Ramblings

The Key to IT Success Is Simple. Listen More.

Don MacVittie — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:54:51 GMT

Ever try to explain something to a three year old that they don’t want to hear? It’s a chore. They change the subject, try to ignore you, turn away, and as a last defense, start asking “why?” a lot.

It is amusing that IT often suffers the same issues. Really. We’re adults, but at the root of the problem, they’re basically the same. When a customer says “We need fluff!” IT often responds with “We don’t support fluff, try some cotton balls instead”.

The other situation that I find massive parallels in is the guy that simply knows everything. When you try to talk to him, he’s so excited to get his point across that he’ll talk over you, rambling on about the topic – or more often a tangent of the topic – and never hear you.

IT does that too. A lot.

Funny thing is that we’ve made several attempts to resolve these issues but have largely – even today - failed. The rest of the world figures this stuff out. The aerodynamics specialist talks about the plusses and minuses of changing the engine design, but then works with whatever the decision is. Much of IT does the same. I’ve been on projects where the answer was “we must have product X because no one else does this one thing we need”, so we worked it out. But all to often that’s not how it works. We’ve created “Business Analyst” positions to put IT mindset closer to business users, we’ve implemented “UI Design” groups, “cross functional teams”, and still persist with “dotted line relationships” (though we mask that by calling them ‘virtual teams’), and yet, far too often we are still doing the same thing.

Now granted, IT is in a tough situation. There is a belief amongst business users that it’s easy. It is part of our job to make it look easy, but to educate when it isn’t. And that’s the key. Users don’t want to know the gory bits-n-bytes details, but they do want to have a vague idea of what takes so long, or why their choice for a streaming media server is not optimal in your existing environment.

All too often, understanding the why of user demands will give IT more tools to deal with the request. Talking about why the organization has standardized on Gil’s Gut Ripper for copying DVDs is not useful to the person for whom Gil’s Gut Ripper won’t work for some reason. But understanding their issues might illuminate why it doesn’t work, or spur ideas for how to get their information copied without supporting everything under the sun.

And it’s Christmas time in The Age Of The Tablet. I got my Android tablet from Lori a month or so ago, many more employees will be getting them. And they’re going to want to try them out at work. Some of them are at least. You need a plan for that, and to understand why. What do they hope to gain from the tablet that your thousands or millions of dollars of network and computer gear isn’t giving them? That’s the key to understanding how to serve them. If mobility is the issue, then the question might just be “what is VDI”. If non-work activity at work is the desire, then “It’s still our network, and you’re still on the clock” might be the answer, depending upon your org.

But, as I and many others have said over the years, the business doesn’t generally want an application, they want to be able to do something. That something pushes them at an application or hardware. Figuring out what they’re trying to do, and why the existing environment doesn’t do it is key to being successful.

Yes, some customers will act like the three year old or the know-it-all, but that doesn’t invalidate the needs of the rest of the company, and it’s certainly no excuse for IT staff to act that way.

Roll into the New Year with a commitment to listen. Indeed, a commitment to obey the proverb “Listen twice as much as you speak.” and solve business problems without acrimony. Or at least with as little as your organization can manage, some are far better at that than others.

And of course, invest in infrastructure that enables adaptability. That’s key too – the more you can do with your existing environment, the less often you’ll have to say no. It won’t solve every problem because you can’t have infinite adaptability and still do real work, but it will ease the pain a lot if your systems, apps, and network can adapt to the needs of the business readily.

This blog brought to you by the letter C and the number 12. :-)

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There’s growth, and then there’s growth.

Don MacVittie — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:23:50 GMT

At our annual sales conference, Lori and I sat in on a great presentation by coworker Dawn Parzych that talked about the Internet, usage, and patterns. There are two interesting statistics that she presented, and I’ve munged them to generate a combined statistic. Dawn is our Product Manager for acceleration, but the statistics I’m pulling out of her presentation are generic informational statistics. She mentioned her source, but alas, I didn’t write it down. Drop me a line if you simply must have it, and I’ll bug her for it.

Statistic one: Number of Internet Users, 1995 to present.

The numbers she quoted were 36 million in 1995 and 2.1 billion in 2011.

Note that the graphs used in this post are all mine, so I bear responsibility if they don’t match the text description.

As an interesting side note, they were all generated in Google Docs because Excel has lost the ability to make such a simple graphic without sacrificing a chicken.

While the graph was generated just with the end points, it no doubt would look much more exponential if I had data for every year in between these two. Still, you get the point, it’s going up pretty darned fast. That’s a 58x increase in 15 years, or an average of 3.89x per year.

But that’s just the starting graphic, there are more.

Statistic two: Average Number of Hours Spent Online per Month

This one is interesting also. The amount of time the average person spends online each month went from half an hour to twenty seven hours – a 54 times increase – in the same time-period. Now if you’re reading this blog, you might think “that’s too low, less than an hour a day”, but that’s because we work in high-tech. I know plenty of people who go days without so much as checking email. My oldest son, when discussing this statistic asked a lot of questions like “how’s that fall out by age?” and “Does that count time ‘online’ with things like the XBox and Wii?” To which, of course, I have no answer since it was a statistic I received in a presentation, but would be fun to pull out and play with. Exactly how does the graph look when age and other demographics are factored in? I suspect that while twenty-somethings were early adopters, at this point, things like Facebook have pulled the grandparents up to something close to the young adult levels – as long as pure gaming systems aren’t taken into account – but that’s a guess, not an evaluation of any type.

So that was all that Dawn had in the presentation – well, not all, there were a LOT more statistics in her presentation, but this is the series that grabbed my attention.

My first thought might have been yours… “What does that mean for user hours. Both are increasing at an astounding rate, how’s that hitting the old infrastructure?”

And so I generated that chart. Please remember that this is a multiplication of two averages, and doesn’t reflect year-over-year actual changes. If year to year data were available for both statistics, I suspect it would be very exponential. It’s not, because we’re just multiplying start and end figures. Still, check out the usage numbers for the Internet as a whole…

That is a whopping 3150 times increase in man hours per month spent online. Yeah, that’s a lot.

Think of what could be done with that number of man-hours. Not to say that all of this time is used unproductively, but it is certainly not all used productively, I can tell you about my six hours online every other week that is pure gaming, for example.

But more to the point, think of the resiliency of the Internet. It didn’t melt, as lots of people claimed it would. And when you factor in the increase in audio and video over the Internet 1996 to 2011, that really is kind of amazing. We should have had a lot more problems than we have.

Of course, I’d love to have the annual numbers, and will ask Dawn if I can have them to post an update. That will likely show the exponential nature much better than these do. Two data points do not a dataset make and all that.

But the point is clear, we’re adding a lot of bandwidth to the Internet, and you’re likely adding a fair share to your own Internet connection. I might know a company that can help with that… I DID mention that Dawn is our Web Acceleration PM too, right?

And all is still running pretty darned smoothly. Where there are issues, there are WAN Optimization and Web Acceleration technologies to help resolve them.

Any bets on what this graphic will look like in another 15 years? How big the numbers will be? Not from me, I figure we’re still in exponential growth stage, but won’t be for a full 15 years more.

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Remember When Hand Carts Were State Of The Art? Me either.

Don MacVittie — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:19:00 GMT

Funny thing about the advancement of technology, in most of the modern world we enshrine it, spend massive amounts of money to find “the next big thing”, and act as if change is not only inevitable, but rapid. The truth is that change is inevitable, but not necessarily rapid, and sometimes, it’s about necessity. Sometimes it is about productivity. Sometimes, it just plain isn’t about either.

Handcarts are still used for serious purposes in parts of the world, by people who are happy to have them, and think a motorized vehicle would be a waste of resources. Think on that for a moment. What high-tech tool that was around 20 years ago are you still using? Let alone 200 years ago. The replacement of handcarts as a medium for transport not only wasn’t instant, it’s still going on 100 years after cars were mass produced.

Handcart in use – Mumbai Daily

We in high-tech are constantly in a state of flux from this technology to that solution to the other architecture. The question you have to ask yourself – and this is getting more important for enterprise IT in my opinion – is “does this do something good for the company?” It used to be that IT folks could try out all sorts of new doo-dads just to play with them and justify the cost based on the future potential benefit to the company. I’d love to say that this had a powerful positive effect, but frankly, it only rarely paid off. Why? Because we’re geeks. We buy this stuff on our own dime if the company won’t foot for it, and our eclectic tastes don’t necessarily jive with the needs of the organization.

These days, the change is pretty intense, and focuses on infrastructure and application deployment architectures. Where can you run this application, and what form will the application take? Virtualized? Dedicated hardware? Cloud? the list goes on. And all of these questions spur thoughts about security, storage, the other bits of infrastructure required to support an application no matter where it is deployed.

These are things that you can model in your basement, but can’t really test out, simply because the architecture of an enterprise is far more complex than the architecture of even the geekiest home network. Lori and I have a pretty complex network in our basement, but it doesn’t hold a candle to our employers’ worldwide network supporting dev and sales offices on every continent, users in many languages, and a potpourri of access methods that must be protected and available.

Sometimes, change is simply a change of perspective. F5’s new iApps, for example, put the ADC infrastructure bits together for the application, instead of managing application security within the module that handles application security (ASM), it bundles security in with all of the other bits – like load balancing, SSL offload, etc – that an application requires. This is pretty powerful, it speeds deployment and troubleshooting because everything is in one place, and it speeds adding another machine because you simply apply the same iApp Template. That means you spin up another instance of the VM in question, tweak the settings, and apply the template already being used on existing instances, and you’re up.

Sometimes, change is more radical. Deploying to the cloud is a good example of this, and cloud deployments suffer for it. Indeed, private and hybrid clouds are growing rapidly precisely because of the radical change that public cloud can introduce. Cloud storage was so radical that very few were willing to use it even as most thought it was a good idea. Along came cloud storage gateways like our ARX Cloud Extender or a variety of others, and suddenly the weakness was ameliorated… Because the radical bit of cloud storage was simply that it didn’t talk like storage traditionally has. With a gateway it does. And with most gateways (check with your provider) you get compression and encryption, making the cloud storage more efficient and secure in the process.

But like the handcart, the idea that cloud, or virtualization, or consumerization must take hold overnight and you’re behind the times if you weren’t doing it yesterday are misplaced. Figure out what’s best for your organization, not just in terms of technology, but in terms of timelines also. Sure, some things, like support for the CEOs iPad will take on a life of their own, but in general, you’ve got time to figure out what you need, when you need it, and how best to implement it.

As I’ve mentioned before, at the cutting edge of technology, when the hype cycle is way overblown, that’s where you’ll find the largest number of vendors that won’t be around to support you in five years. If you can wait until the noise about a space quiets down, you’ll be better served, because the level of competition will have eliminated the weaker companies and you’ll be dealing with the technological equivalent of the Darwinian most fit. Sure, some of those companies will fail or get merged also, but the chances that your vendor of choice won’t, or their products will live on, are much better after the hype cycle.

After all, even though engine powered conveyances have largely replaced hand carts, have you heard of White Motor Company, Autocar Company, or Diamond T Company? All three made automobiles. They lived through boom and were swallowed in bust. Though in automobiles the cycle is much longer than in high-tech (Autocar started in the late 1800s and was purchased by White in the 1950s for example, who was purchased later by Audi), the same process occurs, so count on it. And no, I haven’t developed a sudden interest in automobile history, all of these companies thrived making half-tracks in World War Two, that’s how I knew to look for them amongst the massive number of failed car companies.

Stay in touch with the new technologies out there, pay attention to how they can help you, but as I’ve said quite often, what's in the hype cycle isn’t necessarily what is best for your organization.

1908 Autocar XV (Wikipedia.org)

Of course I think things like our VE product line and our new V.11 with both iApps and app mobility are just the thing for most organizations, even with those I will say “depending upon your needs”. Because contrary to what most marketing and many analysts want to tell you, it really is about your organization and its needs.

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RIP WinXP. Now, To The Future!

Don MacVittie — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:39:42 GMT

Last week, InformationWeek quoted a Microsoft manager as saying there was “No chance” Windows XP would get another stay of execution. This really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, it was only the backlash from enterprises that kept Microsoft from ending support for XP over the last several years.

So now that Windows XP support will no longer be available, it is time for even the most recalcitrant enterprises to consider their options. All of their options. The world is changing on us yet again, and the needs of tomorrow might not be the needs of the future. Or even the needs of today.

As always, I’ll preface this investigation with it’s your IT department, you know it best. Do what is best for your business. With that said, now I’ll tell you what I think you ought to consider – either now or in the near future.

There is a significant portion of your workforce that would do just as well with a tablet as with a laptop. Yes, I said that. And they know who they are. A simple question “would you give up your laptop if you had a tablet with remote storage?” should quickly clear up who those people are. Of course, you’ll have to make certain your applications will run on the tablets, but there are a variety of paths to get you from here to there.

There is another significant portion of your enterprise who would work just fine with Virtual Desktops. Yes, I said that too. Let’s face it, not everyone needs a top-of-the-line computer. I know, that’s blasphemy after the “PC revolution”, but it’s true. A huge percentage of your workforce wouldn’t even notice if they were working on a VDI infrastructure. There are a few classes of employee that would. Road Warriors with varying connection speeds might chafe at a VDI infrastructure, and some groups like application developers or a variety of engineers (the kind that do huge CAD files), but many in your organization are largely already working off of web apps that go over the network. From a performance perspective, that is not a huge difference from VDI.

And some people – digital artists, CAD/CAM specialists, developers and engineers (as I’ve mentioned) that have high memory and disk usage, are still going to need desktops.

But if you pair tablets with VDI, then your executives can check up on their current initiatives from their tablet after dinner – without having to go to a computer. If you think that’s not such a huge benefit, ask them how much more involved they would be off-hours if it was easier to do. The answer is lots. I’m not an executive, and I check my mail on my phone and tablet almost constantly in off-hours, but almost never go boot up my laptop to do the same. In fact, if I log into my laptop at night, it is because I received a message on one of those other two platforms that I need files on my hard-disk to answer (something VDI with universal clients would resolve, since your “desktop” could appear anywhere).

It is time to start thinking about how to handle your upgrade from Windows XP. And it is time to start considering the needs of your users in the next several years before upgrading. Things are changing, more tools to enable the business are available, and a broadly based upgrade is a good time to look into technologies that enable these tools for the benefit of your organization.

I’m writing this blog on XP, so here’s hoping our IT staff is reading my blog :-). Do I want VDI? I don’t know, since I’m in Green Bay (or sometimes Cincinnati) and our datacenters are on the West Coast of the US, I’m going to guess that my performance would suffer. But I am one of those users who, when not writing a bit of software to support a blog, could well work off of VDI. It hurt to admit that though. Just a little bit. I’d love to say “I develop all the time, not possible”, but I don’t. I develop on occasion, and could do it on my home machines if work went VDI. And while you can’t generally ask your employees to work on their home machines, you can ask them for an impartial assessment of their needs.

Perhaps a bit of cloud storage, along with VDI would resolve even some of the edge cases – though fair warning, if you’re planning on encrypting data in the cloud, you’ll need some form of decryption tool that will allow outside-the-network machines to decrypt. Which could be painful. Or even not possible since you’re talking multiple encrypt/decrypt locations and a single target store.

Personally, I think it is time for Windows XP to go the way of Windows 3.1 anyway. We are running Windows 7 or a Linux variant on all of our home machines, and yet for work I still have Windows XP. Time to let the ten-year-old go out and play.

And did I mention that F5 has some astoundingly cool VDI support? No? Okay, well that’s my marketing bit for the day. We do. And I’d love to try it out when our IT upgrades. Of course I have questions and concerns, but for some of us, that’s part of the fun!

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Take a Peer To Lunch. Regularly.

Don MacVittie — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:41:56 GMT

#F5Networks There is a wealth of information out there, don’t forget to tap into it.

Note: When I say “peers” and “lunch” throughout this blog, I am not only referring to IT management. No matter your position in the organization, gathering useful information is always a benefit. Though you’ll want management’s support for the bit where I suggest a two hour lunch. Some IT shops frown on that, even if it’s only occasionally.

In many industries, it is all about word of mouth. I’m not talking about tech-savvy industries that have just rediscovered this truth since Social Media made it impossible for them to ignore, I’m talking about industries for whom it has always been about word of mouth… Take lawn care, child care, and household maintenance for example. In all three cases, most people will hesitate to invite a stranger into their home (or give them access to their children) without a recommendation of someone they trust. This has always been the case, and savvy business people in these markets tend to know that. Once you get into a social circle, it can do good things for your business, if you do a good job. We don’t hesitate to share our likes and dislikes with our friends – offline – and in case you missed it, we don’t hesitate to share some of our likes and dislikes online.

The thing is that everyone is well served by this principal. While it is hard for a business to get started in such an environment, there is always someone who is willing to take a risk and hire without recommendations, and once they do, a good job can lead to more recommendations. Customers who want to be cautious get recommendations from friends in casual conversation, and don’t have to go hire someone they know little about. The trust of someone you trust is enough, in most cases, to settle your concerns.

Yet most people don’t take this trend into the workplace. At least not in most businesses bigger than a startup.

And that, IMO, is a mistake. I’ve heard people dismiss peer’s opinions as, well, opinionated. And of course they’re opinionated, but they’re also just like you – trying to solve problems for the business. The needs of one IT shop, even in a different industry, are often the needs of another. Particularly in regards to infrastructure items like databases, security, networking, and even the physical servers. When doing research into an area that is new for you or you are uncertain of, the first thing you should do is ask peers. Their advice – unlike analysts – is free, and it is forged in the same type of environment your advice would be. That makes it valuable in a way that most other advice is not.

Will they have favorites? Yes. You chose product X for a reason. If that reason is satisfied completely by product X, then you’re going to have good things to say about it. If that reason is not though, you’ll have bad things to say about it. The same is true exactly for your peers. But the advice – if properly framed – is invaluable, because it’s based on actual production experience.

So I would recommend that you take your local peers to lunch regularly, perhaps taking turns footing the bill, and make it a longer lunch. Not “longer than you usually take”, because Ramen between meetings is very quick, but along the lines of a couple of hours. It’s an investment in both networking and peer advice. Talking about things you’re looking into, without mentioning what the overall business project is, can offer up alternative views to the products you’re considering. And that can save both time and money.

Will the advice always suit your needs? No. That’s why I recommend it as the first thing you should do, not the only thing. You still have to do research with your own department’s needs in mind, but if your peer Leia, whom you’ve grown to trust over many lunches says “That company Empire? Yeah, they’re unresponsive and after the sale, their reps are very hostile”, then you have information that much research just isn’t going to turn up, but is important to the decision making process. If nothing else, it gives you something to watch for when negotiating the IT contract for Alderon.

And you’ll get lunch with peers, where you can share anecdotes, perhaps even make some life-long friends. Let’s face it, you’re not going to ask for and give advice for two hours solid, even if you only meet once a month (I recommend every two weeks, but that’s up to you). And no, I don’t recommend the big formal peer gatherings. A regular meeting with a small group will allow people to gradually let down their defenses and offer each other unfiltered advice.

Finding peers is easy. You know who they are – or at least some of them who know some of them. I wouldn’t make the group too big, our Geek Lunch Crowd topped out at around 12, and we still missed some great conversation because at ten or so it starts to splinter along the length of the table. But finding ten people who share your job but in other organizations should be easy. They’re not exactly hiding, and if you don’t know anyone to start this with, ask coworkers for suggestions.

Your business will be better served. I’ve seen these lunches answer vexing problems, serve up plenty of opinion, and offer an outlet for frustration with vendors, employers, contractors, and even family.

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Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

Don MacVittie — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:11:50 GMT

Yes indeed, today is the last Friday in July, making it System Administrator Appreciation Day, that day when you offer a small thanks to the SysAdmin that keeps your systems running while you’re worrying about the apps or the storage or the security.

Seriously, these are people who have to know a little bit of everything IT just so they can do their jobs. Most know how to program, most have decent security chops, most can allocate storage, most know how to create, start, and bounce VMs, and all of them know about systems. But we don’t often take a few seconds to tell them thanks. They’re not hanging over our databases insuring our data integrity like DBAs (another poorly appreciated lot of geniuses) do, but without SysAdmins we wouldn’t need DBAs.

So take a bit of time, tell them thank you, try not to remind them that they’ll be learning a lot more about Cloud Computing than they ever wanted in the next 12-18 months, and offer them a Mountain Dew. Of course they drink Mountain Dew. Maybe diet, but no SysAdmin would be caught drinking some other soda, right? Right?

No matter what else happens, they’ll be there. If your company outsources your entire IT staff, guess who’s going to be turning off the lights for the last time in the datacenter? When something breaks in the middle of the night, guess whom the helpdesk calls first? When things are going astoundingly well, guess whose contribution, though it is foundational to any project, is least recognized while the app and network guys are partying? Yep. The SysAdmin.

So give ‘em a slap on the back, thank ‘em for what they do, and try not to point out that this is likely the last positive feedback they’ll be getting from you until the last week of July next year. ;-)

To our Rockstar F5 Sysadmins that always seem to keep us up and running no matter how crazy things get or how many problems crop up at once, “THANK YOU. Talk to you again soon – like in about twelve months, cool?”

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Users and IT Change. Think of it like rehabilitation.

Don MacVittie — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:05:44 GMT

My mother recently had hip replacement surgery. She’s tough, has needed this most of her life, and only had the surgery now because doctors wouldn’t treat her any more without it. So we kids are taking our turns visiting her during her six to eight week recovery period. The one thing I’ve noticed since I arrived, is that while she is thrilled to have a hip that works like it hasn’t since she was a teenager, the things she cannot do frustrate her. One rule is that you take steps one at a time during the healing process, stepping up with the good foot and only then lifting the other. Yesterday we dropped by the hospital to straighten out a billing error, and she decided to climb some cement steps like she was a teen. Ever dutiful, I called her on it, and pointed out the prescribed procedure. “Well I have to start using it some time, it’s going to get weak if I don’t” was the reply. Bending too deeply is another no-no while healing, and that one she follows, but it really irritates her every time I have to pick something up.

This bears an uncanny resemblance to something I’ve seen before. Many times.

Every system gets outdated. This is both a fortunate and unfortunate axiom of contemporary computer science. The fact is that the reasons the system was deployed go away, the requirements of users change, the technology available changes, or in many institutions, the champion and/or technical specialists leave. That’s the point at which upgrades look much less appealing, and replacement is considered. No one – not the business, not IT, and certainly not top-level management wants to replace a system that works just fine, but when two retired guys living on a remote pacific island are the only ones who can maintain it reasonably, it’s time to move along.

When the time comes, if the system is important or widely used, IT takes huge steps to get requirements right, line up appropriate resources, set contracting for purchased bits of the solution, get AppDev set up for any integration, network staff and storage admins working on provisioning, and gathering requirements from the users. On one project i was involved with, user requirements gathering was an astounding waterfall method of approach every stakeholder, get them to assign people to work with IT, get all the information, then go back and try to reconcile different groups’ various needs. To me it was a fascinating process because users’ needs changed as the rounds went by. This was an incredibly important application that was used by almost every employee in this mid-sized company. After a while the pattern became clear… The first time you asked, answers were all in relation to the existing system, but as you circled back, requests and requirements started to include the state and capability of today’s technology instead of the 25 year old technology they were leaving. In the end, it was pretty clear that the users would get what they wanted, and some extra stuff they had only been dreaming of.

Because one portion of this monstrous system was billing, it could not run in tandem with the existing system. One or the other had to be live, in the oft-repeated on/off scenario.

Like many large projects that have an “on/off” switch to them, the project ran in parallel to the existing system for many months while user acceptance testing was going on. Every night the data from the existing systems was ported over to the new one, and staff in each department dedicated a couple of hours a day testing and seeing how they would do all that they used to do.

And that’s where the trouble started. While most of them were thrilled to have the new system in place and saw a future where they could do astounding things, the product in front of them was foreign and caused work slowdowns akin to the slowdown taking one step at a time causes my Mother. The complaints started rolling in. “I used to do X, now I don’t know how to do it” was a common phrase. Interestingly, the organization had given us time and resources to do end-user training on the new system, and the testers had all been through it. Since there was a Q&A session at the end of this training, all questions should have been answered, or at least most questions.

Slowly, one by one, the people with the worst problems started talking about how bad this system was. After millions of dollars and hundreds of man-years, that is not exactly what IT needed to hear. The problem, as it turned out, was that we did end-user training up-front, having budgeted it and slated it so that the users were trained before they touched the new system. That was fine for what it was intended, but a class room and guided instruction is nothing like sitting and doing your daily job. Once they got back to their desks, then the questions that would not have come up in the classroom started appearing. So we set up a variety of communications channels, and we went out to their sites to sit with users while they tried to do something, and showed them where to find it.

Just like my Mother with her hip is improving daily, and getting closer to normal walking bending and climbing again, users started getting closer to the productivity they’d had on the old system. Just like the physical therapy they give after a hip replacement, our assistance helped the users get back to “normal”. In the end, the testing users became the advocates for the new system, pointing out all that was easier, and all that was just not possible on the old system.

We in IT are the agents of change in these situations. We drive users to solutions that are in the best interests of the company, we push back against systems that would spread our staff too thinly, and we architect both large and small bits of an application, envisioning in our mind’s eye how much better it could be, while the users sometimes don’t see that future until presented with a prototype or even a working model. But too often we’re seen as doing to our partners in the business, rather than doing for them.

Fight the perception, teach them how to work like they used to, help them get up those stairways. It’s a part of the job we overlook when immersed in this database or that application or the other network appliance, but it is a critical part. As a service organization there are some things that will always be rough for IT, but this is one area we can make better by monitoring and communicating, so take the time, the business isn’t better with a new application, the business is better with a new application that users know how to do their jobs with.

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Oh No! It’s Not An iPad! Enough of the Playbook Bashing Already.

Don MacVittie — Tue, 03 May 2011 20:02:16 GMT

It’s kind of funny the way the tech press will kick an incumbent around the block for perceived or imaginary shortcomings in their products. The Blackberry Playbook is a good example. You’d think that RIM went out and created a useless piece of garbage that was never going to see uptake no matter how large RIM’s enterprise market share was.

<Warning, I own a Playbook>

The press and bloggers have leveled a whole slew of complaints against the Playbook that range from no out-of-the-box integration with mail servers to the power button not being convenient enough. Reading most of these articles and blogs leaves one with the distinct impression that the author is typing his article/post on his Mac while listening to his iPod and downloading pictures from his iPhone. Seriously. And I’m guessing for more than a few of the drooling naysayers that is exactly the case.

Lori and I pre-ordered the 32 Gigabyte versions for each other for our anniversary, and they came a little over a week ago. By the time ours were in hand, people were making all sorts of ridiculous claims about how horrible the device was and why it was destined to fail. So we were naturally curious, since RIM doesn’t generally make a poor product, most of them are astounding.

The device bears out as another quality RIM product, whining reviewers notwithstanding. The biggest complaint against the device is that it came without support for email built-in, which reviewers tried to pose as “not ready for prime time”. There’s a difference though, between a feature being left out to enhance overall experience and the entire device not being ready for prime time. A huge difference. And frankly, all this hand-wringing and screaming that the Playbook would never make it without this feature seems pretty silly in an age where a web browser gives you access to your email and calendar. The Apple Fanboys I know respond to that simple observation with “Yeah, but I like to be notified…” really? Did you intend to spend all of your time on a Playbook sized device? I doubt it, that sounds like a lame excuse to kick RIM.

Other reviewers have said “it’s not intuitive! Put it in someone’s hands and they don’t know how to use it!” Well, if you try to use it like Windows that’s true, but it’s true of the iPad too – these devices have a different input paradigm than a full-blown computer does. It takes a minute or two and you figure out how to do everything you need to. Again, a lame attempt to undermine a solid product, in my opinion.

I won’t grace any of the other flailing attempts to denigrate the device with an answer. I mean seriously, you’re complaining about the power button? It’s that thing with the industry standard on/off symbol on it, try pushing it.

<Warning, I am not a fanboy>

Not that it is all sunshine and unicorns…

There are definitely things I don’t like about the Playbook. Like any other piece of complex equipment, it is better at some things than others. In the interest of giving you some real information instead of stammering attempts to undermine the product, here are the ugly bits.

When both WLAN and Bluetooth are enabled, the battery doesn’t last as long as I’d like, but that’s one of those things you adjust to – my laptops, both work and home – don’t last as long as I’d like either.

Tethering doesn’t bother me. I can get at mail and calendar in a browser, but wanted to try it out. I have a Blackberry Curve 8310, and I tried to tether the Playbook to it. No success. Now there were two possibilities here, I’m on AT&T who had some problems getting the tethering software for the Blackberry approved, and my Blackberry hadn’t been updated in forever. So I upgraded, then tried again. Nothing. I went out and found a work-around for AT&T’s network, and tried it. Nothing. So I went and did some research. It turns out that the version of the Blackberry OS required for the tethering software is not available on my phone… That was painful, the Playbook should just have a link you can click to find out if your phone can be used for tethering.

There are a lot of applications out there, but alas, the cool, very productivity-enhancing applications like iPad’s “Cat Toy” and “Get me a beer” applications don’t exist yet for the Playbook. No doubt my work will suffer for the lack.

Believe it or not, the spreadsheet included in the Playbook isn’t enough for me. I don’t need a full featured, astounding monstrosity like Excel, but I was hoping for a bit more than is supplied. Time will no doubt fix this and also provide integration with the major desktop spreadsheets, but for now, I can’t use it to do an inventory I was planning on because the spreadsheet application is weak, and the closest thing I’ve found to what I need is a database application that is more end-user than what I’m after.

I think the Playbook is comparable to the other devices of its kind out there, and with Blackberry’s history of enterprise support it will no doubt continue to grow into exactly what I was looking for. I’m not too worried about all of the negative reviews because all they do is make the reviewer look like an idiot when they scream and holler about things that just aren’t mission-critical. What is a Playbook used for. Access when the laptop is a bit much to be booting up. Not for 100% of your workload. Maybe one day, but the entire space is too new for any decent percentage of workers to start using it as their primary tool.

And F5, rocking our world yet again (we’re hiring… Check here), ordered us shiny new Blackberry Torches so that we can try out tethering. So maybe I’ll circle back if that turns out to be exceedingly cool or exceedingly painful.

Yeah, I thought the iPad was very cool when it came out too… But we don’t allow Apple products into our house for personal reasons (much to our teenage daughter’s consternation). This is pretty much the same product, just with the polar opposite of press reviews.

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CIOs Should Know that IT is Infrastructure as a Service.

Don MacVittie — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:00:00 GMT

InformationWeek has been out and about talking up their most recent CIO survey and keeps calling attention to the fact that one in three CIOs see creating a new business or business model as a driver in 2011. This is not a new phenomenon, but one in three is more CIOs than I would have intuitively thought, so I started to think about it.

There has always been a drive, at least in every company I’ve worked for, that if you want to grow your ivory tower you need to generate revenue. Because IT is a support function – it was infrastructure as a service long before cloud computing came along, if you look at it in the right light – this mentality didn’t generally drive CIOs. Serving the business in the best manner possible was huge on CIO’s list of things to do, but generating revenue just didn’t drive them. Which leads to the question “why now?”

The answer to that question is likely manifold. First, there are those businesses where IT is the business. An online trading house, for example, doesn’t exist without IT. The same is true of Amazon, eBay, and a host of other companies. For those companies, being in IT is 100% being on the business side of the house. Your innovations and modifications are to the lifeblood of the company. Then there’s the advent of cloud, which has people buzzing (right or wrong) about business value and IT as a Service. That has to be playing in these CIO’s minds. And finally, it seems that every year the mantra “do more with less” has been echoing about the halls of IT, and CIOs might just be reaching out for ways to do more and add staff.

But in the end, no matter whether you’re in insurance, utilities, telecom, manufacturing, whatever, IT does add value to the business, and becoming the business is not required to show that fact. Everywhere I have had the opportunity to work, either as a consultant or full-time employee, the company could not function at the level it does without IT. We all know that, the business knows that, the thing is that IT is horrible about communicating that fact. And always has been.

So if you’re in a business whose product is not software, focus on enabling the business, not in creating new business. Lori and I were just chatting this survey up, and she brought up one of the cloud-o-nomics points that makes normal IT folks shudder. No, you’re not generally going to lease out extra capacity to random people. Unless you are in the cloud business, selling cloud services is a distraction from your purpose – to support the business.

You’ve got virtualization to worry about, many of you are starting to look at virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), cloud is on your radar, security concerns continue to leave a dark cloud over IT (yeah I used that allegory), and that’s before you even touch the specific needs of your market and organization. Do not invent work. I’m not saying ignore a good idea – much of the great software out there was created by people who had an internal need and once they solved it they shared it with the world – but don’t say “create new lines of business” as a directive unless your organization is moving that direction.

The point is that IT grew to the behemoth that it is because the business needed support. That investment is reaping rewards, but unless it was specifically made with the aim of getting into new businesses or business models, there is a risk associated with bleeding off some of those resources on speculative productization efforts. Make sure you’re doing what you’re there for, and make certain the business knows it. IT runs large swaths of the business in a fashion so highly automated that without it, the business would implode. I’m not over-exaggerating here, stop and think what order volume would be with no PCs. Now talk with the business about that. Let them know how much growth is directly the result of IT. I remember an insurance company I worked at doing disaster planning – if HQ was wiped out, likely there would be people needing the services of their insurer – and the plan was to shift to doing everything by hand. Eventually the conclusion was reached that it was not feasible to do that, and a secondary, geographically remote, datacenter was built. That was a golden opportunity to point out that the business wouldn’t be what it was without IT, but from what I could tell, no one was sending that message other than myself, and I was an IT architect, so I was sending that message mostly to IT in the hopes that managers would pick up on it.

So if you’re not an IT business, stay focused on supporting those on the business side. Make every decision based upon “does this help the business”, and make it clear that’s why you’re making it. It’s not as cool as creating new products, but if you want to create new products in IT, then go to work for a business in the IT space. They’re a lot of fun, in my experience, and then your energy will be directed in the right way. But for those in non-IT businesses, show how your initiatives will improve things for the business, and if you can’t, then consider very carefully whether that item should be an IT initiative.

Again, the problem is nothing new, since the first network cable was run, something as simple as “we have to upgrade this network segment or bad things will happen in the future” has been a hard sell. Those who will be most successful at IT management will not be those looking to do businesses job for them, but those who can communicate why IT initiatives will help the business grow.

Technorati Tags: IT Management,Business Process,CIO,F5 Networks,Don MacVittie

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It is Never Easy, But There’s a Lot of Change Going On.

Don MacVittie — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 21:23:36 GMT

Every spring I get excited. I live in Wisconsin, which my travels have shown me you may not understand. I have actually been told “that is not your house, there is snow on the ground. All of America is sun and beaches”. Well, in Wisconsin, it gets cold. Moscow style cold. There are a couple of weeks each winter where going out is something you do only after bundling up like a toddler… Mittens, hats, coat, another coat, boots… But then spring comes, and once the temperature gets to the point where the snow starts to melt, the sun starts to feel warm again. It’s at that point that I start to get that burst of energy, and every year it surprises me. I realize that I was, toward the end of the winter, slowing down. Not work-wise, but home-wise. You can’t do too much work outside, there are days I didn’t even break down boxes for recycling because it was too cold in the (unheated) garage. So inside things take precedence. This year it was staining some window frames, helping Lori get her monstrous new fishtank set up, and working on some fun stuff I’d been sitting on.

I register a very similar surprise in IT, even though, just like winter, it is a predictable cycle. The high-tech industry just keeps turning out new ideas, products, and hype cycles.

Black Bear Hibernating – www.bear.org

But this round seems different to me. Instead of a rush of new followed by a predictable lull while enterprises digest the new and turn it into functional solutions, it seems that, even given the global economy, the new just keeps coming. From Server Virtualization to Server Consolidation to Storage Virtualization to Primary Dedupe, through network virtualization and the maturity of load balancers into ADCs, then the adaptation of the best ADCs into tools to manage virtualization sprawl. Throwing in Cloud, then Cloud Storage, and heaping network convergence (with storage networks) onto the heap, and then drop the mobile device bomb… Wow. It’s been a run.

IT has always had the belief that the only constant is change, but the rate of change seems to be in high gear over the last several years. The biggest problem with that is none of this stuff exists in a vacuum, and you don’t really get the opportunity to digest any of it and make it an integral part of your architecture if you’re doing it all. F5 and several other companies have some great stuff to help you take the bull by the horns, ours being instantiated as what we call Strategic Points of Control, but they too require time and effort.

The theory is, of course, that we’re going to a better place, that IT will be more adaptable and less fragile. That needs to be in your sights at all times if you are participating in several of these changes at the same time, but also in your sites must be the short term – don’t make your IT less adaptable and more fragile today on the promise of making it less so in the future. And that’s a serious risk if you move too fast. That is a lot of change in your systems, and while I’ve talked about them individually, an architecture plan (can you tell I was an Enterprise Architect once?) that coordinates the changes you’re making and leaves breathing space so you can make the changes a part of your systems is a good idea. I’m not saying drag your feet, but I am saying that the famous saying “He who defends everything defends nothing” has an IT corollary “He who changes everything risks everything”.

Do we here at F5 want you to buy our products? Of course we do. We wouldn’t make them if we didn’t think they rocked. Do we want you to redesign your network on-the-fly on a Sunday night from one end to the other? Not if it risks you failing. We look bad if you look bad because of us. So take your time, figure out which of the many new trends holds the most promise for your organization, prioritize, then implement. Make sure you know what you have before moving on to the next change. Many of you have stable virtualized server environments already, so moving on from there is easier, but many of you do not yet have stability in virtualization. VMWare and others make some great tools to help with managing your virtualized environment, but only if you’ve been in the virtualization game long enough to realize you need them.

Where will we end up? I honestly don’t know. For sure with highly virtualized datacenters, and with much shortened lead times for IT to implement new systems. Perhaps we’ll end up 100% in the cloud, but there are inherent risks that make 100% doubtful – like outsourcing, you’re only as good as the date on your contract. So the future is cloudy, pun intended.

So take your time, I’ve said it before, and will likely say it again, we’re here to help, but we want to help, not help shove you over the cliff. Good vendors will still be around if you delay implementation of some new architectural wonder by six weeks or six months to stabilize the one you just implemented, and the vendors that aren’t around? Well, imagine if you’d bought into them. :-) Another old adage that has new meaning at the current rate of change is “Anything worth doing is worth doing right”. Of course there will be politics in many of the most recent round of changes – pressure to do it faster – can’t help you there other than to suggest you point out that the difference between responsive and reckless is directly related to the pressure applied.

My big kick is at the moment is access to cloud storage from your local network. Big bang for the buck whether you’re using our ARX Cloud Extender or one of the various cloud storage gateways out there, it gives you a place to move stuff that means you don’t have to back it up, but you don’t have to risk losing it either.

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