Posts Tagged ‘Google’

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Cloud Computing 101: Just Exactly What Is A Cloud?

Thursday, November 17th, 2011
Image Credit IT Managers need to understand just exactly what a cloud is

IT Managers need to understand just exactly what a cloud is

So there I was the other day talking with one of my IT manager customers and I was going on and on about how her team needed to start adapting their design process to include cloud computing. She knows me very well so she felt comfortable in stopping me in mid-sentence. She said “Jim, I’ve been hearing a lot about this cloud computing stuff and I sorta know what is it, but I’m not sure that I fully understand it. ” Oops, I hadn’t realized that there were still folks out there that hadn’t “drunk the cloud Kool-Aid”. Ok, so now we’re going to take care of this.

Say Hello To Cloud Services

So why are IT managers (and everyone else) struggling to get their hands around just exactly what cloud computing is? I believe that the cause of the confusion is simply that there are a bunch of different things that have been lumped together and are now being called “cloud computing”.

Let’s start with the most basic form: subscription services. In the old days, when an IT department purchased some software disks would arrive in the mail, your team would install them on servers, and you’d be up and running. That’s not the way that it works when you are using the cloud.

When you are using cloud computing, instead of having to physically touch hardware and software in order use an application, now all you have to do is to subscribe to it and you can access it over the Internet. No disks, no servers. Great examples of these types of subscription services include Google’s Gmail email service and Salesforce.com’s CRM application.

This is where things can start to get confusing. There’s more to cloud computing than just subscribing to someone else’s application. The company applications that are currently running on servers located in your data center can be moved “into the cloud”. What this means is that you can use servers and storage systems that are remotely located in a cloud provider’s data center to run your company’s applications. You would access your applications and data via your Internet connection.

How Much Is All Of This Going To Cost Me?

The fact that cloud computing is even an option is pretty cool. However, just being a shiny new technology is not enough – there has to be a solid business reason for moving your IT operations into the cloud.

Let’s take a look at costs. First, if you choose to not take advantage of cloud computing then you are still going to have IT costs. In order to stand up new IT applications (and expand what you already have in order to meet growing user demand) you are going to have to buy and install more servers. As long as you are getting more servers, you’ll also have to get more storage. All of these new boxes will need to be maintained and so you’ll need to hire more staff to administer them.

In order to avoid these upfront IT costs, IT managers can make use of the cloud. If you are going to make use of cloud computing’s application subscription services, you need to be ready to pay per user, per month. Salesforce.com charges between $5-$25 per user per month. Google’s office suite of applications costs $50/user per year.

If you choose to run your existing IT applications in the cloud, then you’ll end up paying for how much computing horsepower and storage you use. One cloud computing firm charges six cents per processor per hour of usage.

Oh, and one more item. The way that you’ll connect to your applications in the cloud will be via your Internet connection. Given the importance of information technology, this connection that used to be important will have just become vital. This means that you’ll need to get a larger bandwidth connection in order to deliver the application management functions that your company will expect from your team. This means that you’ll also probably need to invest in a redundant connection in case your primary connection goes down.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing seems to have shown up almost overnight. IT managers might have initially thought that it was another one of the seemingly countless IT fads that have come along in the past few years and shrugged it off. However, for some compelling financial reasons, it’s starting to look like it has taken hold and is here to stay. It’s time for IT managers to show some thought leadership when it comes to clouds.

Some of the reasons that cloud computing has caused so much confusion among IT managers is because it is so many different things. In its simplest form, cloud computing is a subscription service where software is delivered over the web. One step beyond this is using remotely located computing power (the dream team of both servers and storage) to execute company IT applications which are then accessed via the web.

All of this functionality comes at a cost, of course. IT managers can avoid the upfront costs of having to purchase IT hardware in order to launch a new application by using the same resources located in a cloud. However, they need to do some investigations in order to make sure that they’ll be comfortable with having their data and applications being stored someplace else.

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

Question For You: Do you think that IT Managers should insist on knowing where in the cloud their applications and data will be stored?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how an IT manager can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

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Free Answers From Google On How To Be A Better Manager

Thursday, August 25th, 2011
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Google Has Been Searching For What Makes A Good Manager

Google Has Been Searching For What Makes A Good Manager

One of the biggest challenges that modern IT leaders face is how to do a good job of managing their IT team. The burden of making the right technology decisions, managing budgets, and meeting the needs of the rest of the company is challenging enough, but what can make or break a manager is how good of a job you do nurturing and growing your staff. The folks at Google have the same issues and they’ve harnessed their immense computing power to come up with a solution…

How Google Solved The Riddle Of IT Management

I’m not sure if you’ve been reading the news lately, but Google’s been having a problem: they are starting to lose their IT employees. Once upon a time Google was the coolest place on the planet to work, but things have changed.

With the arrival of cooler places to work (i.e. Facebook), folks have been defecting from Google in droves. Adam Bryant reports that this may be one of the reasons that some of the Google number crunchers were tasked to work on a new project in early 2009: Project Oxygen.

This team was charged with crunching all of the data that Google had gathered in order to determine what characteristics of bosses the Google employees were looking for. Basically Google wanted to know what makes someone a good boss.

To determine this, the team wrote code to process all of the performance reviews, results from employee feedback surveys, and nomination forms for top managers. What they were looking for were words and phrases that dealt with either praise or complaints.

What Google Found Out

At Google, technical expertise has always been what they’ve valued in their employees the most. Managers there were encouraged to be hands-off types of managers – don’t hold your people back. The thinking was that if workers got stuck, they could then reach out to their bosses for help because it was assumed that their bosses had deeper technical skills.

Well guess what, they got it wrong! It turns out that what IT workers were really looking for is what we’ve always been told that a manager should be: involved.

Here are the top 5 most important characteristics of an effective IT leader as uncovered by Google’s data mining efforts:

  1. Be a good coach

  2. Empower your teams and don’t micromanage

  3. Express interest in team member’s success and personal well-being

  4. Don’t be a sissy: be productive and results orientated.

  5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team.

What All Of This Means For You

I guess what Google found out shouldn’t really come to any of us as that much of a surprise. I think that we always knew that the secret to successfully managing an IT department had to be the same secret that every other department in the company was trying to uncover.

Google started out thinking that the ability to master technology was the answer and ended up with a completely different answer – it’s the human touch in the end that is the most important. I believe that this lends a lot of creditability to their findings.

IT Managers need to step back for a minute and think about what this means: we’ve got to start to take the time to truly connect with our team if we want them to experience true job satisfaction. I believe that we can all do this, it’s just that we all need to take the time to do it right!

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

Question For You: Do you agree that an IT leader’s technical skills are less important than their “soft” people skills?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’ve got some bad news for all of you IT managers out there: it turns out that 25% of the best workers in the IT department are planning on leaving within the next 12 months. Not to depress you even more, but it turns out that those internal job change programs that you have perhaps created that are intended to develop the next generation of IT leaders don’t seem to be working – 40% of the internal rotations that are made by IT “high-pots” (high potential) employees end up in failure. Let’s take a look at what problems you need to solve …

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Posted in management | 6 Comments »

Big Data Requires IT Managers To Think About Big Databases

Thursday, July 21st, 2011
Image Credit When It Comes To Databases, IT Managers Need To Think Big!

When It Comes To Databases, IT Managers Need To Think Big!

One of the biggest challenges that all IT managers face is the simple fact that often their teams expect them to know everything. In the era of massive data sets, this means that when your IT team runs into a problem that just can’t fit into a standard off-the-shelf database they’re going to show up on your doorstep with a problem that they can’t solve. When this happen, you had better know about MapReduce and Hadoop…

Welcome To The World Of NoSQL

When most IT managers think about databases, SQL comes to mind. This 40-year old standard defines databases as collections of rows and columns which can be joined using different logical criteria in order to help users find the data that they need to answer a particular question. However, as more and more firms move into the world of very, very large datasets, the limitations of SQL databases are starting to become more and more apparent.

Where companies first start to see issues is when the queries that they are trying to execute start to take longer and longer to complete. When this occurs, firms will switch and start to use massively parallel processing. However, even with this approach the complexities of the queries that will start to be done with these massive databases will eventually not work well with traditional SQL databases.

When this happens, IT managers will be asked to look for alternative database solutions. This is when MapReduce and Hadoop will start to show up in your vocabulary.

MapReduce is a programming model that was invented by Google in order to process very large data sets. Hadoop was based on MapReduce and was created by engineers at Yahoo. Hadoop has gone on and has become an open source project that is managed by the Apache organization.

Using MapReduce or Hadoop allows a firm to scale and potentially perform better. It may also allow them to see things that might not be possible if they were using a traditional SQL database. Examples of this come from McAfee who uses Hadoop to do text analysis across large collections of malware in their databases in order to find commonalities that might go unnoticed otherwise.

What Are The Downsides To Using The New Big Databases?

Although these new types of databases are very powerful, they do come with their own set of drawbacks. The first of these is the simple fact that they are brand new. SQL has been around for a long time and everyone knows just about everything that there is to know about it. The newer databases are more cutting-edge and may have drawback that nobody knows about.

Another drawback is that the way that IT developers interact with these new databases is via modern programming languages such as Java, Python, and Perl. Many of your current database programmers may only know SQL and will face a steep learning curve in order to become proficient with the new types of databases.

What All Of This Means For You

IT managers are often expected to have the answer when an IT development team runs into a problem. More and more often these days those problems have to do with traditional databases running out of steam.

The good news is that a new breed of databases has become available that has been expressly designed to work with very large datasets. The Map Reduce and Hadoop databases allow queries to be performed that are either not practical to do for time reasons or just not possible to.

A key point that all IT managers need to keep in mind is that in your management position, you are no longer required to do the investigation that will be required in order to determine if either the MapReduce or Hadoop databases are the right solution for your project. Instead it’s your job to manage your team as they do the investigation. Good luck and be happy that this time out you were able to answer your team’s technical questions!

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

Question For You: What do you think the best way would be for your team to test if the MapRequest or Hadoop databases were the right solution for your project?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Hey IT manager, just how loyal to your company are you? How loyal do you think that your team members are? I’m betting that the answer to both of these questions is “not very”. Given that that is the current situation that we find ourselves in, how did we get here and what is an IT manager to do about it?

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Google’s Lessons For Managing Tech-Savvy Teams

Thursday, January 14th, 2010
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How Does Google Solve Common IT Manager Issues?

How Does Google Solve Common IT Manager Issues?

Sigh, if only we all could work for Google, right? If there is one company out there that seems to “get” IT, it would have to be Google. The stories that float around about how nice the Google campus is and all the free food and other perks sure make it seem like a Shangri-La. Hmm, but wait a minute, no matter how nice it seems, they’ve got to be dealing with the same IT Leader issues that we all are. Maybe it’s time to have a talk with their (former) CIO…

It’s All About Choice

One of the big issues that IT Leaders have to deal with on an almost constant basis is the issue of keeping our teams up and running. This comes down to making sure that they have the right laptops, the right operating systems, etc. If you are not careful, this can eat up a lot of your available time.

Over at Google, Douglas Merrill who was their CIO up until April of 2008 said that the model that they used for solving the individual system issue was freedom of choice: employees got to choose both their machine and their operating system. I’ll bet that pretty much eliminates any complaining!

You would think that this would make support from an IT perspective a lot more complicated / expensive. You’d be right, but Merrill said that it didn’t boost costs all that much in part because of Google’s extensive use of self-service. They maintain internal web sites where users can go to download and install any software that they need. They do this by themselves and it places no additional burden on the IT department.

What About Security?

I can almost hear what you are saying / thinking right now: man, that must cause all sorts of security nightmares. Any IT Leader that you talk with these days probably has one or more horror stories about a team member downloading (or clicking on) something that they shouldn’t have and causing a mess that took forever to clean up.

Merrill says that they look at things a bit differently at Google. Most companies try to secure their networks by locking down the endpoints: our laptops and our smart phones. He feels that this really doesn’t work very well — thus all of the problems that we still have. At Google they put the security into the infrastructure.

What this means is that, yes, they still have antivirus and antispyware applications running on everyone’s laptops, but they also have a lot of software running on their corporate mail servers and infrastructure. When taken together, they feel that they have solved the problem of just how you can secure your corporate network.

Just in case you need more convincing that they really take their security seriously, Merrill states that Google has over 150 engineers who work on nothing but security. They’ve worked very hard to make sure that security is not something that is handled by “some group” and instead is worked into everything that they do. One of the ways that they make this happen is to use automated tools to check each developer’s code before it gets put into production.

What All Of This Means For You

No, most of us are not going to end up working for Google (unless they take over the world, at which this turns into a different discussion). However, how they run their IT shop does hold some clues for the rest of us.

When it comes to resolving issues regarding the technical environment in which their team members work, they’ve turned over the decision making to each employee. We can’t necessarily set up the same system, but it does provide some clues. Where possible if we allow the team to decide things like what code editor to use or what template to use then all of a sudden it’s not “my” decision, but rather “our” decision which is always a lot easier for everyone to live with.

Security is another issue that just doesn’t seem to want to go away. Google’s approach is to do the baseline needed at the edge of the network and then focus on securing the core. This just seems like an overall good idea. Additionally, setting up ways to carefully check your team’s products to ensure that they are secure is always a good idea for any IT Leader.

It looks like Google is running a pretty tight ship in their IT department. Even if we can’t all work there, we can still learn from their example…

Do you think that working at Google is all that it’s cracked up to be, or is it just like working in any other IT department?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As the world economy tanked and countless people in all industries lost their jobs, the one thing that IT Leaders really didn’t have to worry about was having members of their team jump ship to go to work for other firms – there were no other jobs to be had. Well as the economy improves, this is going to change. Got a plan for keeping your team on board?

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Posted in employee motivation | 1 Comment »

Why “I Don’t Care How You Feel” Is Bad IT Management

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Life is hard for IT Leaders and it’s not going to be getting any easier anytime soon. With everything that you need to be doing, it sure seems like having to put up with team members who have personal issues that take away from their ability to do their jobs can only hurt performance. For that matter, those “touchy-feely” workplaces that places like Google and Apple have sure seem to be missing the mark — work is for work or have these companies forgotten that?

The Good Old Days Where People Shut Up And Worked

Those of us who come from a technical background know how the world should be run. There should be a set of rules and everybody should know what the rules are and everybody should work according to the rules. If a business was run this way, an IT Leader’s job would be so much easier — you would only have to deal with the deviations from the rules.

However, we’ve tried doing this — it was called the 1950′s through the 1980′s. Remember the classic “IBM Man”? It turns out that the rigid workplace did work and you could get a great deal of productivity out of people; however, then the world changed.

What happened is that everything started moving much faster. Global competition showed up with a vengeance. Then the Internet arrived and things started moving even faster. All of those rigidly structured companies with their rigidly structured IT departments hit a brick wall. IBM felt it especially hard and there for awhile in the early 1990′s was teetering on the edge of failure.

What Works In Today’s IT Departments

If you miss the old days, you’re not going to like this part. After a lot of trial and error, we now know what it takes to make a modern company successful. The first step is to take the time to realize that the people working for the company are not “assets“, they really are people. These people have a life and potentially a family outside of work and the boundaries between the two have never been fixed.

This means that as an IT Leader you need to take the time to get to know the people who are working on your team. If you are able to really engage with them, to make a connection, then the boost to the productivity of your team can be almost magical.

The operative word here is “flexibility“. If you place people in a rigid IT environment, then they will at best do exactly what you tell them to do when you tell them to do it. If instead you are flexible and focus more on what you want them to do and no so much on how you want them to do it, then this causes your team members to become much more satisfied with their jobs and they will end up doing much more. This job satisfaction shows up as your team members treat customers and other employees better which then results in more loyal customers and more productive business interactions with other departments.

What All Of This Means For You

Creating a rigid IT team that has lots of rules to follow is a great way to keep things under control. New IT Leaders often gravitate to this type of solution because it’s familiar territory — almost like programming an IT system. However, this has been shown to be the wrong way to go about doing things.

The right way to have the most productive IT team is for you as an IT Leader to take the time to connect on a personal level with your team members. This means getting to know them and sharing your personal side with them also.

Creating an IT workplace in which the focus is on getting the work done and being flexible in just how it gets done is critical. This is the type of environment that will bring out the best in your team. The results that your team will produce from this type of situation will be the rocket fuel that powers your career to the next level.

Do you think that IT managers need to worry about getting to know all of their team members on a personal level?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

No budget, no special training, and yet you are expected to do more with less. How can you go about fixing what’s wrong with your IT team during tight economic times? It turns out that there is a simple way for you to identify where you are having issues and how you can fix them. All you need to do is to learn a about a new management tool called social-network analysis…

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