clear that I am gravely concerned about the state of our fabulous planet and its obvious decline. (Don't forget lights out at 8:30pm on Saturday.) I am happy that technology has a place in solving environmental issues but I worry that commercial IT is not one of them.

Pardon my cynicism but following on from yesterday’s post I could only see this new battle cry as an expression of the industry’s desire to find new tactical ways of selling stuff.

“OK so we’ve been selling all this nasty high power stuff for ages now but that was all wrong. Get rid of it and replace it with today’s new stuff and the world will be saved.”

The rampant consumerism that is demanded by our industry is my concern. Almost all IT suppliers’ commercial models rely on the fact that there will be a need to replace or renew both hardware and software on a regular basis. Just imagine if we could freeze the industry and be happy with what we had – where would that leave the suppliers? Ok there would be the odd maintenance agreement here and there but that’s about all.

Until this changes I struggle to see how the IT industry can in any way say that it is turning green. It’s just found another reason to shift tin!

Watch movies on demand and debug the kernal while you're at it

2009-03-26T11:54:00.006+13:00

While traveling on Air New Zealand to Sydney last weekend I was half way through a movie when this happened....

... it's good to see them using Linux but surely they could have turned the screen echo off and leave a message that might explain to the non sys-admins that "Normal service will resume shortly"?

Despite this the service is really good - well done Air NZ.

On the subject of movies I have a beef about the way the studios portray computers. I watched "The Day the Earth Stood Still" which should be re-named "The 90 minutes the audience sat still, and fell asleep", but it had two traits that are interesting.

Have you noticed two things about movie computers. They always bleep and blip when someone is typing or the screen changes - where does that come from? And secondly, and more importantly in this modern world of paranoia, have you noticed that if an organization (usually an American security agency) is under threat it is their "mainframe" that is at risk? This is fair enough perhaps as American security agencies are the only organizations who can afford to run "mainframes" but most of the world has moved on haven't they?

This is no different to any portrayal of a specialist subject that is not in the mainstream. I just think it would upset those people who consider that computers are ubiquitous, there may be a large number of computers around but only a few understand what's going on with them!

Twittering? Sorry don't get it....

2009-03-25T16:36:00.003+13:00

I don't intend this blog to be a multi-media experience but if I see something I like perhaps you might be interested?

Social networking is on my list of subjects to discuss but if you're not sure of my views check out this video.....

;-)

The Complexity Engine

2009-03-25T10:27:00.002+13:00

Just to re-iterate the simple equation that is driving the IT industry:

Flexibility ≡ Complexity

This flexibility means that any problem that arises, either business or technical, can be solved in a myriad of ways. There are no best practice methodologies in the IT industry, a problem faced is solved by a combination of whoever is asked and whatever is available. The ultimate outcome is that every, and I mean every, IT installation is an assembly of bespoke solutions built up over as many years as the company has existed.

This was clear to be seen during my time working for a large integrator. Being part of a team of very clever technical consultants we were constantly coming up with innovative solutions to solve complex infrastructure problems. We tried endlessly to package these solutions up in order to streamline the delivery to our various clients. But it never worked – and the reason why? Because when you walked in the door of a customer’s computer room you had no idea how they had done things in the past. Every installation was different. More worryingly most customers really had no idea how their things were configured.

“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” is a philosophy that has been adopted by most data centre managers nowadays, although it could easily be translated into “Don’t try and fix it ‘cos you’ll break it!”. This problem is endemic across the entire industry, small businesses are as much a victim of this flexibility as the large ones but unfortunately they are unable to put the blame on an IT manager/department – they just have to keep paying the bills.

So where is this flexibility/complexity engine that is causing all this heartache?

Well it’s quite simple. In the absence of any independent global standards or best practice models that guide the delivery of technology into businesses we have relinquished control to the suppliers of our technology. The suppliers are in a mammoth arms race to sell more products and this has become the de-facto controller for the delivery of technology into businesses.

The world of IT product sales is unrivalled in its delivery of tactical solutions – if you don’t nail those weekly/monthly/annual targets you are toast – when I tried it I was toast! This pressure to shift product is now the driving force in IT delivery, and is exacerbated by “The Dick Smith Syndrome” which is the driving force behind most business users IT decision making .

One of the best examples of this is the “cascading marketing initiative” which I saw while working for the PC vendors. Firstly a new message would be delivered from the silicon manufacturers in order to promote the features of their new chips. A couple of months later the PC manufacturers would bundle those same messages up into their product launches to the channel. These channel partners would then set out on their regional road-shows selling the new features to their excited audiences. Finally the techies would return to work and walk the corridors of their IT departments socialising these new features and getting excited about their impending delivery. Of course through all this the problems of implementation and integration were lost in the technology frenzy associated with the new products.

A good example is the recent hype in the media about “unified communications”. The ability to deliver this solution has been around for years but the current brouhaha is generated exclusively on the back of a new product released by “our friends in Redmond”. The initiative has nothing to do with solving customers problems, it is more to do with taking part in a targeted sales promotion. Not sure that message ever gets through to the guy signing off the business case?

The delivery of IT to an organisation needs to be part of a well planned strategic plan but too often it is a loose assembly of tactical tools that are layered onto the previous years solutions. If we rely on the messages from our suppliers we will never get out of the complexity hole we have created for ourselves, and they are voraciously digging for us!

“Never mind Should – we’ve moved on to Can’t”

2009-03-24T11:40:00.004+13:00

We spent a long weekend away in NSW and caught up with my cousin, a successful business owner who has spent his career doing battle with numerous IT suppliers.

When I told him about my “Should” post from last week he responded with the sentence above. When things go wrong with his IT systems his support organisation telephone staff now, usually, start by telling him that whatever it was he thought happened could never happen.

One has to be impressed with the speed at which they come to such dramatic conclusions but I have to question whether this is the best way to maintain true customer satisfaction. Purchasers of IT support services contracts don’t want to be told that they're wrong – it’s just not a good way to start off a problem solving dialogue!

Anyone who calls a help desk obviously has a problem, trust me – nobody ever calls just to while away their time. Generally it is a last resort! If they do ring and a problem is to be solved it is vital that the customer support agent has a positive rapport with their caller - they are their eyes and ears.

The real issue is IT installations are so complex nowadays it is very simple for victims of problems to misinterpret the symptoms available to them. They may not have the knowledge and experience to interpret what they see effectively. To respond to this evidence with a “can’t happen” is, I'm afraid, atrocious.

What the agent should be doing is carefully filtering these perceptions and get through to the real diagnostic evidence. This has to be a skillful process of human psychological manipulation and is generally far from the skill-sets used to select technical support staff. And there definitely are no courses available from the multi-nationals on how to answer help desk calls properly.

I spent many years “on the phones” and would have traded 20 full on techies for a considerate, understanding, slightly technical persuader with a good customer focus. Until those skills become more recognised calling help desks will continue to be a war of technical attrition that most business people have neither the time nor energy to put up with.

They will also, more importantly, not continue to pay for it!

If only we COULD instead of SHOULD

2009-03-19T16:19:00.004+13:00

End of another week….thought I’d discuss my most hated words used in this world of IT.

So why do I hate should? Because it’s used constantly by technical people when ever they’re asked a question they don’t know the answer to, by people they know who can’t question the statement.

My favourite use of the word is the oft used: “It should work?” - Admit it - how many times have you heard it?

What does this sentence really mean?

To the techie it means: “I really have no idea but in order to protect my aura of technical competency I’ll pretend I know the answer. If it works I’m a star, if it doesn’t then I can always say I wasn’t certain? Sorted!”

To the non-technical questionee it means “He’s very clever and it’s going to work. Sorted”

The word should is an opinion and must never be applied to the black and white world of engineering – which I’m afraid is where we are with these kind of discussions.

In my world there should (I think it’s OK to use it there?) be three answers available for the question. They are Yes, No and I don’t know. How much easier would that be and it would stop us disappearing down rat holes of deceit based on dodgy uninformed assumptions – don’t get me started.

Have a good weekend and see you next week – 1 year older!

Heads in the Clouds?

2009-03-19T12:10:00.003+13:00

There is no doubt that the computer industry is excited by cloud computing but as we know all that usually means is that they have found a new channel to sell more gear to!

Don’t get me wrong I think the opportunities that cloud computing offers to businesses are huge but I think the industry's current rapid growth is more a reflection of the failure of “corporate IT” than it is of any intrinsic benefits that might be available to businesses. How can it help or hinder them?

What are the rewards?

The obvious one is business managers and computer users are at last free to pick and choose the applications that they want without the need to worry about all that messy project implementation stuff. They are sick of the processes imposed on them by the IT department. No user requirements, steering committees, milestone slipping and the usual budget blow-outs.

In fact this technology releases managers from the grip of the vice-like stability that most IT departments have imposed to protect the complexity in their server rooms. All they need now is a terminal that is connected to the Internet. To use the service they can sign up, usually on a monthly / per user basis, and start using the application. It’s perfect for monthly budgeting.

All the issues of scalability and system resilience go away because the contract will protect them from that, and they won’t mind paying extra if they want to increase that protection in the future.

Doesn’t get much better than that – or does it?

What are the risks?

Much has already been written about the risks of betting your business on a burgeoning industry but I don’t think these can be overstressed.

Business people, historically, do not understand the complexities of the IT industry and are quite willing to gloss over the details when selecting solutions. Cloud computing was made for this scenario, the ability to attract customers with fancy screens and implied logic is far easier when the solution is buried in a data centre in the back and beyond.

At least with an installation in an IT department there is an opportunity to apply a level of technical due diligence before it’s turned on. The fact that a lot of the time that process fails is another problem – I’ll discuss that elsewhere.

Having had much experience of the wild world of software entrepreneurship I would guess most customers would never sign up to these solutions if they really understood how shonky most start-up solutions are. The risk of committing to a service that has been designed badly is even greater with a cloud application, and the problems will always occur after you’ve entered all your lovely data.

Even when the solution has proven its worth customers have no protection against the commercial activities of their service provider. What happens if they are sold, merge or acquire other companies, what happens if the business model doesn’t stacks up?

One example of this was Pandesic a much heralded joint venture set up at the end of the 90’s between two industry giants – they went bust and apparently gave their customers a month’s notice of termination of service. They assisted their customers to work through the removal of their service but trust me if you’ve committed your business to an application the last thing you want to do is open an email and see all your data in a flat file attachment along with a refund of next months pre-paid subscriptions – if you’re lucky!

I know most of these issues will be sorted out and for them to succeed I’m sure the good companies will rise to the top but there is another risk to those customers.

It goes back to the economics of outsourcing. Organisations outsource the services that don’t contribute to their core activities (like cleaning and payroll) – but I think we will see a growing move towards committing primary activities to software services companies and that’s really scary.

If, for a multitude of reasons, they become incompatible how is a customer going to deal with it? Trust me it’s hard enough to successfully move data around your own computer room never mind from a data centre in Minnesota to one in Kazakhstan through two companies who see themselves as competitors. While still trying to carry on your normal business activities of course.

I worry customers choosing to risk their business on their favourite cloud application make lambs on the way to the slaughterhouse look invincible!

The message I have, for the cloud industry, is that if this is all going to work they have a huge responsibility to their customers. To demonstrate levels of forethought and trust along with moral and commercial integrity that far exceeds those shown by the current IT industry.

I hope it’s a generational thing - but only time will tell.

Cloud Computing – The new nirvana or just the latest version?

2009-03-18T08:59:00.004+13:00

Last week I mentioned that I would discuss Cloud Computing further and explain what it is and the issues that it raises. There are various names that this technology goes under but basically it is all quite simple – it’s application outsourcing. I’ll start this discussion with a little history lesson…

Now being a person of maturity I find this shift in solutions focus quite interesting – I'm afraid it's not that new, it's all happened before.

Apparently social change cycles in human experience tend to be around 30 years in length. The reason for that is that’s the time taken to shift through a generation and is when the experience of one generation begins to be lost and allows new things to be considered – interesting.

Now just a bit less than 30 years ago I got into this industry by doing a Cobol programming course. I was a terrible programmer, still am, but I did find I was as good as the lecturer at de-bugging other student’s programs. The levels of detail required for programming I found rather dull and when I saw my first room full of mainframe code-cutters clattering over their green screens I was far from enthused.

I had been messing around with Commodore PET’s (Personal Electronic Transactor!) one of the original PC’s and loved the rapid turn-around that working with them allowed. I could fiddle and experiment and see instantly what the effects would be. This seemed far better than the endless batching and waiting that was required in the real world of commercial computing – on mainframes.

Just around that time was when the IBM PC had been launched and I managed to get a job with a burgeoning PC support group in a South London Health Authority. This was the start of a frantic few years spent jumping from company to company as they each started installing PC’s.

There were a few things that were interesting about what was happening at the time in the companies where I worked:

They all had large mainframe based IT departments involved in enormous projects.
The IT departments were all way behind on providing the solutions promised to the users on the mainframe systems.
The business managers hated the IT department.
The PC team was set up to take away the PC noise from the real work being done by IT on the mainframe systems.
We PC guys were the friends of the business managers – we helped them do what they wanted to do - quickly. We spoke their language.
PC’s were not cheap but they could be bought by managers on their own budgets and this was not viewed as part of the IT mainframe based budget.
As the PC’s took hold the mainframe became less important to the business managers.
Eventually the PC’s would be brought back under the control of the IT department.
We would all pack up move out and join a new company and do it all again!

What is interesting is that these circumstances have begun to repeat themselves – check it out. Go through the points above and replace mainframe with PC and PC with application providers.

History repeating itself? I think so…..tomorrow I’ll talk about what cloud computing does and doesn’t solve.

How Businesses Create Complexity

2009-03-17T09:17:00.005+13:00

There is another problem with the way businesses develop which is in conflict with the underlying principles of IT. This trend usually kicks-off in the wild and wacky days of the startup but becomes entrenched into the way business is done and ultimately is a reflection of poor strategic planning.

There are two primary building blocks within companies and these form the basis for most computer systems. Data and processes – how hard is that?

Data is, in its simplest form, a definition of the information types that are used by an organization.

I did a course with Clive Finklestein, an enigmatic Australian academic, who many years ago defined the basis for data mapping ( that “one to many” stuff) and he was adamant that if companies wanted to have effective data systems they must start with a data glossary. How good an idea would that be, everybody would know what every noun meant when used at work.

I’ll give you a good (or is it bad) example of how not to do this – I know one large company that has set up at least two customer management systems, although I’m sure there are many more. One for its customers (the people they sell stuff to) and another one for its shareholders. That’s because the shareholder support group see the shareholders as their customers – fair enough. But how can you ever consolidate those two systems if you have defined customers to exist in opposite ends of the company? That’ll take a very nice piece of complexity to solve in the future.

So if an organization can’t define who its customers are how can it expect any consistency of language through its daily work.

Processes are the things that we do in our organizations and again tend to be cobbled together in an ad-hoc way to suite the current environment. There is rarely a grand plan on what to do, how to do it and, most importantly, why it’s being done.

The only exception to this is if safety or legislation dictates that processes need to be formalized. Mind you when they go wrong they are pretty spectacular, I remember seeing the controller of the Chernobil reactor control room exclaiming that he had done nothing wrong as he had followed all the procedures!

When we move things into IT system, unfortunately, we have to define them – awkward I know but unavoidable. When those definitions are made they generally are done under duress by a frazzled BA who has to get his business requirements out before the end of next week as part of the delivery of a tactical computer project. His source of information is a bunch of people who have little interest in any new computer system. What is guarenteed is that he is never under the control of any overall corporate governance defining the use of data and processes. Once completed these then become etched into corporate life in the new system and trust me once they become part of a system there are rarely any changes made down the line.

This lack of corporate governance over what we call things and how we do them (and why) means that our IT systems are bound to fail, or at least lock us into a far from ideal world.

Organizations need to take a more strategic view of how they handle data and processes and ensure that they are not only agreed and socialized but that they have a method of governing and changing them effectively in the future. I fear this skill is being lost!

If we rely on IT systems to solve this for us they will fail, and they have been failing for many years.

Solving Complexity – The Business Way

2009-03-13T09:01:00.004+13:00

As I mentioned in the closing paragraph of yesterday’s post people who work in the corporate world are under the impression that IT is a “business enabler”. This is the perception that is oft promoted by the industry (more words on that next week). They therefore, quite rightly, expect that the computers in their organization enable them to be quick and nimble, adapting to all those industry pressures that Tom Peters’ has been preaching about for so many years. (I think he’s fab by the way!)

More often than not they see an IT department that is imposing grave restrictions on the solutions that they need to carry out their business. (Read yesterday’s post to find out why). So when faced with such intransigence – what can they do?

There are three ways this hurdle has been overcome and they are solutions that are born of the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s. They all have the same effect and unfortunately they will always cause problems for the organizations that are forced to adopt them.

In the 80’s - I was employed by a burgeoning satellite TV company in London. My role was Office Systems Manager and I was to manage the roll-out and support of the PC’s in the organization. When asked, my boss said he could see no real reason why there would be more than 30 installed – I thought I could manage that! They had invested heavily in a very sophisticated DEC VAX back office system that was going to manage all their office needs, or at least that’s what the DEC sales guys were telling them. Those hopes fell into the enormous pit that saw the failure of BSB - one of the great technological failures.

The promised integrated systems were never completed - so what happened? Well eventually me (and my team) ended up supporting over 350 PC’s which were installed over the next 18 months. This is an extreme example of how PC’s can become the release valve within a company for the failure of the primary systems. If I, as a manager, can’t get any answers out of IT I’ll get my own database or spreadsheet on one of my PC's, whether I do it myself or get a temp in to develop it for me.

Although this could be viewed as a valid tactical solution to a short term problem the issue is these business systems have a tendency of growing in importance and become impossible to mange in the future. The lack of rigor applied to their initial development means that they can fall outside the scope of any future strategic plans putting those business systems that depend on them at risk..

In the 90’s - the IT industry was increasingly providing consultancy services to their customers. They then took this one step further and created the IT Outsourcing industry.

Now the message was simple, there were huge opportunities for customers to cut bottom line costs. Although this was possible, I worked in a very successful one at the end of the 90’s, I really don’t think this was the primary driver for the senior executives who were signing the deals. If you examine economic theory on outsourcing it is assumed that the service that are ripe for picking are those that are not seen as core business activities.Now this is bad news for all those people in the IT department because they have always assumed they were critical to the companies success.

I think most senior executives outsource their IT so that they can get rid of a problem that they don’t understand. Give it to some supplier and then if it goes wrong it’s their problem not ours – easy!

If only it was that easy. Unfortunately IT systems have a habit of entrenching themselves into every activity that the business carries out. Most IT outsourcing contracts assume a level of stability and any need to change is deemed outside of the contract and chargeable as a project. If it needs to be changed (and it will) – that’s when the invoices start rolling in. Outsourcing rarely makes money for the outsourcer but their projects are where the real money is made!

I have a hunch that large organizations are going to start re-considering outsourcing and go back to in-sourcing. That’s OK but one thing that it does protect organizations from is the skills shortage – be warned!

In the ‘00’s – what’s next? The ever wonderful world of technology always has the ability to invent a new revenue stream – sorry – solution! You may have seen it in various disguises – SaaS, Web 2.0, Cloud Computing - whatever the name it is effectively application outsourcing. Cloud Computing is supposed to be a wonderful technological revolution so I’ll discuss it in a bit more detail later but let’s keep on subject.

This is a great idea for all those frustrated business managers who are fed up with the IT department’s inability to provide the solutions they want. All that’s needed is a company somewhere in the world that can provide an application and a web address. Paying a monthly fee on a credit card allows access to whatever may be needed and the IT guys will never need to know! At last - freedom from the draconian rules imposed on those internal systems. Well at least that’s how it looks.

All these solutions share the same problem. They are tactical solutions that try to solve a strategic imperative. That strategic goal is to effectively manage the information within the organisation. What complexity is doing is driving that information either down or out of visibility. Alot of that information should be contributing to the collective success of the company.

For IT to be effective it must ensure that the information being traded is readily available. If the organisation is unable to maintain control of its information then I think it should seriously re-consider the idea all together, rather than ignore it, which sadly is the ever increasing trend.

Solving Complexity – the IT way

2009-03-12T13:28:00.004+13:00

How have IT departments solved the problems of entrenched complexity?

For too many years a culture has developed in the industry that allows anybody who considers themselves to be technically competent to have the right to try and solve issues without any level of "engineering diligence". Now I have no qualms with people who are technically proficient to have the ability to change systems, what I do have an issue with is:

Technical proficiency is usually self adjudicated and nearly always over-estimated, as mentioned yesterday, it is far broader and deeper than is usually the reality. In other words most technical people over-estimate their capabilities.

Few technical staff understand all the complexities of an IT environment. During my many years spent in the industry I have probably met 5 people who I would trust to understand the implications of their actions across all layers of an IT installation – I certainly never did! The skills and knowledge required to understand security, networking, servers and PC’s, storage and applications is almost unfathomable!

Any changes made must be auditable and traceable – just in case something goes wrong. Those long failures that reach the press every now again are usually caused by failed roll-back processes usually as a result of over-simplification of the changes being made.

These problems have been solved, in most larger organisations, by the introduction of stringent change management systems usually within the ITIL framework.

Now I think ITIL is a fabulous thing, it provides a strong and, more importantly logical framework, for dealing with changes to computer systems. Certainly a large amount of money has been spent ensuring that there is a Pink Elephant stuck up somewhere. I could never get over the irony of the name - perhaps Flying Pig would have been better?

Despite all its hopes and dreams of imposing a good procedural framework around the administration of computer system, ITIL has never overcome one major problem and that is this relentless ability that so called “computer engineers” (sic) have to fiddle with things and never tell anyone about it.

As an aside, this syndrome has reached epidemic proportions in the small business world where the ability to impose professional levels of diligence on IT support staff is nigh on impossible. I’m sure we’ve all heard it – “We got some guy in we found in the Yellow Pages. He fixed the problem, eventually, but since then we’ve had two other things go wrong – I’m sure it was him!” Not good.

What does the business see when an IT department is protecting its complexity with ITIL. Simple - nothing ever happens! The imposition of stringent change management introduces an enormous amount of inertia into the ability of those IT systems to adapt to any business changes.

This is always bad for the relationship between business managers and their IT staff and usually ends up with that dreaded phrase “I don’t care just get it done!” – usually delivered at 4.55pm on Friday.

There is no denying that processes and procedures can protect an organisation from the risk of failure but what it also does do is alienate the sponsoring businesses from the dream that IT has promised them. This tool that allows them to be lean and mean and flexible is now holding up a hand and saying that these things are now not possible.

How do business managers solve this issue….we’ll see tomorrow.

A sad and evil story comes to an end!

2009-03-12T09:58:00.002+13:00

Just a quick note on the completion of a dreadful story at Otago District Health Board and the evil goings on in the IT department. Redistribution of the people's money for blatant personal gain is about as low as you can go in my world and the jailing of Michael Swann and Kerry Harford is a fitting end.

This is about as obvious a demonstration of the split between management and IT that you can get. Being able to siphon off NZ$17 million could only have been achieved if the governance process had failed.

More of that later!

No need to worry about email....

2009-03-11T12:51:00.002+13:00

"Social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are more popular than email with web users, says Nielsen Online."

There we go, I had no need to worry about companies relying on email to run their businesses, a far better alternative has been found....... oh dear!

Ignoring Complexity

2009-03-11T11:19:00.004+13:00

Yesterday I spoke about IT staff hiding complexity, today I’ll cover the issue that is on the other side of the equation. Nobody escapes from this!

As I mentioned the other day the population of the world outside of IT really have no idea what we do, how we do it and more worryingly why we do things. That would be OK if we were like the other great professions.

Although times have changed, especially with the growth of that pesky internet thing, most people would assume that lawyers, architects, engineers or accountants have an understanding of their chosen subject and that when we engage in conversation with them we need to have done a bit of homework before we start.

We are not there yet! Everybody thinks they know enough to have an opinion….

There are two primary issues with the way ordinary people deal with IT in their lives. You may have seen or heard the evidence in your daily lives. I have two favourites:

Question - “You’re in IT aren’t you?….. (a question then follows falling somewhere between problems with USB connections on a laptop to what will the internet look like in 10 years time and how can I make a million out of it!).”

Conclusion - People generally do not understand that we have instigated a division of labour scheme within IT. Just because we work in the industry it doesn’t mean that we are experts on all facets. Mind you that hasn’t stopped a lot of us from pretending that we do know everything! If we spent more time answering these questions with “I’m sorry that’s not my area of expertise I’ll find somebody who knows.” rather than throwing back half-cocked, misinformed opinions the world would be far simpler.

… the one that really scares me is…

Question - “I’m not technical…..but…. (a statement then follows that can only be true if the speaker has suitable technical knowledge).”

Conclusion - “The Dick Smith Syndrome” – I’ll be following this up later when I talk about the multi-nationals, but there is an underlying issue with technology and its social acceptance. People (especially guys) get turned on by gadgets, they see things in Dick Smith (NZ retail electronics store) and love them. I call it the techno-red-mist! They see no reason why these shouldn’t be used at work. While I agree that these gadgets can make a difference to an organisation their introduction into a critical environment like a business can be more risky then opening up the box throwing away the manual and charging the battery.

What is scarier is that this is usually the rational used by business people to make decisions on multi-million dollar projects! How many software deals have been sealed based on screenshots or feature lists – go on admit it!

Both of these issues cause major problems with the delivery of IT in the corporate world and they demonstrate an ignorance of the complexity of delivering IT services in most mature organisations.

In fact the problem doesn’t stop there. I have recently been working with a start-up (RedWeta) that is going to deliver IT services to small businesses. Following some recent market research we found that 13 out 15 small business owners admitted they had no idea how IT works and what it does – how scary is that for the future of our modern world!

This ignorance of complexity within the business community is our major challenge moving forward. Until it is faced and embraced we will continue to add more layers and therefore complexity to the environments that already exist.

How we have coped or are hoping to cope with this is tomorrow’s subject.

Hiding Complexity

2009-03-10T10:25:00.003+13:00

Yesterday I spoke about complexity in IT. Today I’m going to move on to the next phase of deceit which leads to increasing dysfunction - the hiding of that complexity.

I’m not sure where it all started but I think it’s been born from a toxic combination of senior management technical ignorance and IT staff obfuscation– a word that was developed specifically to describe the attitude displayed by most IT “gurus”.

Over time IT departments have increasingly tried to hide their complexity from their customers. In most organizations, despite, or because of, all the money that has been spent in the past on “cutting edge technology” they are left with environments that are so complicated staff daren’t touch them in case they break.

Now I need to get something really straight here – most business people have no idea what is going on in the IT industry and more importantly they have no idea how IT works in their company. It’s really easy for us, on the inside, to assume that our customers understand what we do – but trust me they gave up caring a long time ago and all they have to go on is the external media messages that keep telling them anything is possible.

The most obvious manifestation of this dilemma is the phrase constantly emanating from executive circles – “I don’t care – just do it will you!” At some point everybody on the coal face of computer administration has been on the receiving end of this message. It leads to some major bouts of creative thinking followed by long nights of trickery to achieve the desired effect. The only real outcome of these actions being another addition to that ever increasing bespoke complexity in the server room.

If they don’t understand what is going on and we don’t tell them how hard it is to change we are on diverging planes of reality that at some point will lead to failure and I think that point has either arrived or is approaching rapidly.

So who is to blame here? From within the IT world we always blame it on ignorant business people setting unreasonable targets. From the outside it’s seen as IT departments who are unreasonably dictatorial and obstructive.

Unfortunatly I think both are right – however it is time for us, as an industry, to fess up to our mistakes. The technological dream that we had and hoped to share with the world has turned into a nightmare and until we start to admit the error of our ways we will never begin to sort things out.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss the business issues that contribute to this problem.

Where has IT gone wrong - Complexity

2009-03-09T09:58:00.012+13:00

So here I am in week 2 and I'd like to thank all my friends for their words of encouragement - I do get the feeling I am tapping into a vein of discontent with the theme of my web site!

So where to start - I was just jotting down a list of subjects to discuss on "Where I think corporate IT has gone wrong - discuss" and now it looks like the 10 chapters of a book - scary!

As I mentioned last week I was going to come back to complexity and that's where I should start. The world of technology is wonderful I know but it has left us with a very sad legacy and this can be explained in a very simple equation:

Flexibility ≡ Complexity

(I didn't get too far in maths so be kind to me!)

In other words if you have many ways of doing things you will create an enormously complex matrix of interacting systems.

That is the legacy of over 30 years of IT investment. In fact you can see it best in those organisations that were early adopters - banks, insurance companies, airlines and telcos. Almost all have a very old system (dare I use the mainframe word?) whirring away in the background. It's the core of their business and the only thing that has differentiated them is how cleverly they have masqueraded it's existence with their customer facing systems.

I have a theory that these systems will start to get closed down when the guys who run them die - not retire which is where we are about now - no, they'll have to leave the planet before their systems are decommissioned. Then, and only then, will these companies be unable to change them, as the massively entrenched business processes that are buried inside them become un-changeable! Sorry guys! :-)

I know some companies in NZ are embarking on a process of "mainframe replacement" at the moment and trust me they are on a hiding to nowhere.

Even worse are those companies who have grown through prolonged histories of acquisition - like insurance companies, telcos, airlines, banks and dairy companies! A walk round their data centres is an experience not to be missed with their menagerie of systems looking like a museum of sunset technologies - it get's me wondering what the antonym of cohesion is?

Here we have the dreaded "spiders web of inter connectivity" which has been lashed together over many years by numerous tactical projects - if you want to see really rigid change management systems give them a call! Merchant banks - don't get me started!

Although these organisations are probably the worst exponents of the legacy dilemma every other company is the same - length of time and size are the only limiters.

The ability of the industry to solve problems simply and repeatably is woeful. The only way they have got close is by using monopolistic tactics to bludgeon the industry into "de-facto standards" - just another word for high market share in my world. Any time an egalitarian organisation has hinted at cross platform standards the industry rallies around and diversifies and attacks to ensure the chaotic status quo is maintained.

I'll discuss how IT departments have handled this complexity, or not, within their own organisations tomorrow.

I hate meeses to peices!

2009-03-06T13:33:00.006+13:00

The batteries in mouse have run out and are humming away in the charger as we speak so apologies for the slow delivery this morning (now afternoon!). ;-)

Note to Google – “How do you use Chrome without a mouse?”. Luckily most of the day to day stuff I use is un-mouse friendly – more a reflexion of it’s aging roots than any level of sophistication.

On that subject I’ve always wondered about the use of mice for "front of house" applications. In other words those applications that are used by ordinary people. The mouse is a great tool but do you really need it for a Point of Sale application – I remember watching a women in a coffee shop apprehensively drawing her mouse across the counter top and clicking away vainly while I waited patiently to pay $3.50 for my coffee. I left it on the counter in the end, as she was reaching for the manual!

It’s one of those things that has drifted from the computer world, where it is really useful, into the real world – where it’s a damn nuisance! A bit of a metaphor for what I’m on about here.

I remember hoping that the death of the green screen would be a great day for the world but I’ve fallen out the other end of that now and realised that it still is the best and by far the fastest way for non IT people to interact with computer systems.

And trust me – there are more of them than us!

ADVICE: When selecting a system for use by non-IT (real) people be careful that you design for them and not us! (Am I right Justine?)

Is there a skills shortage?

2009-03-05T14:43:00.005+13:00

We are constantly hearing there is dire need for skilled IT staff in NZ and there needs to be more focus placed on training students to join the “profession”.

I’m thinking that there might be a different and far worrying problem here. Perhaps the real reason for the skills shortage is that the modern world of IT is just too damn complicated?

Large organisations have been layering on years and years of silver bullet technologies in their IT infrastructures hoping to solve “today’s problems with tomorrow’s technology”.The effect of this has been to build incredibly complicated environments that require enormous levels of skill (or should I be saying wisdom?) to understand, never mind manage and maintain them.

No training scheme in the world can teach somebody the skills to understand these environments, you can either get your head around it or you can’t.

We may not be blessed with too many people who have these skills, but we are, sadly, blessed with many who are happy to gloss over those “mere details” and wreak havoc in the name of progress.

ADVICE: Perhaps the way to really solve the skills shortage is to start taking steps to simplify things rather than continue to add to the complexity?

I’ll talk about this problem of complexity at a later date.

Financial Crisis – The Real Reason?

2009-03-05T14:41:00.001+13:00

Watching Timothy Geithner trying to explain to the Senate Committee this morning what the US government intends to do to sort out the woes of the US financial markets inspired me to discuss a theory I have about why we (they?) got in this mess.

I’m no economist but I see what’s been going on and it’s not that difficult to see what is the cause – spreadsheets! Let me give you a little bit of a history lesson.

Visicalc was initially launched in 1979 on the Apple II and was one of the first ever business tools for PC’s. I remember a story that came out of the launch. The power of the software was so revolutionary the journalists checked to make sure that there was no cable to a mainframe behind the curtain updating the calculations on the screen. All of a sudden the financial minds were opened into a world of creativity which was never possible with the rigid rules of accountancy they had had up till then.

Move on 10 years and most companies were doing their financial planning and reporting on ever increasingly complex spreadsheets. I help design and build an automated spreadsheet consolidation system for a large engineering company in the UK in the 80's. It was real Wild West stuff but it turned round the monthly reporting cycle for this multi-national from a month to 3 days – now that was progress.

Despite the billions of dollars spent on fully featured ERP and financial computer systems since then, I would love to know how many CFO’s sit back at the end of the month feeling happy at the contents of Cell AA34!

But this trend was real and I am quite happy to extrapolate to the current day. I can only assume that this wide open world of finance is wholly based on an ever more complex set of spreadsheet calculations. It is this that has led us to the financial fiasco that we are in today.

Why? Becuase the hardest thing in the world to do with a spreadsheet is work out what the hell it is ever doing and more importantly where it went wrong. Seeing the masters of the universe trying to work out where they slipped up is just like trying to debug somebody else’s dodgy spreadsheet.

The analogy is too close to ignore. I was waiting to hear Geithner say “We’re still checking the data but there seems to be an anomaly with some of the worksheet lookups”.

There’s no doubt that spreadsheets are a great tool for the creative types in the world (and I love ‘em!) but their hidden complexity and poor structure can expose horrible shortcomings when it comes to basing businesses on them.

ADVISE: Free form tools like spreadsheets are great ways to test hypotheses but no way to run a real world. Structure is sometimes a good thing!

Is Email a Critical Part of Your Organisation?

2009-03-03T10:18:00.004+13:00

Recent news of Gmail’s loss of service in Europe may get people reconsidering the benefits of using (free) hosted email solutions for business purposes.

This is not the question organisations should be asking, the real issue is should a business rely on email for real time transactions? The rise of email over the past decade is seen as being a huge benefit to the way businesses communicate however there is a basic problem with the technology.

Email, like real mail, is a “store and forward” technology assuming that delays and failures are an acceptable part of the service. This core assumption has been overlooked and most organisations have grown on an assumption that email is a “fault tolerant transactional system”. Large organisations spend millions of dollars trying to ensure that their email service is always up. Woe betide any IT department who allows the email system to fail – especially with those senior executives wandering the corridors looking for sacrificial lambs .

In fact in one organisation I was involved with I suggested that the email servers be allocated on a hierarchical basis so that executive and senior manager’s email could be protected to a higher level than the rest of the organisation!

This business assumption is flawed, in the past organisations built procedural checks and balances around the delays and losses in the mail system and we need to do the same. We need to disconnect primary business transactions from email, I know it sounds hard but trust me an email system is no way to guarantee service to your customers.

ADVICE: Ensure that email is not used in your organisation as a transactional system between you and your customers and suppliers – if in doubt just use the phone! :-)

Why did I start blogging?

2009-03-02T14:51:00.005+13:00

I was privileged to be invited to the Kiwi Foo Camp recently in Warkworth. This is an anti-conference that has become etched in the geek fabric of New Zealand. In the bio section of the web site I described myself proudly as a non-blogger….so what has changed?

On the final day I ran a session entitled: “Technology: Is it destroying more than it creates?”

I assumed that nobody would be interested in such a melancholic subject but was pleasantly surprised to watch the room slowly fill up. Even more surprising was that a robust and inclusive debate followed with, I think, a general agreement that something is going wrong.

It was this discussion that has inspired me to add a little voice – with questionable journalistic skills - to this movement and share some of my thoughts and views with you all.

Where to start?

I was wondering where to start when I called a friend this morning to receive the following response from the answering service person:

“Hi can I help you – sorry I don’t know what company you’re trying to call we’re rebooting our server.”

Now this is a perfect example of what I was hoping to discuss in my blog, one would assume that an answering service’s primary requirement would be to recognise which of its clients are being called. To me that would mean that the system that provided that capability would always be available….and I mean ALWAYS! But no, it’s much easier to blame failures of the technology than it is to invest money in making sure they never fail. Why is this?

My experience is that when solutions are designed they rarely include an assumption that one day they will be mission critical. This is especially the case when a company is buying in a solution from a specific supplier. If cost is the main reason a customer uses to purchase a supplier would be insane to include the ability to enable fault tolerance – it’s never cheap. So we buy the system, it becomes crucial for our business and then when we ask it to be made fault tolerant we either get a “Sorry” or a huge bill to upgrade. It’s always ugly.

ADVICE: How do we protect ourselves from this dilemma? When buying any system that is critical in running your business assume that some day it will need to be “always up”. Challenge your suppliers to explain how this can be done and map out how this will be achieved in the future and what, importantly, indicative costs will be incurred. If they can’t - don’t buy it!