So first let’s think about community.  People live in a community because of a common interest.  That interest could be centered on the landscape and beauty of the community.  The interest could be financial, in that many people in the community may work for the same or even similar employers.  The community might have a unique cultural diversity or even a cultural singularity that might be of interest to people in the community.  The more of common interests there are in a community, the bigger the community becomes.  The marketer’s job is to tap into those interests and you will find more and more small sub communities within the larger community.  As a marketer if we integrate ourselves with an interest group, we can market to that group.  Instead of selling them everything though, we are most successful when we market products and services that are of interest to that sub-community.  As an example don’t sell vacuum cleaners to a group of car enthusiasts, unless that vacuum cleaner is designed specifically for the problems with cleaning a car.

On the internet, there are communities as well.  These communities are focused on information and data.  Find these communities and you have also found a group of buying customers.  Which is the pitfall many marketers run into, in any buying community there is interest in buying a very limited product or service.  That is the problem with most corporate online social marketing strategies.  Instead of marketing to the group interest, they market as if the group were the general community.

As an example: Look at Facebook.  Marketers will point out the number of users on the system.  As if to say that all these users are potential buyers.  The reality is that very few of these users are there to actually buy products.  Instead they are interested in participating in an online community and sub-communities.  Finding and supporting these sub-communities in Facebook or across the internet is the first step for online marketing.

Experts like Tracey Warren teach businesses understand and leverage these online communities by providing services like a “Social Media Tuneup.”  So if you were a producer of car parts, the first goal is to identify the car enthusiasts groups.   If on the other hand you market eggs and other groceries, marketing to a car enthusiasts group might not be as effective.   The car enthusiasts are not in the buying mode for eggs.  When they are, they will be looking at a different group.

The rule I share with people is that social networking is like a cocktail party.  People are not there to do business.  That is not to say that a lot of business isn’t done at cocktail parties.  It’s done in a very subtle way.  Nobody opens an egg selling stand at a pool side party.  It could be argued that everyone at the party will probably be buying eggs in the next week, “Why not at this party?”   The reality is that when people buy eggs they go to a grocery store… not a cocktail party.  Instead go into the party and ask, “So when and where do you buy eggs?”  Chances are it will be a place where you can sell your eggs online.

Oh and if they help you give them some virtual chocolate as a thank you.

So why bring up online marketing strategies and community marketing?  The topic of this blog is modern network architecture, not old school network architecture.  As the day to day infrastructure support moves into the cloud, there is less need for server support.  The modern network architect will need to understand and answer these types of questions for their employers and clients.  This is the question I was asked by a consulting client at the beginning of the article.  The more we don’t understand about online marketing, integration with business systems and the like, the more we become legacy and irrelevant in determining the future architecture of the network.

The first thing is to build a team of social networking experts.  Some of the experts I like to work with include Michael Hartzell (an expert in Guerrilla marketing and inbound marketing) Tracy Warren (An expert in Facebook and twitter marketing), Berry Zimmerman (an expert in Linked in and other Online community tools) and Eric Veal (an expert in integrating CRM to track social networking contacts).  The amount of knowledge and information these and other experts I work with, around the concepts of social networking is massive.

I’m still learning the concepts of social networking, but there seem to be several ways of thinking about social networking.  The first method I’ll call broadcast marketing.  Similar to television marketing, sends a message out to everyone regardless of interest in the message.  The second method is attraction.  Attraction methods of marketing are dependent on a much more focused message that is interesting to a very small sub-set of people online.  The information is so interesting that the small sub-set of people are attracted or drawn to the message.

When I started in this industry 21 years ago, I noticed that there were some rare individuals who seemed to almost intuitively understand the technical concepts.  These rare individuals were the true pioneers of the industry.  The problem was trying to get the information out of their heads and onto paper in a way that makes sense.  I find the same problem with Social Networking experts.  Like the early IT experts, these social networking experts understand these concepts intuitively.  They have a difficult time expressing the concepts.  I think this is because they don’t understand just how brilliant their minds really are or that this natural intuition is not part of everyone’s thinking.

I find that social networking experts are like those early pioneers I used to meet in the IT world.  They were brilliant, successful but sometimes appeared to live in their own worlds.  The amazing thing was that early pioneers laid the foundation for today’s modern network architecture.  I think we are seeing a new age in marketing.  I think we are at the stage where the social networking marketers are still struggling to explain their ideas.  Eventually though, traditional marketing may well need to take a back seat to these social networking pioneers.  As technical experts we are seeing our jobs moving offshore and into the cloud.  We need to re-invent ourselves to stay relevant.  Because most social networking experts are very social, but not as deeply technical as we are, I wonder if there isn’t an opportunity here.  Anyone looking to re-invent themselves might consider this space and how one might fit in.  Social network really isn’t going away.

One of these attraction strategies I call the chocolate strategy.  I learned it from one of the social networking experts I work with, Michael Hartzell.  Michael has an intuitive understanding of marketing and in particular Inbound Marketing.  I call it the Chocolate Strategy because Michael has a weakness for chocolate.  Not only does he like chocolate,   but even more he likes to share chocolate with others in his life.  This sharing marks a big part of who Michael is and the marketing strategies he encourages people to follow.

Chocolate has been called the ambrosia and a drink for the Gods.  Chocolate drinks were originally only for the royal families in the early South American cultures.  Today most people love chocolate and many have a secret stash of their favorite chocolate treat hidden somewhere that nobody else knows about.  So it’s no surprise that you quickly start making friends when you start giving away free chocolate to the people around you.  When you do this, some people will be so impressed they will want to get to know you better.  This giving freely with no expectation, is the idea behind the social networking strategy I’ve dubbed the chocolate strategy.

Zig Zigglar in his talks describes the principle in a different way.  You can’t walk up to a log and say, I’m cold start burning.  You first need to put some work into the fire.  You need the kindling and oxygen for fuel.  Once you have that, you need some heat to start the kindling.  Then as the kindling starts burning the heat from the kindling begins burning bigger and bigger pieces of fuel.  Until finally there is a roaring fire.  This analogy works for businesses and relationships.  We also know that a little gasoline judiciously applied jump start that kindling from small heat source to bonfire in minutes.  Chocolate when applied strategically is like gasoline, when starting a relationship.  Of course like gasoline can blow up in your face if we don’t consider the human side.

When online you can’t just give a person a piece of real chocolate.  At the same time are there virtual treats?  So here are a list of virtual treats: A personal email (Spam does not count as a personal email), A recommendation on an indexing site (A powerful recommendation can be made on Google maps), recommendations on Linked In, mentioning someone you respect in a blog article, Introducing them to an online community site that is focused on something they love.  Comment on their blog.  Recommend their blog to someone else you know that might be interested in the information.  The list goes on and on.

For the chocolate strategy to work, the recommendation needs to be real and truthful.  There shouldn’t be an expectation of reciprocation.  The articles should be not worthy and interesting.  The article might be something that the person might want to show off to their friends and clients.  These types of small kindnesses or virtual chocolate makes someone turn and notice.  Like a thank you card after being invited to dinner or a party it makes you stand out in the crowd.  If you truly want to know this person then standing out in the crowd is how you will be seen.

This idea of putting in the work and demonstrating interest is the principle behind what I call the chocolate strategy.  If this sounds attractive to you, practice on your friends and past co-workers.  Go to linked In and make a recommendation.  If you aren’t the first, you are probably one of the few.  Go to Google Maps and recommend the business.  You’ll stand out because you are one of the few.  You will attract interest.  Rather than having to beat a path to their door they will be beating a path to yours.

Oh… and if you do like chocolate, you might want to connect with my friend Michael Hartzell… if you ever meet him, you probably will be offered a piece of chocolate and if you are lucky a friendship with someone who is pretty cool.

Recently a client of mine suggested that UC communication was silly.  I’ve worked on teams where tools like Lync make life much easier.  It’s not just about text messages.  It’s about presence, phone messaging, remote meetings with and without video.  Yet in this IT department, with a full UC solution, didn’t even bother to logon to the system.  This makes me wonder… are most IT departments keeping up with technology?

I think it’s quite odd for me to say this.  I fought the wars early in my career for desktops, servers and other tools back in the DOS days up until today.  IT organizations with international footprints are dependent on server technology that was great, 5 years ago… but is no longer considered reliable.  Imagine a Fortune 500 technology company who decided against using a separate SAN storage system.  This company supports millions of users on their systems.  Yet the designers decided not to use SAN technology.  Instead they voted for drive systems we would have seen 10 years ago on servers.  Today that company is constantly running out of disk space while supporting their users.  Because they have no SAN the company must copy files to another system, and add drives directly to the server when there isn’t enough space.  IT experts are watching disk space and hard drive activity looking for tell-tale error that are the early warning signals for failing drives or full disk drives.

Why would a company avoid using the technology that will allow them to scale their growth?

Some say it’s because the technology is unproven and may be unreliable.  More often, designers and network experts just aren’t keeping up.  Technology is changing so fast, that we no longer have a job if the present technology is replaced.  The longer the company waits though to change the technology the more expensive it will be.  Replacing one server at a time is much less expensive than changing 100’s of computers that are years past their time.  The more I talk with IT experts, the more I find that these experts are just as human as everyone else.

If you think it’s hard to get a user or manager to change their thinking about IT.  Try convincing an IT expert to change.  Even as I walk through the schools I still see the technical colleges teaching the same degrees and information from the same books they taught from 5 and even 10 years ago.  Hardware is moving off site, yet people are still building on premise data centers.  A good business class server starts at about $5000.  Add the rack, air-conditioning, UPS, dedicated power, physical security, IT expertise it’s becomes much more expensive.  Consider that the lowest cost Azure server costs less than $20 dollars a month.  When is the cost to support a single on premise server ever going to match the value of an Azure server that is backed up across multiple continents and accessible from anywhere.

Now I wonder if there aren’t systems experts right now ready to argue that there are times when you will want a server on premise.  Or that there will always be some people with servers on their sites.  So an Azure or Amazon or other cloud service provider isn’t the right choice for everyone.  So my argument might be to say, Look back when Edison setup his first power plant.  Back then it was thought that ever business would be providing its own power.  Today we have a power grid with cheap power.  Nobody would consider building their own electrical plant in order to stay off the grid.  I would suggest that 20 years from now, what people will be awestruck that so many people considered having systems on premise.  In fact most of my smallest clients haven’t bothered to buy a server.  They combine SaaS services like 365, Dynamic CRM and have no need for any server systems.

I put the software on one of my older Lenovo’s (System is about 2 years old and was running windows 7) and laptop is running just fine.  Of course the system has no touch screen capability.  So I’m figuring out how to do everything with a mouse or finger pad.  (I remember when I had to move from DOS command line to a GUI interface.  The change is not that traumatic.

I really haven’t read any documentation on the system, so I might have a better experience if I knew the system from the designers point of view.  So after a few months I’m not sure I understand why there are two interfaces.  Each has its own things you can do.  I’ve been discovering them online as I run into problems.  I think though even without the understanding I probably prefer the new interface.

So when working on non-Windows 8 systems, I find myself wishing it was a Windows 8 system.  When I’m on the Windows 8 system, I seldom wish to go back to Windows 7, XP or earlier.  (Sometimes I did feel that way when I moved from DOS to Windows 3.11, 3.11 to XP, XP to Windows 7.)  Mostly I’m waiting for my learning curve to catch up.

Having worked on the Lync team, I’m really looking forward to a new system that is completely compatible with everything Lync.  I’m ready to throw away my smart phone, handset and start carrying something light and easy to use.  I think it would be nice to empty my pockets and lighten the load on my backpack.

I’m curious how others are seeing the Windows 8 OS?  Do you we going to all be using Apple or Amazon tablets in the future?  Or does Windows 8 have a chance?

In high school I learned a lot about management theory.  So it wasn’t a surprise to see the subject when later in college I was working on my MBA.  One of the principles in management has to do with the managers assumptions about their workforce.  Back in the 60′s started being taught as theory X vs theory Y.

Theory X – Up and into the 50’s managers were taught that employees were lazy and did not want to work.  That all workers would do everything they could do to get out of working.  Part of the managers job was to build a management system that held employees accountable for working every minute of every hour.  Then to get as many hours out of an employee at the lowest cost.

I think if we look back at some of the turn of the century work places; Coal mines, foundries and other manufacturing businesses the working conditions were deplorable.  It was no wonder that after a 6 day work week with 12 hour shifts, an employee might be wanting to get off work and see his family.  When working conditions got better something amazing changed.  Employees began enjoying their work.  It wasn’t until the 1960’s that management theory included a new theory called Theory Y.

Theory Y – Assumes that all workers see their work as a fulfilling part of their life.  The goal is to do as good a job as possible.  Employees are not lazy and can be trusted.  Managers then must assume that the worker is there for a reason much bigger than just money.  To enable this type of worker the manager should add more and more flexibility and authority as the employee requests it.

It took over 80 years for the business management culture of the 1800’s to catch up in the 1960’s.  The result?  A workforce managed by Theory Y managers is a much more productive workforce.  More production ultimately means more profits for the same cost to the employer.  Theory Y is now embraced by the management culture in the United States.  This is great.

What if  the managers on your team were trained in Theory X and not Y? Life can be miserable for the employee who is used to theory Y managers.  Work is especially shaming for the employee.  The most productive employees will go find a job someplace else.

Personally, I think this is the biggest weakness when it comes to outsourcing teams from other countries.  Put a theory X manager in charge of a Theory Y workforce and suddenly there is confusion.  With that confusion, is a workforce that is much less productive.

I am sure that over time, managers from other cultures will learn to manage this new way.  It didn’t happen overnight in the United States… and it probably won’t happen overnight for the managers with a strong theory X culture.  In the meantime though, the employees, the company and even the managers lose.  As an business consultant, I interview the managers while the managers are interviewing me for every project.  I discuss Management styles to discover who I might be working for.  After working with managers who are theory X trained or even untrained and promoted from a technology team I’ve decided that I won’t work for managers who aren’t versed in Theory Y.  I’ve been much happier ever since.

Part of the reason why people hire me is to identify true experts from the experts who are just a little more information than others in a specific topic. We all have met “experts” who claim to be experts. When you ask them what they can do, they assure you that they are able to do anything you are asking them to do. Confidently you present them to a client, only to wish you’d never met the person. The person you met may be a quick learner and believes they can learn enough to keep just ahead of the project. These experts want to believe that they are able to stay ahead of the game enough to fool everyone else in the room. These types of exerts have literally cost me $100’s of 1000’s of dollars.

How do we tell when an expert, is really an expert?

So the first thing to do is ask questions. Ok… not just questions, because you probably are asking questions. Instead we want to ask more questions in a very tactical way. What I tend to do is to start with simple questions. Then ask a series of questions that are a little harder and a then another series of questions that are little harder still. Don’t limit this to technical questions like define the AD FISMO roles (I was asked this by 5 out of 6 interviewers on one job interview). Ask about the projects they’ve worked on where they picked up the experience to learn about the basic questions like, “Do you know active directory?”

What I find is that for the simple questions, you can see the confidence in the answers they give. These are the subjects they’ve seen dozens of times.  They will have ideas and details about these questions. This becomes your baseline for understanding how this person responds to questions they have an in-depth understanding about. Whether this person is shy, or extraverted, if the person becomes more and more vague in their answers, they are probably not quite the experts they claim to be.

As you ask more questions, is the confidence and accuracy of the details still there? If the person is a bit shy, you may even notice more animation when talking about their work. (Shy people often forget their shyness when discussing things they truly know.) Eventually though, the questions broaden or deepen in technical complexity. The expert understands what you are doing and is comfortable with sharing the limits of their knowledge and understanding. The inexperienced expert will bluff. Then continue to bluff long after the interviewer has recognized that the expert is bluffing. Confident experts never lose site of the realization that eventually all technical interviewers are looking for the edge of their experience and knowledge. True experts realize that it’s important to them, that they get on projects where they can best leverage their expertise. We’ve heard of experts being successful on projects that they shouldn’t have been successful on. These are business myths that could occur on simple projects, but complex projects are never successful when everyone on the team is unable to carry their share of the load. The expert wants to be on a project where they can carry their load.

So the question comes back to what is a true expert and how to you identify them?

My personal feeling is that the weakness in IT is that the IT department is actually a tactical not a strategic arm of the business organization.  Sure we hear the term web strategy or server strategy, but in actuality these are just marketing terms.  Tactics focus on the day to day execution.  Strategy is not focused on the day to day.  Strategy is focused on the long term picture and alignment with a long term vision.  The IT department doesn’t focus on the long term.  Instead technology groups are focused on getting things fixed, managed or implemented as quickly as possible.

It could be argued that there are many strategic tools that the IT department uses for technology planning.  Some of these tools include;

Data repositories that include system life cycles, information knowledgebase, and historical records for tracking projected vs. actual metrics and more

Capacity Mapping tools that visually graph business capacity vs. actual technical capacity

Gap Analysis tools that identify the so call “stretching seams” in the present capacity as business grows

Unfortunately these and other tools are very static when looking at the long term future of data systems.  We know that in the future technology will change and tools will change.  So these tools can really tell us about what’s going on now. 

True strategic planning thinks into the future rather than assuming that today’s problems will also be tomorrow’s problems.  Who should be making strategic plans for the technology department?  If the IT is truly a tactical component of the business, should IT be doing the strategic planning for the business?  As strange as this sounds the answer is no.  Now many IT professionals would argue, my CEO doesn’t even read his own email.  How can this person possibly make a strategic technical plan.  I think this is a good question.  Yet lets look at the other departments.  Though the CEO is not an expert in Accounting, the board makes strategic decisions for the Accounting department.  The same is true for every department, people who know nothing about HR, Law, marketing, sales make strategic decisions for each of those departments.  Why should it be different for the IT department? 

Throughout my own history in IT, when the IT department has made strategic decisions about technology the department gets in troubles.  Because the department is in trouble, the business quickly follows.  When IT is truly successful it’s because the top level strategic thinkers in the management team have designed the strategic planning for the IT department.  Working as a technology consultant, I thought my role was to represent the IT department in the board room.  What I find is that I am actually representing the strategic vision and leadership of the management teams to the IT department.  When the IT department follows the strategic planning of the management team everyone, including IT, is successful.

The IT role changes in many ways.  First and most obvious as the technology changes, the role of technology expert is to keep re-learning the technology each time it changes.  Many technology experts are experts in multiple technologies.  So the learning curve is constant as we learn new technologies and develop new skills in those technologies.  Then it starts all over again as a new change or a new technology is rolled out into the work place.  This learning by itself is enough to keep any technician on their toes.

The role of the technology expert changes in other ways besides technology.  Another important way is with the growth of the business.  For example: Change control is actually pretty easy when there is just one expert managing a system.  Even with 2 experts, it’s not difficult if both experts are constantly communicating.  Now imagine 10 experts or 20 experts.  The casual methods of change control start breaking down.  Non documented changes are “fixed” by other experts causing the system to break down over and over again.  Change control becomes a governance role in the IT department to avoid problems where one technician is stepping in and breaking the fix of another technician.

My role has changed as well, now I see myself as a governance role.  I don’t walk in and fix technical problems.  Instead I walk in and fix the business processes.  Before I can fix the process, I need to understand what’s going on.  The process before fixing something is called Due Diligence.  In this role you don’t fix technical problems any longer.  This is the common thing about a governance role, it’s not about fixing things, it’s about fixing process.

Due Diligence is about figuring out where everything is at right now.  The first question I always ask is, “Where’s your documentation?”

You can imagine what the response is to that.  There’s more documentation today than there was when I was first managing networks.  The problem is that even with the most advanced networks, nobody really knows how to build a knowledge base.  Second even fewer technical experts understand how to write technical documentation.  So the first question is often the first problem.  My job becomes documenting, at least at a high level, the technical environment.

I then begin reviewing the system logs.  I want to identify risk for the owner.  If there’s no documentation, there is also probably no analysis of the network itself.  The first step then is to document the risk status of the network and report those to the management teams.  A

The next step is to begin identifying the roles in the IT department.  I’m looking for governance roles.  The reasons network fail is because there are ineffective governance roles.  If for example the IT department head is also managing the servers, running incident tickets, designing the network and doing root cause analysis we have a problem.  All governance roles must be held by separate people from the roles they are governing.  The system architect should be verifying the function of the systems.  The root cause analysis must be done by someone other than the Incident technician.  These are all red flags when analyzing the network.

Due Diligence is the process of gathering the data that the governance role will use to analyze the network.  I’ve never been called into a network that had appropriate governance roles.  These networks manage themselves well.  I have been called into companies that have grown past the capacity of the present IT staff.  Through due diligence, my collaboration partners and I, have found it’s possible to identify risks and missed opportunities.  Then the governance role can analyze and create new business processes for the IT department to follow.  The result is a strong and more efficient team.

What I found for myself was that I wasn’t planning my projects well enough.  It turns out the technical execution is actually a very small part of the project.  As the project becomes larger and more complex, the non-technical aspects of the project become more and more important to consider.  Planning a project for me is like setting up dominoes.  When you push the first domino each of the following dominoes falls next.  So with the energy to push that first domino dozens, hundreds or even thousands of dominos will be affected. 

Taking the domino analogy one step further, in a project no all dominos are the same color.  Some are black, some are blue, some are white and they all need to be ordered in the right way.  It turns out that planning the project is much more important than the execution itself.

We’ve all been on projects where suddenly the dominos stopped, even though here are dominos still standing.  What happened?  On domino in thousands was ignored so it was just a little to far away when it fell.  This meant it missed hitting the next domino.  If you’ve been on a project like this, trying to start the next domino in line becomes a real problem.  Now the project team is putting out fires.  Fires that probably never should have started.

Sun Zhu taught his leaders to plan everything in their headquarters not on the battle field.  What I find with most projects is that there are some fires that couldn’t have been anticipated, but 90% of the time fires on the project are a result of poor planning.  To avoid fires I add what I call governance roles into my planning.  An example of a governance role can be seen all over business.  The controller is a governance role for the CPA.  The Human resources department is a governance role for the employees.  The board of directors is a governance role for the CEO.  When IT departments and technical projects fail, I’ve found it’s because we don’t plan any type of governance role into the project.  Among my partners, I always try to assign a business governance role and a technical governance role.  The business governance keeps the project on track and makes sure no roles are getting side tracked. 

The technical governance role allows me to verify that my technical experts are being honest with me.  We’ve all seen technical experts who use their technical expertise as a way to consolidate power.  Adding technical governance negates that power.  I use technical governance to hold my technical experts accountable on a project.  I put the governance piece in form the beginning so everyone is aware that that can’t shade the truth in any way