CIO

Information Overload

Information overload is a topic which has seen enough blog and article time to provide a generous amount of information overload on its own!  As an example, I searched Google for the term “information overload” and it returned the first 10 of approximately 2,160,000 “hits” (…but who’s counting?   :-)   No wonder we need data warehouses!  I figure that is probably a bit more information than this modest man can (or wants) to handle - yet of course as I scanned that first page of “hits” I had to check out a couple of them.

One of the hits that I followed in particular caught my attention and prompted me to both chuckle to myself and to think about my own habits.  A blog response from Noam Chomsky  really started me thinking — in response to a question about tips for handling information overflow he replied:  “I wish I could answer sensibly. I just can’t. You should see the room in which I’m working. Piles of books, clippings, manuscripts, notes,… All sorts of lost treasures buried in them.“  Sound familiar?

His response really brought home to me that my habits of saving information, whether it be printed material, sound clips, email or internet links encourages my sometimes overwhelming “buried” feeling - information overload is alive and well in my life, as well as “…all sorts of lost treasures…”!

Now, to get to the real point of this post — as a developer I believe that it is in my clients best interest to support them in providing the information they need to forward their businesses -  whatever that is.  It is very easy for me to provide them with too much information (…some say there can never be enough) in the form of reports, graphs and miscellaneous on-line “views” of their data.  However, I believe that it is a “key” responsibility of mine to constantly be aware of the tendency toward “information overload”.

Girls, Technology and Career Paths

Once again I have found myself drawn to an article dealing with “girls”, technology and careers.  The article in question, “Girl Power! Summer camp grooms tomorrow’s techies” introduces us to a summer high tech camp for girls 11-14 years old.  It seems that these girls are experiencing opportunities to see technology in action in what is referred to as a “girl-friendly” atmosphere.  The hope of the program being that this program will “…make technology relevant — even cool — for this at-risk age and gender group…by exposing them to women in technology-related careers”. 

As I look back at my experiences in this industry I see but a handful of women who have chosen to make software development their career, and even fewer seem to be involved with other IT functions.  To my way of thinking, we are missing out!  I don’t think we need hard headed “know it all’s” of any gender, but I strongly believe that we do need the perspectives that only a women brings to a project, and the lack of women involved in technology restricts us.

While I have heard many a snide remark made regarding some of the female perspectives that those daring enough to voice did in fact voice, I have often wondered about how many of the impractical, almost “toys” that have come and gone in the corporate world would never have gotten off the ground had there been respected female perspectives listened to.

I hope the program referenced meets with successes way beyond their stated goals.  The statistics presented in the article about women and their technology careers tells us something is missing - and indeed it is - the female talent. 

Top 5 Characteristics of an effective IT professional

Staying with my recent top 5 theme  here is my list of most desireable characteristics for an effective IT professional:

1. Patience, patience and more patience - IT can be stressful, fun, challenging and a whole lot of other things!  Having an overflowing supply of patience - with users, with other techs, with software, with hardware, with vendors, with bosses and with self is of major value!
2. Ability to adapt quickly to change is another ingredient that I believe is essential.  IT needs, tools and equipment is constantly changing - and keeping up with it can be a challenge.  Those that can adapt quickly shrug off the discarded work of the past in favor of attacking the new, without seeing the past work as being futile or a “waste” of time. 
3. A positive outlook is a must have for an effective IT professional.  Change and “issues” of all kinds crop up daily in the IT world - so having a positive attitude brings about stability in self and the environment - things are jsut better.
4. The effective IT professional is not a 9 to 5 person - IT functions often require that work be done “off” hours.  The most miserable IT person I ever worked with really just wanted a job to go to between 9 -5.  Needless to say, he didn’t work out!
5. A love for challenge rounds out my top 5 characteristics of an effective IT person.  IT is NOT easy street — it is NOT narrowly defined — it can be multi-disciplined, requiring knowledge way beyond the technical.  IT is NOT for everyone — good thing — if it was, everyone would be doing it whether they posses these characteristics or not!

Have you also read my Top 5 Reasons to Love IT and my Top 5 Reasons to Hate IT? 

Top 5 Reasons I Hate IT

After what seemed like a sleepless night I woke up in early morning thinking about my reasons for being involved in IT and what it means to me.  As with so many professions, I have discovered I have a “love / hate” relationship with IT.  Heres my top 5 list of why I hate IT:

1. It is constantly changing - and because it is constantly changing it requires significant effort to keep up with the needs of the organization and the available solutions, and to evaluate them and mold them into the “best” solution
2. Sometimes it seems that nothing is easy - there are many challenges that an IT professional can face on a day-to-day basis that just seem to defy logic and reasoning.  It “should” work!  You’ve followed the directions, over and over again, nothing is wrong — except it isn’t working!
3. It can be a thankless job - Ask any IT professional when they received their last compliment for a job well done keeping a system going for the last 500 days with no down time!  Ask also what they experienced when last they were dealing with down time!  (Remember “down time” is a double 4 letter word!)
4. The challenge can get burdensome - Like it or not, every person in IT at whatever level will be challenged to learn constantly — “learn or burn” one associate I worked with used to say.  I have learned so much that I’ve never used!  It becomes difficult to not consider that learning as useless, but the challenge goes on day after day.
5. It’s NOT a 9-5 job - which for me has never been an issue, in fact I like the flexibility that not being 9-5 provides.  However, down systems, major weekend upgrades and constantly extending hours into the “off” hours time slot can get old. 

Be sure to read my Top 5 Reasons I Love IT also.

Top 5 Reasons I Love IT

I love my work!  I have always loved my work, although it hasn’t always been in IT.  When I came into IT it was with a wealth of experience in business and entrepreneurship, with successes as well as failures.  Here is my list of the top 5 reasons I love IT!

1. It is constantly changing - and this is truly the flip side of a coin — since the constant change can both be loved as well as hated!  I love it because I am an individual who once something becomes routine I lose interest and have to force myself to the grind.  In IT with the constantly changing needs it seems there is always something new to experience. 
2. It can be rewarding - Users love it when their systems work - or help them get more done in an easier fashion - and that is a reward to me.
3. It is challenging - and being a man who likes challenges (most of the time) I’m OK with this.  For some, however, the constant challenge becomes more than they can deal with effectively - and that is NOT a pretty picture!
4. It provides some level of flexibility - and I emhasize “some level” because I realize that not all in IT have the kind of flexibility that I currently have.  However, IT does often provide the ability to work from home, most or at least some of the time.  There are also of course those times when there is NO flexibility — like for instance a down system.  Life for an IT professional takes on a whole new meaning when there are 100 people who can’t work because a system is down!
5. It makes me feel good - to be able to provide a service for another which they are incapable of providing for themselves.  For me it may be something like being a musician and not playing for others.  What good is beautiful music played only for ones own ears?  The talent required to be successful in IT is meant to be shared as well.

Be sure to read my Top 5 Reasons I Hate IT also.

Is this Green IT?

I must be getting cynical in my old age — or maybe just cynical when it comes to marketing!  Either way, I just have to say something about the advertisement I recently saw saying to “Make Your Company Greener” by hosting your server with them.  Actually the idea is very catchy (Hey — it caught my eye!).  I even browsed the ad more than once, and now I’m blogging about it!

The claims for their service are nobel, the marketing spin excellent - but is this green IT?  I think NOT!

I think green IT involves much more than virtualizing servers, although that is certainly a step in the right direction.  I think it also involves re-thinking the business processes and how they affect the need for the multitude of equipment which we so readily add.  I think it involves a major shift toward the “paperless office” and all that the concept has promised.  Green IT won’t happen overnight - it isn’t a place to go!  Rather I think “Green IT” is a way of doing business, in fact, a way of life.

Information Silos and Other Images

Images of the “Information Silo”, the “Data Warehouse”, “Data Management” and “Business Intelligence” could undoubtedly conjur up humorous images for the graphically or artistically endowed technologist.  Traveling through farmland as I often do, I often see the farm silos and chuckle to myself as I think of ”Information Silos”.  I wish I had the talent to create caricatures of the images I think of when encountering these terms - I’m sure they could evoke a chuckle from somebody other than I.

Anyway, that being said, these terms are no laughing matter for those faced with the real challenge of making simple the complexity of data available to companies today.  From my experience I’d say that most companies - even those single location small companies, have a multitude of information stored in a multitude of systems.  The “systems” containing this data may be an individual PC, a company ERP system on a server, a sales (CRM) system (maybe on a multitude of salespersons laptops) - each its own “silo”. 

There are many stories of failed BI implementations.  Why?  I would posit that users trust their data and information, but not necessarily that coming from say, the IT department.  They know where “their” data is coming from, how it was collected, and it’s meaning - because its “theirs”!  Whether it presents a complete picture, or is applicable in all instances is totally irrelevant - just ask that branch manager, or department manager … or whoever has the data.

That being said, I’d say that perhaps key to getting the most value from the data you have available is getting the buy-in of the end-users of the data in regard to data source and reliability.  If a data source is to be used, do the end-users “trust” the data?  No trust - Don’t use it!  An interesting post suggesting 3 causes of failure for BI implementations is available here - an interesting read.

User Innovation

A recent post by fellow ITKE blogger John Wilder entitled “Sparking Innovation” caught my eye this morning and I just have to comment.

His statement that “…I trust my users to come up with innovative ways of using some of these new products, and I’m not so sure that IT would ever be able to envision all the possible uses…”  immediately brought my mind into the many situations I have experienced where my users innovative ways of using a piece of software has resulted in their identifying ways in which IT (…or the developer/tester) certainly had not envisioned it would be used.  Is it a bug when software isn’t used in a manner for which it was designed?  Bug or not, the situation has often led to “changes” to the software.  I believe that users, because of their innovative approaches to use CAN be the best of software quality testers — but developer beware!

John also refers to a situation where program use is resulting in a tension between a direction that IT is promoting and another approach suggested by the users.  This kind of tension between application use has been a common experience for me when developing custom programs for my customers.  Some users will prefer one direction, and others another.  IT and the developer walk a tightrope between users every time this situation manifests itself.

Beta Testing - Not for Everybody

It’s like the stock market - it can be risky - it can be frustrating and downright annoying - and it can be rewarding.  I’ve always liked participating in beta testing of products which I find of value, or as has happend to me before, in a product that I had to use - but (let’s just say to be nice), needed a lot of work — and by beta testing (with our live data of course) we got to evaluate the latest and greatest of the software.  Most of the time it was a win-win situation, but not always.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how my chiropractor didn’t realize what it meant to be a beta test site, and consequently just how much she “suffered” with the arrangement.

For me, as a custom software developer, I think I like participating in anothers beta test because I invevitably learn from the experience.  There are 2 major learning opportunites that I consider to provide the value for me by participating — they are:

1. The opportunity to really learn a product and understand it
2. The opportunity to find out just how the software provider works

Products and companies have made it and lost it based upon my experience with beta testing their product.  If a company isn’t easy to work with when you are providing beta testing, they probably aren’t a company you’ll want to work with long term.  Likewise with the product.

On the way to Green IT

Green IT — you’ve read and heard a lot about it recently.  Green (whatever) is the color of the day, week - indeed future.

However, I can’t help but think about all the trees we were going to save by having our computers do all the work for us, and then present results without paper!  Remember the paperless office?  Talk about the paperless society?  …and wouldn’t paperless be a good green initiative?  The paperless office sounded like a good idea at the time, but I venture to say that for most companies efforts to be paperless have gone stagnant - and why is that?

Could it be that perhaps it just doesn’t work?  Could it be that people still want to read or skim over printed pages rather than fuss with a mouse, or read something on a screen limited in its display, and positioned (normally) very differently than say when one reads a book or newspaper?  Have you ever seen someone curled up comfortably in their easy chair reading a computer?  I for one have not!

While I believe we have made great strides in some areas toward minimizing paper use with programs such as on-line libraries of scanned business documents, B2B invoicing, data warehousing and “Business Intelligence - given the increase in data now available because of our faster, more powerful computers I submit that perhaps at best we’re holding our own.  The additional computing power and data analysis has meant mroe computers, which of course means more energy — so we now add in virtualization of said servers - and the cycle starts again.  First we had a prolific growth in physical servers, now it’s virtualized servers - and software wanting to run on its own server spurs more growth. 

Of course there’s also the other green - the long green (aka US $).  We want to do all this “greening” without spending the long green.  Most “green” initiatives don’t save money in the short term, and in the economy of today investment in the long term is limited due to short funds.

Finally there’s the last “green” I’ll refer to — that of the “green” with envy kind of green, also known in a previous era as “keeping up with the Jones’s”.  The Jones’s have something that you perceive as good - so you want it!  So what if it uses up more resources.  While there is a lot at stake for us as a global society by “going green”, I’m seeing much talk, but little action.  Shifting from one resource drain (such as power consumption) to another (such as serving up twice as much paper in printed documents) hardly seems green to me.