Cold Calls

I receive about 3-4 cold calls a day from various IT Service firms trying to sell me everything from hardware and software to ways to make my testing more efficient.

Thanks but no thanks.  You may have the best product in the world but if you need to resort to cold calling in this day and age then you have no clue how to sell into IT and likely don't have the right product in the first place.

Please read up on this new thing they call social media.  Its a great way to get introduced to someone you think might be a sale someday.

Cold calling is for dinosaurs and we all know they aren't around anymore.

-KB

Revenues from Litigation

I understand litigation is necessary for some things when the normal course of business can't get you where you need to be.  The graphic below though is just ridiculous.

Off Topic: XP vs. Windows 7

Thanks to my soon to be eleven year old daughter's ultimate curiosity for all things downloadable I recently had to reload my XP machine at home.  I couldn't find my XP disc and I had a copy of Vista and Windows 7 available.  I started with Vista as I was worried that the 6+ year old machine with its Pentium 4 3.0Ghz processor and 2 GBs of RAM would perform sub optimally on Windows 7.

I loaded vista and first thing out of the shoot I had driver problems.  Thank god for extra machines because the driver in question was the network card (for non-techies this is bad if you like internet things).  I found the appropriate drivers and uploaded them.  Presto I was running Vista.  On a promo version time-bombed for 30 days from install.  Oops.  No problem, I just go to activemyvistacopy.com or some such nonsense.  Oops again, website doesn't exist.  Quick Google search shows that it has been inactive for 2 years.  Oops.

I had a valid copy of Windows 7 so I decided what the heck - time to upgrade.  Again.  Thankfully the vista drivers flowed through and all my custom hardware (I build the PC from scratch over 6 years ago) all worked like a charm.

A week later and I have to admit - it actually works better than XP.  Small victory for a lost Saturday.

-Kris

Microsoft continues to struggle in mobile - needs to listen to Apple

If you missed the WSJ alert or article, Microsoft announced that their big bet on the teen market, the Kin devices were being killed after just two months on the market.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703426004575339402480468426.html?mod=djemalertTECH

How does an organization launch something and then two months later kill it?  There is always the chance that all the research was right, the product was awesome and consumers just hated it.  It begs the question how Microsoft can't seem to translate their success in the software market to mobile phones.

My personal opinion is that Microsoft is spending way too much time chasing the market.  Trying to catch up to Apple and Google rather than trying to innovate on something they have that already works.

Ask any serious video gamer what the two top console platforms are and they will tell you Nintendo's WII and Microsoft's Xbox.  Ask them what the top multi-player platform is and there is no second best.  Microsoft owns the multi-player market from consumer experience to market share and monetization.  Why not try to capitalize on that success.  Rather than chasing Apple and Google, why not build a mobile platform that syncs with Xbox live and drives a really cool experience for people who use and love that platform.  You can control innovation because you already own the services side of it and you can make your fans even bigger fans by expanding the offering.

I'm sure some Marketing guy at MSFT has a dozen reasons why they looked at it and passed but Apple's success didn't come from them chasing anyone.  They listened to their users and created what they wanted in the iPhone.  They leveraged an already huge base of iPod users and took it to the next level.  Its worked really well for them, might be time for Microsoft to borrow a trick from Apple for a change.

-Kris

Apple worth more than Microsoft

It was bound to happen.  Microsoft's products are great but they continue to lose ground in key markets like the mobile and entertainment base.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/technology/27apple.html?emc=na

On a side note I am liking the new Office 2010 but interesting enough I could probably live without it.  More on that later.

-KB

IT in the Cloud

The more I investigate Cloud infrastructure the more I'm convinced that anyone with annual revenues of less than $1 billion should be using it.  Usage rates will vary but one thing is certain even with VM technology you will never utlilize 100% of your capacity.  You will have RAM bottlenecks or CPU bottlenecks or Disk Bottlenecks.

Most Cloud infrastructure vendors including Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering are charging based on actual usage.    Need an application for one week out of the month?  Turn it off until you need it and then turn it on.  Only pay for what you need.

But aren't virtual servers a good thing you ask?  Yes they are the middle man for savings based on shared environments.  In fact Virtual Machines (VMs) are what Microsoft, Amazon and a host of other companies use to make their cloud offerings.  VMs only get you so far though.

I put together a graph of the cost to a business running a physical server, a VM and the cloud.  Basic Assumptions:

1) An organization replaces its physical servers every 4 years (this may be too aggressive for your organization) due to end of life/warranty, etc.
2) Average CPU utilization is 20% (I find on average that avg. CPU usage is usally a lot less than this on a dedicated box (its not uncommon to see avg CPU at 1% with spikes at certain times).
3) The VM is 1/5th capacity and cost of the physical.  You can load up more VMs on a physical server but you start to have RAM or CPU bottlenecks if you carve it up into too many chunks.

File this under "It was bound to happen"

A friend shared a link today to an Engadget article that shows how a hacker can take advantage of the massive amount of computer controlled components in your automobile.

This just underscores a broader issue around system security that automobile manufacturers have decided to ignore.  Security, even physical security, needs to be planned into a system not as an afterthought but as a part of system design in the beginning.

I'm sure some sitcom or movie in the near future will have a good scare scene related to this news.

-Kris

The Three Dimensional Graph of Choice

I constantly hear people telling me they have to have something done a particular way.  Its this way or it doesn't work.  Black or white.

Why do the religious nut jobs seem to insist that the world is black or white?  You are either interested in quality or you are interesting in making money.  Why not both?  Why not a sliding scale of quality based on the deliverable you are building.

When is good good enough?

Building great software involves thinking about and designing practices that support building software the way YOU need to build software.  Not the way your cousin does it @ tweeter.com down the street.  Tweeter.com has 8000 servers and monkeys as customers.  You do not.

Processes like QA, development - controls on how you build software should be evaluated based on a 3 dimensional graph of # of users, complexity and Lines of Code (LOC).

Why the three dimension graph?  Its an easy way to visualize a sliding scale of control.  Developing something just for yourself?  Avoid QA all together - I know I write bug-free code so why not let myself enjoy the fruits of my labor sooner?

Lets talk a bit about the three dimensions because its important to understand why each of them plays a critical role in helping you decide what level of process or control you need to develop your software.


Lines of Code (LOC)
Developers hate this measurement.  It makes them feel like what they are developing can be measured like a widget off of an assembly line.  The reality of the world is that as good or bad as it is, it is a measurement.  Last I checked there was no way to measure "How beautiful" your code is.

Need a new feature on your website?  Well that's just 1,200 lines of code - can I have it next week?  Why then is it important?  It is important because it is a neutral way to judge the size of what you are building.  I constantly try to get my team to consider building applications without writing code?  Why?  If the world existed of packaged software that I didn't write a single line of code for I would never have to support the codebase.  Supporting applications from a development perspective is arguably the single most expensive thing you can do in IT.

Think about this example for a minute:

You spend 20 hours writing a feature in a legacy application.  It goes through QA, you bug fix and all out the door you've spent 30 hours of time building this feature.  It goes into production, your users love it - champagne bottles pop and you all drink to your success.

Six months go by and someone needs a change to your feature.  The developer who built the feature is not available - he's tied up on another project, he left the company for a job @ tweeter.com, whatever.  Maintenance is a crappy job in any profession and building software is no exception.  So its not your best and brightest you put on maintenance duty - Its Steve - you know the guy who is smart enough to load the development tools and do a little poking around but not skilled or seasoned enough to be designing your latest "double the business" idea.  Rock stars don't get invented so every shop has their promising interns, new hires, etc. hanging around to learn from the Rock stars and hopefully one day be one of them.

Steve doesn't know your legacy app so he takes a few hours to get the app loaded and understand the basics of how it works.  He then starts to explore the feature you wrote.  He has no idea why you implemented it the way you did and proceeds to determine that because you used a "double helix hash" method of storing key values he can't fathom the change he is being requested to make being able to be done that way.  So he decides rather than to re-factor the code it would be faster and simpler for him to just rewrite it from scratch.  Only this time he decides that he going to make it more extensible, add comments and make it easier for the poor developer who gets asked in 6 months to make another change to actually make their change without rewriting the code.

50 hours into Steve's rewrite Paul, Steve's manager, finds out he has been taking 5 times as long to write the change as Steve estimated and tells Steve he has 1 day to finish it up.  Steve hurries through the last pieces of his rewrite, leaves out some comments and puts in some very cryptic but functional code to accomplish the change.  It goes through QA and 70 hours have gone by and its finally in production.  Six months later someone finds a defect that Steve's code introduced and the whole thing has to be "fixed" again.

How many lines of code are you current supporting?  How quickly do maintenance issues get addressed?

# of Users
This is an easy metric but one that often gets overlooked.  Everyone assumes that when they design software for the web that they have to design the software for the 1.1 Billion people on the planet that have a reliable internet connection.  Its easy to dream about millions of simultaneous users from around the globe using your bright shiny software to the delight of everyone at your company or organization.  Its also easy to get to a real number.  Do you have multiple languages on your website?  Getting rid of the unicode and translation requirements can drastically simplify development.  Won't ever need a simplified Chinese version of your website?  Then don't design like you might some day.  How many people visit your website today?  What is your Alexa traffic rank?  Where do they come from?  Thinking about the actual use patterns of your software will get you a rough order of magnitude for the # of users.  Remember that you are solving a problem not building the next Google or Facebook.  Don't believe me?  Look at sites like BookRags.com  They are the #1 natural search result for many book summaries, etc.  If you deliver value people will use your software.

Complexity
This is a harder one to judge but I can give you a few examples to help you figure out where you sit on the scale.  Is your software going to interface with other systems?  Is it part of a larger technology process?  Does your software need to do some heavy lifting that can't be done with packaged software?  The answers to these questions and more will help you decide if your software is complex or simple.  Don't let your developers bully you into this.  9 times out of 10 in  my experience developers when left to their own devices will over engineer a solution and increase the complexity unnecessarily.  You have to continue to push people to understand what exact problem they are trying to solve and like anything in Technology there are 20 ways to do it.  Engineers will also try to find the most complex - its their nature to do this.  Avoid it at all costs.

So we have this 3D graph to help us make good decisions about how formal or informal our software development process should be.  So what does it typically look like for IT shops?  Based on my experience, which is arguably limited to just 8 different companies across 4 different industries, it looks a lot like this:

So what types of things look different?  Well imagine you are developing software for a Hospital and that your software could ultimately determine if a patient lives or dies?  What if you are building software for the Space Shuttle?  What controls should you have in place to ensure everything works as designed?  I like to use the Space Shuttle because its likely still one of the more complex pieces of software there is but has a low number of users and a decent number of lines of code.  Think about the controls required to produce the following, courtesy of an article in Fast Company:

"But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors."

 Unfortuanately we typically design our internal software like its going to run the Space shuttle.  It has to be extensible says the business.  It has to be maintanable says IT.  How will we keep the data in sync Finance asks?  All these things create anxiety and angst with software developers until you end up with the 3D graph of choice looking like this:

Before this happens to you, take a moment to think about the three axes i've written about above.  This isn't rocket science folks - well that is unless you are one of the 260 people in the world that design Space Shuttle software.  For the rest of us getting the framework and process right may just get you to a better place.

-Kris

If you want to create jobs incent people to create businesses

Paul has a great post out today that talks about how job growth is inevitable for new small business.  Interestingly he uses the Drunkard's walk (or should it be stumble) to illustrate that it is simply inevitable for young companies to provide job growth.

"Young companies are the single-celled paramecia of the economic world: at t=0 they stand at the bar wall facing the gutter. They can’t lose jobs because they haven’t created any yet. All they can do initially, other than fail, is stagger away from the zero employment wall."

It changes the way you think about how to add job growth into the mix.

-Kris

Remembering New Orleans via Social Media

Our program office has put together an awesome program to take students this summer to New Orleans to help in the rebuilding efforts.  We are using social media to drive attention to the event.  Its an interesting experiment that companies around the world are trying to see how to leverage the power of the community.

The cool part about what we are doing is that if you download the Remember NOLA badge we will donate $1 dollar to a New Orleans Charity.  We have a goal of reaching $50,000 but it takes everyone you know to do this.

So my ask of you:  Please pass on:  http://www.remembernola.com to your friends and family and help us reach our goal of donating $50,000.

Thanks,

Kris

Leadership in 30 seconds

Its taking charge when the situation warrants and only then.
Its making others better - better colleagues, better scientists, better friends and better human beings.
Its making people uncomfortable but not in a vindictive way.
Leadership is always being that guy or that woman that people turn to when nothing else makes sense.

Some say its being a linchpin.

I bought 5 copies today for my leadership team because I believe they are linchpins and we deserve the conversation.

-Kris

Off balance sheet reports

Interesting video that is easy to follow - http://vimeo.com/9963640 

The author argues that there was a seminol event that occured during the Great Depression that triggered governmental reform.  One of the major fraudsters of the day was shot and killed and the ensuing trial and investigation of the Match King drove eventual reform.  

It begs the questions - do you think that things have gotten so bad in the great Recession that in order for us to trigger governmental reform of the finance sector some wall street fraudster needs to show up on CNN looking like someone from a Quentin Tarantino film got a hold of them?

In some ways we are a much more violent society and in others there is not as much of a pronounced gap between the have's and have-not's.  Talk to your grandparents if they are still around.  How did they act during the late 20's?  How did their parents react?  Have we reacted the same way?  Do we know how to save?  Do we know the pain of consuming less?  The obesity rates in America in the last ten years are good thought provokers that maybe we haven't learned any lessons.

I don't think the damage is real enough in today's world.  We have food banks, shelters, welfare, food stamps, unemployment, our parents, etc..  I don't think the pain is real enough to drive the type of reform that needs to happen.  To move from the fictional financial statements to something that is real.

Friday Fun - or why modern cars require more software than a Jet Fighter

Good clean fun.  http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/this-car-runs-on-code/0

-Kris

Why Cloud vendors will continue to struggle to gain adoption

While I was at the public sector CIO summit for Microsoft last week there was a lot of talk about the cloud.  Microsoft has at least half a dozen cloud offerings with the most marketed being Azure.  Over and over again I heard CIO's ask the same question and one that I haven't found answered from any cloud vendor yet.

Amazon doesn't have it.
Google doesn't have it.
Microsoft doesn't have it.
Even Scoble's Rackspace doesn't have it.

Bandwidth.

Its great to put all of these applications and services in the cloud but if I have to rely on my existing crappy data connection to access it you really haven't solved anything.  It's like standing on one side of a desert canyon where you can see a paradise oasis on the other side but have no way of getting there.

I may have locations across the US or the world and not all of them will have fantastic data links with guaranteed quality of service.  The more I put in the cloud the more the quality of my service is reliant on the network bandwidth available.

Every online service in the world knows this.  That's why they buy completely redundant bandwidth from separate vendors to ensure uptime and performance for their customers.  That's why InterNap had a fantastic business model in the year 2000 but now are irrelevant because everyone does this now themselves.

As a CIO I'm interested in leveraging the cloud.  It can save me time and allow me to focus on other areas of the business instead of how to keep my servers patched or have the latest Exchange hot-fix applied at the right time.  Unless you are an online service these activities don't add value to the bottom line.

I'm waiting for a cloud vendor to start partnering with bandwidth providers.  That's when the game gets interesting for me.

-KB

Don't be a Logicalis

Today I received a package in the mail from Logicalis.  As is often the case in my position I get lots of cold calls or spam in the mail trying to sell me some service, bandwidth, CRM, Hardware, etc., etc.  My favorite until today was the Oracle rep calling me to renew my maintenance.  We are a MSFT shop and don't own any Oracle software...

Today was different.  Logicalis went to the trouble to include a USB stick with a case study on it from Johnsonville Sausage.  You know Johnsonville - good brand, full of MSG, available in every supermarket I've ever been to (e.g. household name).  The packaging was done up with a ton of hype to watch the video ("Best 5 minutes you will ever spend").  

The guys went to the trouble of sending me the video on a USB stick, so what the heck.

If you are going to focus your marketing message on one thing - in this case the video on the enclosed USB stick you should probably make sure it is compelling.

I'm an IT guy which means I deal with data all the time.  Numbers, formulas, Excel, BI - you name it I live in that world.  Not once in the 5 minute video were any numbers mentioned.  Did Logicalis help Johnsonville reduce their time to implement something?  Did they cut their IT maintenance costs?  Did they get them to market faster?  Did they help solve some supply chain issue?  The only number mentioned in the video was by some Logicalis exec talking about how many years they have been working with Johnsonville = 12!  

If you are working with an IT outsourcer for 12 years I'd expect a little more insight into their business than things like "We helped them move to a more flexible system."  wow.  for 12 years?

The content itself was also poor.  Everyone and I mean everyone was facing the side instead of the camera and clearly reading off of a queue card.  These were clearly IT guys trying to make a video and it showed.  

Probably the worst thing about the video was that there was only one Johnsonville guy on the video who was clearly reading off a queue card and was the highest manager they could find.  No execs, not even multiple IT folks saying how great the service is.

I know working in the IT market is tough but with companies like Logicalis as your competition you have no option but to succeed.  

And for the Logicalis folks - if you find this on Google - fire your head of Marketing.  If the only message you can conjour up is work with Logicalis because we have been working with Johnsonville for 12 years you need help.

I want my 5 minutes back.

-KB

How to get the most out of Outlook

I gave a training today around how to get the most out of Outlook.  My top 10 list.  Enjoy.

-Kris

Using Outlook To Increase Your Productivity

View more presentations from krisbliesner.

Geeks of the world unite!

One of the coolest inventions of the century - Microsoft's surface has just been violated by some college students showing what is possible in game development.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/02/10/hands-on-dd-on-the-microsoft-surface/

I can admit to having played a game or two of D&D in my teen years and it is a very cool implementation.  I'm just waiting for the price to go down on the units so it can be an actual consumer device vs. a R&D plaything.

Geek out.

-KB

How do you price your products or services?

I just read an ebook by Todd Sattersten courtesy of Seth Godin.

You can get the book here.

It will change the way you think about three things: Price, Cost and Margin.

Highly recommend.

-KB

New iPad Picture

Ok, so it still doesn't do multi tasking.  No external devices.  No memory cards.  no camera.

But do you people really have to pick on the idea so much?

caveat: I used to work for a competitor that still thinks multi tasking is important.

If you are an apple lover I'm sorry if this post offends you.

-KB

How has the Internet changed the way you think?

Fantastic group of essays by people radically smarter than me.  Love Paul's entry.

http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_7.html

You're welcome.

-Kris