IT department

A Return to Dry Land (and a little bit about cellular coverage at sea)

Just got back from my vacation, and I’m pretty sure the batteries have been recharged, but I’m still trying to get geared back up. I really did manage to disconnect (for the most part) on this vacation, and as I said in my previous post – it is a good idea once in a while.

That being said, I did keep an eye on things while I was at sea, but mostly to insure that nothing major was melting down and also to keep my inbox from being a total mess when I returned. My phone never left the cabin during the trip, but I did check it once a day to clear things out. I left instructions to my staff to mark things urgent if anything earth-shattering did happen, but luckily we dodged that bullet. I’m a huge believer in the philosophy that a manager should be able to disappear without having things fall apart. There is very little that I do where I’m not “backed up” by a member of my staff. The only exception to that are things such as performance review and similar staffing issues.

One of the things which did surprise me during the cruise was the ability to stay connected. Our ship offered a service called Cellular at Sea, and it provided outstanding service for the duration of the cruise. The service works with just about every carrier, and being an AT&T customer I found that I had about 4 bars of 3G coverage in my cabin. The service shuts down while you’re in port, so you’re on your own in picking up local coverage if any is available.

You do need to keep in mind that you’re roaming while using the service, and costs can go up accordingly. This wasn’t a huge concern for me, because I didn’t use the phone for any voice calls. I did bump my kids’ text service up to allow for international text messaging, and I’m hoping that saved me a few bucks. They did limit their use of texting, so I’m hoping the hit isn’t too bad when I see next month’s bill.

Going Offline for a Week

I’ve been very delinquent on posting to my blog of late, largely due a crazy workload centered on our merger with another company. Office moves will do that to you. The growth is good, but it does take its toll.

In a couple of days I’m going to be taking off on a long overdue vacation, celebrating my 25^th wedding anniversary and also taking what is probably the last big “family vacation” with my two teenagers (one of whom will no longer be a teenager when we end the vacation).

One of the things I intend to do on this trip is to completely disconnect for a change. It’s not going to be one of those vacations where I sit in a beach chair and respond to e-mails as they arrive. You can never completely disconnect in this job, but sometimes it’s a good idea to try. This is one of those times. I’ve got an outstanding staff that I trust, and I’m completely comfortable allowing them to make some big decisions for a week. I’ll be just fine checking on urgent messages at the end of the day. At the end of the vacation, I’m also building in a day to decompress and ease back into work. I’ll also try to get caught up on the inevitable glut of e-mail on that day.

While I will be taking a laptop on the trip, I probably won’t be posting to the blog during this vacation (although it is kind of tempting to post something from the middle of the ocean just to prove that it’s possible). The primary purpose of the laptop will be to download and store images from my camera, and also perhaps watch a movie or two. See you in a couple weeks.

Sparking Innovation

I’ve always been in favor of rolling out new products to small groups of end-users, especially when a new app arrives and I’m a little unsure of how it might be used. 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. Recently, we’ve done this with both Microsoft SharePoint and OneNote. One of those experiments has turned out well – one not-so-well, but both continue to be works in progress.

When we first began deploying SharePoint, we correctly suspected that it was probably too big for IT to figure out. I don’t mean that we couldn’t figure it out from a technical perspective, but rather that we simply couldn’t envision the twists and turns the deployment would bring. We were correct, and for the most part the deployment has gone very well. The original group “got it” with regard to the application’s purpose, and they were instrumental in helping us launch the product to the entire company. To this day, the twists and turns surprise me, but so far we haven’t run into any major issues or what I’d call misuse of the product.

We tried a similar tactic recently with OneNote – a product which I personally love, but unfortunately this one has taken an entirely different direction with regard to my test group. One of our users has proposed turning OneNote into our primary product for managing all of our workflow, and has even proposed that we utilize it for filing other documents – embedding Word documents and Acrobat PDFs into OneNote notebooks.

This is by no means a disaster. The problem for us is that many of these ideas for OneNote are actually running counter to ways in which we’re just beginning to use SharePoint. It’s certainly something which can be controlled. My bigger fear is creating a perception, especially with a power user, that IT is standing in the way of innovation and new ideas. The trick is keeping the user involved, and getting them to understand why you’re saying no to what they think is a great suggestion.

What’s the Plan?

Having just been through another merger, we’re just now beginning to see things settle down following a big move day last week. During 15 years in this business, I’ve been through about a dozen office moves, mergers, etc., Earlier this year, I had one of my new staff members ask me what the plan was for bringing his office online with the rest of our Agency, and I had to chuckle since it always seems as if we’re making up as we go along.

I certainly don’t enter into these things without a plan, but I honestly don’t think that any two of these moves have been the same. There are certain things surrounding moves which happen every time, but it seems like the differences far outweigh the similarities. For example, the biggest issues surrounding our move earlier this year involved telecommunications and actually turning up the connections between sites. In last week’s move, the single biggest issues involved the physical move itself. We actually had two moves to deal with, first an internal reshuffling of our offices, followed by the move-in of nearly 45 people a week later.

There are certain things you do for just about every office move, and I’d probably put communications at the top of the list. One of the keys is letting employees know what’s happening and when, whether it’s about who will actually be moving their computers to what their new phone number will be. We’ve also assembled a pretty good team of people who’ve been through this a few times, and that doesn’t hurt either.

Finally – flexibility is critical. You can’t get too hung up on that whole planning thing. As much as you may want to have a certain phase completed at a certain time, you had better be prepared for changes and schedules that slip. There are a lot of things surrounding moves which you can’t control, especially the vendors. Things will get delayed. You just deal with it. That’s part of the plan.

Let the Users Decide?

One of the more interesting ideas I’ve heard floated in a while is that of letting our users decide what platforms they use. The idea surfaced again here in an article about how Gen Y will change some of our institutions, including IT. It’s an interesting idea, and there are days when I feel like it’s already beginning to happen to those of us in the Advertising business. Perhaps we’re a good barometer for this particular trend.

For us, the trend is most apparent with regard to PDAs and Smartphones. Almost from the beginning, we’ve been very liberal in terms of what we allow and support. In fact, we’ve simultaneously allowed the use of Blackberry, Palm (Goodlink), and ActiveSync devices on our systems. We’re soon eliminating support for Palm-based devices, but at the same time we’re going to be adding support for the iPhone.

At first we were concerned about our ability to support all the different devices, but I’ve found it more and more difficult to make this argument. Beyond the initial setup, and possibly the need to support a specialized server, we really haven’t been taxed in terms of having to support these devices. For the most part, we get involved during the initial setup, and the basics of configuring a device for Blackberry server or Exchange Activesync are pretty much the same from one device to another. We’re currently telling users they can use any device they want as long as it supports ActiveSync (soon to include the iPhone), and we only limit Blackberry’s because of the licensing costs.

The issue becomes a whole lot trickier when we begin talking about computers and applications. We’ve always had pretty clear lines dividing our PC users and our Mac users. We’ve also had some pretty clear rules dictating who gets laptops. The applications we use have generally been even more defined. When new employees walk through the door we never asked them if they would prefer to run Outlook or Lotus Notes. Exceptions to these standards have been few and far between. It just seemed to make sense for us to standardize on the products we support.

However, I’ve seen the cracks beginning to appear in these areas too. The Macs are beginning to find their way into areas traditionally reserved for PCs. It’s usually been the result of moving an employee between departments, and not feeling that it was worth the effort to take away their computer just because they were switching departments. I still think it makes sense to standardize on hardware platforms for purposes of support, but I do think the day is coming in when we’re going to find ourselves facing some real battles over which platform we expect an employee to use.

While our software platforms have been more rigid, there is one excellent example of letting the users dictate our software choices. A few years ago, our Creative users decided they wanted to make the change from Quark Xpress to Adobe Creative Suite. IT was definitely involved in the process of switching, but the switch itself was definitely dictated by the end users.

This will be an interesting trend to keep an eye on, and I do think we may be seeing it impact our industry sooner than others.

Supporting Creative (Part 2)

When I first launched this blog, I pitched IT in the Advertising business as being unique. I also stated that much of that “uniqueness” was due to supporting Creative. Now that I’ve been writing this blog for several months, I’m beginning to wonder if the people we support are truly unique or not. The last time I discussed this topic, I also promised to talk about the differences between the typical IT person and the typical Creative person. I guess it’s time to take a crack at doing just that.

IT people and Creative generally don’t think alike, with IT people tending to be much more logical and Creatives being much more, well, Creative. I guess we could get into the whole right-brain, left-brained thing, but the bottom-line is that we tend to be different. Generally, this doesn’t cause many problems, and in fact we seem to work pretty well together.

There are many users in Creative who just don’t have that troubleshooting mentality when they encounter an issue. A simple example - when a document doesn’t print, try printing a different document, or try using a different printer. Over the years, we’ve found that many of our Creative users do catch on to these relatively simple troubleshooting steps we ask them to take, and now many of them have already tried these things before calling us. The part of this I wrestle with the most is whether they’re really any different from any other department we support in this respect.

However, I do think there are definitely IT types who don’t thrive in this environment. I’ve had IT guys over the years who are outstanding in what they do, but who just don’t have the personality to survive in this particular business. The problem comes when we try to hard down to lock things down, and to force too much structure on our users. It’s probably a whole lot easier to do in a financial environment. I can think of one IT person who struggled in our environment, and who is now thriving in an engineering company.

I’ve also found that you can find ways around the personality issues, but it’s only when you have options available to you because you’re growing. One of the things we’ve done in the past is to move folks who don’t thrive in the desktop support role into backroom IT roles as Systems Administrators. Keep them in the server room where they have less interaction with the end-users.

When I think about supporting Creative due to the personalities involved, I’m just not sure they are all that different from Account Service or other non-Creative departments. I keep coming back to the bigger issues and differences stemming from supporting Creative, and that’s the Mac-PC thing, and the file sizes they routinely deal with. Those issues outweigh by far any personality-type differences

How Connected Should We Be?

I’m writing this in a moving car on the way to my son’s lacrosse game. It’s about a 1-hour drive, and I’ve already communicated several items to my IT staff via e-mail, activated 3 new users on our Office Communications Server, and begun writing this post. Needless to say, my wife (and driver) is getting very little of my attention, and that’s probably not fair.

I think it’s fantastic that we have the capability to do what we do from remote locations, but I think we have to be very careful not to go overboard. I spent last Thursday evening in the Charlotte airport, communicating with co-workers who were literally on the other side of the globe. It was a scenario in which 5-years ago, these questions would have gone unanswered for days - we actually accomplished something in about 5 minutes.

We have to do what we have to do sometimes. In my current situation, which is overloaded with time-critical projects, it seems like these tools are invaluable. On the one hand, we can walk out of the office confident that we can still be productive in a moving vehicle. On the other hand, we can’t lose touch with the people sitting next to us in the car.

That’s why I’m making this a short post.

Paperless Workflow

In addition to our current acquisition-related projects, and our implementation of Microsoft Unified Communications, we’re also in the midst of another project which began late last year – implementing a paperless workflow system into the heart of our day-to-day operations. While paperless workflow isn’t really an IT project, it definitely touches upon several IT systems. It’s really not even fair to try to discuss the scope of this project in a blog entry, but I’ll try to summarize it.

At the heart of our paperless workflow system is Adobe Acrobat, accompanied by WebDAV servers at each of our office locations, allowing our users to collaborate electronically on a job from start to finish. Since we’re using the WebDAV servers for storage of the PDF files, we’re not cluttering up our user’s mailboxes with multiple versions of a job.

We’re using some Microsoft software – Exchange (e-mail) and SharePoint to traffic and schedule the job through the Agency. The two systems work very well together to provide notification of status changes on a project. SharePoint was perhaps the biggest surprise we encountered during the early stages of the project. I briefed our Studio Department on SharePoint one day late last year, expecting a lukewarm reception to a Microsoft product from some of our most hardcore Mac users. It turns out they had been looking for a way to schedule jobs electronically, and the next day I was shocked to find them tearing down their scheduling whiteboards. Just like that, SharePoint had become a mission critical application. They loved the way that status changes in the SharePoint schedule automatically kicked off e-mail alerts to the entire team.

Other aspects of the project got more into some IT hardware. Gigabit Ethernet capabilities finally made it possible for our Mac users to effectively work off a file server rather than constantly moving files from the network to their local hard drives. This provided a huge benefit to collaboration for our Creative teams. It did change things significantly from an IT perspective, as we begin to move away from large hard drives on our local machines and need more storage on the Creative servers.

We also added more LCD monitors to our inventory in order to facilitate working electronically. Not having a physical piece of paper to review and markup meant that more of this work was being done on screen. A small investment in monitors has added up to huge gains in productivity.

It’s certainly not an insignificant project from an IT perspective. I find myself spending quite a bit of time explaining the complexities involved in making all these systems work reliably, but it does seem to be working. We’ll probably be spending most of the rest of this year getting this implemented in all of our offices. In light of everything else we have going on; it’s just another part of a very busy year for IT.

Growth and IT

How do you handle growth? This is a question that’s really been troubling me over the past couple of weeks. For many of us, the day-to-day issues of running IT are pretty straight forward. We keep our existing “stuff” running, and occasionally we introduce some new “stuff”. For years, that’s what I did also. Occasionally, we’d get a little larger, adding an office every once in a while. That presented different challenges, but it was always manageable.

Our current growth feels different. Despite adding some locations over the past 10 years, we’ve hovered in the 150-200 employee range for much of that time. We’ve now jumped to about 260 employees, and we may be heading to 500 employees much fast than I ever envisioned. Furthermore, if that happens, it will probably mean a doubling of our existing locations – from 7 offices to somewhere between 12-15 offices.

What does all of this do in terms of IT and Telecomm support? The typical small IT Agency, which is large enough to require IT support, comes with an IT “Jack of all trades”, and there’s a limit to how many of those types an Agency needs.

At some point, you’ve got to start thinking about what a larger IT Department should look like. I think we’ve reached that point, so I’m thinking about it a lot. How many IT people would be required to support 500 people in 12-15 different locations, keeping in mind that we support 2 different platforms (Mac and PC), and that we also support telecomm. I’ve always felt like 35 was the point where an Agency needs in-house support, I think that number is a pretty good starting point for determining a support ratio in this business. I also think you can increase that number as you get larger, gaining some efficiency of scale. So let’s say that a 500 person company could get by with a 50-1 ratio - that means 10 IT people.

The next question is how to apportion those 10. Personally, I think an organization of this size should move to a formal help desk environment, which could be centralized in one location, or even split between several locations if geography dictates it. How many help desk personnel? What about the rest of the IT positions? An organization of 500 probably justifies a few specialists of some type – perhaps a telecomm manager, a network manager, a DB specialist, a graphics systems manager, etc., I guess those jacks-of-all trades might come in handy after all.

Unified Communications Implementation – Update

We’re making excellent progress on our Microsoft UC implementation. To date, we’ve rolled out Microsoft Office Communications Server and in our main office, and we’ve begun testing with the Communicator and LiveMeeting clients. In addition, we’ve nearly completed the migration to Exchange 2007 and we’re in the process of removing Exchange servers from our remote sites. This week we’re rolling out OCS Mediation servers to our main office and two remote locations. These servers, along with soon to be installed gateway servers, will be the connection between our Exchange server and our phone switches. We’re probably about 2 weeks away from tying it all into our existing phone system.

I’m currently in the process of presenting an overview to our users in order to prep them for what’s ahead. We’ll be doing formal training for the system around the middle of June, but for now I’m just laying some of the groundwork and giving employees an idea of what’s ahead. One of the big reasons we’re deploying Microsoft UC is to facilitate the connection of new phone systems into our existing system. Secondary to that is our plan to once again implement Unified Messaging – this time through Exchange 2007, and also to provide presence information via the Communicator client.

One of my great fears is that I’m introducing too much too fast, and some of the items I didn’t mention above could also take off on us. In addition to those features mentioned above, we’ll also be providing chat capability, the ability to easily redirect phone calls to other numbers, and additional conferencing capability through LiveMeeting. I’d like to roll these items out following the initial implementation of UC, but I know that some of my users will begin to play with them on day one. Other than LiveMeeting, which is a separate client I can choose to leave uninstalled for now, many of the features mentioned above are built right into Communicator.

I’m also a bit nervous about Microsoft’s Mac support. We’ve only recently received an update to Messenger for the Mac which works with OCS 2007, and we’re currently searching for a LiveMeeting client. I’m concerned that LiveMeeting on OCS requires a client and does not provide any web-based conferencing capability. That being the case, it’s not necessarily the end of the world, because out intent all along was to use this primarily as an internal conferencing system. We use Acrobat Connect as our conferencing system to the outside world. However, it would be serious limitation if LiveMeeting didn’t provide a way to include our own Macs.That would hurt.