Database

The IT Worker Telecommuting

Somehow or another in spite of my best efforts to escape computer-speak when I’m not actively at work it seems that even my personal “life” is laced with computer and IT geeks.  Of course, as I’ve blogged about previously, I don’t really try to separate my “life” into a “work-life” and “personal” life — but I find it interesting that so many of the new people that I’ve met in the past year are associated with computing to some extent or another.  (Of course living in New England with its high concentration of “techies” probably contributes greatly to my experience!)

At any rate, I found myself engaged in a couple of interesting conversations this weekend about working from home, the economy, job environment and IT careers in general.  Of particular interest in those conversations was the subject of “the home office” and “working from home”, and in particular the challenges that are presented with the “home” environment.  Not all of us engaged in the conversation were currently working from home, but a number of us have had the experience and could easily relate to the “stories” and experiences of others.

One of the topics which constantly came up (with associated “stories” ) was the experiences of the “worker” with their “family” during “work” time.  The number one issue that came up was related to the need when “working”, to be left undisturbed, as if they had driven off to an office somewhere.  Of course, for this to truly work for all of the relationships concerned, telecommuting from home cannot be a 24/7 operation.  Clear boundaries have to be set.

However, this is more easily said than done it seems.  Many of the participants in the conversation were feeling especially insecure about their current employment status — and the general consensus is that with such insecurity in the background, there is a tendency to try to work 24/7.  This does not work!  It was suggested by one participant that he thought perhaps that was what the company hoped for when they allowed him to telecommute!

Having employees who work from home certainly can save a company money.  The full-time telecommuter doesn’t require office space, the part-time telecommuter can often share office space — less office space required, less expense.  If on top of that savings the employer then gets greater productivity from the employee - it’s a win!

Data Normalization - Know Your Data

A post here in these ITKnowledgeExchange blogs that recently caught my eye was this one written by Stephen Harris entitled “Data Challenges Can be Solved With Business Intelligence“.  It is a rather lengthy post touching on several points about data challenges and BI.  What I immediately latched onto in his post was what he refers to as a motto - “Thou shalt know thy data“.

While I have never phrased my firm belief in knowing your data in the way he does, I certainly agree that knowing your data is an absolute must.  Furthermore, his reference to cleansing, auditing, securing, managing and refreshing data is also an essential ingredient toward any meaningful reporting - never mind the special requirements for an effective BI implementation.

Once again I find myself “down sizing” information and ideas I read about to the needs of the businesses which I service, the small ones.  I’ve blogged recently about reporting requirements in these economic times, and certainly “…having information about your business at your fingertips…” is critical, not just a “nice to have”.

Reporting, BI and data “cleanliness” all depend to some extent upon the normalization of the data.  I can’t imagine trying to normalize a database without knowing your data.  If you would like a quick introduction to the topic of normalization I found “Introduction to Data Normalization: A Database “Best” Practice” to be an excellent place to start. 

As with so many areas in development there are multitudes of tradeoffs which come into play with the design of a database.  It is absolutely critical that the developer know and understand the data pieces (fields) and how they relate, but just as critical is that the developer understand the reporting requirements and other characteristics of the data, the database itself, the network and hardware platform, and “how” data will be queried.  Many speed issues can actually be caused by a database which has been normalized to such an extent that in order to provide the reporting required in an acceptable time span many extra steps are required to prep the data for the presentation sequence desired. 

The more up close and personal a developer is with the data the greater the opportunity there is to evaluate the data quality.  After there have been a number of changes in the form of additions and subtractions to fields or tables in the database it is a good practice to review the design again to determine if there are changes that should be made to further normalize the database.  My experience indicates that often changes are desired.

Reporting, Reporting, Reporting

My subject for this post - Reporting! (Perhaps you guessed! )

A few days ago I posted about “Green IT” and reporting methods and considerations to utilize less “paper”.  My post today regarding reporting is simply this — I posit that it is reporting which provides the greatest value of any business IT system.  Given this position I further venture to say that in this economic climate there will be an ever increasing demand for reporting which previously was neither desired, requested or dreamed of!  Just within my limited client base I have seen an increased interest in looking at new ways to report the wealth of information contained within client systems.

In addition, I have also seen that in some cases to get the information now being asked for will require additional input - (being of course that if data isn’t available it cannot be reported ).  This presents an interesting mix of work, application maintenance and report building - just what the doctor ordered for an otherwise “slow” time.

Through my years in IT and application development I have experienced many times the frustration of users regarding the presentation of their “data” in meaningful ways, or worse yet, their frustration knowing that data useful to them is simply “inaccessible” - “locked up” within the database somewhere.  During times such as these management becomes more interested in the “finer points” of their operations - “What does this cost us? … How about that? …Can we look at …?”.  During the busier times there seems to be a fear of having “too much” information, and surely “information overload” is easy to accomplish!  But in these tight times the value of specific pin-pointed reporting cannot be overlooked. 

Perhaps this is an appropriate time to be looking at what we can do in reporting to help our companies to succeed during this economic downturn.  Wherever possible it seems appropriate that we application developers “suggest” reporting that will add value.  Heck, it might also mean some job security

This probably isn’t the time, however, to suggest starting on implementing a new BI system, although wouldn’t that be nice?

Application Design for Green Reporting

Perhaps the phrase “Green IT” and various variations of same is over-used, however I suspect that its prevalence does cause us to think “green”, even if we’re sick of doing so.  When I chose “Application Design for Green Reporting” perhaps you wondered why I might have chosen such a title.  Good question

Seriously though, my reasoning is simple - and that is my belief that we as developers can and should do everything we can to ensure an appropriate use of resources - and in those resources I would include not only the obvious paper, but also disk space  (since inefficient disk usage may result in the need for added disks, and thus more energy used). 

Saving paper is certainly the easiest way to design for green, and we as developers have the opportunity to affect paper usage in a dramatic way - those steps may include:

• Offering on-screen views in lieu of paper
• Offering ability to print to a document such as PDF
• Designing reports using minimal header and footer margins
• Working with users to ensure ALL data printed is used
• Working with different font sizes to reduce paper needs
• Reviewing sub-total lines, are they used or just there because…?
• Reviewing page breaks - Are ALL page breaks required?

Additional Notes:

• Printing to PDF documents is great, but … here is an area where disk usage should be considered and an appropriate way to maintain (delete) out-dated or no longer needed “printouts”
• Margins in general require review with a critical eye.  Header and footer areas should contain only information useful to the users.  Use one liners wherever feasible.
• If a report will be going only to a laser printer, pages required for printing a report can sometimes be significantly reduced by going from two-lines per record to a single line per record - all with the same information only by changing to landscape mode
• A proper mix of font sizes can also significantly reduce paper use, while at the same time ooften producing a much more readable report!
• I have found many an opportunity to eliminate sub-total lines which has resulted in great paper savings
• Page break review might be a situation such as providing an alternative to printing the report with a page break at each customer change - or not.  Providing an option rather than forcing the page break can make a hugh difference.  Make the default to the “green” choice of no page-break.

How many pages have you saved today?

End of Year Squeeze

I’ve never really established what phenomenon is at work come December but it seems that throughout my time as a software developer and IT manager, December has always been a particularly busy month.  This December has been no exception, although not all of the “busy-ness” has been due to programming that I’m invo0lved with.

At least some measure of the activity has often been around getting new equipment configured and the application installed, users created and all the various pieces of “technicality” that goes along with adding or replacing a server.   Come December many are able to “lighten up” their workloads and enjoy the holiday season with long lunch hours, after work “get-togethers” with co-workers, extra time off (catching up on vacation time not taken), or just plain “easy going” for a while.

However, IT never sleeps!  This economy which is demanding that we do more with less surely won’t help those of us in IT have an easy December.  What there is for us to do, however, is to just make the very best of whatever “breaks” we get during this holiday time — and enjoy every minute of the time.  One of my earliest employers used to quip “Work hard, Play hard!” — I’m up for that as soon as I figure out when play time starts!  

Not Fun? Why Do IT?

While doing some cleanup yesterday I ran across my “spare” bumper sticker which I purchased at a Ben & Jerry’s a few summers ago.  At the time I purchased 2 of the stickers because I loved the message so much - 1 for the car I was driving then, and 1 for my next car.  The time has come - next warm day I’ll clean the car (…or at least the bumper!) and install the bumper sticker.  “If it’s NOT fun - Why do it?” has really been very much a part of me all my life.

Even in my early career in manufacturing production control I expressed my thoughts very freely to my co-workers.  Imagine my surprise when it came back to haunt me when an employee I hired a few months previously walked into my office and told me something like this — “It’s not fun — so I’m not doing it any more!  I’ll be gone in 2 weeks!”  That was an eye opener!

Each time I see the phrase I’m reminded that indeed I do have choices to make.  As frustrating and difficult as IT (Information Technology in ths case) is, and as strong as my love / hate relationship with IT is, I remind myself that I am fortunate to have the choice of doing IT or not.  I also have choice as to how I do IT — every client I deal with, just as they interviewed and evaluated me for the work they wanted done, I also have evaluated potential clients to at least “best guess” how well I will be able to work with the potential client.  I can honestly say that such client evaluation has served me well since I can have fun with my clients - and we’re better off for it!  (Especially during those hard times of dealing with system failures or “bugs”!)

IT and the Business Student

I had an experience this week!  It was one of those unplanned “moments” where it seems that the universe aligns and presents an opportunity for the taking.  This is the story of an experience involving a grand-daughter (student) and a “grampy” (IT blogger).  You might guess the personalities involved here

A chance set of circumstances aligned such that the “grampy” in our story had an opportunity to transport subject grand-daughter back to her college with what was expected to be a 3-5 hour drive depending on the traffic involved.  The travel day was beautiful, the traffic light, and the trip started off with little conversation (…it was still quite early in the morning!). 

As the trip progressed subject grand-daughter began to think about what she was going back to at school — including her IT course which she began to fret about — saying that it was a required course for business students at her school and that she just wasn’t understanding any of it.  She expressed concern that the book seemed so technical - and that she couldn’t seem to understand all the various acronyms - what they meant - and what they did.  All just seemed to be one big mystery to her!  She expressed concern about not being able to “see” or “visualize” such things as a LAN or a WAN — never mind the possible array of components that might exist within them!

Her frustration came through loud and clear!  Enter the “Grampy IT Guy!”  Now it just so happens that at the very moment that she was communicating her concerns they were less than an hour away from the IT department subject “Grampy” recently retired from.  A quick call to said company IT Manager (MIS as they refer to it), and reassuring said IT Manager that there was no intention of pointing said student toward the IT ratrace as a career — a stop at the old company for an IT department “visualization” and Grampy’s IT 101a course was scheduled.

The extent of the value of said stop remains to be seen, and can probably never be quantified – but what subject Grampy realized from the event was in fact valuable — first, that as an IT guy there are a lot of assumptions made regarding understanding, secondly, presenting IT to the business student provides a valuable foundation for the inevitable future contact with IT in business, and third that moving beyond the “book” learning adds significant value to the education.

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.