Posts Tagged ‘software’

Open Source: Is This A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing For IT?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010
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Is Using Open Source Software A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing?

What if software was free? Every IT Leader has to stop and ask themselves this question every once in awhile. With the cost of ERP and database systems constantly increasing, software costs can quickly become a significant expense for any IT department. The “Open Source” software movement, born in the days when Napster was giving away commercial music for free, is one way the IT departments can get high quality software for free. But should they?

The Many Flavors Of Open Source

There isn’t enough space in this article to list all of the open source projects and applications that are out there. Some of the more famous include the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python) . In my business I use WordPress to blog and vTiger for CRM; however, there is also the Movable Type platform and SugarCRM to choose from.

A healthy open source project has lots of programmers contributing changes and new features to it. It needs strong central management in order to do good project management: what goes into the next release, who tests it, and when it’s available for general release.

Why IT Leaders Should Use Open Source

When an IT Leader considers using open source applications as a part of a IT project, support is the first thought that springs to mind. In the world of Linux this issue has been solved by the arrival of multiple firms that provide professional support for given flavors of Linux distro (Redhat, etc.).

If an open source package is popular, there will be a firm out there that can provide support for it. However, one of the unique aspects of the open source movement is that there is a very large unofficial support group for virtually every application. On countless web sites and support boards, IT staffers who run into a problem with an open source application can post their issues. Eager users and volunteer programmers will more often than not spring into action and provide quick suggestions on how to solve the problem.

One additional benefit of using open source is that it gives an IT Leader a way to motivate and retain staff. Allowing your members of your team to work on an open source project and to contribute new features that they develop to the overall project can be a fantastic motivational tool. This allows the them to feel that they are contributing to a worthwhile cause. Happy workers don’t want to leave their team.

Why IT Leaders Should Not Use Open Source

You’d think that the case for using open source was open and shut, right? I mean after all it’s free. However, before you leap you may want to double think taking that plunge.

For one thing, the road to today is littered with open source projects that were born, flourished for awhile, and then died due to lack of interest. It truly does take a village to keep one of these things going and if you’ve based a mission critical process on an open source app that dies, then you may be left high and dry.

Support is another issue. The concept of having “one throat to choke” is one thing that helps IT Leaders sleep well at night. If you are using open source, then there may be no responsible party for you to reach out to if all of a sudden things stop working.

Your specific IT configuration may no longer be supported at some point in time: if the rest of the world moves on to the next version of an operating system and it’s not yet time for you to do so, your open source apps may stop working.

Finally, the more time that your team spends working on open source apps, the more transferable their job skills may become. They may decide to pick up and move on after they’ve gained the knowledge that you paid them to learn.

What All Of This Means For You

For IT Leaders, the world of open source software keeps getting even larger and more established than it is today. You are going to have to make some hard decisions as to just how far into the open source pond you are willing to wade with your team.

Open source often comes with little or no formal support. However, the sheer number of people working on a project can fill in the gaps. Allowing your team to work on open source projects can be a double edged sword: they’ll have more job satisfaction, but they might end up leaving.

The price of open source software really isn’t free – you’ll have to make an investment in it if you want to use it. Pick wisely and you just might become know as the open IT Leader.

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

Question For You: What pieces of open source software will you start to use first?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m guessing that you wouldn’t go to work naked. Then why-oh-why are you thinking about going to work as an IT Leader when you don’t have all of the skills that you’ll need to do the job correctly?

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IT Leader Start-Up Issues: What Have You Gotten Yourself Into?

Thursday, March 11th, 2010
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IT Leaders In New Positions Need To Take The Time To Do An Assessment

IT Leaders In New Positions Need To Take The Time To Do An Assessment

Every IT Shop Is Different

In the life of an IT Leader, there will come the day that you find yourself in a new position. You might be working for the same company and just be in a different role or you might be starting a new job – no matter, the challenge is the same. Where do you start? It turns out that doing nothing right off the bat might be the right idea…

Doing An Assessment Of Your Team

When you find yourself in a new IT Leader position, you might be tempted to do what many of us have done in the past – make some noise. We’ve all see others do this before: almost immediately upon assuming a new position, they do a reorganization or some such action just to show that they are going to “shake things up”. That’s all fine and good, but it really doesn’t accomplish anything.

Instead, your time would be better spent doing an assessment of the IT team that you’ve just inherited. To use the popular terminology of the day, this needs to be a 360-degree assessment of both those people who will be on your team as well as the people that you will now be working for.

What you’re going to be looking for is to develop a good understanding of how things are right now. You might be overflowing with things that you want to accomplish (or you might have been told what you will have to accomplish), but now is not the time to be making changes before you know what is going on.

You’re not going to find what you need written down anywhere, instead you’ve got a lot of talking to do. Your situational assessment needs to cover a lot of ground. Specifically you’re going to want to know about the following four areas:

  1. The IT ecosystem (hardware, network, communications, endpoints, etc.)
  2. Applications (business and support)
  3. Corporate organization and hierarchy
  4. Processes and procedures for common IT tasks

Results Of An IT Team Assessment

As you can probably guess by now, an IT assessment is not something that you can do overnight. It’s going to take some focused effort to uncover the information that you’re going to need.

What you should be looking to assemble out of all of this data collection are a set of key indicators that will tell you where you need to be spending your time. Each one of the areas that you’ve collected information on can probably by now be broken down into an additional level of detail: specific hardware systems (e.g. storage), specific applications, etc. Each of these IT components will have their own status.

This status in its simplest form can be thought of as being a traffic light: red, yellow, or green. The green status areas can safely be ignored for now – they are under control. Things get more interesting when you start to take a look at the yellow and red areas.

Clearly the red areas need immediate attention. However, it’s the yellow areas that will provide you with the greatest value for having done the whole assessment task. These are the areas that while they may be under control for now, have the potential to “go red” and quickly turn into a problem that could consume your hours, days, or even weeks.

What All Of This Means For You

When an IT leader is placed into a new position, his or her first actions can often set the stage for their long term success. Starting things off by taking actions just to look like you are doing something won’t help – it may do more harm than good.

Instead what you need to do is to take the time to do an assessment of your new IT environment. This will require you to look both up and down the company hierarchy. You’ll be trying to understand how all of the components of the IT department fit together (or don’t!)

A well done IT assessment will provide you with a clear roadmap on where you need to be spending your time. The areas that are either not doing well or just getting by are where you’ll need to be spending your time. Focus your time and talents here and you’ll be able to shine in your position.

Question For You: What do you think the most important thing that you can do is when you are just starting a new IT position?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In order to be successful as an IT Leader (no matter where you are at in the company’s management hierarchy), you’re going to have to do what you are told. Well, wait a minute, maybe I should phrase that differently. How about something like this: you are going to have to find out what they want you to do and then you are going to have to do it?

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