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!

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?

Earlier this morning I read “A CIO’s Five Rules for Managing Through Tough Times”posted on CIO Insight.  I believe that each of the points made in that brief post are pretty much what I would consider to be generally sound management principles — regardless of the business area.  There has been much written during hard economic times about the risks of not planning for the future, as well as the advantage which can be gained through maintaining some level of work toward the time when the economy improves.  His first point “Maintain focus on key projects that will yield long-term business advantage” is, in my opinion, somewhat of a no-brainer, although I have seen over-and-over again the “long-term business advantage” projects either shelved indefinitely or canceled.  I believe that unless the company started the project for all the wrong reasons that this is a grave mistake.

Particulary in the area of custom applications, timing is everything.  This is a good time!

We who manage IT have a responsibility to conserve resources wherever we can – it is both good business as well as good for the environment.  One need not do much more than watch most offices in operation for a couple of hours to identify wasteful and unnecessary paper usage.  There is much that we can contribute to improve office procedures to use “less paper”.

From the software design standpoint, a critical review of reports which get run regularly might indicate that certain data is never used, and by eliminating the data paper volume may be reduced as much as 60% — that’s a serious savings over time, and probably well worth the investment to change the report.  Also with regard to reports — has the capability to print to disk, pdf or maybe fax been made available for the report?  How many times I’ve seen reports first printed to the laser printer, then brought to the fax machine to be sent!  (Then the report put into the waste paper basket!).  Another IT suggestion may be the investment required to provide duplexing printers — using half the paper per print job!  What a concept!  Yet another possible contribution to “less paper” can be incorporating a document imaging system or scanning into an application.

I suspect there are many opportunites that you can identify in your organization where a little bit of creative IT (Intuitive Thinking) can result in the “less paper” office — but paperless?  Forget it!.

In 2009 I see more attention being paid to training existing IT staff in new areas rather than looking to hire from the outside.  There is no argument that budgets will be tight to non-existent.  Management will certainly  be looking to chop costs anywhere they can without risking failure of the operations.  I suspect that IT departments who to this point have been reluctant to join the virtualization bandwagon will be forced to train staff and begin implementing virtualized systems.  There have been many case stories showing that huge savings can be achieved – not only with hardware savings, but also support and staff.

My crystal ball does show a lot of activity — like a storm at sea, there is churning of the waters and constant change.  Certainly there will be loss of IT jobs as projects get canceled.  What I see for the future is that many will find they have to get training that perhaps they do not yet have.  I suspect that 2009 will see more hiring from the smaller companies than the large ones – which will mean fewer hires overall and more unemployment.  Some IT workers used to large operations may have to be satisfied working in smaller environments and keeping much busier than they’re used to. 

What has brought this infamous day to mind was reading a white paper entitled “ERP at the Speed of Light“, an excellent white paper which I discovered this morning as the result of an email. Looking back for me as I read the white paper’s list of “key risks” of an accelerated implementation, we experienced each of the risks outlined in the paper, as well as a few more not mentioned — not the least of which was “buggy” and incomplete software.  While we made every effort to work with the “out-of-the-box” processes offered, they just didn’t work.

The article states that “…in any scenario, there is a certain level of disruption of existing operations in the course of an ERP engagement…”, and we certainly experienced that to the utmost!  Our implementation accomplished only one primary goal in its early stages — our unmanageable different applications inherited during growth through acquisition were replaced — as a company we were now all “on the same page”, the page hating the new software.  We had in fact been united!

There have been a number of articles published recently about green IT and saving power.  Certainly the increasingly popular use of server virtualization where multiple physical servers are replaced by a single physical server running multiple virtual servers can produce a dramatic energy savings.  I suspect that one possibly over-looked area of potential savings exists by replacing existing “old” computers with up-to-date energy efficient systems.

A recent article in January’s Microsoft TechNet Magazine by Jim Lynch of Techsoup.org got me thinking green again.  The article “What On Earth Is Green IT?” is available on-line.  Available on-line at Techsoup is a useful 1 page list entitled “10 Green Technology Resolutions for 2009“.  Both are worth taking a look at.

But then … there are those other times which fall into a couple of different categories.  The first category is the category where as the developer, after looking at the request more closely you determine (much to the dismay of the requestor) that to accomplish the task will really require some major changes – lots of work – and of course that also means time and money!  After close consideration the idea for the change is either re-designed and re-considered, or scrapped.

Then there is the second category — I call it the “…seemed like a good idea at the time…” category.  This is the project which is stated very simply, and upon further investigation as the developer you decide that it will in fact be a great enhancement to the program, and will not take much to implement.  WRONG!  This is the killer project!  Not until getting into the finite details of the application do you realize that it is a monster!  After spending double the time you expected on the project with no definitive end in sight reality has hit hard!

Very simply, the requirements were over-simplified, the review before the project was over-simplified, and the execution anything but over simplified.  Oh well, chalk it up to just another day in the world of software development.  Cheer up, there’s another project coming along right after you finish this one – if you ever do that is!

It is then that I realize once again that I have choices!  (Choices are a MARVELOUS thing!).   One of those choices is that I can throw away most everything, and then either access on-line as needed, or just do without — or hope that I can remember enough about something that came across my desk to be able to search it out and come up with it.  I’ve been working on this method over the last couple of days!

Recently I have been incorporating scanning functionality into many of my customers applications.  The functionality has proven very productive for my customers, and they love it!  Therefore I certainly have another choice — i.e. buy some kind of “document management” software and scan.   What a novel concept — using the very technology I use every day!  Hey — I could also create my own custom “document management” system and have just what I need available at all times – once scanned that is. 

Bottom line is this however, by the time my day is through there is neither interest or energy left to dig into either a project to learn some new software, or, to actually create something for myself.  I continually wonder what’s wrong with this picture!  Here I am, a reasonably technically savvy application developer, and yet I continue to work at least somewhat in the dark ages!  The fact is that I can either choose to work 24/7 and at best inefficiently produce, learn or otherwise develop what I need — or — I can choose to create some kind of work-life balance.  I choose to balance thank you!

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”!)