Category: Solution Architecture

IT Investment Apathy

View from the TopI have found myself in a number of discussions over the last few days when people have expressed significant apathy about the value of IT investments. The apathy normally centres around the potential business benefits of making the investment. In clear terms people are saying that they are very skeptical about any claims of benefits from any IT investment.

This isn’t a new thing – we seem to have had nearly 5 years now when people’s focus has primarily been on cost reduction. But I had thought a few months ago that we were starting to see the glimmers of a change, a change towards focussing on value and innovation.

Is it just the people I am speaking to who are having the problem seeing the value or is this something that we are all facing?

Even when there is very clear benefit and lots of research, people just don’t believe it. My current example of this is the use of multiple monitors. There is loads of research which says that people gain significant productivity benefits by having more than one monitor. If I was specifying hardware I would insist on all desktop devices having two video outputs and purchase an extra monitor for every refreshed device. Unfortunately everyone I speak to is focussed on providing the cheapest standard desktop that they can. The problem is that this focus on cost closes the gate on the productivity gains from having multiple monitors.

If IT has become seen as a cost rather than a value then we have to do something to change it?

Am I just talking to the wrong people?

Telepresence – Video Conferencing V3.0?

Formby BeachOn this day when one of the important people in the world (Tony Blair) will be talking to another bunch of important people (the Iraq Enquiry) over a “video link” I thought I would talk about the latest iteration of “video link” – “telepresence”.

If you can take major global decisions over a “video link” why does anyone travel anywhere?

Once upon a time companies invested loads of money in ISDN links and dedicated video conferencing equipment in an attempt to get their staff to travel less and to be more responsive. Many of them had a flurry of activity, training people how to use the specialist equipment. Once the facility became available the rooms where the equipment was housed were fully booked, but bit by bit the poor unsuspecting video conferencing equipment became neglected and unused.  People found that the rewards for seeing someone on a screen were not high enough compared to the hassle of setting the conference up, getting the room booked and getting everything working. We discovered that voice was “good enough”.

The other week I was in a customer office and passed a set of five “video conferencing” rooms, in each of these rooms the equipment wasn’t even cabled in. I asked one of my colleagues there how long it had been like this. The answer “Ever since we moved in months ago”.

A few dedicated followers still use specialist video conferencing equipment but for most of us Video Conferencing Version 1.0 came and went.

Having discovered that it was too much hassle getting the dedicated equipment working we decided to try a different route. “Why don’t we give everyone a camera and then they can sit at their desk and be part of the conference?” we thought. But network bandwidth was limited, and cameras were expensive, and screens were only small. Each of us tried out desktop video conferencing, each of us thought it was great for a few minutes before we thought “what’s the point?”.

Most people I know have a USB connected camera somewhere in there desk or at their house; most of them are sat in boxes gathering dust.

Loads of kids still video conference their buddies but for the rest of us Video Conferencing Version 2.0 came and went.

Many products take until version 3.0 to be useful, could Video Conferencing be one of them?

Over the last few months a flurry of announcements and commentary has been expended on the new buzz word- “telepresence” (or Video Conferencing Version 3.0?).

If you haven’t a clue what I am talking about you should watch one of the many videos that are available (here, here, here).

At the same time the desktop video conferencing arena is going through a change as the quality is getting better and better.

But will these changes make us use it? Why didn’t I use video conferencing before?

This is a purely personal perspective, but I have heard others express similar views.

The face-to-face element of face-to-face meetings are overrated. The amount of personal effort I am willing to expend to get the face-to-face experience is very small. I normally work from home and using a telepresence type facility would require me to undertake some travelling. I’d need some convincing before I could see the value in the effort required. I’m one of a growing number of people in this situation. What I actually want is a far more realistic “around the piece of paper” experience. I want to be able to share a piece of paper and voice far more than to be able to share a face. I’d actually be more interested in sharing my hands than my face.

There are occasions when face-to-face is very important. They tend to be meetings within a particular context (negotiations, interviewing) but I don’t personally spend all day in those type of meetings.

There are some things that I do want from something I would call telepresence, especially when I’m working from home. I want to feel like I am in a team and I think that video could play a huge part in that. I want to feel that I am sat with a bunch of colleagues whom I could look at and ask for help in a way that is far less intrusive than Instant Messaging or the telephone. I suppose what I am asking for is ambient presence.

Scavenging and Understanding

DovedaleOnce upon a time I had time to craft answers to problems, I would investigate them get into the roots of them, immerse myself in them and know that the answer was indeed the answer.

It is getting increasingly difficult to do.

I don’t think it’s only me.

The Internet has turned us into scavengers. Whatever the problem, whatever the situations, someone on the Internet has an opinion on it. Quite often those opinions are good opinions, but they stop us looking further, they stop us short of actual understanding. My field is hardware and software, but if this was reading it would be like moving from Shakespeare to Mills and Boon, the words are the same, the subjects are the same, but they just don’t go as deep.The Internet has allowed us to find an answer much quicker, but the vastness of the information available stops us doing the ward work of getting to an understanding.

I have been in numerous conversations with people when I have been given phrases like “Microsoft say that most of the problems they see are to do with name resolution, therefore, we need to check name resolution”. The statement is valid, but in the situation, the context, when it is used it is often completely invalid. The statement is used without understanding. A similar one is “This system is so flaky, we need to rebuild it and start from scratch”. Starting again may indeed be the correct answer, but when I challenge the flakiness and try to get to the bottom of it I find very little real evidence that a whole series of problem warrant a rebuild. What is really being said is different, what is really being said is that we don’t understand this thing, so if we create something new we might have a better chance of understanding it. The problem is that rebuilding something doesn’t normally help with understanding.

Understanding is hard work, there are no short-cuts to it.

The other day I mentioned that Microsoft have started making VHD of their products available for evaluation purposes. Some of them are limited to 30 days. 30 days is long enough to look at the gloss, but it’s certainly not long enough to gain an understanding.

How do I gain understanding:

  • I start with the principles – why is something built like this. Quite often it’s been built like that because of history – so what’s the history?
  • I try to understand all of the elements – there’s no point in understanding the software if you don’t understand the hardware. I normally do this by applying knowledge I already have, but I also read a lot.
  • I focus on the dependencies – if things are dependent, why are they dependent? I try to do this with real test systems. If I take out a component what happens?
  • I assume that nothing works exactly the way it is supposed to. Software is great at doing what it is supposed to do when it is in a nicely tuned test-bed; it rarely works the same in real life.
  • I meddle outside of my remit. I have a remit, I am an architect so I’m not supposed to look at real software, or real hardware – rubbish. If I’m going to understand why something is as it is I need to meddle with the real thing.
  • I read broadly, I don’t just read within my context, I try to gain an understanding of the broader principles at play. It’s all about understanding “why?”

How do you gain understanding?

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Motorola buys Good

Sudbury HallThe mobile technology market continues to consolidate, and Motorola seem to be doing most of it.

This time it’s Good Technology.

It’s an interesting buy because the primary benefit of Good has always been it’s cross-platform support.

Alongside other purchases (most significantly that of Symbol) Motorola would appear to be making a significant bet on the move to mobile. Interestingly they are trying to provide an integrated stack and not just consolidate devices (for instance). Enterprises like to be in a position where they can purchase everything from one vendor, and Motorola might just be that vendor in the future.

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Next Generation Evaluation – Microsoft VHD Test Drive

CottageOver the years I have evaluated (played with) lots of different software products. One of the reasons I believe that desktop software took off was that it was easy to evaluate. There was no need to have lots of expensive hardware available, you could just stick it on your PC and see whether it did what you wanted it to do,and whether it looked nice.

Server software is more difficult to evaluate, because it requires a server. The problem with much Microsoft software is that it is becoming increasing interlinked. All of this interlinking means that you don’t just need one server, you need a few. thankfully operating system virtualisation came to the rescue and allowed us all to run multiple server instances on one piece of hardware, but there was still a huge investment to be made in maintaining this environment.

Over the last few days Microsoft have provided some assistance to all of us testers by making a whole set of evaluation Virtual Hard Disk images available via the VHD Test Drive programme. The theory here is wonderful for anyone who evaluates server software. Instead of me having to create a set of server images, deploy all of the pre-requisite software and then finally get around to looking at the application I actually want to look at, I can download some images, start them in Virtual Server and then get straight into the evaluation.

Beyond that Microsoft are working with other vendors to get their software available via the same route.

“We expect more than 20 partners to begin distributing their software via the VHD Test Drive Program later this quarter, including Altiris, BEA Systems, Check Point, Citrix, CommVault, Dell, FullArmor, HP, Network Appliance, Platespin, Portlock, Quest Software, SourceCode Technology Holdings, Symantec and UGS.”

I have a few reservations. If I’m evaluating software I do like to get into the nuts-and-bolts of how the software is installed and configured. You need to trust that the vendors have delivered their software in a standard way and that the VHD hasn’t been heavily customised. The other issue is that the evaluation period on some of the products is a bit stingy.

The big change to come, though, will be the availability of software for production use via this route.

The Commercialisation of Open Source

Autumn TreeYesterday Novell and Microsoft make an announcement of a partnership. Previously Oracle made an announcement about support for Red Hat.

It would seem from these announcement that the next wave of commercialisation of a sector of Open Source has begun. Simon Phipps of Sun had an interesting angle on the story.

I have to admit that I don’t understand all of the wheels within wheels here. The complexity is the issue though. Each time something like this happens it creates confusion and most corporates hate confusion.

The people that really get hurt by the confusion are the small organisations seeking to make their presence felt – I’d include Novell and Red Hat in this. Oracle and Microsoft are the real winners here with HP, IBM and Sun doing very nicely too.

It’s really difficult being in the middle. The small business and personal users of Open Source software don’t want to pay for support, the larger organisations need stability and will keep, for the most part, with tried and trusted suppliers.

Red Hat and Novel, if you want to survive you need to create stability and remove all the confusion.

Why?

Pendle HillI haven’t written much lately so I thought I would get back into the swing of things with a pointless post with a pointless question.

I often ask the question “why?”

Why would you want to do that?

Why doesn’t something work right?

And then I see things like the device that uses waves to “print” on the surface of water and the “why’s” just come flooding out.

There are so many of them that I can’t be bothered to write them down. Nice technology though.

Microsoft Marketing and Packaging for Vista and Office 2007

Stoneyhurst CollegeA little while ago there was a video around that parodied the way that Microsoft did its marketing and packaging when compared to iPod marketing.

The new packaging for Vista and Office 2007 looks pretty good.

Centralisation Myths?

Sand ArtCentralisation is everywhere.

  • Call centres are points of centralisation.
  • IT is constantly trying to pull everything back to the data centre.
  • Many business functions are centralised.
  • Organisations outsource so they can get the benefits of centralisation.

Why? There are normally two reasons and they are the usual business reasons – cost and quality. Functions done centrally are supposed to be more cost effective than those done in a distributed fashion. Centralisation allows specialisation which should lead to an increase in quality.

If there is a quality problem, or a need to reduce costs the first mechanism that people turn to it centralisation.

The increase in quality and the reduction in cost is regarded as a certainty.

It’s almost become a business mantra – “I must centralise”.

I am personally becoming increasingly skeptical about centralisation.

I feel that I should declare my experience here. Throughout my nearly 20 years in IT I have been involved in a number of centralisation activities; centralisation to a data centre on a site, then to a data centre in a country, then to global data centres. I have also been involved in IT help desks. When I was a new graduate I would man the help desk for two afternoons a week. I watched on as the help desk went from supporting a site, then to supporting a number of sites within a country, then a country, eventually it supported a number of different customers across different time zones.

I’m not doubting that these activities reduced costs, though none of them gained the cost reductions people were hoping for. There was also a change in quality but it not dramatic and not on every measure.

So why am I skeptical?

My main area of skepticism is caused by one word – change. These centralised entities are terrible at responding to change.

They naturally become highly integrated within themselves

The help desk naturally consolidates to a single set of systems. That is how costs are reduced after all. The consolidation of the systems creates cost reduction and increases the quality. That is until something comes along which drives change. Lots of small systems, each running independently can change when they need to change. There doesn’t need to be a huge requirement to change. When a huge integrated system exists change becomes more and more difficult. Where change is difficult change will either stop, or the cost of change will be dramatic.

People forget that change is inevitable.

The same is also true for IT systems. Changing a single system that does a single role is far easier than one large system that handles lots of roles. I’m sure that some people believe that if the cost of changing one system with one role is X then the cost of changing one system with lots of roles (Y) is less than X * Y. In my experience it’s more than X * Y it’s more like X * 1.5Y.

Because change is difficult it happens rarely. When it does occur the change ends up being massive, it’s normally not possible to change a single entity. The system has coalesced and for one thing to change, lots of things have to change. It’s become a chain reaction. Between the massive changes, though, the quality of services is constantly decreasing as the service delivered becomes further and further from the service required.

I’m not suggesting that we throw out the baby with the bath water here. What I am advocating is that we approach consolidation in a more pragmatic manner. Rather than blindly following the centralisation mantra we should evaluate the centralisation option knowing that change is inevitable and plan for it. In planning for it we may discover that centralization isn’t actually the correct option.

 

Turn-off and tidy-up

Standing stonesToday Lifehacker has an article entitled “Top time-management tricks” which highlights this statement in Realtor Magazine:

“When I start to feel overwhelmed with clutter, whether it’s on my desk or in my home, I take a short block of time — 20 to 45 minutes — and I turn off all communication; I let voice mail take over. Then I just attack the pile. I’m always amazed at how much I can accomplish in this short period.”

Prior to reading this post I actually did just that. I’ve had a stack of document to review and stuff coming at me from all angles right the way through last week (and weekend). The result was a desk that was a tip and absolutely no focus on what I was doing.

Tidying through the clutter I cleared a whole load of actions off my to-do list. I did add a few extra back in, but these were ones I had been carrying in my head, getting them down on paper made me feel like I was getting rid of even more clutter. I’ve tried to be methodical and to keep my desk tidy, but I’m not that organised, particular when the pressure is on. Taking time out to tidy up makes all the difference to how I feel.

Following I tidy up I often feel the need to change my working practice a little too.

 

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Is change difficult?

Formby BeachOver on Thinking Faster, Jeffrey Phillips is trying to challenge some of our thinking about change.

I have long puzzled why some change is easy and some change is more difficult, particularly corporate change. Previously I thought the issue was communication and understanding. If we communicate well enough to people they will understand why the change needs to happen and then it will go more easily. I then  discovered how difficult communication is. Even when vast amounts of effort were expended on communication, the change still wasn’t easy.

Jeffrey suggests that the issue is really choice and control:

“I think this is driven by choice.  I can choose to change my diet or route to work.  I can even choose to change my career.  However, I want some control when change is forced upon me, and I suspect that many other people feel the same way.  The reason people resist change in organizations is not because they can’t change, and really not because they fear change, but because the individuals don’t control what’s happening.”

My experience is that choice and control are part of the story, but that they feed into a bigger issue – felt need. To put it more specifically – do I feel like I need what this change gives me. I’ve deliberately used the word “feel” here, it’s not whether I actually need the thing that this change is giving me, it’s whether I feel that I need this thing. A child feels the need for the favourite toy as much as the need for a glass of water, but they don’t actually need the favourite toy. Adults aren’t too different.

Asking people to take control and to give them a choice about when and how increases their feeling of need. They’ve put something of themselves into something, so they must need it. Giving a child more than one favourite toy is one way of removing their reliance upon one.

Communication is difficult because people will only engage with the communication if they feel they are going to need it. Most people read communications from the Tax Man because the likelihood of need is quite high, fewer people read the leaflet selling double glazing unless you feel like you have a need for new glazing.

Talking of double glazing, a great example of felt need is one of my neighbours who replaced all of the glazing in his house (at significant cost) because he said that the house looked “tired”. He didn’t even try to convince me that it would save him money in the long-run (the usual way of justify a felt need). He felt that he needed to change the glazing, so did.

Quite often, though, the felt need and the actual need are blended together into a complex matrix. Clothes are probably the most interesting example of this. We change our clothes with the seasons (in the UK we do anyway), and we change them because they get worn out. We also change our clothes because fashions change, what we regard as looking good changes. Because of this merged set of actual needs and felt needs there is a whole industry desperately helping us to change. They’re not telling us (directly) that we need to change, we are because we feel the need. One of the actual needs to change our clothes is that they get worn out – but there is very little information from the clothes industry on how long a piece of clothing will last. The reason for this is that one of our felt needs for change normally kicks in before the clothing has actually become worn out. We even see clothing that doesn’t fulfil the actual need, but the felt need is so strong that people wear it.

I’ve been involved in a lot of IT change. Most of this change has been very painful. In most cases we have focussed 100% of our effort on the actual need, and spent a minimal amount of time trying to understand the felt needs. I remember the commotion that one particular lady created by insisting on keeping her current monitor during a desktop refresh programme. Why? Because this monitor had all sorts of stickers on it that this lady felt she needed. The was an actual need to replace the monitor, it was worn out and probably hurting her eyes, but the felt need was far stronger.

We need to get smarter at trying to create a felt need; choice and control seem like good tools to use in this quest.

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A Free Software Adventure

Lilacland: Grandad inspects another local art installationOver the last few months I’ve been working on a project in my spare time. This project has been a departure for me because it has been for a charitable organisation where the terms of reference have been significantly different.

I’m used to situations where the questions of cost v benefit are defined in pounds and dollars.

I’m used to working in situations where the requirements specification is reasonably well understood (well sometimes anyway).

I’m used to large scale situations.

As a diversion from all of these, this project has been fun. It’s had a life of its own and hasn’t finished yet, but I thought I would share where I am up to.

The project in question is the web site for the church we attend Fulwood Free Methodist Church.

The first question I had was this: “What is a church web site supposed to do?” We had some key aims that we wanted to achieve, but apart from two or three basic things this was a journey of discovery.

My architecture skills helped (a little) with this journey; it helped me to break the problem down into a number of different areas:

  • Audience – What was the primary audience for the site?
  • Content – Where was the content going to come from? What type of content was it?
  • Freshness – How was everything going to stay current and fresh?
  • Technology – What technology were we going to use?

It was obvious early on that we needed to have some sort of content management system and to move away from one person being responsible for all of the technology, the content and its freshness. I looked around at a few Open Source Content Management Systems and settled on Joomla. This was a few months ago and it wasn’t 100% clear at that time whether Joomla was going to take off, but thankfully it has. We already had an agreement with a hosting company which included MySQL and PHP included, so that was the easy part.

The next thing to tackle was the audience and to structure the content around the audience. We concluded that our primary audience were those people who didn’t attend, with church attendees being a secondary audience. With that we did a bit of brain storming around the type of questions that someone not attending might ask:

  • What is on?
  • What should I expect when I visit?
  • etc.

We also wanted to make future events and important content visually up at the front.

Joomla has a concept of Sections, Categories and Items. Items are created in Categories which are within Sections. Any item can then appear on the front page along with selected modules. Modules provide added functionality like a calendar or a document management capability, or a banner. This is then all displayed in a template.

Since starting we have constructed the main site and sorted out the structure. We have also sorted out most of the content, though there is more content to come.

The next challenge was how to make things more interactive. Being a blogger I am now encouraging the church staff to get blogging. Joomla is a bit clunky when it comes to blogging so I decided to make a break from Joomla for blogging and to add WordPress into the mix. Have WordPress alongside Joomla also allowed me to put the mechanics in for podcasting the Sunday Talks.

Although very different to Joomla, WordPress has a similar set of concepts and structures.

So without spending any money on software we created a web presence that:

  • Is interactive through feedback and comments
  • Stays fresh with time based material
  • Controlled making some information available to everyone and some only available to registered users.
  • Allows multiple people to update it so I don’t have to do it all.
  • Allows changes to the theme without messing about with the content.
  • Continues to be extended with new components, modules and widgets.
  • Supports subscription
  • Supports documents

A big thank you goes out to all of those people working away at producing this software so that the rest of us get such great functionality for the best possible price.

It’s been great fun learning something new.

Go and have a look and let me know what you think www.fulwoodfmc.net.