ITKE Community Blog » Google Guerrillas

The #GoneGoogle meta-revolt

Michael Morisy — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:38:23 +0000

Last post on the Google Guerrillas and I promise I’ll find a new topic to harp on for a while, but just thought you might find it interesting how Google’s viral campaign has turned against them.

As PaidContent reports:

As part of its new campaign to promote Google Apps Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has been encouraging users to Tweet on the benefits of ‘going Google’ under the hashtag ‘Gone Google.’ But with Gmail officially down the hashtag has taken on a new meaning, as a number of users have used it to circulate their complaints.

PaidContent also notes that Microsoft is quietly pushing news of the revolt out there, with COO Kevin Turner pointing to news of the outage to convince current Microsoft customers to stay on board.

Help user-IT relations with a party: So crazy it might just work

Michael Morisy — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:47:47 +0000

I received a number of responses to my post on whether Shakespeare would slice up the server admin if he were around today, both via e-mail and in the comments.

Wayne M., an IT Director in Needham, Mass., had little patience for uppity users:

I can’t speak for anybody else’s company, but the users at my company (with very very few exceptions) seem about as technology challenged as possible! And to say that they can manage their security better than IT? We spend much of our time installing desktop and network security protection to keep them from shooting us in the foot!

On top of that, most of the user community that I know might be technical at home, but want to have nothing to do with it at work! They aren’t paid enough! I’ve been told that to my face time and time again. “You guys in IT get the big bucks! Why should I know how to handle a (simple) PC problem?!”

Let’s stop dreaming and come back to Earth.

Others were a little more forgiving, with Nottslanding suggesting that a peace could be brokered, based on her own experience with an annual mixer that went a long way towards breaking down the red tape between IT and the users they serve:

The first one was staged as part of a Halloween costume day in a rather “straight” company. We convinced the uppermost management that since a significant part of their operating budget went to technology costs and there was often grumbling about that outside the technology “silo”, maybe the customers didn’t understand how that money was spent. Likewise, as the mainframe systems technology manager (not applications), hearing the grumbling from my staff about sudden changes in priorities, or “unlimited” use of valuable resources, or introduction of new technology that hadn’t been blessed by Tech Support, convinced me that the techies weren’t really aware of the driving business requirements. Almost no one below the top executive officers had ever been in the highly secured computer room.

The operations staff had a wonderful time decorating the computer center. Their first theme was the “hazards” of being a computer operator, enhanced by clever placement of straw dummies – e.g. a dummy squished by a huge roll of printout paper, one mostly covered in tape cartridges from a rack under which a floor panel had collapsed, the legs of a cable puller crawling under the raised floor, and a
dummy, totally covered by paper, except for its legs, in the recycle bin (among other things). Each small group of people was escorted through the data center by a technical person. The technical people started by finding out which systems the tour group supported, and most of the operators knew what resources those systems used. The customers had NO idea of all that went on back there. Meanwhile, just by being face-to-face, both parties got to see the people they sometimes communicated with, or whose names became linked to applications. Most the computer people didn’t really know what some of those applications did, and the visitors were encouraged to fill them in. There at the last station – just before they were led into the telephone switch part of the computing facility, the dummy in the recycle bin suddenly sat up, as if startled and awakened from a nap. That drew both screams and laughter. We even got the CEO on camera at the surprise!

On the day of the event, the Data Center managers all came dressed in “grunge”. We’d done a Saturday shopping trip to all the Goodwill stores to get our outfits. On the morning of, we assembled ourselves in costume, and arrived as a group. An elderly couple getting into our elevator, chose not to ride with us. Before we did anything else, we crashed an Executive meeting, with an entry something like “we’re the data center and we’ve got your data. If you want it back, you have to spring for the refreshments.” – which they did.

That was certainly NOT a dull meeting. The size of the tour groups got larger throughout the first day, as it was recommended among peers. A good time was had by all.

As I mentioned, it became an annual event (different themes, of course, which were always arranged by the operators who almost never got out of the computer room). All the executives extolled its success, especially since they got such positive feedback from all the different departments (as did the Data Center). Response grew so that we had to schedule Halloween tours. The production services personnel (the ones who provided the human interface with input/output and distribution at the data center) set up the tour schedules. The customers got to see the life cycle of a “trouble ticket”, presented by the folks at the help desk. The “techy geeks” actually knew quite a few of the customers because they were always in the trenches fixing customers’ problems. The techs introduced the customers to all the work they normally do in addition to direct customer support, explaining how “maintenance” interruptions and new hardware and software provided stability and new functionality for systems. The managers of each of those groups took care of setting the focus for each year so it wouldn’t be the same old stuff every year.

And as an offshoot, from then on, every Halloween became a costume day throughout the HQ building.

So: What you have you found successful: Giving peace a chance or locking ‘em down before they cause trouble? Let me know your thoughts at michael@itknowledgeexchange.com or in the comments below.

GMail fails, but will Google Guerrillas back down?

Michael Morisy — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:50:17 +0000

I just posted yesterday about the dangers of ditching IT for Google, and the Big G makes the point better than I ever could: GMail, the 3rd most popular web e-mail service, went down today for a while, with spotty communication as to why and little information in terms of problem resolution.

Now, GMail and Google’s other services likely have better uptime than many IT organizations, but as the author of TechCrunch’s article noted, Googles Guerrillas were having a tough time:

I use Apps For Domain for everything – my contacts, my email, my todo list, my chat, my documents and more recently, my phone. As soon as it went down, I noticed in less than a second. I am now completely stuck, after a few months of being impressed by how I was able to run my entire life on Google.

It is not just the frontend that is down, but also the backend IMAP and POP servers (Update: they are up, but slow). This is a huge fail for Google, considering how admired they are for all the technology they have built internally to scale out their applications.

Most IT organizations would at least provide prioritization of business critical services, along with a trouble ticketing system to assess what is down where. With GMail, on the rare occasion it does go down, it goes down in a very big way.

Now the question is, will this dissuade any of the Google Guerrillas that recently wanted to chuck IT in favor of a user-ocracy?

Would Shakespeare slice up the server admin?

Michael Morisy — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:37:25 +0000

I can’t help but wonder: If Shakespeare were writing today, about office life instead of aristocratic foibles, what kind of barbs would he lob at IT? I suspect it wouldn’t be pretty.

His (in)famous call to “kill all the lawyers” surely drew a laugh then, but maybe now he’d urge us to flay the helpdesk or roast the server tech. He certainly wouldn’t be alone.

Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist for Slate, takes IT to task and urges a user revolution:

Millions of workers around the world are in the same straits: They’ve heard about the joys of Firefox, the wonders of Google Docs, or any number of other great programs or Web sites that might improve how they work. Indeed, they use these apps at home all the time, and they love them. But at work they’re stymied by the IT department, that class of interoffice Brahmins that decides, ridiculously and capriciously, how people should work. …

In the information age, most companies’ success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.

Ok, so there’s worse libels than interoffice Brahman (which is actually kind of growing on me), but this comes after Google’s similar call for a user revolt. The popular BBC sitcom The IT Crowd portrays its protagonists as social outcasts lead by a clueless IT management drone (see below).

Can’t IT just do its job without some uppity journalist telling them they don’t know what they’re doing?

Because while there are legitimate gripes about treating workers like adults, there are more serious dangers of losing sensitive information. Thumb drives, for example, are generally considered as simple a technology as they come, and workers clamor for them trying to port files from home and work computers to, you know, get their job done. Trying to do an approved file move over a VPN network takes orders of magnitude longer, so why would anyone ban them? Because lost or stolen thumb drives happen all the time. And even if they’re finding USB drives, users just aren’t particularly savvy. And as for the call to allow free-for-all on instant messaging, our very own Nathan Simon just wrote about a new Trojan targeting Skype users: What happens when ne’er do wells get access to an executive conference call? You can be sure that IT will be held responsible for the technology the executive’s nephew helped implement.

There’s plenty more deconstruction and critique of the article over at DVICE but, for all the technical nuance that the Slate article misses, it catches on to a very real demand: Users want their freedom, and they want it now. Two years ago, executives started demanding their iPhones despite security and technical concerns, but now more users are demanding their own tools, and like Farhad, they’ll use them whether you like it or not. What can and should IT do to meet them halfway?

I suspect, like with so much in IT, there’s no one real answer. While columnists will happily proclaim “Tear down this wall!” regarding IT restrictions, each shop is different, and some restrictions are outside IT’s control. The “No Fun” restrictions Farhad cites, for example, often come straight from a CEO tired of seeing half an office’s monitors tuned to Facebook or EBay. While you ponder your strategy, I’ve included a snippet from the IT Crowd below. If you’re struck by any insights or would like to share you how you met your users halfway in restoring IT sanity (or even how you quashed a user rebellion), let me know in the comments or via e-mail. I’ll keep your name and affiliation private if you’d like.

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Is your IT department fighting Google guerillas?

Michael Morisy — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:05:21 +0000

Google’s “Go Google” campaign is well underway, having kicked off at the beginning of the month with a series of plus-sized billboards in strategic cities, the now almost mandatory Twitter hashtag campaign and some major customer announcements, including Motorola’s mobile devices unit. The must cunning strike, however, might be a series of cheeky, innocuous-seeming posters:

It’s not quite inciting an all-out user revolt, but anonymous postering, cryptic typewriter text and the imperative demands all break the mold in how IT projects are usually handled: It’s more V for Vendetta than white paper analysis and staged roll outs.

Have you felt the heat from users? Does it strike you as a cry for freedom from clunky, expensive apps or a call to IT anarchy? I’m curious as to your thoughts, either in the comments below, to michael@itknowledgeexchange.com, or on Twitter at @morisy. In the meantime, perhaps V himself can give voice to those guerrilla user’s demands:

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