Archive for the ‘information technology’ Category

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IT Managers Need To Realize That Virtualization Isn’t All That It’s Cracked Up To Be

Thursday, June 9th, 2011
Image Credit Sure Virtualization Seems Neat In The Beginning, But…

Sure Virtualization Seems Neat In The Beginning, But…

To read the IT trade journals or speak with IT managers you’d think that we’ve all found the magic silver bullet that IT’s been looking for during the past few years: server virtualization. The ability to mash together a bunch of different expensive individual servers and shrink the company’s IT footprint down by a factor of 5x while reducing power and cooling costs at the same time sure seems to be a miracle cure for IT budget problems. Guess what: this isn’t Hogwarts and you’re not Harry Potter. Virtualization has its own set of problems and we need to have a talk…

What Is Virtualization?

So first off, let’s make sure that we’re all on the same page here with our understanding of just exactly what this virtualization thing is. In the past, IT teams used to set up a new server for each new application that they wanted to deploy. This resulted in the team having to maintain farms of servers that were all horribly underutilized.

The arrival of virtualization software changed everything. This low level software allowed multiple applications to run on the same physical hardware but believe that they had the box all to themselves. Now you could combine multiple individual servers into a single physical box. Things like what operating system an application used no longer mattered – you could mix and match to your heart’s content.

Problem: Virtual Machine Sprawl

Evangelos Kotsovinos has taken a close look at just exactly what it means to introduce lots of virtual machines into a company’s IT infrastructure. What he’s found is that although IT managers might think that this changes everything, it doesn’t.

It turns out that managing a virtual machine (VM) takes roughly the same amount of effort that managing a real box does. When you couple this with the fact that it has become so easy to set up new VMs, what you’re seeing is unconstrained virtual machine sprawl.

IT teams are struggling to keep up with more and more VMs as staff set them up and then forget about them. Every IT manager now needs to come up with a VM reclamation solution.

Problem: Scaling

The very newness of VMs is causing IT teams to encounter a whole new set of management headaches. In the old days, IT teams had developed the tools and processes that they needed in order to deal with building large groups of new servers or handling a planned data center maintenance activity.

The arrival of VMs has upset this carefully established way of doing things. The problem is that often the VM management tools aren’t able to scale up to the size of enterprise operations. This leaves IT teams struggling to find ways to manage the beast that they have created.

Problem: Troubleshooting

There’s something deeply satisfying about tackling a system problem when you have the physical box in front of you. You know that you can always reach out and swap out various components if you have to. The same is not true when you’ve virtualized all of your servers.

Kotsovinos points out that a VM is really a collection of interconnected physical subsystems: server, storage, and network. When you are dealing with a system problem, like a slowdown, it’s going to require a whole new set of skills to track down what’s really going on. Additionally, virtualization is so new that often the right tools to do this type of trouble shooting may not exist yet.

Problem: Silos

Think about how your teams are set up today. Generally we draw lines between various disciplines based on what they do: the Unix team, the Windows team, the storage guys, the network guys, etc. The arrival of virtualization in the data center is going to screw all of this up.

The reason that virtualization can cause such a disruption is because issues that have to do with the VMs more often than not involve all of the various disciplines. No longer will the storage team be able to just focus on storage issues. Instead, they are going to have to work together with several other teams in order to try to solve complex problems.

What All Of This Means For You

Server virtualization is a fantastic discovery. However, IT Managers need to realize that it’s not going to make all of their problems go away.

Instead, virtualization is going to end up replacing one set of problems with another. These will include potentially unchecked virtual machine sprawl, scaling issues, more challenging troubleshooting, and a breakdown in the IT silo structure.

Face it, virtualization is going to take over both the IT back office and probably the IT front office eventually. IT Managers need to understand that as this occurs, we’re all going to have to adjust how IT teams are run in order to meet the new set of demands that virtualization is going to put on us…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What do you think is the best way to keep virtual machine sprawl from getting out of hand?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Here’s a quick quiz for you: is workplace tension a good thing or a bad thing? No matter how you answered this question, that tension thing is always there – a constant presence in the workplace. It’s how you choose to deal with it that will have the greatest impact on your team’s performance…

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A Tale Of Woe: What To Do When IT Is Too Complex?

Thursday, July 1st, 2010
Image Credit Is It A Solution That Only An IT Leader Could Love?

Is It A Solution That Only An IT Leader Could Love?

There probably isn’t a problem out there that couldn’t be solved by adding some IT to it. In fact, once you had done that, you could probably make that solution even better by adding more IT to it. At what point is too much IT considered to be too much of a good thing? IT Leaders need to be able to realize when enough is enough…

The Story Of A (Small) Bank

Doug Bartholomew has taken the time to hunt down stories about when IT Leaders allowed the technology monster to get out of its cage. One such story has to do with a small bank in Texas that had a pretty simple problem: they wanted to keep track of all of their interactions with their customers.

Now any IT Leader worth their salt would instantly realize that this type of customer issue is exactly what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software packages have been designed for. The trick; however, is to match the solution to the problem – and that didn’t happen here.

The small bank had 16 bankers who keep track of everything on paper. It was working ok, but they had difficulty “seeing” just how much contact they were having with a given customer. Everyone agreed that a CRM solution was needed. In the end, the bank selected a Siebel Systems (now a part of Oracle) solution.

Did You Hear The One About The Monster Application…?

There’s no question that Siebel makes a great CRM application. I mean it sure seems like it can do just about everything. The problem in this case is that the small bank really didn’t want it to do everything: most of the installation of the application focused on turning off functionality that they didn’t want.

The next issue was the simple fact that for a customer who didn’t have a lot of existing technology, the solution that they had selected came across as being very complex. Multiple screens had to be navigated to complete a function and a new way of thinking about both products and customers had to be adopted.

The result of this is that the very folks that the bank needed to use the new system, the bankers, didn’t want anything to do with it. Once they stopped using it, the value of the application to the bank pretty much went out the door.

In the end, after having invested roughly $500,000 in software licenses and implementation costs, the bank ended up walking away from their CRM application.

A New Way Of Doing Business

This story might end on a sad note with the bank staff going back to doing everything by hand, but it doesn’t. Instead, the IT Leaders went out and found another application that better suited their needs. This new application was much simpler although it had a lot less functionality. It was just a shared database and spreadsheet program that was much easier for the bankers to use.

In fact, the bankers soon found that they were able to create customized reports without having to ask IT to help do it. Now that’s using IT the way that it’s supposed to be used!

What All Of This Means For You

IT Leaders do love our IT technology. However, we need to keep in mind that not every business problem that comes up needs to be solved with an ultra-sophisticated IT application.

We always have to take the time before we design an IT solution to study our customers: what is their real issue? The trick to creating the right IT solution is to provide the end user with just enough (but not too much) IT technology to get their job done.

IT Leaders who can take the time and not over design solutions for their end users are the ones who will be able to best meet the company’s goals of doing more and moving faster using IT technology.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think the bank should have stuck with their initial CRM solution and just customized it to meet their needs?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

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Posted in information technology | 2 Comments »

What A Rental Car Company Can Teach IT Leaders

Thursday, May 20th, 2010
Image Credit
Maybe We Should All Be Trying Harder…

Maybe We Should All Be Trying Harder…

As IT Leaders, we should all be trying harder to find ways to use the talents of our teams to make our companies run smoother. Hmm, I wonder if there are any companies out there that could serve as an example for us? Good news – there is one: >Avis rental cars.

How Hard Can It Be To Rent A Car?

It turns out that Avis Rent A Car is really both Avis and Budget – both companies are owned by the same company (who knew?) The first lesson that IT Leaders can learn from Avis is how they roll out new technologies: they don’t bet the farm on any one technology. Instead they do proof-of-concept trials and gauge customer feedback in order to decide if they should go ahead an rollout a solution company-wide.

Avis is not afraid to use wireless technology if it solves a problem. If you’ve returned a rental car to Avis lately, you’ve probably been greeted by an employee standing in the return line with a wireless device. I know that I haven’t had to go into the office to return a car in a long time – thank you wireless (great because I always seem to be running late for my plane).

As an example of IT Leaders thinking outside of the box, Avis has taken this remote check in one step further and now they will email you a copy of your receipt so that you don’t have to worry about stuffing a piece of paper into your luggage as you jump on the shuttle bus.

How To Innovate When You Work In A Parking Lot

One of the reasons that Avis’ IT Leaders are so innovative is because they can see their competition on the other side of the parking lot. That causes them to try harder.

The Avis data center is currently outsourced to IBM so Avis doesn’t have to spend any time worrying about typical data center activities. Instead they spend their time working on things like trying to make sure that a customer’s experience at the rental counter will be the same experience that they’ll have when they visit the company’s web sites.

The Internet plays a big part in every IT shop these days and Avis is no different. Avis uses XML to interface to other travel related businesses via the Internet. By doing this they are able to avoid booking fees and this saves everyone a lot of money.

Finally, Avis IT Leaders have also spent a lot of time and effort to create a direct connection between themselves and their insurance companies, car dealerships, and collision repair shops. This allows them to quickly react whenever one of their customers has a car crash.

What All Of This Means For You

Normally rental car companies and their cars don’t get even a second glance from IT Leaders as we race though the airport. However, maybe we’ve been overlooking a well run IT shop in our haste.

Avis is locked in a constant struggle with other rental car companies and so their IT Leaders have to be constantly innovating. They use whatever IT technology best suits the issue that they are tying to solve and this includes wireless and XML.

In the end, it’s the close working relationship that the Avis IT Leaders have been able to create between themselves and the business side of the house that has allowed them to achieve so much. Maybe that’s why they try harder…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Knowledge

Question For You: What do you think that Avis should do next in order to make renting and returning their cars even quicker and easier?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The world of IT is experiencing a form of “cloud fever” in which every company seems to be talking about how they are going to use cloud computing to become more successful. Well, talk is cheap and in the end it’s starting to look like nobody really has a clue as to how to go about actually doing this…

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Posted in information technology | 2 Comments »

Maybe It’s Time For IT Leaders To Go Shopping To Learn New Tricks

Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Image Credit
The Retail Sector Needs Good IT Leadership

The Retail Sector Needs Good IT Leadership

Good IT Leaders find ways to use the tools that IT provides along with the skills that their teams have in order to help the company move faster and do more. Nowhere is this currently more visible than in the world of retail sales…

Do Retail Stores Even Still Exist?

After the past bruising few years, one might be forgiven for thinking that the world of retail was going away. Look around and you can probably see countless shuttered stores in your area. However, if you take a moment and look just a bit closer you’ll see something else: some stores are starting to wake up. The global recession drove a lot of firms out of business, but the ones that are left are eager to get back to work.

Their products haven’t really changed all that much, but they realize that they are going to have to work hard to change the shopping experience for their beaten-down customers. Making shopping easy is the goal and this is where IT Leaders can lend a helping hand.

The research firm IDC forecasted that worldwide retail IT spending was going to grow by 2.4% from $81B to $83 in 2009. On the flip side in the manufacturing sector, they forecasted that supply chain management spending was going to grow to $3B in 2009. Clearly retail firms are placing their bets for future growth in the hands of their IT departments.

What Can IT Leaders Do To Help Online Stores?

Being willing to help the company out is an important part of being an IT Leader in retail; however, often times the big question is just where that help is needed. The first thing to realize is that not all stores are created equal. Specifically, online stores are different from traditional bricks & mortar stores.

If you work for an online store, then you are going to want to be using your team’s IT talents to find ways to add more features to your web sites. These can include such things as: making purchasing easier to do, adding customer reviews, or even videos showing how to use your products.

Online stores are lucky (sorta) in that they have a great role model in their industry: Amazon.com Love ‘em or hate ‘em, everyone agrees that Amazon does a great job of presenting products and then selling them like there’s no tomorrow.

Following Amazon’s lead, IT Leaders need to work with their teams to find ways to simplify the online checkout process and incorporate recommendation engines that can help solve customer problems while up-selling additional products.

What Can IT Leaders Do To Help Offline Stores?

Traditional stores that were not “Internet only” stores were predicted to be going away now that the Internet has arrived. However, clearly that’s not happening. Instead, what’s going on is that traditional stores are using IT to reinvent themselves and make the shopping experience more enjoyable for their customers.

Moving the point-of-sale (POS) terminals to where the customers are is one way that IT Leaders and their teams can help out the rest of the business. In order to do this a whole series of IT challenges need to be overcome such as finding ways to wirelessly connect cash registers to the network and allow credit cards to be securely processed.

Inventory management and its cousin application supply chain management are also prime areas where IT can help traditional retailers to reduce costs and boost profits. Implementing or optimizing these applications allows a retailer to link their sales forecasts with their manufacturing or ordering processes and prevents over / under stocks.

What All Of This Means For You

If IT Leaders aren’t careful they can focus on the wrong things. They can spend too much time thinking about how to optimize what IT does, and not enough time thinking about how to make the rest of the business run better.

Online and offline retailers are different types of firms. IT can play a role in helping both types of companies be more successful by helping them to make the customer’s shopping experience more enjoyable.

IT lives to serve the rest of the business. This means that smart IT Leaders know that when it comes to supporting a retail business, it’s how they use IT that’s going to be the key to their success.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Knowledge

Question For You: Do you think online or offline retailers value their IT departments more highly?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As IT Leaders, we should all be trying harder to find ways to use the talents of our teams to make our companies run smoother. Hmm, I wonder if there are any companies out there that could serve as an example for us? Good news – there is one: Avis rental cars.

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Posted in information technology | No Comments »

Web 3.0 Is Coming – Are IT Leaders Ready?

Thursday, July 30th, 2009
What Is The Web 3.0 And Are CIOs Going To Be Ready?

What Is The Web 3.0 And Are IT Leaders Going To Be Ready?

Oh Web 2.0, it seems like only yesterday that you arrived – is it possible that already you may be getting ready to be replaced? The answer is not quite yet, but the outline of what the Web 3.0 is going to look like is starting to firm up. IT Leaders need to start getting ready for this change now so that when it arrives they can take advantage of all that it will offer…

What Was Web 2.0?

Before we run off and start making predictions about the future of the Internet, maybe it would be a good idea to take just a moment and make sure that we are all on the same page as to just exactly what the Web 2.0 is / was.

When the web first showed up (Web 1.0), everyone rushed out and created static web pages. That was a great start, but it got a bit boring because nothing changed without a great deal of effort. Web 2.0 extended what we had by adding blogging, Wikipedia, social networking (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and even microblogging (Twitter). This changed everything because all of a sudden things could be easily changed – and they were!

What Is Web 3.0 Going To Be?

IT Leaders who are trying to keep their teams on track and on top of new technologies need to be asking just what is going to make up the Web 3.0. Dr. Jim Hendler at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been spending some time thinking about this and he’s come up with some interesting ideas. Dr. Hendler points out that the next version of the Web appears to all be based on Tim Berners-Lee’s (you know, the guy who invented the Web) vision of a semantic web.

In this next iteration of the web, what we’re going to see is more and more complex mashups of data from different applications being used to deliver data in more useful ways. Dr. Hendler believes that the read-write abilities of Web 2.0 applications will be used to build Web 3.0 applications that operate at the data, not the application level.

What’s Going To Make The Web 3.0 Happen?

Before the Web 3.0 can show up, a few critical pieces need to drop into place. Ultimately, what needs to happen is that it has to become easier to integrate web data resources. This is exactly what IT Leaders need to be staying on top of. Here are the emerging technologies that are going to allow this to happen:

  • Resource Description Framework (RDF): provides a means to link data from multiple different websites or databases. Uses the SQL-like SPARQL query language.
  • Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): We already have these – this is how you merge and map data that is found in different locations on the web.
  • Web Ontology Language (OWL): allows relationships to be inferred between data that is stored in different parts of the same application.

Final Thoughts

IT Leaders have many different responsibilities that they have to juggle at the same time. Keeping up on new and emerging technologies is part of the job. The Web 3.0 will be at least as significant of a change as the Web 2.0 was. If they move quickly, IT Leaders can position their teams to get in front of a significant change before it happens. Right now they have such a chance – Web 3.0 is not here yet, but it’s getting ready to arrive.

IT Leaders need to have their teams spending time time to understand what problems that the company is facing today will be able to be solved once you have a better way to unify all of that data that is available on the web. A critical first step is assigning staff to learn and become experts on the new Web 3.0 technologies early on. If you can prepare for the future AND accomplish your other IT tasks at the same time, then the Web 3.0 will have provided you with yet another way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

What is the level of adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in your department currently? Is anyone currently studying the new technologies that Web 3.0 will be built on? Is anyone on your team studying how Web 3.0 abilities can be used to help your company? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you ever heard the phrase “When senior management doesn’t know what to do, they reorganize”? I’m not sure if this is always true, but it sure seems as though when times are tough reorganizations, restructuring, and even re-engineering are things that can happen to any department in IT. What’s an IT Leader to do about it?

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Posted in information technology | 2 Comments »

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