Droid does, but will IT support it?

Verizon’s first Android phones, the Droid Eris by HTC and Motorola Droid, are being released today. The commercials highlight a string of new features not currently available on some other (iPhone!) phones (”Everything iDon’t Droid does“).

Although this new generation of smartphones seems to be a tech geek’s dream, IT might actually be most resistant to new technology when it will impact the business. IT has to decide early on if it’s going to support yet another new smartphone. The BlackBerry was once the standard, and RIM paid a lot of extra attention to enterprise IT support capabilities. IT spent a lot of time getting applications to work on BlackBerry, only to be faced with the iPhone a few years down the road.

The executives (interestingly not the Gen Xers) were the big iPhone purchasers. The C-level brought these new devices in as primary work phones and expected IT support. And since IT is ultimately there to support the users, if the decision makers want Exchange on their iPhones, well, they’re going to get it. IT would have to manage iPhone support costs and risk exposure while working around hardware and OS limitations.

The problem is, IT then has to worry about a new set of security policies (last year Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS both had exposed flaws). Are there remote wipe capabilities? Is there encryption available? Further, the apps the sales team needs to use — for example, Salesforce.com, CRM, etc. — have to work on these new devices.

Although Verizon is offering some Exchange support for an additional fee ($15), recent reports state this will just be a software feature and won’t actually be in the same league as corporate network integration.

Do you really want to manage four sets of the same application (one for each potential device) and four different security policies, five times over?

You have to decide where to draw the line on device support – balancing user needs with business realities.

2009 IT Geek Halloween costume ideas

Another year, another list of truly geeky Halloween costume ideas that say IT 2009 all the way. (Eye rolls, please!)

• Moving to Gmail: Want to stand out in a crowd of your midmarket peers? Pack your bags (top one off with a “Gmail or bust” bumper sticker) and wear an “I heart Lotus Notes Microsoft Exchange GoogleMail” t-shirt — ’cause you’re moving to Gmail!

  A survey of 53 firms by Forrester Research Inc. showed that 36 are considering or have considered a change in their email delivery. And one Gartner analyst said that the interest in Gmail has been growing since mid-2007, with more and more people pondering the pros and cons. Our own Linda Tucci interviewed one CIO earlier in the year who moved from Lotus Notes to Gmail and estimated saving about $500,000 in capital and operating costs over five years, and another $400,000 in labor. So bring some scissors — because you’ll also be cutting costs.

• Twitter Fail Whale: Going as the Twitter blue bird is so cliché. When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the “fail whale” error message — an illustration of red birds lifting a whale from the ocean along with the text “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.” Tie a few red, helium-filled balloons to your body and display the error message across your chest.

  Stand as the constant reminder of the potential trouble brewing behind that wide-eyed blue bird. Pose the question, “Is using Twitter always right for the enterprise, or is it a risk to a business?” And keep a list of the threats posed by Twitter, including data leakage, inappropriate content and lack of IT control. Make a splash in the office!

• Disaster recovery zombie: Zombies are in, disaster recovery is dead. Take advantage of this opportunity to put a unique spin on an oldie but goodie. Auto failover, redundant data and more emphasis on business continuity are moving CIOs away from the need to recover data (restoring thousands of servers leaves room for mistakes, mishaps and corrupted data) and on to the importance of continuous operations — made more accessible via virtualization.

  Go for the zombie makeup, the telltale strut and then cover yourself in disaster recovery plans (Post-Its may make a revival here).

• Lean thinking in IT: Doing more with less, reducing waste and focusing on customer satisfaction is what Lean IT is all about — so keep this one simple. Wear a plain outfit you made yourself from recycled materials (props for going green), lean wherever you can and offer tidbits of advice such as:
  - Don’t take maintenance agreements as set in stone. You can’t get discounts without asking.
  - Avoid using a single source. You’ll see more innovation by using multiple vendors.
  - Collaborate. Communication is key to compress cycle times.

  Buddy up with colleagues wearing Six Sigma black belt and ITIL v3 framework costumes for a real party – the A+(service) Team!

As for what my costume will be this year, I’m still deciding (and looking for suggestions!) Have any great ideas? Let me know via email, @kcaretta on Twitter or post a comment below.

What will net neutrality mean for SMBs?

After five long years of debate, lobbying and political posturing, the FCC finally voted yesterday to begin crafting net neutrality rules. With differing opinions across the board as to what this means to the Internet, privacy and the businesses affected — the question is, what does this mean for you?

The proposed rules would restrict how broadband providers such as Verizon and Comcast manage their networks, so that users could send and receive any legal or legitimate content over the Internet without worrying whether it’s going to be blocked or slowed down by the service provider. Comcast, for instance, actively interfered with file sharing online, controlling what kind of traffic and data could use its bandwidth and giving priority to some types of content and traffic while slowing down other traffic.

The FCC determined Comcast had gone too far, and the new rules will mean providers must become more and more like “dumb pipes,” with little leeway to shape the Internet’s traffic flow. Net neutrality also aims to prevent Comcast, Verizon and other service providers from being able to control Internet pipes to favor their content over content created by their competitors or demanding high fees for performance when a competitor’s content is requested.

It matters because the ban will allow small and midsized businesses unimpeded access to the Internet to send and receive legal and legitimate data across the Web, ensuring performance during their use of services from companies like Salesforce.com and Google. Large providers such as Comcast and Verizon will not be allowed to slow file transfers or favor their own Web apps or even email applications over competitors’.

Since corporations like Comcast have their hands in many different business areas, that was a real threat: Comcast could potentially block smaller, less widely known competitors from sending and receiving data or even simply reduce, for example, the performance of Google Docs — preventing healthy competition.

Net neutrality will allow Google Docs, an unknown startup and Microsoft to all compete on the same grounds without Comcast picking a winner and favoring it.

While the counterarguments fear for the stifling of innovation and heavy-handed government involvement with the privacy of the users, the proposed rules could potentially put (or keep) smaller organizations on the same footing as larger corporations.

Pervasive BI scenarios, from search technology to the cloud

Whenever I go to a show related to business intelligence or speak with an expert in the field of BI, there are endless opinions on how to get more out of BI and get that data out to more users. One answer that keeps coming up is search technology; another is cloud computing.

Back in June at BI vendor Information Builders’ user show, many attendees spoke of the benefits of marrying search technology and business intelligence. At the time, the Royal Bank of Canada was beginning to look at search technology to mine unstructured data in dead repositories. The 70,000-plus-employee company has unstructured data all over its enterprise, but the main target for now is archived enterprise content management repositories.

Also at the time, Boris Evelson said the future of BI lies in appliances that crawl both structured and unstructured data and places all information in optimized storage, where it becomes instantly available. The front end requires no IT support and users can explore the BI environment using search-like capabilities with no limitations, whether data is in email or desktop docs — making BI at last pervasive throughout the enterprise.

In a more recent conversation with SaaS BI vendor Birst’s CEO, Brad Peters, I heard a bit more skepticism on the topic of business intelligence applications being replaced by search technology. “It seems that every six to seven years that becomes a hot topic and you start to see BI companies trying to classify themselves as search companies, and it has come around once again,” he said.

It is true that BI tools are looking more like search, giving users the ability to pop up search-like dashboards and interfaces, but turning a search technology into an outright business intelligence tool is not that simple.

“The reason BI [tools] are successful is because business rules and the business logic around how your business is run is encapsulated in the BI solution, and that is created by adding human capital. And that’s something you can’t really pull out of search,” he said.

If you do a search on company revenue, for example, the result could be calculated 15 different ways based on what the user punches in. So can you trust that data?

“How was that data calculated? Where did it come from? If the answer is ‘I don’t know,’ then you can’t trust that number, and if you can’t trust that number you don’t have BI,” he said.

The idea of giving users a search box so that any user, with any level of skill set, will finally have access to BI, does appeal to Peters.

Yet, some argue that BI is not meant for the masses, but the business analysts within the company whose sole job is to crunch the numbers based on criteria set by executives.

As for the future of BI, Peters sees it in the cloud. A place where all your data can be accessed by logically integrating data, versus physically, giving data access to anyone in your organization.

Yet, when you bring up the marriage of search and BI to some experts they cringe, arguing that BI alone is hard to manage, never mind introducing another technology into the mix or adding unstructured data such as email or word documents into your BI strategy.

The debate continues, but it is clear that BI and search technologies can learn a thing or two from each other.

Give us your take in the comments.

The challenge of managing risk when IT budgets tighten

I see an interesting sea change when it comes to risk: Thanks to the recession, as IT risk management is constrained by tightening IT budgets, the risk of doing business goes up.

As part of my security, compliance and disaster recovery coverage this year, I’ve listened to a lot of experts talk about the how-tos of risk management, such as, how CIOs need to stop taking a checklist approach to regulatory mandates and forge a risk-based strategy for compliance. Or how security officers still taking a buy-another-gadget approach to security will lose their jobs if they don’t focus on risk management. All this sounds good, as it implies that a rational scrutiny of risk can save companies money by focusing the available dollars on the most likely scenarios. But the reality is much worse.

A CIO I talked to this week has seen his IT budget cut by more than 50% over the past few years. He’s in the newspaper business, an industry whose business model has been beat up worse than most in this recession, so the necessity to cut costs is not unexpected. To help keep the company afloat, he’s dropped maintenance contracts, including on some mission critical systems. He’s walked away from a premier — albeit difficult-to-work-with — longtime database vendor to save more than $100,000 for his company.

“Sometimes the gamble has paid off, and other times we have paid for it,” he said.

A few months ago, he had some equipment fail. Under his higher service level agreement, the components that failed would have been replaced almost immediately, in two hours at most. In the new reality, the provider had to fly the parts in from a neighboring state. “We were down for about 12 hours, and it was mission critical,” he said. These were the internal networks for about 40% of the company. People affected couldn’t use email or store files.

Risk management makes these decisions all sound so, well, manageable. As the recession shows, however, CIOs can research the IT-related risks to their enterprise, plotting out every what-if scenario in the IT playbook, and still be surprised or, worse, undone by elements unimagined and unimaginable based on past experience. That’s when the person in charge has no choice but to be a risk taker. And be brave.

Why cybersecurity awareness is everyone’s responsibility

October is national Cyber Security Awareness month! The campaign, sponsored by the National Cyber Security Alliance, a partnership that works with the government as well as corporate sponsors, encourages online safety and best practices to protect high-value information online.

And what better time to raise awareness than on the heels of the Gmail/Hotmail/email phishing scam that compromised thousands of accounts. On Oct. 6, news broke that at least 10,000 Hotmail addresses and passwords had been leaked online. The next day, it was revealed that 20,000 addresses and passwords for email accounts from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, EarthLink and Comcast had also shown up on the Web.

Continued »

What Google Wave means for IT: Collaboration in IT management tools

The rush for Google Wave has begun. The much-anticipated release of Google’s collaboration tool has generated media hype, exclusive invites to try the beta and even eBay bidding wars for the opportunity to try it first. And this step in collaboration technology is a big one, as it works to combine email, wikis, blogs, instant messaging and social networking capabilities to allow integrated communication in real time. The use cases for the Wave technology could be endless as developers work on extensions to further enhance it.

For IT, I have to wonder how Google Wave will also change the face of project management, business process management and IT service management. Why? Most of the major concerns I hear regarding these types of tools are their lack of functional, easy-to-use, real-time collaboration and monitoring features.

Continued »

Budget saver: Ramping up process automation with free automation tools

Recently, I’ve been talking to CIOs at midsized organizations about whether the recession is over and the recovery has begun. In some industries at least, the cost-cutting isn’t over and the need to do more with less continues as a mandate. Some organizations are now cutting maintenance contracts, as Linda Tucci wrote this week. Others are turning to business process automation through scripting or the use of automation tools to automate parts of IT like help desk requests — sometimes for free. Continued »

Social networking, real-time data feeds — where does that leave IT?

The District of Columbia has won the 2009 Innovations in American Government Award in Urban Policy for its Data Feeds: Democratization of Government Data project, the first initiative in the country that makes almost all current government operational data available to the public in real-time, raw form. Using social networking capabilities and aimed at increasing civic participation, transparency and accountability, the program has relieved some of the burden on the city’s infrastructure.

Midmarket CIOs can possibly learn from D.C.’s success — strategically opening up data access can mean more grass-roots employee innovation and, for a real ROI, fewer internal and external support calls. So how can IT provide an efficient service to the organization, track its performance and free up time to work on other projects?

Continued »

ERP implementations: In search of ERP best practices

Besides the obvious blockades to an ERP implementation — the cost and the potential long-term disruptions to the business — midmarket companies are still moving forward with ERP projects.

I’ve been getting some interesting questions about how to move an ERP project forward since sharing Peet’s Coffee & Tea’s ERP implementation story. One email was from a person who has never done an ERP implementation before and is hitting a wall at the stage of choosing an ERP vendor.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I can tell you that a series we ran called ERP Journey chronicled a CIO’s 20 months spent choosing and installing an ERP system. One big point was how he chose a system after identifying and reviewing some very vertical-specific packages, contacting some user groups and even asking other companies in his same field what they used and why. Continued »