Whitehouse IT in the dark ages

Now the news comes out - Obama’s staff move into the White House offices and discover old, tired and broken technology. This along with restrictive policies which appear to be based on 1970’s IT thinking are hampering his teams ability to do their job. They sound like web savvy workers slamming into the wall of antique technology. My god – most of them use MACs and Blackberrys. Sorry – not allowed at the White house. “Here’s a PC running Windows 2K . . . the last person using it didn’t complain, so what’s the problem?” I’m sure they’ll work through it. Their boss has managed to hang on to his Blackberry or something like it (rumour has it a $3,500.00 General Dynamics highly secure PDA) so I’m sure he’ll sort things out for them.

I can’t help but wonder that this scenario is being played out in other enterprises without the high profile the White House has. Gen Y tech savvy workers leave school and go to work and discover their employer’s idea of high-tech is four year old PCs running MS-Office and Outlook email. They’ll find a way around it but may put their jobs in jeopardy by ‘breaking the rules’. My advice? Break the rules – be careful – be productive – but break through to the 21st Century. It’ll pay off in the long run.

Dean

Who’s minding the store when IT staff gets cut?

With the continuing downturn in the economy everyday brings news about job cuts in the IT industry. Today Microsoft announced cuts to its workforce over the next eighteen months. It’s bad when large companies cut thousands of staff – after all these newly unemployed people have lives and families to worry about. What’s scary for me is when smaller companies cut their staffing levels. These are the ones that you don’t read about in the paper or out on the web but they have an impact just the same.

Why am I nervous? If they cut IT staff, who’s keeping up with the security, backup and continuity of services? Am I trusting my personal information to companies who are neglecting to protect me because IT tasks are given over to overworked staff or even under qualified staff after the caretakers are let go? This is not a willful neglect but borne out of necessity to reduce costs. But still makes me nervous. 

Dean

Digital Landfill

Lately I’ve become attracted to phrases which capture a wealth of ideas or concepts in just a few words. I’ve been accused of talking too much while saying too little. While reading the book Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath it occurred to me that I need to trim down my use of words into what they refer to as proverbs. While I work on my own verbiage, I’m always on the look out for other peoples simple catch phrase or coined expressions or proverbs. Digital Landfill is one of them.

Check out the great slide show here at the AIIM Information ZEN site or here on YouTube, where they talk about the corporate digital landfill. Not hardware or electronic devices but data that lives everywhere in an organization and on a multitude of storage media -  PC hard drives, PDA’s, phones, CD’s, DVD’s, servers, USB RAM sticks (thumb drives), backup tapes and on and on. Digital Landfill – there is no better way to describe all those files. At least we clean up and recycle our paper once in a while. Digital ’stuff’ seems to go on forever (or at least until your hard-drive crashes and takes the only known copy of your resume with it).

Back in the good ol’ days of mainframes, data storage space was expensive so there was little waste. Or at least little chance for waste to grow into a landfill. It was also highly managed. With today’s extremely cheap storage space  (I just purchased a Maxtor external drive with 500Gigabytes of space for $200 – my first PC hard-drive was 20Megabytes and it cost me $250 used) it’s easy to amass a mountain of data and just forget about it.

What’s the solution? Move everything back to the hosted environment! SaaS (software as a service), web based storage, cloud computing, thin client desktop and portable computers that have little to no storage capacity. Within a corporate environment and a world with almost ‘ubiquitous’ internet access (I love that word ubiquitous - “Existing or being everywhere, or in all places, at the same time; omnipresent“!) this is not an impossibility. At least this keeps your data from wandering off and making landfills of it’s own. But even by putting your data in a cloud you still need to manage it. Digital landfills live on servers as well.

Corporate policies regarding data (creation and duplication and re-storage) are important but they need to be tuned to meet the needs of the community of workers who need access to data. Keep it simple and easy to navigate. Keep it protected and confidential when required. Accept the fact that digital landfills exist and work hard to eliminate them. There are countless stories in my past when our servers alerted us to a disk capacity threshold being reached. We would take a look at the top consumers and what they had stored: hundreds of songs from Napster (how did they get past the firewall? – another problem to look into), four complete and distinct copies of an obsolete version of Novell Netware installation CD’s (we didn’t run Novell so where did these come from and why?), weekly backups of local PC images from the last year-including the Windows OS, every email message this user had ever received from email systems we abandoned years ago and lots of porn. Less than 10% of the users consumed 75% of the available diskspace. Talk about a digital landfill stinking up the neighbourhood.

Unlike physical landfills that are a huge challenge to deal with, digital landfills can be disposed of by simply deleting them when the data is no longer required. I’m reminded of the BOFH (the bastard operator from hell) who was a cranky character whose adventures many IT folks followed years ago. Some still do. When a user called to ask for more storage space on the mainframe, the BOFH had a simple solution…something like this - “Just let me enter a few commands here at my terminal and you’ll have lots of space – del *.*, enter. There you go!”

Dean

Lost: data and personal information

Here we go again . . . here is an article from ZDNet … NY Bank ‘loses’ 4.5M unencrypted customer records.

And talk about timing – as I was reading that article, Jennifer Stoddart , Privacy Commissioner of Canada, was on BNN TV talking about data loss. She was to the point and articulate and I really enjoyed listening to her. (NOTE: they are fast over at BNN.ca but the clip hasn’t been posted online yet as I write this. But it will be later  – check it out!)

At the heart of it all was unencrypted data lost over and over again in the same fashion, for the same reasons. The example she gave was of data downloaded to a notebook pc and then the computer would be stolen out of the car it was left in. It seemed to me that MS. Stoddart said something about hearing this story over and over again. (I’ve seen computers with confidential corporate data on the hard drives stolen right out offices). When asked why companies didn’t apply appropriate security to their data, she replied that it was based on cost. As an example she told us about TJX and how investigation has determined that it had been decided by the TJX executives to not implement tighter security prior to the incident because it would cost too much and would affect their profit. Or words to that effect. It’s all about risk management, TJX gambled – and lost. (Don’t get me wrong, I shop at one of their stores and I really enjoy it – they have some great stuff that you can’t get anywhere else. And by the way, I never use my credit card.)

But I’ve been there too and I quote…”Keeping all data on protected servers is just not in the budget! It’s just too inconvenient to not be able to take my data home (or to a conference or a vacation or where-ever) and work on it. I burn everything to CD’s – it’s my backup in case the IT department misplaces it (or) I delete it by accident!”

Is this a good case for ‘cloud computing’? If data lives somewhere other than a local hard-drive is it safer? What about 8Gb USB memory sticks? Should the IT departments fill up USB ports with epoxy as part of their standard desktop configurations? The bank mentioned in the ZDNet article lost their data back-up tape – should they ship their tapes with armed-guards like they do with money?

I used to read this site all of the time but I got tired of seeing the same things over and over . . . but I still wander by once in awhile just in case my name might be on one of data breaches they report on.

Dean

IT/Business Integration

Jason Hiner executive editor of Tech Republic has a good article in his post in Tech Sanity Check – Sanity check: If you’re working on IT-business alignment, you’ve already lost.  There are two key phrases in the article that caught my eye:

• “As you can see, this is not about IT/business alignment. It’s about IT/business integration.”

Are the IT departments in these large corporations that far removed from business that they need to be sliced’n'diced and assimilated by business units?

• “…better explaining IT spending, getting other leaders to think of technology as a business enabler…”

How many business leaders (particularly the older generation) think of IT as a cost centre and utility rather than the ‘enabler’ that it can be?

This was part one of a two parter from Jason Hine . . . can hardly wait for the next installment.

BTW: In the last year I’ve been talking to a lot of small businesses that have less than 50 computers in the organization. What I like about these companies is the close relationship IT and the rest of the organization enjoy. There is also a higher level of commitment to IT as a business enabler from management than I would have thought. The IT staff are still spread a little thin but due to the hot Alberta economy there is funding available to address the IT resource requirements. After all that’s why I was there talking to them. What can the large enterprise learn from these smaller companies in regards to IT/business integration? I don’t have the details but I do know there is something there . . . for the most part the people in these small organizations were very happy with their IT  – technology and people. There was one IT department that was struggling to turn themselves around. The CIO described it as a 180 degree shift. The challenge put forward to me was the RTC – resistance to change, of the IT staff to this new way of doing business. Unfortunately I didn’t get this contract. Which was too bad, I was really looking forward to the challenge. I wonder how they are making out?

Dean

Supporting employee owned IT

Been there, done that, lost sleep over it . . . how far should corporate IT go to support user/employee devices?

Here’s a good article from TechRepublic on Gartner’s advice . . .on the latest support issue – employee owned SmartPhones.

In looking over Gartner’s suggested best practices I saw things we attempted to apply years ago when PDAs came out. We applied limited support definitions through the use of signed Service Level Agreements (SLAs). As usual, most folks did okay on their own but (remember the 80/20 rule?) we did spend lots of time on some of the employees wanting to use these devices. When new IT management came in they declared these SLAs a bad thing and they were destroyed and support as required by the employee was offered and delivered as required. Good PR move – bad resource allocation move.

In small companies the IT department (usually 1 or 2 techs) don’t have time or the skills to support non-corporate technology. On the other hand, in a small organization – say 10 to 20 employees, the IT department can be closer to the user community and may be able to offer advice on non-corporate IT issues easier and with less impact on daily workloads.

The key is for senior management to make the decision on whether IT should support non-corporate technology and (this is really important) back it up. If the answer is NO – don’t make exceptions (including the president) and if the answer is YES – cut the IT folks some slack if they are out fixing someones smartphone when the email system goes down.

Dean

Turmoil in the IT department

TechRepublic is a great source of information regarding the world of professional IT. Not only technology issues are addressed but staffing, strategy, vision and management from a higher level.

The latest item that caught my eye is discussion over the new model for the IT department . . . you can check it out here.

Dean

Podshow PDN {podshow-bd32226ce1b9d372bec7dc7f8932f757}

Quote of the day!

Been busy with other things so I haven’t had the time to post much…besides, I’m getting tired of sounding like I’m whining all the time!

I found this on the Forester Marketing blog attributed to Christie Hefner, CEO of the Playboy empire (and yes the daughter of founder Hef’)…

“Go to another company”

The above title is Christie Hefner’s response to a question about what to do when you’re in a company filled with people who don’t want to change the way they did business in 1972.

She also has some interesting things to say about Information Technology . . .

Christie Hefner: How Playboy Protects Its Assets

Baseline,  February, 2006  by Elizabeth Bennett

Dean Owen

DeanO’s A-BLOG Episode #6

DeanO’s A-BLOG Episode #6…

download original file

More on the future of IT Managers and IT departments.

IT-World Canada article by Sandra Rossi – “IT managers may become ‘directors of processes’“

John Roberts, Gartner VP

Extra special bonus:
Code Monkey from Jonathan Coulton

Dean Owen

IT Governance

While reading through my various feeds this morning, I eventually reached the following article from BuilderAU on a particular IT consultant’s incompetence and how it was uncovered through an assessment by another business consultant. A quote from the article “…how we identified imprudent management activities, poor control mechanisms, and incompetent business activities that threatened the viability of the organisation…”. A very interesting article on why a company – SME or enterprise – needs to have a clear, industry standard based IT governance set of practices, including the evaluation of internal and as in this case, external services.

Does your company have a set of measurement tools and processes to ensure your IT is delivering value to your company? This is the value of such international frameworks such as ITIL/ITSM and COBIT. Regardless of whether you have four computers or four thousand, your enterprise can benefit from IT governance.

Dean Owen