Paralysis by Analysis

It is important not to fall victim to “paralysis by analysis.” Information technology professionals by nature are very analytical and by nature want to analyze everything before taking action. This is clearly important up to a certain point. Sometimes, it is actually beneficial to not see an option and save a tremendous amount of time by not analyzing an option that turns out to be a “rat hole.” As they say “ignorance is bliss.”

More important than avoiding time wasting activities is just having the personal power to make a decision and take action. The joke on these lines is “He won’t take action because that would require a decision.” This problem becomes amplified in larger organizations where there is a culture of zero tolerance for mistakes. Sounds great in theory but when no one is willing to make a decision and take action for fear of making a wrong decision you have “paralysis by analysis.” Everyone starts taking cover on all issues and using CYA as their mantra! There will be meeting after meeting with many planning discussions and meeting notes and maybe even some action items but nothing is really happening.

Being decisive, making decision and then moving forward is absolutely a key for long term success. So how do you handle failure from making the wrong decisions? Mitigate risk and learn from mistakes. Embrace failure! “Fail early, fail often and fail cheap.”

Here is a quote by Charles Bosk, a Sociology Professor at University of Pennsylvania, who spoke with student surgeons and his observation of how they handle mistakes:

"When I interviewed the surgeons who were fired, I used to leave the interview shaking," Bosk said. "I would hear these horrible stories about what they did wrong, but the thing was that they didn't know that what they did was wrong. In my interviewing, I began to develop what I thought was an indicator of whether someone was going to be a good surgeon or not. It was a couple of simple questions: Have you ever made a mistake? And, if so, what was your worst mistake? The people who said, 'Gee, I haven't really had one,' or, 'I've had a couple of bad outcomes but they were due to things outside my control' -- invariably those were the worst candidates. And the residents who said, 'I make mistakes all the time. There was this horrible thing that happened just yesterday and here's what it was.' They were the best. They had the ability to rethink everything that they'd done and imagine how they might have done it differently."

Nicholas Carr: The Internet is Hurting Our Brains

I read an article by Bill Snyder “Nicholas Carr: The Internet is Hurting Our Brains.” The article is discussing the idea Nicholas Carr wrote about in his book “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” The concept is that we are highly distracted on-line jumping around from site to site and this is causing us to lose the ability to focus. I am not sure this is isolated to Google either as it seems to me we are generally in a more interrupt driven society. If you are not running from meeting to meeting, reading through emails and then on the phone pretty much the entire day then what are you doing?

I do find the time to think, read entire articles and write this blog. At the same time I often feel highly distracted and this creates a sense of anxiousness. I often arrive at the end of the day feeling somewhat apprehensive. 5:30 rolls around and I am thinking, “I can’t go home for another couple of hours because I just need to accomplish more to have a productive day.”

Clearly there are plenty of distractions and challenges to staying focused on accomplishing tasks. Is this actually damaging our brains? Maybe it is damaging… and besides it is not great being distracted. So how do you combat this? Here are a few ways to attack this:

1. Schedule time to work on items and do not look at email or take calls.
2. Read emails only once and either take action, delete, file or move to an action folder.
3. Designate a certain amount of time for reading online articles.
4. Participate in activities that do not involve technology – leave the mobile phone behind.
5. Take vacation and don’t check email for a few entire days.

Ok, enough - This is not actually brain surgery. It is an important point and it really goes back to life balance. In this case it is a technology and technology free balance. Nothing really changes – Use to be we worried about the TV frying our brains and now it is the internet!

On that note, I am ready for some technology free summer vacation.

Article in CIO Magazine by Bill Snyder “Nicholas Carr: The Internet is Hurting Our Brains”:
http://www.cio.com/article/597350/Nicholas_Carr_The_Internet_is_Hurting_Our_Brains

General George Casey on Leadership

Last week, I attended a presentation by General George Casey, Army Chief of Staff. General Casey discussed his current role and their goal of restoring health to the Army. He shared the challenges around the kind of warfare we are involved with today versus the past.

General Casey discussed Strategic Leadership. He said “Strategic leaders guide the achievement of their organizational vision within a larger enterprise by:

1. Directing policy and strategy
2. Building consensus
3. Acquiring and allocating resources
4. Influencing organizational culture
5. Shaping external environment
6. Communicating

“They lead by example to:

1. Build an effective organization
2. Grow the next generation
3. Energize subordinates
4. Seek opportunities to advance goals
5. Balance personal and professional demands; a. Read, b. Sleep, c. Exercise, d. Think, e. Personal passion (Hobby, sport)

On reflection, I think this is good stuff. I prefer building commitment to a plan rather than consensus but I suppose this could be semantics. Acquiring and allocating resources is probably more significant in large government organizations. At Nortec we focus more on saving and reducing resources consumed. Culture should probably be at the top but not sure this is supposed to be in order of importance. In business, shaping external environment, I would relate to front line selling and this is clearly key to business success. Communicating the vision is necessary so everyone knows the right direction to be going and this is where clear metrics come into play.

I am a big believer in leading by example and inspiring the team. I enjoyed the presentation and I think General Casey does a great job highlighting the key components to successful leadership.

Now, if I can track down that photo they took of me with the General...

CEO2GOV Summit Event Information:
http://tiny.cc/gycph

It Is a Great Time to be an IT Leader

A challenge for IT leadership has been aligning technology with senior management the CEO, CFO, COO. Historically the IT leader has not always had a position on the senior executive team and reported often to the CFO, sometimes the CEO or COO. This has changed with most companies now having a CIO and at the same time the other executives have become more IT savvy. This creates a great environment for the inspired, entrepreneurial spirited IT leader.

The IT leader now has direct access to the senior management team and the senior management understands more about technology. This can be a double edged sword as the CIO has to listen to other executives who “know how to do the CIO’s job.” Taking this into consideration it is still better having a senior team that understands technology and the value it brings to the organization. It may require more interaction to agree on what can be done but at least the conversation is seen as important and something senior management is interested in discussing.

It is time for the IT leaders to run with the ball and create creative ways to take advantage of technology. IT leaders need to build the vision of what can be accomplished with technology from operations to marketing such as social media and web 3.0. The technology vision needs to be drafted into a brief well written and understandable technology plan. This vision needs to involve the entire leadership team and be a plan that they all agree upon and are committed to implementing. This plan can be further reaching and more powerful today because the senior teams understanding of technology will assist in seeing the value.

An article in CIO magazine “What CEOs expect form CIOs” by Richard Pastore, that inspired this post:
http://www.cio.com/article/596384/What_CEOs_Expect_from_CIOs?page=1&taxonomyId=3156

Evolution of Information Technology – Dealing with the Shift to the Cloud?

While still in early stages, Cloud Computing is definitely a growing area within information technology (IT). Hosted service and remote managed services are growing faster in some areas than others. Small companies are moving their entire information technology department to the cloud in some cases. Certainly new companies are looking at this strategy right out of the gate. Most companies and particularly large enterprise organizations are utilizing a hybrid model. When it comes time to purchase new hardware or migrate to a new version of software it makes sense to evaluate cloud computing.

How should information technology leaders deal with this shift? There is some resistance since ultimately as technology moves to the cloud, one might think that a company will need less internal IT staff. This is true to a certain extent; however it is true more so for those that do not embrace cloud computing than those that do. If the premise is true that more technology will move to the cloud (and I think it is…) than IT professionals that embrace this and become experts at dealing with it will be in demand. Companies will need troops on the ground to migrate, manage and support the cloud services.

Here is a related article “Cloud Computing Is An Evolution of IT, Not An Overthrow”:

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/blog/archives/2010/06/cloud_computing_22.html

"Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

I read “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. This book is written by the same authors as "Switch" that I read and reviewed on April 8th: http://andrewgrose.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html

I liked ”Switch” and I really liked “Made to Stick”. The main idea of “Made to Stick” is that there are certain criteria that make a presentation or story stick with the audience or reader. What will the audience remember about a presentation a day later? This is important for business leaders and for that matter everyone in order to make your ideas stick! It is well known that conveying ideas in stories is more effective than explaining bullet after bullet and this is one of the key concepts – So what are the other nuggets?

Made to stick discusses how to make the stories more compelling by drawing in the audience at the beginning. It discusses the gap theory which is essentially that we do not like a gap in knowledge and this is why we will sometimes watch a lousy movie to the end because “We just have to know what happens!” The book discusses several techniques and boils it down to an acronym SUCCESs: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story. The book then walks through stories that reinforce these 6 key components to make ideas stick. It is a good check list when you come up with a marketing advertisement to check off each box to see how many you hit. The more you hit the more likely your ideas will stick.

One example that the book gives of a sticky story is the Subway story of Jared. The story is that Jared goes to Subway everyday and enjoys the food and looses 245 lbs. It is definitely simple! It is unusual since usually you gain weight eating fast food. It is very concrete and credible. Finally it is an emotional story about a guy going from 425 lbs to 180 lbs, essentially saving his life by eating at Subway! There is a check mark in every box so it is no surprise that this story sticks.

I recommend reading “Made to Stick.”

Desktop Virtualization

I read an interesting article in Forbes magazine: “Desktop Virtualization Tips for CIOs” by Elias Khnaser. The article points out that desktop virtualization does not always mean VDI as it may mean streaming a virtual application or running virtual machines on your desktop but I will stick with VDI – a virtual desktop implementation.

Virtual desktop implementation (VDI) is compelling from a management standpoint. It certainly saves money on desktop operational expenditure but not on capital expenditure according to Gartner. This is different from server virtualization. Server virtualization’s savings on Op Ex and Cap Ex made it extremely compelling.

The article points out that VDI must be planned entirely differently than server virtualization as the challenge becomes supporting many more applications than what is running on a server. This is where you run into problems of what applications will run on the desktops and who is in control. The technical team will like the control and ease of management – Will the users like it? VDI does create a great access anywhere and consistent look and feel.

The article is good – here is a link:

http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/24/virtualization-windows7-vdi-technology-cio-network-desktop.html

Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSD) are growing at a rapid rate. The latest information states 510 Million and growing 50% over the next year. This is still a small number compared to traditional hard drives and Seagate just released a hybrid to enhance hard drive performance. Solid state technology is going down in cost and the controller technology is advancing to make SSD more attractive in more applications. Solid state technology does have a strong appeal as everyone knows that the more moving parts the more likely you will have a failure.

Here are a couple of articles on SSD Drives:

http://www.reportlinker.com/p0196489/Enterprise-SSDs-Technologies-and-Markets.html?request=news

http://hothardware.com/News/5Way-SSD-RoundUp-Sandforce-vs-JMicron/

Managing Cloud Computing

I read an article in CIO Magazine “Cloud Computing: What CIOs Need to Know About Integration” by Kim S. Nash. The article discusses the use of cloud based solutions and how they show up at companies the way a PC did in the 80s – often not through the IT department. IT departments role will be to integrate and manage at some stage. Clearly this creates an interesting challenge for the CIO.

The article also discusses running internal systems in parallel with cloud computing in order to accommodate peak requirement period i.e. between Thanksgiving and Christmas for retail and January through April 15th for accounting businesses. This appears to make a great deal of sense. The challenge becomes how to manage this! The business needs to recognize the savings and not consume them in management. It is still early days so it will be interesting to see the developments.

Nortec’s cloud offering is Nortec 24/7 and it includes hosted service including Exchange email, network monitoring and managed services. The cloud services are growing rapidly and going extremely well. In the hosted Exchange email solutions we implemented entirely cloud based solutions. On the existing Exchange email cloud services migrating premise to the cloud or from one cloud service to another is like any other migration and takes planning and time to implement. We are now working with Exchange 2010 in many clients and with this Microsoft offers a seamless passing back and forth to the cloud. Cloud technology is evolving without a doubt….

Link to article “Cloud Computing: What CIOs Need to Know About Integration”:

http://tinyurl.com/2cgl3b7

Creating Smart IT Leaders by Susan Cramm

I attended a conference call presentation by Susan Cramm on Creating Smart IT Leaders. Here are a few take away concerns and concepts:


1. Users are frustrated with IT, “they stifle creative entrepreneurialism that is critical to advancing the state of business”
2. Users are younger, tech smarter, and demanding; If IT department doesn’t do something, they will do it without their help
3. 30% of what IT has planned to do is “stupid, dumb work”
4. IT needs to empower the users to self serve
5. Ensure IT can be managed and measured
6. Use fast-cycle, value driven deliver – i.e. Agile development and Scrum method
7. Only 10% of companies are IT Smart!

I enjoyed the presentation and now I need to read the book!

Virtualization: The State of Virtualization in Federal Agencies

I read an article in Channel Insider or should I say slide presentation on virtualization in the Federal Government. It appears the Federal Government is a little behind on virtualization. The Federal Government certainly has a tremendous opportunity to consolidate and save money so this should be compelling and does present a great opportunity. According to the survey education events look like the most important thing that can be done unless of course we can get a Federal Government mandate. Mr. Obama, it is time to make a Federal mandate on virtualization. Maybe something like “70% of all Federal Government computers must be virtualized by 2014! "

Article:
http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Virtualization/The-State-of-Virtualization-in-Federal-Agencies-703535/

The Servant Leader by James A. Autry

About a year ago I went to a presentation by James Autry about his book, “The Servant Leader: How to Build a Creative Team, Develop Great Morale, and Improve Bottom-Line Performance.” I thought his presentation was moderate, and I was not immediately motivated to read the book. The book sat on the shelf for about a year. I picked it up last week for no apparent reason and I read a chapter or so. I thought … this is a really good book!

The essence of “The Servant Leader” is to help everyone that works for you in an authentic manner. The command and control management style is not effective as it does not create an environment that is creative and has a positive morale. Mr. Autry also stresses the importance of balancing the human factors and the pure business side of things. He really emphasizes the importance of a manager being connected and engaged with their staff. The management method he recommends boarders on being over the top California new age style, and frankly I struggle with this a little personally and philosophically. I did like the book and I agree with most of what he is suggesting. He also drilled down on how to deal with each different scenario, sort of like a how to book. I am not sure this was necessary, but I suppose it helps drive the tactical details of the methodology. I would recommend the book, especially the first 100 pages!

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

The main concept of Outliers is that people are largely a product of their environment. The first example given is that of professional hockey players. The more successful players are likely to be born near the beginning of the year. The reason being is that they are grouped by the year they are born so the older kids are naturally more likely to be better and therefore get more attention and practice. The extra attention and practice builds upon itself. These four sentences take many pages in the book and the point is beaten to death. It is an interesting point, no less. The book builds on this point stating that to be really great at anything it is primarily practice and not talent. The number Mr. Gladwell comes up with is 10,000 hours of diligent practice to be great at just about anything. The Beatles it turns out spent several years playing in environments where they were required to play for many hours straight every day of the week. They went from being modest performers to being great performers. The book goes on to make interesting points regarding cultural backgrounds and many other examples to support the impact of environment on an individual’s behavior and success.

I thought Outliers had some interesting material however it seemed to over emphasize the importance of environment. Clearly environment is an important factor to success. It is no coincidence that there are so many successful people in America – It is an environment that allows individuals to forge out and become successful. However, often when you look at successful people you will see that they overcame many obstacles and usually through pure perseverance and passion not because of their environment.

Virtualization Impact

Virtualization is proven to reduce cost by consolidating servers on less physical servers. I read an article “Does Virtualization Increase IT Management Costs?” by Charlie Schluting in Enterprise Networking Planet. Charlie Schluting states, “Cisco started saying that virtualization doesn't actually save money due to increased management costs involved with running a virtual infrastructure.” The article goes on to discuss all costs associated with virtualization: management, training virtualization staff, virtualization consultants. However, I believe it still makes sense to virtualize corporate infrastructure and that these costs will continue to decrease as virtualization becomes more and more mainstream.

In the 90s there was promise of the paperless office as the typewriter died and the word processor took over. Companies were also able to scan documents and discard the paper. However, it turns out that businesses actually print more revisions of every document with a word processor than when using the old type writer. We print far more in general not less than in the past. I doubt anyone is going to argue that we should go back to typewriters and discard scanners. Clearly we are able to produce better quality documents and office automation makes the office worker more efficient and effective.

Will virtualization drive more servers and more applications? Applications you could not justify because of the cost associated with supporting another server can be quickly and easily launched on a new virtual machine. Will businesses then end up with more physical servers?

“Does Virtualization Increase IT Management Costs?” by Charlie Schluting:
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/_featured/article.php/3876576/Does+Virtualization+Increase+IT+Management+Costs?.htm

“Switch: How to change things when change is hard” by Chip and Dan Heath

I read "Switch" by Chip and Dan Heath. The book is about how people behave and what drives their behavior. Essentially they describe three components to human actions and they outline them as the elephant, monkey, and environment.

The elephant is our instinctual, emotional drive and our habits. Essentially, the elephant describes our regular non thinking type behavior. Our monkey is riding the elephant. Steering the elephant to do the kind of things we rationally want to do. The analogy does a great job of creating the image of this poor monkey trying to control this very powerful willful elephant. When you see that bag of cheeses the monkey may want to pass and the elephant wants the wonderful orange goodness – who wins? The environment is the people you are around and the social acceptability of your behavior.

After explaining the elephant, monkey and environment, the book gives examples of these forces and how to flip the switch to change the behavior of yourself and others. How it makes sense to appeal to the elephant instead of the monkey in some cases. Sometimes to effect the change you are looking for you need to change the environment. Who do you hang with? Appealing effectively to one or more of these behavioral forces will cause the desired change in yourself and others. I liked the book because it is powerful, interesting and a short easy read.

“5 Virtual Desktop Pitfalls” by Jon Brodkin

I read “5 Virtual Desktop Pitfalls” by Jon Brodkin in Network World. According to Mr. Bodkin the 5 pitfalls are cost, storage, network, multimedia support and user experience.

The network requirements and user experience are probably the two areas that have improved the most over the last decade so I would say these are fading pitfalls. In fact the improvements in network infrastructure and the user experience are driving VDI adoption.

Multimedia support will continue to be a game stopper in some cases.

The cost pitfall surprised me. Mr. Bodkin quotes Forrester analysis finding that the ROI is 3 – 5 years if that. This contradicts acquisition costs that I have seen that were lower than the cost to replace desktops not to mention the lower operational expenses. Clearly a business needs to be in desktop refresh mode to have a rapid ROI.

The article is worth reading especially if you are involved or considering a VDI implementation.
Link to “5 Virtual Desktop Pitfalls” by Jon Brodkin:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/040110-virtual-desktop-pitfalls.html?page=1

“Virtualization Management and Trends” a CA Study by Forrester Consulting

I read “Virtualization Management and Trends” a CA commissioned study by Forrester Consulting. The study was to evaluate the impact, challenges, and requirements around the operational aspects of virtualization. The report had seven key findings:

1. Capacity management is top operational concern
2. Moving to internal cloud requires process and automation
3. Comprehensive domain coverage is critical
4. Need a top-down application approach
5. Cloud based offerings are in demand
6. Operational control moving to day to day administrator
7. Virtualization is very positive to operation

The study confirms the explosive growth of virtualization and the overall shift to management automation. The essence being, that as a businesses moves to a virtual environment it is extremely important to have well planned and managed infrastructure. This is clearly cutting CAs own grass as a supplier of virtualization automation tools but this is in line with industry best practices. Management software and tools have often been shelfware in the past. Virtualization is driving the adoption and implementation of management tools and is forcing a more efficient managed infrastrtucture.

“Virtualization Management and Trends” a CA commissioned study by Forrester Consulting:
http://www.ca.com/us/analysts/reports/collateral.aspx?CID=227749

Virtualization and Security

Virtualization continues to grow at a rapid rate as a result of the compelling ROI. Although the average consolidation rate is less than 10:1 the latest hardware and virtualization software enables companies to implement upwards of 20:1 and 30:1 consolidation. The challenge is getting the expertise to implement, secure and manage the virtualized infrastructure.

Most IT leaders recognize the challenge to grow virtualization skills. We are investing heavily in developing deep technical skills around virtualization. Gartner in their recent report is estimating that 60% of servers are less secure in a virtualized environment versus physical enviornment. This will continue through 2012 and slowly decrease to 30% by 2015. The reason they contribute less security in virtual environment is the lack of IT expertise around virtualization.

"Virtualization is not inherently insecure," says Gartner vice president Neil MacDonald. "However, most virtualized workloads are being deployed insecurely. The latter is a result of the immaturity of tools and processes and the limited training of staff, resellers and consultants."

We will continue to invest in growing and recruiting the best virtualization experts to meet the challenge head on. We are committed to implementing secure virtualized infrastructures. We are developing air lift programs to help our clients in later stages of their virtualization implementations to take their skills to the next level. The case for virtualization is extremely compelling and growing fast so it will demand diligence and commitment from internal IT and consultants.

Gartner Report "Addressing the Most Common Security Risks in Data Center Virtualization Projects":
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=clientFriendlyUrl&id=1288115

Leadership and Management Lessons from "Undercover Boss"

I read this article by Meridith Levinson in CIO Magazine about the new CBS TV Show “Undercover Boss”. The show takes CEOs of very large companies and has them go in the field and work as a helper with the front line workers. There is something intrinsically funny about the CEO of a very large waste management company getting in the field cleaning bathrooms! The article has some youtube videos of segments from a couple of episodes of the show and they are great. I think the show is interesting and reveals great insight into how some policies cause pain. It also demonstrates how taking genuine interest and appreciation of employees goes a long way.

Link to the article:

http://www.cio.com/article/565064/Leadership_and_Management_Lessons_from_Undercover_Boss_

2010 Prediction

I sense an increase in business activity. Personally, I have noticed higher levels of activity at Nortec as well as in office real estate that I own. The stock market continues to show recovery. Everything I read is pointing to 2010 being a growth year. The growth is predicted to be increasing from one quarter to the next starting slowly – at least that is the prediction in information technology industry. The only area that I think has not turned the corner is residential real estate.

Overall attitude of most people should improve. Recruiting and retaining top professionals will get harder – not that that ever seemed to get easier. Overall businesses and individuals will do well.

This is long needed positive news. Although the wave is not entirely upon us, I can hear the rumble and see some foam in front of it.