Archive for the 'Information Technology' Category

AM Radio……and Beyond

Published March 22, 2013 Information Technology , Life Leave a Comment
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The VCR and the DVD – there wasn’t none of that crap back in 1970

We didn’t know about a World Wide Web

Was a whole different game being played back when I was a kid

Wanna get down in a cool way?

Picture yourself on a beautiful day

Big Bell Bottoms and groovy, long hair

Just a-walking in style with a portable CD player – No!

You would listen to the music on the AM Radio

Yeah, you could hear the music on the AM Radio

These are the opening lyrics to the song “AM Radio” from one of my favorite 90’s bands, Everclear.  I was a kid in the 1970’s and 80s, and I can very much relate to the picture painted by these lyrics.  While these lyrics are from the perspective of a kid growing up in the 70s, you could just as easily rewrite them from the perspective of a kid in 1990 or even 2010.

I still remember the excitement of getting an Atari, a “portable” jambox that weighed over 5 pounds, and cable TV.  The latter of which did not happen until I was in my late teens.  I remember feeling lucky to have a 12” black and white TV in my bedroom as a teenager, and it was a TV on which I had to use pliers to change the channel to pick up one of the 4 stations we could tune in over the air. I also remember going into debt when I was a junior in college to buy a Tandy (yes Tandy) computer so I could use a rudimentary spreadsheet program to help with my accounting classes.

I also remember getting my first laptop when I entered the  high flying world of Big 6 Consulting in the late 90’s – I don’t recall the exact specs of it, but my back to this day remembers that it was heavier than a brick.  And I recall connecting that laptop to pay phones (yes pay phones) at the airport so I could dial-into our Groupwise mail server.  And I can’t forget the awe and amazement when I was issued a cell phone a few years later.

Fast forward 15 years and I am now sitting on a plane writing this blog on a touch screen tablet that weighs less than 2 pounds and is connected via wireless to the entire world at 35,000 feet – all while listening to one of the 1000s of songs on a my iPod and thinking about which type of smartphone I want next  – smartphones that I am sure have more memory and horsepower than that first brick of a laptop I had and certainly much more than the Tandy computer that took me 2 years to pay off back in the early 90s.

As a kid, I never imagined we would have the real time interactions we have today.  To think that in my lifetime, I went from Polaroid picture to being able to stream real time video anywhere in the world from a 3 inch x 5 inch device in my hand is just crazy.  Just last week, I was riding in the back of car through the mountains of Colorado while having a conversation with a business associate in Australia via a tablet connected to a wireless hotspot.  While this is common place technology in today’s world, I couldn’t help but stop and think about how dang cool it was to do it.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

In the past two weeks I have had the opportunity to listen to people from Intel and Microsoft talk about what is coming down the technology pipe.  While many of us are amazed at the technology that is hitting the market now – all the touch laptops, tablets, phones and the ever increasing number of connected things – it sounds like what will become available in the next 18-24 months will rock our worlds – in how we work, how we learn and how we live.  The pace of technology innovation feels to be picking up.  The question is “Are we all ready to keep up with it?”

A few final disclosures:

1)      As a kid, my parent’s car had nothing but AM radio.

2)      We still have VHS tapes and a VCR to play them on at our house.

3)      I just recently took the very first DVD player I ever owned to Goodwill.

4)      I can now change the channel on my TV from my iPhone (no pliers needed)

5)      I still listen to AM radio on a regular basis.

Business Technology in 2020

Published March 5, 2013 Information Technology , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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I was recently asked by CenturyLink to contribute an article for an ebook on predictions for business technology in the year 2020. The ebook “Business Technology 2020″ can be found on CenturyLink’s ThinkGig blog. You can also view it using the following link/bitly: http://bit.ly/1149RVV Below is my contribution to the ebook.

I was recently asked the question, “What will business technology look like in 2020?”

My first thought was, “That’s so far out into the future; there is no way to think that many years ahead.” Then I looked at the calendar and realized it was almost 2013, and that 2020 really wasn’t far down the road. I also realized my oldest daughter will be wrapping up college around 2020 and entering the workforce for the first time. So I decided to ask her what she thought it would look like.

My daughter’s first response was one of shock that in seven years she would be starting a career. She told me she thought people would just be using some kind of tablet for work, but a tablet a little bigger than what we use today. One that lets you do multiple things at once: be on a video call, edit a document, and look at a Web page. She also thought the cube mazes at many offices would go away because people would not need to be plugged into anything to do their work.

Though the musings of the future in the eyes of a 13-year-old are interesting, I have my own thoughts on what business technology will look like in seven years. If the past decade is any indication, we are in for a wild ride. I have often said that if my company’s revenue and operating income had grown over the past decade at the same rate as our data storage and bandwidth requirements, I would have retired early. My crystal ball shows that growth in data to still be going strong in 2020, which means a continued demand for more and faster storage, faster network speeds, and larger data circuits.

I have said before that I could see being the CIO of a company without a data center. I don’t think that we will be there by 2020, but it will certainly be closer to a reality. I envision a continued contraction in the size of corporate data centers and the continued expansion of computing capacity being delivered by third-party service providers. I recall five years ago worrying about whether the main data center we built would be large enough to handle our growth and physical consolidation of smaller satellite centers. As I walk through that data center now, I worry about what to do with all the space where racks full of servers once stood — servers that have now been virtualized and take up a small fraction of the physical space. The worry of having a too small data center has been replaced with the worry of having one that is too large. As we march toward 2020, server virtualization and X as a service — X being software, platform, infrastructure, or application — will continue to change the shape of data centers. There will be fewer servers, more network hardware, and less energy consumption.

When I look back at how much has changed with end user devices since I entered the workforce in the early 1990s, I can’t help but think that we will see that same pace and innovation over the next seven years. They will not have gone completely the way of the typewriter, but the install base of desktops and laptops will be reduced substantially by 2020. Tablets and smartphones will be the standard devices in the workplace, and I am sure there will be some not yet thought of device form factor that will be the hot new thing in 2020. Rest assured: There will still be people camping out in June 2020 to buy the iPhone 13. Much like my daughter, I also see the use of the traditional office phone, hard-wired data drops, and the conventional office cubicle slowly being phased out as we approach 2020. I might even dare say that for some businesses, the office as we know it today will cease to exist. The office will truly become wherever the employee happens to be, which will surely drive InfoSec professionals crazy.

So in summary, how do I see 2020? More data. More mobility. Smaller corporate data centers. I just hope that CEOs in 2020 realize they still need CIOs.

The Day the iPad Died

Published February 14, 2013 Information Technology , Music , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music used to make me smile
And, I knew if I had my chance that I could make those people dance, and…
Maybe they’d be happy for a while
But, February made me shiver with every paper I’d deliver
Bad news on the doorstep – I couldn’t take one more step
I can’t remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride
Something touched me deep inside the day the music died

For those under the age of 40, these are the opening lyrics to Don McLean’s 1971 song about the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in 1959 – also known as “The day the music died.”  Years ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa and see the last place those rock-n-roll legends performed.  If you love rock-n-roll and find yourself in Iowa, stop by and see it.

Today’s thoughts are not about the death of music.  They are about, at least for me, the passing of a device that much like Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens had an extremely bright but short flame.

I became an “i” guy out of necessity soon after the first generation iPhone hit the market.  Our CEO at the time called me up and told me that he wanted an iPhone to use with his work email.  I attempted to explain that the iPhone would not work well with our older version of Lotus Notes and that the experience would not be one he would like.  As CEOs are apt to do, he did not want to hear that  and insisted that I go get him an iPhone and make it work.

So off I went to the Apple store to buy one and set up an ATT wireless plan.  With a few days of tweaking and testing, we were able to get mail flowing, but no calendar synching, no access to our corporate directory, no synching of his contacts, and no access to any of our internal systems.  It was a far cry from what could be done at the time with Blackberry devices.    I delivered the device to our CEO along with the long list of things it could not do within our corporate environment.

Three days later, the CEO called me and told me the iPhone was not what he expected – for all the same reasons I had tried to tell him before ever purchasing one.   He told me he was sending it back.  So there I was, with a $500+ device and a 2-yr service commitment on a personally-liable account.   So for the next two years, I carried that iPhone as my main device and dealt with the pains of Lotus Notes in an ‘I” world.    As technology progressed and we moved to a new email platform, the iPhone became a more powerful and useful device.  While I flirted with other devices – various Andriods and even a WinMobile – I stuck with the “i” world.

Towards the end of 2011, I told people that the work laptop I was currently using would be the last laptop I ever used.  As I became further immersed in the ‘i” environment, I set my sights on the iPad.  I had a vision of the iPad being the end of the Windows-based laptop.  I tried for over a year to make the iPad be THE work device for me. I bought “Office-like” apps for spreadsheets and word processing.   I leveraged cloud storage to have access to needed files.  I downloaded apps to enhance my Sharepoint experience.  I forced myself to not take my laptop on trips so that I was solely reliant on the iPad.

While I was able to survive with the iPad, I never felt completely comfortable.  The “Office-like” apps were not full featured and clunky to use.  I yearned for my Excel and my Word.  I was also apt to forget to send files to the cloud, so I was always looking for that one file that I really needed.  Yes, I felt cool carrying the iPad, but I never could pull the plug on my trusty laptop.

That all changed in mid-January.  As part of the CIO track at DellWorld, I was offered a free Dell Latitude 10 Windows 8 Professional tablet.  My first thought when I was told I would be receiving the tablet: “here’s another toy to play with for a week or two.”  I did not have any expectations that this device would be a game changer.

When my Dell account executive delivered the Latitude 10 to me, we opened up the boxes and I causally glanced at the tablet, but did not jump right in to firing it up.  Hours later, I finally turned it on and the revolution was on.  I had in my hands a one and a half pound 10” laptop in tablet form.  I had the familiar Windows operation system (once I got past the tiles), my trusty Office apps, all my files that I shamefully keep on my local drive, and a long lasting battery in the palm of my hands.  The next day I had our desktop team join the device to our domain.  Soon thereafter, our desktop management tool was pushing down apps just like it does with any other Windows based computer.  Finally, there was a tablet that could be managed with our existing tools.  It also came with a handy docking station for easy connection to a full screen monitor, mouse and keyboard.

After three days of using the tablet, I shut down my workhorse Thinkpad laptop for the final time.

A week later, I had to ask myself where I left my cool iPad.  It was right where I left it the day I got my hands on that Dell tablet.  I had gone 7 days without using the iPad – a device that previously felt like I used every 7 seconds.

For me it was “The day the iPad died.”

Darrell Royal: An IT Visionary?

Published December 19, 2012 College Sports , Information Technology Leave a Comment
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I recently received a copy of DKR: A Royal Scrapbook as a gift. As you have probably figured out by now, I am a huge University of Texas fan and receiving a gift like this book is a special to me.

The book chronicles the life and coaching career of what I consider one of the greatest college football coaches of all time. It is a book I will certainly pick and read many many times. Darrell Royal was known for espousing words of wisdom and the book is full of his quotes. While the quotes were typically spoken in the context of football, many of them can be thought about in a much broader context.

During my first read through the book, I came across one particular quote that as soon as I read I knew it was the start of a blog entry.

“Climbing is a thrill. Maintaining is a bitch.”

The quote was said in the context of the thrill of building up a winning football program and the huge challenges that must be overcome to maintain that football program at a consistently high level. Recent football seasons have proven that to be the case – just look at the recent struggles of USC, Auburn and my beloved Longhorns. All three have gone from being National Champions during the past decade to having average or below average teams in the past couple of years.

However, when I read it I thought about the challenges faced everyday by IT organizations. On a frequent basis I read white papers about the percentage of an IT organization’s budget and resources that is spent on day-to-day operations versus spent on implementing new technology to improve and benefit the business. Many of these papers peg that breakdown at around 80% on “keeping the lights on” and 20% on moving the business forward. I recently heard the CIO at Dell proudly state that they run around the 70-30 mark.

When you see figures like 70-80% of IT resources being consumed on maintaining the existing environment, you can see how one could agree with the idea that “maintaining is a bitch.” I know I can relate to that idea.

Maintaining a complex IT environment is challenging. While many technologist want to ignore the existing and just focus on the thrill of rolling out the new technology, I think there is value in having staff that see the value in maintaining what is already installed. Especially when that staff takes the concept of maintaining to a different level of not just being content with the “as is” but instead look for ways to make the maintaining more efficient and more effective.

I have worked with many talented technology professionals that were consumed with just working on new stuff. They never wanted to spend time on maintaining what was built. It was build, build, build all the time. During my stint in the Big 4 Consulting world, the climbers were everywhere – me included. We were all about the thrill of the implementation.

However, as I moved out of the consulting world and into corporate IT, I started to appreciate the maintainers. This appreciation grew when the economy slowed down and then dipped, and then dipped again. While talented, many of the “I just want to work on new” employees in our IT organization were near the top of the list for staff reductions. Meanwhile the “maintainers with a twist of efficiency” types became the rock stars of IT. Even as business picks up, I still find these employees to be extremely valuable. In my eyes, employees that are finding ways to maintain the technology environment in more effective and efficient ways are not only brining stability to the business, they are also innovating. They are finding ways to reduce the cost of maintaining so that there is more capital available for pure innovation.

Now don’t get me wrong, businesses need technology climbers. The climbers take us to new heights through implementing bold new technology. However, once we reach those new heights, we need to the maintainers to keep as from tumbling back down the mountain.

Is maintaining IT a bitch? I think so. I am just happy that some people like dealing with the “bitch.”

Oh and one more thing: Hook’em Horns!!

No Slam Dunks – An Update on the Qwest for IT Perfection

Published August 27, 2012 Information Technology 2 Comments

You may have recalled that way back in January of this year, I started a campaign within my company to eliminate self-inflicted technology outages. The slogan for the campaign was “There are No Slam Dunks in IT.” After a rocky start in January and February, our team got on a roll and posted an impressive 190 days without a self induced outage.

During this time we made numerous changes within our environment. We added new locations; we upgraded major network infrastructure within our data centers; we replaced telephone systems; we virtualized servers like crazy; and we did a major email/collaboration platform upgrade. Through it all we followed our steps of good change management. We planned. We communicated. We executed. We tested. We communicated. It was a beautiful site to see.

But I noticed something as the days started piling up. Slowly but surely the confidence of the team swelled. Unfortunately it swelled to a point, where it felt like as a team we began to think that there were indeed “slam dunks in IT.” It seemed the more success we had, the more corners we cut. We slid in extras during maintenance windows. We stopped doing some of the double checks we were doing earlier in the year. Our communications lacked sufficient details. We were still following our change management steps, but to some extent we started going through the motions. We reached a point of being too confident.

After a few near misses in early August, our streak of days without a self-inflicted outage came to an end last week and two days later we stumbled again. While you never like to have outages, I was almost relieved that we stumbled. I wish it had just been one stumble and not two, but I think the issues brought our team back down to earth and reminded us that we have to continue to be diligent in following our change management processes. It highlighted that going through the motions doesn’t cut it.

We have reset the clock, but I am confident that we can once again get on a good roll of days without IT causing an outage. I just hope this time around the confidence does not go to our heads because Slam Dunks aren’t allowed on this court!!

Hey! You! Should You Be on That Cloud?

Published May 11, 2012 Information Technology , Risk Management 1 Comment
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I said, Hey! You! Get off of my cloud

Hey! You! Get off of my cloud

Hey! You! Get off of my cloud

Don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd on my cloud, baby

 I am fairly certain that Mick and the boys were not singing about today’s clouds – computing clouds that is.  I guess they could have been advocating private clouds, but I highly doubt it.   However, if any of the Stones were current day CIOs, they might be singing “Hey, you! Should you be on THAT cloud?”

It seems these days that everybody in business has a cloud, is on a cloud or wants to be on a cloud.  It feels like every tech article I read, every discussion I have with my technology partners, every request I get from my internal business partners includes the cloud word or one of the “X” as a service phrases – where “X” = software, platform, infrastructure. In fact I just read about a new company that has created a SaaS offering for farmers – not exactly an industry synomonous with leading edge technology.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love this cloud stuff.  I have even gone on record as saying I would love to one day be the CIO of a company that has no data centers and owns no servers.  But that day is not today – but its getting closer everyday.

There is still much to be sorted out with these clouds.  While I meet with company after company that wants to talk about sellling me a cloud, not one of them wants to talk about how to manage them.  How do you best evaluate the risks associated with cloud computing?  How do you keep non-IT parts of the business from jumping on every cloud that drifts by them without fully thinking through all the ramifications of doing so? Without strong governance you have cloud chaos.  In my part of the world, out of control clouds are called thunderstorms.  While thunderstorms can bring much needed rain, they can also cause a large amount of upredictable damage.

To avoid the thunderstorms of cloud computing, companies must implement comprehensive cloud management procedures throughout the organization.  The non-IT parts of the business need to include IT in the evaluation, selection and implementation of all cloud-based services.  At the same time, IT cannot be the “department of NO” in an effort to keep everything within the four walls of the corporate data center.  In addition, any ventures into the cloud need to involve those dreaded people in legal/contracts departments and whatever role(s) within the company responsible for risk management functions.

An easy place to start with cloud governance is to create and publish a simple “X as a Service” risk assessment form.  The form asks 15-20 basic questions about the proposed cloud offering.  The group within the company that is driving the effort completes the form and submits to the InfoSec or similar group within the company. The information about the proposed service is reviewed and where needed additional information can be requested.  Where needed, the Infosec team can engage other functions – legal, privacy, finance, etc. – within the company to obtain specific feedback.  It’s not an overly elaborate process, but it gets information about the use of cloud computing flowing through the organization and rasies awareness about potential risks associated with such services.  Once risks are identified, efforts can be undertaken to address those risks and beging enjoying the benefits of the cloud.

Not all clouds are created equal – so make sure you choose wisely.  If after looking at a cloud offering, there is a level of doubt about it, stop and ask yourself, “what would Mick do?”

No Slam Dunks in IT Update

Published April 2, 2012 Information Technology Leave a Comment

As you may recall, one of my first entries on this blog – way back on January 31 – was about change management. It was there that I introduced the “It’s Been X days since our last self-inflicted outage” ticker. At the time, we were sitting at 19 days without an incident and from there we were able to extend that counter for another 15, almost 16 days. Unfortunately, around February 15 we had to reset that counter due to some missteps in executing a series of SAN migrations and some missteps in communicating the impact and subsequent resolution to the impacted parties. In short we failed to follow through on two of the five change management steps established at the beginning of the year, we did not execute flawlessly and we did not provide timely communication after the change.

For those of you that missed that early on entry or if you just have a hard time remembering things you have read in the past 90 days, here are those five simple steps again:

Plan – make sure each change action/project we undertake is well thought out, steps are documented, risks are assessed. If disruption in service is expected, plan for when we make this change to limit the impact of the disruption.

Communicate – communicate each change action/project to the parties potentially impacted prior to executing the change

Execute – flawlessly execute according the plan developed

Test - test to make sure that the change executed resulted in the expected results and there are no unintended consequences from the change

Communicate – communicate to the potentially impacted parties that the change has been completed and tested

;

It seems so simple – just five little things to do for each change. While we still have a ways to go, we are doing a much better job of managing and executing changes. I have seen and heard much more discussions within the IT teams about potential impacts of proposed changes and much more thought around the best time to execute the change and who/what to communicate about the change. In addition, the execution of the recent changes we have made has been flawless. Since February 15th, we have been on a pretty good roll and are going on 45 days without one of those dreaded self-inflicted outages and the painful clock reset that goes along with it. I am not sure how much longer we will go without an incident, but I am happy with the improvement I have seen in how everyone on the team approaches changes. The planning, the communication and most importantly the execution is the best I have seen in years.

As part of our continued focus in this area, I wanted to do something fun to reinforce the idea of “No Slam Dunks in IT” that I reintroduced to the team in January. Since I am a basketball junkie and it is that time of year when many of “mad” for college hoops, I decided what would be better than sending each person in IT a basketball emblazoned with our company logo AND our “No Slam Dunks in IT” logo. So last week, IT staff around the globe received a little gift to help drive home the focus on change management.

Now I hadn’t budgeted for buying and sending out basketballs to 100 or so people, so I might get a question or two from our CFO who just happens to be my boss as well. But, if it helps drive home the ideas we have been pushing for the past 90 days and it results in avoiding even one self-inflicted outage then the payback on this little “fun expense” will be huge.

Oh and since I am a hoops junkie, I will leave you with my prediction for tonight’s national title game: Kansas 74 – Kentucky 71. What can I say? I am a Big XII-II homer. Rock Chalk Jayhawk!!!!

Post game update: so much for my hoops prediction. But I think I am still right on about change management.

Slam Dunks: No Such Thing in IT

Published January 31, 2012 Information Technology 1 Comment
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There are No Slam Dunks in IT.

That’s a saying I have thrown around for close to 10 years now. But one that I think too many people in technology fail to remember on a daily basis. They get caught up in the urgency of the moment, short cut change management procedures, fail to think about the downstream impact of what they see as a minor, isolated change. All too often the mindset of “the easy change,” “the lay-up,” or “the routine lazy fly ball” ends up as an unexpected outage. That break away slam dunk clanks off the rim and bounces out of bounds. That easy two points turns into a turnover.

As we kicked off 2012, a relatively new to the company network engineer noticed that a top of rack server switch had two fiber uplinks but only one was active. Anxious to make a good impression, he wanted to resolve that issue. It was an admiral thing to do. He was taking initiative to make things better. So one night during the first week of the fresh new year, he executed a change to bring up the second uplink. Things did not go well as the change, and I will not go into the gory technical details, brought down the entire data center network. It was after standard business hours – whatever that means in today’s 24×7 business world – but the impact of that 10 minutes outage was significant. A classic case of a self-inflicted wound from not following good change management procedures.

It was actually a frustrating incident for me, because as we put together the 2012 Business Plan for Corporate Technology Services, we were asked to list the keys to success for our operations and the actions we needed to take achieve success.

THE #1 key for success listed was: Avoid self-inflicted outages and issues that take away cycles from the planned efforts and cause unplanned unavailability of our client facing solutions.

So 30 days prior I had told our CEO, CFO and the rest of the executive management team that our #1 key to success in IT was to avoid such things, yet here I was four days into the new year staring at the carnage of a self-inflicted outage.

Outages are close to a given in the world of technology. Servers will crash, switches will randomly reboot, hard drives will fail, application will act weird, redundancy will fail, and there will be maintenance efforts that we know will cause outages. Given that, every IT organization must take steps to not be the cause of even more outages. Business leaders know that there will be some level of downtime with technology – have you ever seen a 100% SLA? Rarely. It usually some 99.xx% number. But outages that are caused by the very people charged with keeping things running drives them nuts, and rightfully so.

The morning after that self-inflicted wound, I communicated out the following to every member of the IT organization:

We need to strive to make sure that we are not the cause of any unexpected outages. We must exercise good change management process and follow the five actions listed above. As our solutions and the underlying infrastructure become increasingly intertwined, we must make an extra effort to assess the potential unintended downstream (or upstream) impact as we plan the change.

When making a change we must always follow these steps:

Plan – make sure each change action/project we undertake is well thought out, steps are documented, risks are assessed. If disruption in service is expected, plan for when we make this change to limit the impact of the disruption.

Communicate – communicate each change action/project to the parties potentially impacted prior to executing the change

Execute – flawlessly execute according the plan developed

Test - test to make sure that the change executed resulted in the expected results and there are no unintended consequences from the change

Communicate – communicate to the potentially impacted parties that the change has been completed and tested

To keep this goal of avoiding self-inflicted outages top of mind, we implemented a ‘It’s Been X Days Since our Last Self-Inflicted Outage” counter. Basically taking a page out of the factory accident prevention playbook.

We had to reset it once after we implemented it, but we are now at 19 days and counting. Let’s hope that the next reset is no time soon.

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