Socal Media

Erik’s presentation on social media and the impact on corporations and consumers was eye-opening. As most of you know, I am pretty uneasy about social media because of privacy issues. However, Erik’s viewpoints have made me thinking about what is eluding me, the importance of understanding social media and the impacts on personal level and corporation alike. It doesn’t necessarily mean I will jump on the bandwagon right now and start to write on facebook or twit (I still prefer to keep my thoughts and information to myself), instead, I will start pay more attention to how social media technology is operating as well as the trends and future of the technology.

Erik had several important examples of how social media enable individuals to take on the big corporations. Any individual has the access to the mass media that was never within reach and has the level field to go to battle with big corporations. Although not all the individuals will catch the attention of media, but the fact that some non-technical individual was able to win the battle with corporations, like the musician’s battle with United Airline, is enough to make big corporations to pay close attentions to customers’ complains. However, the question I have is how do corporations to balance delicately the needs of customers and abuses from a few customers. “Customer is always right” is a good slogan, but in practice, it is impossible to satisfy every customer. The only defense I could think of is what Amy said in class, online community to policy itself, or corporations will file law suits against the abuser (of course, we will get into first amendment debate again, can we just drop that debate? Just kidding).

Enough about potential bad things could happen to the corporations. Let’s discuss the benefits for corporations. Erik used some great examples on how corporations to get online community involved in contributing ideas and knowledge. DELL asks customers what they wants, goldmine company used crow sourcing to find new gold location, and more recently NETFlex awarded a team of researchers for finding the best customer renting pattern. Those are some of the successful stories. But I think corporations should also open up for ideas to solve their problems within the companies. Before opening up to the world, corporations should open up to their employees. For example, how do you cut budget in a tough economic environment? Who knows that better than the employees and the managers who spend the money? They know how much and what to cut without jeopardizing the quality of the products and services. Instead of downsizing or outsourcing, CFOs just tell the employees that they need to come up to a total saving of x amounts. I have seen projects waste 50% of the budget just to meet the project requirement of within certain percentage of the budget. Crowd sourcing initiative inside the corporation is not wide spread yet in the corporate world, but it worth into that.

PC Reboot and Some thoughts

An exciting event happened today at work, all users’ PCs are starting to reboot and reboot in loop conditions. It reminded me of a virus few years back that forcing PC into reboot loop. Everyone was curious to find out the root cause of the problem. It took IT couple of hours to trace the problem back to antivirus definition file. However, my discussion point is not about PC reboot. There are two thoughts come out of this event, business continuity and the value of Information Technology that often asked in this class and from business units.

Organizations large and small are focusing on the business continuity practices since the unfortunate event of 911. However, most organizations are focusing on recovering IT infrastructure. While it is important to have a plan to recover IT infrastructure, organizations often miss a great opportunities on how to recover their business without IT. It was not that long ago, PCs were not at every employee’s desk and some or all employees worked on the telephone and used paper to process business transactions. Such manual process has lost since PCs took over the organization’s business activities. The assumptions of IT infrastructure availability is always there are bad for business in case of either natural disaster events or human errors like we had today. Those unpredictable events can stop business processes cold and dig a big hole for business to recover if the outages last more than just a few hours or even a few days. Business needs to have a manual process for the most critical business in order to survive in the most extreme events. Hacker penetrations are also a big concerns, not too long ago, Google’s network was compromised by hackers (according to a report by New York Times). The hackers could have done more damages other than stealing Google’s code, but who can guarantee knowledge stolen won’t be used in future attacks to disrupt or bring down the whole network.

The second thought is about the value of Information Technology bringing to the business. It is difficult to put a dollar sign on Information Technology, but today’s event does demonstrate the value of Information Technology. We can tell that without Information Technology there will be no business, just like employees. Without employees, there will be no businesses. It is true that business can go back to manual process as stated above, but the question is can you compete based on that kind of business model? I challenge anyone who said they can. Therefore, the value of Information Technology is embedded into business process. If you must put a dollar amount for Information Technology, ask yourself a question, how many more employees do I have to hire without the help of Information Technology? Can you compete without Information Technology? Do you know the answer?

Electronic HealthCare Record

I went to the Loyola CIO award event last week where Dr. John Halamka was the recipient. Dr. Halamka is the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and is well known in the national health care IT. In fact he is the Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel and Co-chair of the HIT Standards Committee. He talked about some of the new technologies with healthcare, like eHR (Electronic Healthcare Record). Some of the vendors include Microsoft, Google, and IBM. So I decide to take a look at the eHR, of course Google is easy to find as usual as oppose to other vendors. Many people concern about the privacy of the eHR that needs to be addressed. I will just go over some of the features of Google Health so you will get a taste of what to expect if you decide to give it a try.
After you login to Google Health @ https://health.google.com (need a Google account), you will be asked to setup a profile about yourself that includes insurance, conditions, medications, allergies, procedures, test results, and immunizations. It also asks for your personal data, i.e. sex, race, blood type, weight, and height etc. You can also add/import your healthcare data (files and images) to your profile after setup. To address the security concerns, Google Health has notices service to either email or mail alerts to you if your information was breached by unauthorized access.
After you add medications into your profile, drug interactions will show any potential drug interactions that could be harmful for you. If you have a new prescription, it will tell you if you should take the prescription. Drug complications is a big problem in healthcare industry and such service will help to reduce the risks posed to the patients and reduce insurance cost for doctors because medical malpractice litigations will drop as a result of this service.
Explore medications and treatments show the available online services to you. You can link your profile to one or more of the web sites and get the services. One word of caution, if you link your profile to the service provider, you may consent them to see your medical records. One of the online provider is Cleveland Clinic MyConsult provides second opinions if you need. Of course, it depends on how comfortable you are to get medical service online.
Other services provided by Google Health include “Share this profile” to share your record to your family members and doctors. “See who has access” provides limited reports on who has what kind of access to your records. “Medical contacts” allow you to add contact information when medical notification is required. “Find a doctor” provides a tool to search a doctor that provides the service according to your profile.
Above is just a brief overview of Google Health. If you feel like it, you may want to investigate more on your own. Since this is linked to your Google account, I would advise to create a new Google account just for this purpose if you worry about security.

Neutrality

The U.S. Court of Appeal ruled today that FCC (Federal Communications Commission) does not have authority to require broadband provider to give equal access to all internet traffics. I know some of you may look at this ruling from big government's angle, which I will not get into. But one must realize the potential affect on the future of the internet in the United States. Neutrality is important because it could diminish internet innovation and lose the edge we have in the world.

When broadband providers control the traffic flows, they can pick and chose what applications will get the best bandwidth. Such controls can either make application owners to pay for better bandwidth or share some part of revenues. This is in addition for broadband users paying their own services so broadband providers will receive payments from two sources, application users and owners. The amount of revenues from these double source can be huge and consumer will always pay it at the end because application owners will pass the costs to the consumers to maintain their share of the revenues.

Another important issue regarding to neutrality is that the broadband providers have total control, like traffic cops. They have the power to decide what consumers can get and which applications the consumer should get. How so, you might ask? Since they control the speed of the traffics, they can affect user experiences by reducing/increasing bandwidth according to their preferences. They can increase bandwidth for their favored applications while reduce bandwidth they don't like. As we all know, once we, as consumers, had bad experience, we tend to abandon that application. If you think about it, the broadband providers have enormous power to sharp up the future of the internet instead of letting market, consumers, to decide.

Here is another one. Some of the most popular applications today, Yutube, Flickr, and Hulu for example, started from very small. They reached today's popularity because of the neutrality. If they had to pay for bandwidth, who knows if they can get the popularity they enjoy now. When broadband providers control internet traffics, new applications will have a harder time to reach to the targeted audiences and will slow innovations. Entrepreneurs will be hard to find in this country while other countries will gradually catchup with us and eventually pass us. In addition, without neutrality, our free market based economy will no longer be true.

One argument I heard was that broadband providers spent billions of dollars to build up their networks so they should be able to control the traffics on their networks. The problem I have with this argument is that consumers pay for the services and they should have the freedom to go anywhere I want. If Comcast doesn't provide a competitive video on demand services, then consumers should have the choice to watch videos on hulu instead of being forced to watch videos on Comcast.

Online training experience

A few years back, I took two technical online training classes because I could not take two weeks off to attend classroom training. The training classes included the following features: class training materials, remote access to the servers, interactive messaging with trainer and classmates, call-in phone to listen to the class lectures, and PowerPoint presentation. I ended up dislike the training classes and will share some of the pitfalls of the online training so others can learn from.

First, you need to find a place you will not be disturbed. Since I had to work while taking the training classes, I ended up taking the classes in my own cube. That was the biggest mistake. People constantly disrupted my training sessions, some for business related works while others just stopped by for personal conversations. Each interruptions made me fall behind the class and I had to work really hard just to catchup what others had already done. I was extremely stressed over the whole training classes and the end result was I did not learn as much I was hoping for. For those who prefers online training, my suggestion is to isolate yourself from all different kind of disruptions. Otherwise, you will not learn or struggle to catch up with the class.

Second, you need to make sure you can self control and discipline. For the long training classes like the ones I took, there are some part of the classes that you may not like and away from classroom makes it easy to find something else to do, like checking your emails, browsing news, reading blogs, twitting, writing to your friends on facebook, or just catching up with friends. No one can control the participants' environment in online class while classroom can be tightly control. It is up the participants to show self restraint from wondering out or the class experience will end up like I had, disappointment.

Third, you must make sure you have reliable communications and connection to the virtual classroom. Before register for the class, you need to make sure your telephone, computer, software, and internet connection speed meet the requirements. For example, make sure you have a headset if the class is long, or make sure you have enough internet bandwidth for video conference. Any additional software required for the class should be installed ahead of time so you don't have to worry about something goes wrong while installing software. Not enough bandwidth can make your online class experience miserable.

Fourth, you need to make sure you have enough knowledge prior or basic understanding of the online class materials. It doesn't make any sense for a college to provide online orientation for incoming freshmen because their never had any kind of college experience before. The same can be said about technical training. If you have never had any kind knowledge before, you are better off taking in class training or at least you need to spend sometimes on the topic before the class. Comprehending new concepts or understanding new technology can be time consuming depending on each individual. However, the better you prepared, the more you will gain from online training.

Hopefully, my own experience will help someone else to avoid the mistakes I made and get the most out of the online training.

Presentations from co-CIOs

Three important things I got out of our two CIO speakers are how to build a career, what are the important factors to have co-CIOs in the organizations, and how insulate yourself from outsourcing by adding value to the organization. They are extremely important as graduation date is approaching and continuing difficult business environment in the World. Learning from the successful CIOs is helping to set a attainable career goal and correct course my me personally.

Joyce's presentation touched me mainly from two fronts, career path and how co-CIO works. The path of Joyce from manger trainee to her current co-CIO demonstrated on different levels how to pursuit career goals and be successful. Her earlier featured a fearless young professional who was brave enough to tackle any challenges in the career path. In the process, she built her own credibility with her boss and gradually moved up. But when personal interests, career, and corp culture didn't match, it was better for her to move on instead of being miserable and stayed. I had the same experience as Joyce that I was so unhappy at one of the previous company that I decided to leave and it didn't matter what kind of monetary reward I would get (recently I was told that my recruiter short changed me on the compensation, but I would make the same decision again). Work/life balance was another big issue for Joyce and she did turn down good opportunities that didn't fit her life style.

Both Joyce and Dan spent fair amount of time talking about co-CIOs. It seemed both were happy to be the positions and had a good working relationship between them. To me, and to a extend, many of us, there were some disbelief that co-CIOs situation worked out so well. My experience in the corp world was that the in fighting for power were always there and it was not uncommon that back stabbing occurred in any corporations. The management theory I learned from leadership also contradicted co-CIOs, that in order to be effective, one needed more power than the other to get things done. But since Joyce and Dan knew each other very well and worked together in the past from a different company, they could work out their agreement and obeyed by it. I give them the benefit of doubts and believe them. There are always exceptions in theories and real world events.

Dan's presentation was useful in how a current CIO views the future trends and opportunities. Dan talked about how globalization impacted the IT, in terms of outsourcing to the east. The trend of outsourcing was irreversible process for IT and other business, like productions. I thought it was very insightful for Dan to point out the way of shielding from this trend for us. Moving up to the higher value chain would mean better values for the company that could not be outsourced. Learning and types of jobs were the two different ways to protect yourself from outsourcing. The more you learned and the more you could offer to the company. If you were in high value type of jobs, then you were better protected because outsourcing could not provide such high value. Dan also mentioned about IT trends and I thought it was very helpful relating high value jobs. Often trends were associated with innovation and cutting edge technologies, therefore they were not targeted to be outsourced by the company until they became mature technologies.

New Hardware and Virtualization

AMD announced new product Opteron 6000 with eight and twelve-core x86 processors earlier this weekend (link http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20100329/bs_nf/72455 ). Here is one of the major advantages of the new platform, it provides 119% better performance over AMD’s last generation server chips without losing processing power and the price will stay just about the same. Just like many times in the past, both Intel and AMD are improving their products very rapidly. The new platform is designed to replace older platform products by AMD.
The importance of this announcement is what Dan talked about in our class, one of the major trends in IT, virtualization. The concept of virtualization comes from unused computing power of physical servers. Space and power usage are two other important factors in virtualization push. The growth of the Information Technology requires more servers to host applications and processes. Modern data centers are filled with tens of thousands of servers and space for servers are hard come by and expensive to maintain. The costs of cool a data center require lots of power day and night. It is one of the major expenses in operating data centers. I attended a Microsoft webcast last month about their new Visual Studio 2010 preview. One of the topic in the webcast was about cloud computing and virtualization (here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3b5Ca6lzqE ). The presenter showed a Microsoft data center in Chicago. Microsoft used truck load to put new servers in their data center and tried to save cooling power costs by opening roof of the data center.
My experience in the IT field told me that applications within an organization will alive until the last user leaves that organization. No one will voluntarily give up his/her applications unless forced to and will give you ten thousand reasons why the application should live for another day. For this very reason, you will see tens of thousands of servers are dedicated for legacy applications. DOS (for those who still remember) applications are still common in many organizations. What virtualization comes to play is to consolidate many of the old servers that are still needed to run applications together, but they won’t require too much processing powers. I don’t have the proof, but I would image a new AMD Opteron 6000 will probably have more processing power than 100 Intel Pentium I processors ten years ago. Other service providers will also benefit from AMD’s new product. They will be able to provide more services to the clients with less space and less power consumption.

IT or Business

The relationship between Information Technology (IT) and business is always a hot topic. Does IT drives business or business owns IT? The answer depends on who is giving the answer. Although I have a very strong IT background, my answer always is that the business should dictate IT contradicting to the most IT professionals. To me, IT does not generate revenue unless IT is the core of the business that generates revenues. IT helps business to run more efficiently and provide competitive advantages. From IT's perspective, the cutting edgy technologies are exciting, cool, and fashionable. But does it make any sense in adaption the latest technologies if business case is not yet made? I remembered Joe ask the question of how do yo justify the cost of IT projects in class. From a business's perspective, any project only makes sense to accomplish a specific goal, most of the time, return over investment. The difficulty of justifying any IT project makes me believe that only business can understand the true value of the IT project. This is not to say that IT does not have any role of how to implement the business' requirements. IT knows the capabilities the technologies and how to choose the best technologies to meet the requirements.

Some may complain that business does not know what is the best technology for them. It is true that business often lacks behind the technology trends. But IT must learn how to educate business the latest trends and capabilities of the technologies. Just like how business push a new product to the customers. You need a strategy to show off your new products to attract customers. Business is the customer of IT so why should not IT adapt the same strategy like business, marketing technologies to the business? But IT should use a different word for this process, education. It is important not to educate business only IT thinks business should know, in another word, do not pick the technology for business, let the business pick the technology. There should not be any favoritism, like luring business to the technologies that IT thinks are the best by hiding any pros and cons of the each technologies. IT must have faith that business will pick the best technologies for itself.

I read the blog titled, IT leaders, It's time to Give It Up, the writer states that business users are arguing for the control of the technology adaption because of the delay. With outsourcing increasingly becomes popular, there is a viable alternative other than your own IT out there. In fact according to Gardner's survey, by 2012, 20 percent of the business will have no IT assets at all. IT needs to have the urgency to serve business better and cheaper. What do you think?

Team Building

As I blogged before, I think our group is a very tight group as a whole. Everyone in the group is willing to help out whenever possible. How did we build this team together is a little hard to say. But I believe there are two important factors in team building. One is to have a person who can show leadership and has the personality to bring everyone together. The second one is each team member must show willingness to participate in the team building activities. Without the person to bring everyone together, the team may get along, but it won't function what we consider as an idea team. On the other side, if a team member is unwilling to join team activities, then it is hard to be successful by forcing him/her into the team.

We have a supervisor who is very dynamic and has a very attractive personality. He constantly asks people out to lunch and organizes happy hours whenever he feels and hears team members complaining about being tired. Team members have many opportunities to know each other better through lunch and happy hours. Team building activities also establish bonding among the team members that makes team members much more willing to help each other. One example is the on-call scheduling. Since we are required to respond to pager 24x7, each person must take two weeks at a time. It is very common for the on-call person to ask other members to cover in short notice without any hesitation when he/she can not stay near home.

Current economic environment creates problems in employee morals. Many organizations are cutting jobs and outsourcing business operations to stay profitable and meet Wall Street expectations. Employees are hard pressed to stay focus on their jobs and motivated in this kind of environment. But it is more important than ever to motivated employees to take on more responsibilities. One way to motivate employees is to through team building. When the team functions well, each team members is willing to shoulder more responsibilities and works collaboratively. This is why team building should not be overlooked in hard time. Some expect employees to work harder because they are fear of losing their jobs. But such notion is misguided. Maybe employees will work in fear, but in the long term such tactics would not work well or employees lose their motivation and the workforce will be less productive in the future. So pay attention to your team and make sure they are well prepared to take on the next project.

Short term vs long term

I had an ongoing facebook conversation with a friend over the last few days. The topic is about outsourcing in companies. He and I shared the same feeling that senior management of the American companies worry more about short term financial success and sacrifice long term interest.

Ever since dot come bubble, we have housing bubble, and then the great recession. All the problems can be traced back to the shifting investing philosophy from long term to short term. Everyone (me included during the dot com bubble) wants to make a quick buck and have unreasonable expectation of return from investments in stocks. The impact on the management is that they must do everything to meet Wall Street's expectations, no matter what. The end result is that, companies like Enron played the accounting game to keep stock price up. For other more honest CEOs, they would not try to cheat or break the law, instead they cut cost to meet the financial expectations or outsource to reduce costs. One might ask what is wrong with outsource? My answer is that, there is nothing wrong if you can provide the same level of quality product or service. More often, the quality suffered. I can still remember calling DELL and received bad service. Apparently I was not alone. A few years back, DELL bashing was so great that they had to move some part of the phone support back to the U.S. DELL's image suffered greatly and its market shares had dropped from number 1 to number 3 according to the most recent data analysis.

The great recession made the matter worse. The reduced demand from consumers added additional pressure to the companies. To many CEOs, the only way to keep their profits is to reduce cost. Not many dare to invest more to produce better products (Intel and Apple maybe the exceptions). The traditional way of thinking that company must be responsible to all the stakeholders, not just to the stockholders is no longer true. Today's stockholders are more mobile than ever before. Remembered day-traders? Technology makes online trading costs at the friction of the old broker fees. Investors can move their money to anywhere around the world in seconds so long term investment philosophy is no longer fashionable today. CEOs must realize that short term gains may hinder their companies' long term health. In another word, investors interests (short term) may not align with the long term success of the company. Decisions to reduce cost, outsource, or layoffs should not harm long term viability of the company.

Crowdsourcing within the company

In a large company, there are many talented employees that are available and can be targeted for the Crowdsourcing concept. Personally, I know many very smart Information Technology individuals that could be leveraged for important projects. For example, SharePoint Administrators know how this technology works so when business starts to develop SharePoint based applications, business can leverage the knowledge of the SharePoint administrators during design to avoid some of the pitfalls. I have seen some business units tap into knowledge during the hiring process to ensure the right developers are hired. But this only happens when the hiring managers know administrators well, not as the best practice company wide.

In a big company, not everyone knows each other. To make it more difficult, in most cases, people don't know the strength and weakness of the employees in other department, business units, or sometime within the same department. Crowdsourcing in the narrowed sense can be adapted into company's strategy, especially in the information technology field. Many talented employees are buried into everyday works that an employee with less experience can do and provide little value to the organization.

How to tap into all the talents within the organizations is a two step process. First, you need to gather the talents of the employees. In another words, you want to know who can do what better than anyone else within the company. One way to gather the information is during the annual reviews. It is common for managers write reviews only for employees' financial rewards/promotions, but what employees excelled in some areas are not leveraged and information can not be found easily nor shared across the company because of the HR policy. HR needs to extract such important information and separates it from the rest of the confidential information and enter into a centralized database that can be shared across the company.

The second steps is to place a policy company wide to use the talents within as much as possible before bringing in outside consultants who are expensive and may or may not workout in the end. In contrast, internal employees know the environment, process and business of the company. They know how to overcome the road blocks from their previous project experience. They know the internal politics and how to maneuver around the potential, but critically important requirements. For example, security requirements can kill, fail, or delay a project if they were not taken into considerations. All these knowledge can not be learned in a short period of time for the outside consultants.

Perfect ending!

Just got home from work on the Friday night/Saturday Morning. The workday started at 9AM in the Morning. Today is the last day before our project is going to the UAT (user acceptance test) for the team high visibility project. Our company partner with one the the greatest technology company in the World to work on their rapid deployment project. The whole group was ready to finish the project and hand it to the user.
I went to check with our DBA to ensure our database is ready. To my surprise, I was told that the server had some issues and database was not going to be ready until after lunch. Once the whole team learned of the news, you could tell the tension out there. We couldn't do anything without our database. Some how everyone was still confident we would be able to get it done. We still worked on our own part to prepare for installation in the afternoon. As promised, we had our database ready after lunch.
We were in the good mood again and ready for the next task, testing firewall port was open. Firewall was setup the night before, however, since our database was not up and running, we could not test. I opened my telnet and tried to connect to the database, I watched on my screen “connecting …..”. The longer the …... going, the more nervous I got. Finally the bad news came, “unable to connect”. It was time to regroup. My of my team member got on the phone and reached out to the network team. In the mean time, another team member contacted vendor who was standing by to help us to install their software. An hour passed by, network group concluded that web server was using the wrong IP.
It was time to get server team involved. Server team spent the next hour to research why the server was using the wrong IP and suggested to add another network card to the server. The suggestion sounded reasonable and we agreed. Second network card added to the server. I started my telnet session again “connecting …..”. Bad news again! We went back to network and asked for help. Network told us to run a command to force server using the correct IP. What a great idea! It worked. My telnet session finally went through and we were golden. All of us relieved after all, we had our plans for the Friday. One was planning to go to girlfriend's big birthday dinner, one had a movie date with wife, and the other two had poker night planned weeks ago.
We were ready for roll and we had vendor ready to support us. We were happy again! Our supporting people went home since we had resolved all the problem. The rest of the install was just a piece of cake. We followed our installation instruction and ready to install. We ran the first command, “Error, unable connect to the database”. We could see the database, we could reach the database, but we just could not connect to the database. Vendor suggested we used different way to connect. No, it didn't work! After many tries, we concluded that something wrong with the account we used to connect to the database. DBA went home already. Time to page on-call DBA. It was raining outside and they just left work. We waited for awhile and got a call from our on-call DBA. After we told him what kind of problem we had, he said he just pulled to the side of the road and it would be another 30/40 minutes before he could get home, but there was another DBA would be able to help us in a few minutes.
DBA back from home and spent a few minutes to check the account we were using. There was nothing wrong with the account permission! But we still could not connect! Finally we found out that we read the password wrong. There was an exclamation point in the password “!”, not the letter “i”. Now you knew why I used so many exclamation points here!
We ran the command again and it worked. We were able to connect to the database, finally, yea! We finished installation. It was time to configure the software. “Go home” said our supervisor. It was going to be boring for you from now on. We had done this part before so it was going to be easy. Not long after he said “go home”, “Houston, we had problem”. The configuration person reported wizard crashing. No................., this could not happen. It did happened. It was time to go back to the drawing board again. Everyone one of us researched on the reason behind the crash. Vendor was doing the same. After many tries, one of the team member found the solution. We needed our colleagues from directory service to help. Our service account didn't have proper permission. Fortunately, it didn't take long to get us back to the business. Our service account was granted the permission to fix the problem. Wow, finally our server was serving up the page to ask our credentials that we didn't get before. We were excited! Enter user name, then password. The login page came back to ask user name and password again. We must type in the wrong password. We typed slowly to make sure we didn't miss typing it. Still didn't work. What else could be wrong! Then we remembered trouble shooting 101 in our favor operating system, reboot! Of course, it worked, actually it worked like a charm. We could continue configuration wizard again. “Running.....”, then “Error” again. Was this real? This could not be true. We would never be home, everyone was thinking the same. It was close to the midnight. This software was getting ready to be released to the public at the end of month. Let's run it again. To our surprise, it didn't give us the error this time. But why? At this point, no one would care to find the reason it worked the second time. We got it done and we finished up the work.
What amazing over the whole day was that no one gave up and we had a sense of humor among us the entire day. It was the team work that got us through and ended the night with an exclamation point!

What should Sally do?

This is a case study on the www.hbr.org. To read the case, click on the link. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/what_more_evidence_do_you_need.html

After reading the upcoming case study and comments, I see this case differently. AMC (American Medical Center) is not a successful hospital, at least financially. It makes perfect sense to keep the status quote if AMC is successful, but this is not case here. To play defense and go down the path of not losing money in the foreseeable future, AMC's CEO lacks the vision and courage to lead the organization and set a higher standard for AMC. As indicated in the case, senior management is contend to have low standard of not losing money, instead of set the bar high of being profitable. In the long term, low goal standard will formulate a conservative culture and prevent new ideas or changes. AMC's problem lies it does not provide any better cares for the patients than the competing care providers. Even worse, its' facility can not compete against the nearby providers. No wonder AMC can not attract high paying patients to off set poor patients who do not pay.

To improve AMC's competitiveness, it must either invest in the facility to match competitors, or to reform its health care system to bring better health care delivery system and better quality. Major investments in improving facilities are a huge challenge for AMC. However, switching to EBMgmt (Evidence-Based-Management) will increase the quality care and AMC can t make this approach to build its reputation on providing better care than the competitors. Given the choice of better health care or comfortable facility, patients will chose quality over comfort. However, quality improvement takes time and so does the reputation. How to convince the board and senior management is perhaps the biggest obstacle.

A superior vision is only half of the battle for AMC, just like many other companies, it is far more difficult to win the political battle. The key is to have upper management and the board of directors to buy in this vision. I am sure just like Sally's worry about the future of her own career at AMC, the CEO Mark is also worry about his own future. The fact that Mark allows EBMgmt to go forward at the first place is an indication that he believes in it. Then the question is how to persuade the board of directors to believe in EBMgmt. One advantage is that middle managements are already on board. The key is for Sally to express her opinion to Mark and two of them build a strategy to give middle managers a chance to communicate with other senior managers and the board of directors directly. I believe the decision for Sally to make totally depends on how strongly she believes in EBMgmt practice.

Information Technology

Dealing with security is an important part of my job. From my perspective, I would like to make my servers as secure as possible while allow business to conduct their business without too much burden. It is always tricky to find the middle ground between the security and business, but the lacking of communications is the main problem. Just say no (seems like a very popular these days in all aspects of our society) without any explanations nor any constructive suggestions does bother me. I am glad Jeff is talking about the importance of security and communicates the reasons within his organization. Such communications are critical to understand and balance the needs of security and business. I believe there is at least one solution out for each problem in the IT field, but no solution is available for undefined problem. More importantly, Jeff is educating his peers within the organization so they can understand where his perspectives are coming from and work with him resolving any potential security issues. With cyber space crimes are increasing dramatically in the last few years and stores about security breaches appeared in the news are so damaging to the company, business and senior managers realize the importance of keeping company out of unnecessary spot light. I believe what business and other IT departments do expect security folks to communicate in understandable and plain languages so they can be addressed in the business processes and policies across the organization.

The other item I like Jeff talked about is to put security concerns in the processes so we don’t have to retrofit later. Different organizations have different processes to complete projects. Some leverage security staffs during the designing stage that put security issues up front. Our organization has a different approach to design a new application, involving architect team and project management team throughout the project’s life cycle. In our case, architect team is aware of some tools and ways to address technical security issues. However, not everyone on the team has the same level of security knowledge. In order to standardize security, it is necessary to provide security training so all team members have the necessary knowledge to apply security concerns in practices. From project management’s perspective, there should be a standard template that includes security as part of every project within the organization. Combining two teams and building a standard will ensure future projects to meet security requirements at the beginning and not have to rework when security becomes an issue that have to be addressed.

IT project ROI

Many people, including myself, have asked how you calculate ROI (Return on Investment) for IT projects. There are times when IT projects’ ROI can be calculated just like other non-IT projects. For example, you implement new software to automate a work process to replace the manual work done by employees. Your ROI is the saved labor cost divided by the cost of the project itself (Labor/Cost) either calculated annually or over a period of time, say five years. It seems pretty simple, at least in term of math’s concern. However, IT project ROIs’ are rarely that simple. Usually, you will have one or more IT administrator(s), who’s labor costs are much higher than your data processors’ labor costs, to manage the software, perhaps software annual maintenance costs, software upgrade costs with labor and outage costs (every three to five years at least), support costs with software vendors, along with implementation costs. What about the risk of failing projects? As I blogged before, only about one-third of the IT projects are considered as successful. If you add all the costs up, you will get a totally different ROI. Then the question is how do you justify IT projects?

There are two aspects we need to consider ROIs. Tangible and intangible benefits are both equally important in calculating ROIs. Tangible benefits, such as reduce costs and increasing revenue are much easier to put into numbers. If you reduce a number of employees needed to do the same work, you can calculate the labor savings easily. As for increasing revenue, you just need to add the revenue generated through the new implementation. The more difficult part is to calculate intangible benefits, for example, if the blizzard of the 2010 happened during the final week of Christmas shopping season and you don’t have an e-commerce presents. In another word, the risks of not having something need to be considered as well. Another intangible is convenience, for example check your balance of your 401K can be processed 24x7 on the web instead of contacting a customer service representative during the normal business hours. The trick is how to calculate those intangibles? Often, IT departments are put in charge of calculating ROI that I think it is a mistake and perhaps contributed to the low IT project success rate. Business units are benefiting directly from the IT projects so they should be one in charge of putting intangibles into dollar amount because they know how valuable the convenience is for their customers and so forth. IT department should be put into charge of calculating the cost side of the project since they know how to implement the projects and costs associated with software, hardware, labor, and time needed to implement. By working as a team, both IT and business are better off to get a better understanding of ROI and whether or not the project is worth to pursuit at the first place. I believe it will also improve the successful rate of the IT projects.

Dream Job

Let’s face it, all of us in the class want to improve our chances of getting our dream jobs. That’s why the following points I got from reading the following article on Businessweek.com are helpful to share. The title of the article, “Landing Your Dream Job” (http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/feb2010/ca20100218_464850.htm), lists several helpful processes to get your dream job. Normally, when I think of getting a new job, it always starts with writing a resume following by job search either through headhunter(s) or on my own. Never in my mind had I thought of building a process to land my dream job. The writer, Martin, Zalewski, uses his personal professional career to lay out a process to help readers to achieve their professional goal. Below are four steps from the writer and the way I understand them.
• Think of the present opportunity as a springboard for the job ahead, whether it be with the same employer or with someone new. Personally, I like to do different tasks or jobs since I got bore pretty easily. But for some people, they just like to do one job that they feel comfortable and they do well. I understand that you may fail while do something that you don’t know very well, but the learning process is a valuable lesson for later. The more you learn, the better you are prepared for your dream job.
• What am I capable of achieving? A big part of testing what your capabilities are is to take a risk to find out. People tend to feel comfortable doing what they know best, but lack the courage to explore their own potentials. From the employees’ perspective, they don’t want to take the initiatives to manage their own professional life and leave it to the manager to plan out for them. From the managers’ perspective, they sometimes behave in a selfish way of hiding their best performing employees to themselves and won’t let their employees to realize their full potential.
• Where do I want to be? Monetary reward is a part of motivation for many people, but it is not the only element. Accomplishments are important for some people so getting recognition is very important to them as well. To answer the question, you need to find out what are the most important to you personally and setup your career goal towards accordingly.
• How am I going to get there? Today’s business world is changing ever so fast, especially in the information technology field. Technologies change every 3-5 years so it is important to keep up with the latest knowledge about technology in addition to learn new skills necessary to achieve personal dream instead of dreaming about personal dream. Another point I think write got it right is the mentoring aspect of the development. Having someone who already went through the process is very helpful and provide a short cut to avoid some of the mistakes.

Management Style II

We had a class about management style earlier and everyone wrote a blog about it too. When I read this blog on Harvard Business Review (http://blogs.hbr.org/corkindale/2010/02/why_good_people_skills_matter.html) titled, Why Good People Skill Matter in a Recession by Gill Corkindale, it reminded me how to manage employee and what to avoid. It is amazing how deep theory X management style is rooted in today’s business world. For some, threats and punishments are still the most effective ways to manage employees. The example from the blog, the female executive was ready to change her management style to better manage her employees until recession started. She abruptly changed the course of her direction and reversed back to her tough and abrasive style that annoyed to her peers and employees according to feedbacks. She fired employees using recession as excuses and made her employees harder by threatening to fire them so she didn’t have to deal with people management issues. As we discussed in class, such management style may work in the short term, but in a longer period, such style will not work well in today’s business environment. What surprised me the most was that, she understood that she needed to change her management style in order to advance her career in her company. Whatever reasons she was not doing herself any favor for her either. Granted, the pressure of producing results are higher than in good time, employees are tend to work harder to justify their job security, but people are showing their true color in the high pressure situations. I believe she missed an opportunity to demonstrate her abilities that she was capable of being a good manager and inspirational leader to get the most out of her employees.
In the blog, Gill Corkindale also listed several draw backs of such management style. Employees will not have any loyalties to the managers and the organizations. Once opportunities are open, those employees will leave their organizations. The second draw back is that manager will lose the trust of the employees. The third draw back is that work quality will be poor since employees who are not motivated will not care about their work quality as long as they get the job done. Perhaps there is another very important reason such management style won’t work is that over the long run, employees will become less creative and the organizations will become less competitive in the market place.
Gill Corkindal listed several guidelines on how to manage in the blog during the recession. The below are directly quoted from the blog I think is worth reading:
“
• Be visible. Walk around, hold meetings and speak in small groups
• Be as open, honest, fair and decent as possible Be serious and realistic but remain positive and hopeful for the future
• Keep people in the picture even when there is little concrete news. Share as much information as you are able — in person, in meetings and through frequent updates — about the challenges the company is facing and how it is performing. If you don't know what's going on, say so.
• Give people frequent opportunities to discuss and ask questions about the situation
• Be a role model. Do your job well and stay positive. This will ensure there is a positive mood in the office and that morale is high so people can work with fewer distractions.
• Engage your staff — leverage their expertise, involve them in decisions and remind them of the shared responsibility to pull the organisation through the crisis.
• Encourage and motivate people through positive feedback and extra help if they are struggling. Don't be over-critical as this may backfire on you.
• Let your people know how much you value them. This can be done through positive feedback, recognition and rewards such as small gifts or flexible working. If people feel they are valued, you will have their loyalty and support.
• Keep an eye on your peoples' health and wellbeing. Recessions are stressful
• Ensure that you have good training and development programmes in place — these are a good investment for the future and will pay dividends when the organization has come through the recession. Coaching and mentoring also foster self-reliance and self-worth, which are important factors when it comes to keeping motivation high. “

Bring out the best without crisis

I just read an article posted on businessweek.com (http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/feb2010/ca2010029_389441.htm, the article is from Harvard Business Review) titled Crisis Response Factors-Without a Crisis. To summarize the article, the author, Ron Ashkenas uses people and organization respond to the earthquake in Haiti as an example of how organizations could use the power of the three human response factors, Urgency, Empathy, and Innovation, to get tasks and projects accomplished quickly. In nature disaster like the earthquake in Haiti, the three factors comes together to respond to the human tragedy. First, we realize the urgency of the responses that could determine the life and death of tens of thousands of Haitians; second, we are connected to the people when we see the devastations on the news and TVs and empathize with them; third, we find new ways to get things done bypassing the normal procedures. The article further discusses how to sustain the three factors within the organizations.
I found this article is very helpful in today’s business world, especially in large organizations. Too often, IT projects failed (more often than you think, the latest from CHAOS Report 2009 indicates that only 32% of the IT projects are successful). There are many reasons for the failures, but the three factors mentioned above are some of the important reasons behind the failures. In big organizations, different departments have their own priorities. The mentalities of your top projects are not mine is so often seen in projects large and small. For example, business and security have different goals of their own. Business wants easy access to information while security wants to secure information. How do you resolve this conflict? Perhaps looking back to the Haiti earthquake will give us a clue. Business and security will come together to find a solution when both share the same urgency. Personal performances in large organizations are largely determined by the accomplishments within the department instead of the whole organization. Recently, perhaps not too far ago, during the banking crisis, some people defended their bonus (very big) by stating that they made money for the banks and they were not responsible for crisis that required federal government to bail out the whole banking system. They did not see themselves as part of organization and did not care about success or the failure of the organization. In another word, they did not empathize with the company. When people are in the crisis mode, they tend to think fast and find ways to the solutions. In the normal project, people tend to lack the urgency and go through regular procedures. While procedures are necessary to follow, but innovation thinking can bring efficiency and improve existing procedures.
I totally agree with author’s statement that in order to bring out the best performance, managers need to find a way to bring employees to the crisis mode without a crisis happening and build it into long term success of the organization.

Legal Issues/Information Security

Record keeping is one of the most important in IT. By law, companies are required to keep emails and other electronic documents for seven years in case of legal procedures either started by the companies themselves or against the companies. The difficulty of record keeping is how to identify what to keep and what not to keep. Too often, for the sake of simplicity, companies keep all electronic records. Then here is the problem of cost of storing them. With more information are in digital formats, the volumes of the information are increasingly growing and storing all information are getting more expensive both in terms of storage space and labor cost.
The second issue is to how to secure companies data and propriety information from unauthorized access both external and internal threats. There are two aspects of securing company data; one is to setup ACL (access control list) that only allows certain authorized personal to have access to the data and denies all others’ accesses. The second half of the information protection is auditing and threat detections. ACL can be broken given enough time to the hackers using methods such as brute force. In order to prevent such attacks, reviewing auditing log and deploying hacking detection technology will enable company to catch hackers in action and send out alarms when such attacks are happening in the real time.
When data security is breached, which will happen sometimes, companies need to have a policy to deal in such an event. First is to assess the scope of the damage to gauge the situation. Second is to contain the damage and prevent to spread to other part of security breach, i.e. user account privilege has access to other important data. Third is to investigate the incident and find the source of the attack and the root cause of the security breach. Forth is to improve security procedure to prevent future similar attacks.
Intellectual property can be the critical part of the companies’ competitive advantages. I remembered a in 2006, administrative assistant of the executive from inside Coca-Cola tried to sell Coca-Cola’s trade secret to Pepsi. She was turned in by Pepsi and Coca-Cola avoided a disaster outcome. Had she found a buyer with intent to get into the beverage business, who knows how much damages she could cause, maybe billions of dollars? How did she get the information is an important lesson to learn in today’s business environment and a case study of information security.

iPad or iBust?

Apple just unveiled its latest product iPad not too long ago and planned to make it available to general public in a few months. Its previous new products, iMac, iPod, iTune, and iPhone, won praises from users as well as commentators. The recent earnings reflected the success of those products. Because of the popular products, Apple has held up better than most of the other technology companies both in terms of finance and stock price. In fact, its stock price reached five year high earlier this year. What about the new iPad? How does it impact Apple’s financial?
From what I heard, there have been lots of disappointments for iPad. I talked to some Apple lovers and read some commentaries like Tom Kaneshige from CIO.com (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/01/28/urnidgns852573C400693880002576B90032026A.DTL). My impression is that iPad doesn’t generate nearly as much as positive reactions or followings than other products from Apple. The general complaints are that the product itself is not technologically advanced which is a departure from Apple tradition. People love Apple for the technology, design, and fashion. Now people are pointing to the shortcomings of the iPad. From Tom Kaneshige’s article above, he listed four issues (I heard more than that) with iPad.
1. iPad uses LCD, an outdated technology that is on its way out. I had a friend who got a LED TV last month that has much better picture and uses much less power than LCD. According to the article, Apple uses LCD because 10” OLED won’t be available until later this year. LCD drains battery much quicker than OLED and shortens the battery recharge intervals.
2. iPad doesn’t come with a camera. All new laptops come with a camera. For people who used to use video chatting and participate in video conference, the lack of such popular feature is a no go. Maybe customers can buy a camera and plugged it on to the iPad, but integrated hardware always preferred than add on hardware.
3. iPad uses 1024-by-768 pixel resolution instead of HD output 1280-by-720 that can be outputted to a HD TV. HD TV is the way to go so missing it is a big deal. The rational for going with 1024-by-768 is cheaper. People who buy Apple products are not your typical Wal-Mart shoppers, buying stuffs on the cheap side.
4. iPad doesn’t support flash. Flash is one of the most important features on the web. Watching movies on Hulu, Crackle, and live broadcast events on the internet is a huge part of mobile device. This counter Jobs’ claim that iPad offers the best web browsing experience. You can make the judgment yourself.
How does iPad help or hurt Apple financial is hard to predict, but my personal guess is that it is not going to be successful as other products from Apple introduced in recent years. Perhaps Apple releases iPad just to generate a buzz in public and offers a better iPad later in its version 2 of the iPad. I am sure someone will disagree with me and point out the other side of iPad. Are you buying an iPad when it comes out?

Communication

Communication is an important part of our company’s operation. At the departmental level, the policy for communication is to “over communicate” so relevant employees and customers are well informed.
In most cases, my communications with my direct supervisor are through verbal communication. I prefer verbal communication because I can see his emotions and get a better understanding instead of emails that for the most parts are hard to get reading of the real situations. This is especially true when the topics are HR related. For the technical related issues, I would not mind emails, phone calls, or anything other methods.
The second communication method is email. Email is a cheap and easy way to communicate with mass while in person meeting is almost impossible due to the size of the gathering, schedule conflicts, facility limitations, geographically diversity, and so forth.
The third communication method is town hall style of meetings. Recently, our group moved from one department to another department. While we know some of the employees in the new department already, but it is helpful to get a chance to know all the new colleagues and it is helpful to facilitate team work environment.
The fourth communication method is webcast/telephone conference call. Earning call and other important events are held via webcast to have the effect of the in person meeting and allow two way communications. Since internet speed and availability are getting cheaper, webcast is increasingly become popular, especially for technology fields.
I feel our communication is good in a sense that important business decisions and strategies are communicated through proper channels and through the most proper methods mentioned above. As an employee of a big organization, there are layers of layers managements between me and to the CEO and some information are filtered out through the channels, perhaps intentionally. This is why there are always rumors out there because partial or incorrect information create speculations and panics. In the long term, it hurts employees’ moral and creates instable workforce.

Risks of Outsourcing

In case you haven't heard, Google is thinking about leaving China because of alleged hacker attacks from China (Google hasn't publicly provided evidences yet). Depends on which side you are on, you either support Google's move or you are against it, but I am not taking side on this issue. Instead, I am specifically thinking about how Google's move might impact its customers and corporate clients.

Google has being pushing their online applications, gmail and other online collaboration applications, i.e, Google Docs to the corporate clients. Increasingly, more corporate clients are adapting the outsourcing strategy to outsourcing part of their in order to cut costs. Few have a good understanding how outsourcing can affect the businesses that are at the mercy of the outsourcing company. Using Google's pending move as an example, if Google decides to leave China and Chinese government decides to close traffics to Google.com in additional of Google.cn's abandonment. Google's customers will no longer be able to access their gmail and online collaboration application like Google Docs. How does this impact your business if you are an international company, or even a small company that have business in China (by the way, China is the 3rd largest economy in the world and is becoming the 2nd largest this year according to some predictions). That's a big part of international market. The question for the corporation is "Can you afford it?"

Just to clarify, I am not against outsourcing. I think it makes sense for corporations to outsourcing some non-essential IT to concentrate on their core businesses. It is essential to think through how and if you have any control your business after you decide to outsourcing. This is not an exclusive IT outsourcing issue. Even if you are outsourcing your production or have an operation in another country, you need to think about how much control you have over that part of your business and how reliable they are because political and business environment in another country can and will change. Often we take our technologies for granted, email, telephone, etc. But don't take them for granted since they could be at the mercy of the foreign government. I just read a report on Yahoo.com by AP titled "What Internet? China region cut off 6 months now" (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100119/ap_on_re_as/as_china_internet_blackout). You can read it yourself and see how business and people's life are interrupted. Can you tolerate it?

Outsourcing is not just let outsourcing company to deal with your issues; actually, you should prepare carefully before you decide outsourcing and have a strategy to deal with the unexpected problems that is out of your control so your businesses are not on death watch.