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Loading ...Good thing I lied about my age
Hello and welcome to Shane Schick’s Computerworld. I am Shane’s assistant editor, Greg Meckbach. Shane will be away for a while. See his most recent post below.
I have two confessions to make. First, I have been a luddite, and did not sign up for Facebook until nearly a year ago, when I joined ComputerWorld Canada and made a profile for our group. The second confession is, I lied about my age to join Facebook. When I joined, I got following message: “Facebook requires all users to provide their real date of birth as both a safety precaution and as a means of preserving the integrity of the site.”
Whatever. My first thought was, “Holy cow, how gullible do you think I am?” Instead of entering my real date of birth, I chose a date in history that’s easy for me to remember. Without going into detail, my fake birthday is more than 30 years prior to my real birthday, which is probably why I keep seeing ads for items like dentures and Depends when I log onto Facebook. When friends and family asked why, I said I would never enter my real date of birth on a social networking site, because that information is highly sensitive. Not because I’m embarrassed to be born on such and such a date, but it’s because security experts at financial companies like MasterCard have decided that the best way to verify the identity of a caller is to ask his or her date of birth. Plus I was a little skeptical of Facebook’s claim that “you will be able to hide this information from your profile if you wish.”
Some would say I was paranoid, but as we reported Thursday, Facebook accidentally made its members’ dates of birth public on its beta site.
This ties into the issue of electronic medical records. One major argument against the entry of medical records into electronic form is the risk of a security breach if it’s not properly encrypted. While this is a valid concern, I would argue a person’s date of birth is actually more sensitive than his or her medical information. Given the choice between having my cholesterol count published on the Internet, and having some fraud artist (who already knows my mother’s maiden name and banking information) find out my date of birth, I’d prefer to get the medical information leaked.
Now, as Mark Steyn would say, I have to add the “of course” clauses. Of course some people have medical conditions that they would rather not be made public. Of course privacy is not the only impediment to the digitization of medical records. Of course it’s difficult to rob a person blind simply by obtaining his or her date of birth. This doesn’t change the fact that when a social networking site asks for your date of birth, it’s kind of like asking for your latest medical records. You just have to hope they’re smart enough to keep this information private.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Oh, baby! Why I won’t be blogging for the next month
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Even home users of Microsoft Office need to be well ‘Equipt’
If I’d just waited a few more weeks I might not have had to spend so much buying Office.
Thanks a lot, Microsoft, for only announcing your subscription-based plan for users of your productivity suite after I just put money down on a brand-new notebook. Office was part of the bundle they offered us at Future Shop, but it still tacked down an extra couple of hundred dollars to the purchase price. Under the Equipt program, Microsoft will charge users for programs like Word, PowerPoint and Excel in much the same way that corporate customers are acquiring new software, and in some cases it could be a lot cheaper.
It will not, however, be free, which is why Equipt is unlikely to stem the tide of free software from Google and other companies. The boxed version of Office was never really in short-term jeopardy anyway. Those downloading OpenOffice and the like are probably more savvy than the average Future Shop customer, and probably not Microsoft fans anyway. For the rest of us, it will take more time before even Google’s productivity tools enjoy the kind of mind share that, for example, Word does. But as long as Equipt costs money, it won’t be able to compete with free, and eventually the features might be even more attractive than the price point. What Google et. al are offering aren’t simply loss leaders; they are market leaders-in-waiting.
IT managers could probably safely ignore Equipt were it not for the fact that home computing software is likely to be used for after-hours work tasks as well. Their choice of productivity tools could have a direct bearing on their acceptance and adoption of the tools that are given to them by their IT department, affecting the level of training required and even the kind of processes that are set up. Google Apps and OpenOffice work a lot like Microsoft Office, but there are some things they do better or worse, and several things they do a little bit differently. That can affect things when you’re working with distributed teams, some of whom are working off-site at home or in the field on their personal laptop.
For companies that have basically standardized on Microsoft, it might make sense to recommend Equipt, giving employees the chance to stay as up-to-date on the home versions of their software as the ones on their office desktops. For others, it might be irrelevant. It all depends on whether these software products remain simple productivity tools, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest they aren’t. As word processing documents, spreadsheets and similar applications get integrated with enterprise business functionality (including analytics), what users deploy at home should be consistent with their corporate settings unless management decides productivity should be confined to corporate headquarters.
Although we still refer to “professional edition” and “home edition” for a lot of people, Microsoft Office is just “Office.” Equipt will be one of the ways the industry learns whether the distinction still has a lot of meaning for the consumers that get a lot of work done outside of “work.”
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...You’re either satisfied with your IT job or you’re not
Whenever we publish the results of IT World Canada’s annual salary survey (buy the full report here), everyone automatically looks at the big numbers and compares how they rank with their peers. That’s the whole point of this project. But beyond the coverage we’ve already provided, there were a couple of other points around job satisfaction that I think should be highlighted and further explored.
First, the good news: Overall, 87 per cent of all technology professionals said they would recommend IT as a career choice. Think about that for a minute. Despite all the budget constraints, the outsourcing, the user griping, the unrealistic deadlines and the manipulative vendors, a lot of people would encourage others to follow in their footsteps. That’s a ringing endorsement of this industry, and a healthy sign that IT presents the kind of variety, challenges and (yes) compensation that provides personal fulfillment.
But when you look a little deeper, the picture becomes a bit murky. For example, 60 per cent of those we spoke to said they are either satisfied or very satisfied with their job. Fourteen percent said they were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. But there was another entire quarter of respondents, 25 per cent, who said they were “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied” with their jobs in IT.
You could blame this on the question, of course. What does it really mean to be neither/nor? In fact, it means a lot. It means you’re not sure how to gauge your overall job satisfaction, and that depending on your circumstances, outlook and options, the pendulum could swing either way.
Looked at another way, it’s possible to interpret that 25 per cent as being unable to make up their mind because their job is changing so much. They might have been hired on for their technology expertise but are now being thrown business-related responsibilities for which they are unprepared. Or they are in training mode, trying to adjust to a new reality and simply need more time to make up their mind about how satisfying it is.
Having that many people sitting on the fence is not healthy for the long-term retention prospects of the enterprises that employ them. Making them more satisfied could come down to pay – the average salary this year was nearly $78 – but it will also be about how well companies can define what the role of IT departments will be. If they properly understand what their responsibilities are, and if their efforts are recognized appropriately, they might at least say they’re satisfied. But even to have more IT people dissatisfied or very dissatisfied would be better, because the root causes would likely be easier to identify.
Can you really say it’s a good idea to go into IT when you’re not sure how you actually feel about it yourself? It doesn’t really seem to make a lot of sense. Unless . . . maybe 87 per cent say information technology is a good career choice because, their personal satisfaction notwithstanding, they still see possibilities in it. Buried within all the statistics around what ends up on an IT manager’s paycheque, perhaps we have stumbled on a measurement of hope.
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(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...10 changes Steve Ballmer should make at Microsoft
When I appeared on CBC Newsworld last week to talk about Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft, they asked me whether I thought the company can survive without him. I tried not to roll my eyes.
“I realize there’s a temptation to identify with the founder of a company,” I said, “but he’s put a good succession plan in place. Ford Motor Co. managed to survive without Henry Ford, and I think Microsoft will survive without Bill Gates.”
I barely mentioned Steve Ballmer, because I wasn’t sure how well he would be recognized by a mainstream audience. Although he’s a familiar face within corporate IT departments, I’d argue he’s still not a household name. Here are a few of the things he needs to do next, whether he ever becomes one or not.
1. Make user education a corporate mission. We all know there are more features in Word, Excel and Windows itself that customers simply do not understand. As a result, they spend too much time and energy working around problems Microsoft’s products already solve. Ballmer should invest some marketing dollars in a “Did You Know That Windows Can . . .” campaign that highlights the work Microsoft’s developers have done.
2. Don’t leave the technical vision to Ray Ozzie. The former Groove Networks leader is capable of great insight into technology trends and writing extremely long staff memos, but it should be Ballmer who most clearly articulates the kind of computing environments Microsoft wants to help customers build in the next decade. The last thing he should want is to be seen as merely the sales guy. As Steve Jobs proves, you don’t have to write code to offer some inspiring thoughts on the management of information. Even Gates left too much of the heavy lifting to his subordinates during keynotes. Ballmer should try to change that.
3. Open yourself up as a case study. It can’t be easy running one of the world’s largest companies, so Ballmer should be able to provide CIOs and IT managers a unique perspective on how Microsoft uses technology to align itself with business objectives. He should talk about Microsoft walks the walk.
4. Don’t bash the competition. Microsoft is still dominant in nearly every market, so it makes no sense for Ballmer to bash Google, Apple or other rivals as he has in the past. Microsoft should be more focused on improving its products and growing its business, not swatting at what, in a market share sense, are still flies. There’s no need for the Scott McNealy approach here.
5. Start an open source project. Microsoft has stuck to the same business model for years, but what if its dream team of developers actually reached out to independent ISVs and offered them the same kind of ability to tweak future products as Mozilla does with Firefox, or the way Linux evolves? The company doesn’t even need to release the result as a commercial product (call it “Office Sandbox,” for example) but it would help the company start the kind of positive grassroots following it needs. The whole “shared source” strategy has only gone so far. And although it has released thousands of documentation around Windows and Office already, it needs to communicate something about the difference that’s made to the industry.
6. Engineer a smooth transition to Windows 7. After the Vista debacle (and by extension the XP fiasco), it’s hard to imagine things getting much worse, but demonstrate a willingness to let customers upgrade at their own pace. If companies like SAP are able to offer feature packages to customers rather than demand an ERP overall, Microsoft should be able to do the same thing with its operating system.
7. Partner where it counts. Microsoft’s agreement with Novell was supposed to usher in a new era of interoperability. That may have happened for Suse Linux customers (although there’s not a lot of proof yet), but what about more popular distributions like Red Hat? They’ve held out so far, but Ballmer should be working hard to change their minds.
8. Iron out your acquisition approach. Too much attention has been focused on the buyout of Yahoo and not enough on what Microsoft is doing with the firms it actually managed to purchase. This includes Fast Search and Transfer. We should be seeing the beginnings of a new enterprise search strategy from Microsoft by now. Where is it?
9. Get friendly with the social networking crowd. So what if Microsoft invested in Facebook? Microsoft should be developing for Facebook, just like all the other ISVs that want some exposure to an often technically savvy audience. Imagine if Microsoft created something that make social networking easier, safer or easier to integrate with its applications. That would change a lot of people’s perceptions about its laggard approach to the Internet.
10. Don’t give up on spam. Bill Gates predicted the world would be free of the unsolicited e-mail scourge by 2006. Microsoft had the talent to deliver, and still has. Ballmer would make a considerable mark at Microsoft, and within the IT industry in general, if he could marshal he resources to make good on his predecessor’s promise.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Bill Gates’ last day (revisited)
This clip was widely shown earlier this year at Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ speech at the Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas, but I think with this being his official final bow it’s appropriate to revisit it. If you want more up-to-date footage than this, check out CBC Newsworld today around 2:30 EST where I’ll be discussing the big guy’s legacy and the company he leaves behind.
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...LinkedIn guilt: The new social networking disease
“LinkedIn,” the CIO said. “That thing drives me nuts.”
I was in a meeting today with one of our editorial advisory boards when the above statement was made. These are not really public discussions, so I won’t mention names, but suffice it to say this is a really likeable guy who’s running a major technology operation for a well-known Canadian company. We were talking about the whole social networking thing, and whether he was really a part of it.
“I get these invites (to LinkedIn) from someone I worked with more than 10 years ago,” he went on. “I barely remember their name. And then it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you worked at . . .” Suffice it to say he probably didn’t accept the invitation.
Another senior manager I know recently told me LinkedIn has become less of a way to keep in touch than an ongoing chore. “I constantly have CIOs and people like that asking me to ‘recommend’ them,” she said, referring to a feature on the site that allows you to become an online (and alarmingly permanent) reference of sorts. “They all want to get consulting jobs, so I’m spending all my time trying to think of these nice things to say.”
First came Facebook fatigue. Now we have LinkedIn guilt.
The whole thing reminds me of an episode from season two of The Office (U.S. version) where narcissistic boss Michael Scott eventually wearies of the toady who keeps trying to make his way into Scott’s good graces. By the time the episode ends, he offers a reflection to the camera: “I don’t like people who suck up to me just because I might be able to help them in their career,” he muses. “I want people to suck up to me because they like me.”
Maybe IT industry folk are more likely to lay on the LinkedIn guilt because they have a hard time being liked by their coworkers in the first place. If they’ve been so inundated with other projects that they couldn’t reset someone’s password or had to install an employee monitoring tool, it might be that much harder to get that LinkedIn recommendation. Or maybe, given their reputation for poor soft skills, technology professionals prefer to hide behind LinkedIn rather than asking in-person for a reference or recommendation.
Much as Wikipedia had to experience some growing pains around accuracy, LinkedIn’s recommendations feature will probably face skepticism over its sincerity. Not that I would ever hire or not hire someone based solely on their LinkedIn profile, but as a way of measuring those intangible qualities of a job candidate (especially one whose skills and role you only partially understand), nothing beats the power of peer testimonials.
Perhaps IT managers and consultants using LinkedIn should approach their profile the same way they would scale a physical network: slowly, based on what’s appropriate, and never without considering the drain it might put on other resources. In this case, those resources include the time and patience of those whose loyalty you might really need one day. Now who’s feeling the guilt?
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Google shouldn’t corner the market as an agent of organization
We all know what Google does. So why don’t more users understand what IT departments are supposed to do?
If nothing else, the search engine firm managed to corner the market on a great mission statement. Rather than describe itself as a business that helps people find what they’re looking for online, Google has said it wants to “organize the world’s information.” There are probably a lot of other companies that wish they’d thought of that one, because it touches on so many areas of data, content and process management.
In a recent article on Harvard Business Publishing’s Discussion Leader Web site, Umair Haque uses Google’s mission statement as the jumping-off point for a more thoughtful exploration of business purpose. He forms this as “A Manifesto For The Next Industrial Revolution,” and suggests that growth is contained the inherent DNA of any organization. How that growth is channelled, though, is another matter.
“What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges,” Haque writes. “Here’s what it looks like. Organize the world’s hunger. Organize the world’s energy. Organize the world’s thirst. Organize the world’s health. Organize the world’s freedom. Organize the world’s finance. Organize the world’s education.”
Haque stresses that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list but the beginning of a discussion among business leaders. “If you’re a corporate boardroom, and you’re not refocusing and restructuring to meet these new challenges – here’s the bottom line: the next industrial revolution has your name written all over it,” he says.
IT departments are only one component of a business, of course, but they are routinely characterized as (theoretically) a key enabler of growth. Therefore, technology becomes the tool by which a company would attempt one of Haque’s worldwide efforts at organization. The problem is that many firms, even if they had this kind of ambition, tend to identify it only as they evolve. Then turn to their CIOs and IT managers to figure out the means to make it happen from a resource and in some cases process/workflow perspective. If IT isn’t really prepared to enable the organizing, the company is bound to fail.
Maybe the real first step is for technology professionals to determine their own personal mission statement, based on the model in Haque’s manifesto. Though this could vary by industry, a common one based on the role should be possible. If Google is all about organizing the world’s information, for example, perhaps IT managers should think of themselves as responsible (at least collectively) or organizing the world’s knowledge. Too highfalutin? Maybe, but not if you’re an IT manager who really wants to get closer to the business, to understand it and drive it forward.
Take the opposite approach: There a lot of people for whom “management” is a four-letter word, something difficult to really define unless you’re doing it really badly. But people understand the difference between something that’s organized and disorganized. What if IT managers thought of themselves as IT organizers? It might sound a little too tactical and less strategic. But organization requires strategy, and helping people get quicker access to knowledge is a worthy goal of any individual or company. Technology professionals might want to consider it for a manifesto of their own.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Licence renewal: How to be a better, bolder IT manager
For me to preach the concept of social skills to an IT manager is absurd, because I can barely muster them in my personal life. I never talk to strangers unless it’s in a professional capacity. I don’t even look them in the eye. I could never do what Anne Fauteux is asking people to do.
The Toronto-based artist has set up a makeshift office in a gallery called Mercer Union, where she has set up what looks like a clothesline from which pieces of paper are strung. Each of these pieces of paper are “licences” to do the kinds of things you would not normally do, such as say what you think even at the risk of offending someone, or embracing someone on the street. Once you’ve made your choice, participants are asked to make their bold move over a three-day period, and then share their experience on the artist’s blog. This kind of detracts from the second word of “Licentious Anonymous,” which is the name of the project, but never mind. Even without the social networking angle, this exercise strikes me as a perfect fit for technology professionals.
In some ways’ Fauteux’s concept reminds me of a management retreat I went on some years ago, where we discussed innovation and decision-making with the president of our company. We were encouraged to take big risks, even if they didn’t work out. Like a lot of large companies, we were guilty of being slow to move on things, and he told us we should “act first and ask permission later.” And if we failed? That was okay, he insisted. “Fail, fail, fail!” he exhorted. Unfortunately that’s not how things actually worked at that company. When you failed, your future was far from certain.
IT managers are often charged with the same ambiguous commandment, but are equally unsupported. Instead of confidently making strategic use of technology to improve a business, they are either passive-aggressively pushed back or have doors closed to them. Even more than their counterparts in marketing, sales or finance, they are constantly asking permission, for approval or for executive sponsorship.
Imagine if someone were to hand a licence to an IT manager which said, “This entitles the bearer to replace something obsolete even if it’s more expensive in the first year of operation.” Or what about a Licence to Tell Senior Management They Don’t Know What They’re Talking About? I’m sure a lot of IT managers would love a Licence To Ignore Users Who Consistently Lose Their Passwords. Best of all might be a Licence To Delegate A Project To The Person Who Should Really Be Doing It.
There are probably many other, better examples, but the point is this: We constantly focus on what keeps IT departments up at night, as though anxiety is what drives accomplishment in the management of technology. I think a lot of enterprise IT would run much better if, security issues aside, we didn’t have to be so afraid.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...When an after-hours BlackBerry leads to overtime demands
If IT managers could get paid overtime whenever they’d had to check their BlackBerry outside of office hours, a lot of them would be rich by now.
A story is making the rounds about how ABC News was trying to put a clause in their writer’s contracts that they would not be compensated for checking e-mail on a company-issued device after 5:00 p.m. The employee’s union lashed out, saying that it’s trying to avoid a 24/7 workplace for its members and that mobile computing shouldn’t “shackle” people to their jobs. Technology professionals everywhere probably got a good laugh from that one. Reportedly, things have since been resolved, although the details weren’t made public, and we don’t know if either side was really satisfied. For at least three days, though, some writers at ABC News had their BlackBerry devices taken away. Not a good sign.
Although it may sound like an isolated incident, the story indicates a looming problem for organizations that are using technology to improve productivity. The long-promised anytime/anywhere access of mobile computers quickly translates into work always/wherever, and as such it could have a big bearing on how some applications and tools are adopted by users. If workers feel technology is keeping them on a short leash, life won’t get any easier for the IT departments who are helping to keep the leash properly fastened.
In the case of ABC News, the BlackBerries were company property, but it’s not hard to imagine similar conflicts arising over the equipment purchased and used by individual employees. If they want access to the network, for example, overtime may become the hidden cost of connectivity. Already there are bosses who expect employees to be reachable via cell phone at all hours. What happens when more of those cell phones integrate PC-like functionality that would give them the ability to access work-related data and applications?
This speaks to a detail in the ABC News story that probably went unnoticed in the hysteria over the always-contentious issue of overtime. The writer’s guild said checking e-mail was one thing. It was when that e-mail led to scripts being written or guests scheduled for the show. This is when the issue gets thornier. Should knowledge workers be paid overtime merely for awareness of information, or only for awareness that leads to immediate action?
These aren’t IT issues, of course. They are HR issues, but HR isn’t always in the room when senior management authorities access to information to workers in the field, or when the successful deployment of a Web-based tool is marred by the poor morale of sleepless employees. For actual technology professionals, the probability of overtime should be worked into the contract or the bonus structure, as is already done in many organizations. But the overall goal in most enterprise companies is to reduce the amount of IT department overtime by engineering a better application and hardware infrastructure. It’s everyone else’s overtime that, if the infrastructure scales well, is bound to keep going up.
