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Loading ...Eat, pray, love, compute
The train broke down near Oshawa, Ont., and stayed there for more than an hour. Once all the grumbling and emergency cell phone calls to friends died down, it suddenly sounded like I was sitting in an office. All around me people were opening up laptops, fingers dancing over keyboards and making the most of the time. It was all the more extraordinary, therefore, to not only be sitting next to one of the few other people on the train who decided to read, but that we were reading the same book: Eat, Pray, Love.
My seatmate and I didn’t get a chance to discuss the book – she promptly pulled her jacket over her chest like a blanket and fell asleep – but she probably wouldn’t have been interested in my take on it anyway. Eat, Pray, Love was written by Elizabeth Gilbert, who tells the story of getting over a messy divorce by spending time in Italy, India and Indonesia. A self-described “seeker,” she takes up a serious interest in prayer and experiments with a variety of ways to find God. However one passage, about mid-way through the book, struck me as not only relevant to IT managers but offered an exercise worth trying.
While in Italy, Gilbert admits to a friend that she doesn’t feel she could ever live permanently in Rome. Her companion, who was born there, tells her that may be because she has a different word for it. His theory is that every city “has a single word that defines it, that identifies most of the people who live there.” Rome’s word, he informs Gilbert, is SEX. This prompts her to think about the key words for other cities (New York’s is ACHIEVE, she decides, while Los Angeles’s is SUCCEED) and for herself. “I know it’s not MARRIAGE,” she writes. “It’s not DEPRESSION any more, thank heavens . . . my word might be DEVOTATION, though this makes me sound more of a goody-goody than I am and doesn’t take into account how much wine I’ve been drinking.”
IT managers probably have their own words. Some might describe them as a group, while others might encompass the totality of their lives. As a profession, there are a few that readily come to mind, like INNOVATE, though that may be more “aspirational” than a reflection of reality. For a lot of them it’s more likely FIX, unfortunately. Depending on the kind of projects that make up much of their time, it could be IMPROVE, which combines a bit of both.
A number of large enterprises are more geographically distributed than cities, and a few employ nearly as many people as a metropolis. They don’t tend to boil down their essence to a single word but elaborate on it in a mission statement, but those who work there or deal with the company could probably offer up some suggestions (my word for Vial Rail Canada, for example, would be CHUG, which is not a compliment). Much like Gilbert’s quest for a sense of belonging, IT managers might want to think about how well their word matches with that of their surroundings.
I don’t think it gives much of Eat, Pray, Love away to say that Gilbert eventually chooses her word, ANTEVASIN, which is Sanskrit for “one who lives at the border.” That may work for a seeker, but technology professionals are on a different kind of journey, one that should take them closer to the center, and where they need to feel more at home.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Vista SP1 install in real time
It’s hard to get a real sense of how many enterprises have actually deployed Vista, but for those IT managers who have it might be interesting to watch this clip where someone tries out Microsoft’s first service pack for the OS. And yes, it is the business version of Vista. I don’t know who this guy is, but his whole tone has the kind of dry, occasionally cynical wit I’m come to associate with a lot of technology professionals. The production values are a little shaky, but this is as good a preparation for SP1 as you’re likely to find.
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(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Why HP is sticking with the software-for-the-CIO strategy
The first thing they told us when a group of local media sat down with the head of HP’s worldwide software division on Thursday is that the company has a policy of not discussing its competitors. This, despite the fact that one of them happily answered my questions about the BMC takeover of BladeLogic a week or two ago, and despite the fact that the executive in question, Tom Hogan, wasted no time in bringing up IBM.
“To speak candidly, I watched IBM struggle to get to that $100 billion mark, which they still haven’t achieved,” he said. “There’s an issue when big chunks of your business are hardware-based.”
Of course, you could say the same about HP, and perhaps even more so. Before its purchase of Mercury Interactive and later Opsware, the company was not much of a software player, despite its OpenView product line. Hogan, a former IBMer who joined HP two years ago, admits this. “If you asked about HP as a supplier five years ago . . . you would have heard that it’s got great products, but not the company I would call if I needed to solve a business problem,” he said.
Hogan claims the software unit is now the fastest-growing in the company, even outpacing HP’s traditional money-maker, which is printing and imaging. What’s intriguing about its strategy to me is its target audience. Instead of chasing after line of business managers or senior executives, as everyone from SAP to IBM appears to be doing, HP remains more focused than ever on the needs of the CIO and the IT department. In this respect, it is zagging where a lot of the competition is zigging.
“When we’re calling on a CIO, we tell them, ‘We’re not hear to compete on a packaged applications basis,” he said. “What we want to do is help the CIO drive better business outcomes from their total investment in IT.”
Hogan compared the situation of users, whose manual processes have slowly been replaced by automation through enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and the like. “No one said, ‘What about bringing (that level of automation) to the CIO?’” he said.
Some have, of course, but the pressure to demonstrate how well IT is aligned to the business has led some vendors to bypass CIOs altogether and go straight to those they report into. Although it has been building its business intelligence product line, HP’s primary focus is on the management of infrastructure, the network and information related to it. I had to cringe, however, at its acronym of BTO, which stands for business technology optimization, and the subset BIO, or business information optimization. These will not only be confused with business process outsourcing (BPO) and business process management (BPM), they will be less memorable than the company’s ill-defined “adaptive enterprise” motto.
As refreshing as HP’s attention on the IT department is, I see two problems. One is its under-developed professional services organization, which IBM continues to dwarf and which Dell will likely surpass if it manages the right kind of channel strategy. The other is cloud computing. I asked Hogan what he thought the impact of cloud computing would be on HP’s software plans – whether, in five years, his customers would still be enterprises or merely the handful of providers to those enterprises.
His answer? That cloud computing was poorly understood, and that even if you knew what it was, a lot of business units would rather make requests of their IT departments without getting a service charge. I argued that some cloud providers could be better automated than most enterprises today. “They could,” he acknowledged, “but a lot of organizations who have farmed some of that out are now taking it back in house. If you asked many organizations about their provider relationships, they are not happy right now.”
Hogan, and HP in general, had better hope so.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Use a fog index to clear up enterprise content confusion
If the word processor I’m using to write this has a fog index, I can’t find it.
A colleague recently asked me about fox indexes, believing that it used to be a feature embedded in an early version of Corel’s WordPerfect. For the uninitiated, a fog index refers to a way to measure the reading level required to understand a piece of written content. Developed by American businessman Robert Gunning in the 1950s, it usually relates to the comprehension of grade school students. A newspaper like the Globe and Mail, for example, is probably written for someone with a grade 10 education. A supermarket tabloid is probably aimed several notches lower. You can probably already guess the implications for content management in the enterprise.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...What people are saying about the future of open source
In two years we’re going to see another major open source vendor the size of Red Hat taking on the platform companies like Oracle and SAP in the battle for subscription-based software market share in every segment except security tools and business intelligence.
This is not my prediction but the collected wisdom of those who participated in a survey whose results were released at InfoWorld’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) this week in San Francisco. For the most part, they are not the findings that were highlighted by Northbridge Venture Partners, which commissioned the research. Instead, their emphasis was on how a bad economy was good for open source (you do the math), and that the open versus proprietary software spend will 50-50 within the next five years. These were rather foregone conclusions. There was much more, however, that suggested deep unrest in the industry that’s still to come.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The case against online Can-con regulations
I hope Bryan Adams has a dot-ca domain name registered somewhere.
More than a decade after the rock singer faced a skirmish over whether his album was “Canadian” enough to get additional airplay on radio stations here, the regulator who sets Canadian content rules is reportedly taking a second look at the Internet. The Toronto Star published excerpts from a CRTC draft report on new media which suggested that we may need Can-con quotas for Internet service providers and content creators. The governing principle behind this thinking is the same as always: without the regulations, we’ll do nothing but pay attention to what the United States broadcasts over the Internet.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...IT professionals are defined by talent, not their generation
A couple of weeks ago I was having a dinner party which included an acquaintance who is new to the IT industry. He’s in his mid to late 20s and started out in with a major retailer before moving on to a small but interesting startup about a year ago. I asked him how it’s going and he sounded bored.
It wasn’t that he disliked the people (especially compared to his first job, where the IT departments were full of lifers who didn’t really have much interest in their jobs, or in him). But after a year of developing a product he was hungry to work with new tools, more interesting technologies. You got it: he sounded exactly like the kind of next-generation IT professionals that employers don’t know how to handle.
Since I published a feature report in ComputerWorld Canada called “Close the IT Generation Gap” we’ve had more than 2,000 page views and about 15 comments, some of which are worth highlighting for the insight they provide on this issue.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Surprise! An IT usage policy that actually makes sense
I’ve often imagined the ideal IT usage policy, but I never thought a company I worked for would be the one to compose it.
Before anyone accuses me of sucking up, let me point out that I once wrote in great detail about the IT policy at my previous employer, while I was still employed there. For those who missed it, the policy was illustrated by a cartoon character based on a padlock (who I nicknamed Paddy), described by our company as “The Cautious User of Information Systems.” This helpful guide was not distributed to employees (even new hires) but printed out and secured by a thumbtack to the bulletin board of our office kitchen. Even a year after leaving the company, I’m certain Paddy is still hanging there, waiting for some attention.
Contrast that with what arrived in our e-mail inboxes this morning. “Updated Internet usage policy,” the subject line began, before reminding us that everyone here is responsible for complying with the policy in full. It came from human resources, and the first line indicated our key contact for questions or clarification (which is our manager, not the beleaguered IT department). Those were the first things they did right. But there’s much more.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Risks, regulations and a reality check
It quickly became apparent to me that a roundtable Microsoft was hosting on Tuesday about compliance was really another commercial for SharePoint. But that turned out to be the more minor exaggeration.
Although executives eventually admitted – after implying SharePoint was an all-in-one solution to meeting regulatory requirements – that its portal product was only one piece of the compliance puzzle, no one was willing to tone down the rhetoric about compliance risk. Time and again we heard about the need to create better systems for managing data, in order to “keep the CFO out of jail.” The reality check is very few CFOs have gone to jail, and it’s not the IT manager’s fault that they’re there.
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(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Behind BladeLogic’s buyout: Why data centre apps are hot
Q9 Networks said it was indifferent. Peer 1 Networks simply turned me down. Fusepoint Managed Services passed, too.
I thought getting comment on the consolidation in the data centre automation space would be easy. And who better to discuss it than the company who are providing data centre services to some of the largest firms in Canada? Maybe they don’t want to talk about what they’re using because they see it as a competitive advantage. Perhaps they aren’t happy about the consolidation but don’t want to mess with their existing suppliers. Or it could be they’re as uncertain as the rest of us.
BMC’s acquisition of BladeLogic on Monday is not necessarily the end of the activity in this space, but it should suggest to IT managers that the marketing around such technologies is going to get a lot louder. Since HP already secured its position with the acquisition of Opsware last year, it may be worth paying more attention to the companies that passed on BladeLogic. This includes EMC, but also those such as Dell which weren’t even rumoured to be thinking about it. It should be clear by now that anyone who’s serious about selling IT infrastructure should also be serious about helping companies manage that infrastructure, and selling expensive services (a la IBM) is not going to cut it.
