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The Evolution of Advice

Doing some housekeeping recently I ran across an old briefing paper I had put together for a client perhaps six or seven years ago. This was in the wake of the dot-com implosion, but the economy as a whole was doing well and technology investment, among those who hadn't imploded with the bubble, was lasering in on that long-sought path to productivity that emerged in the wake of all the hoopla. The IT department was all fired up about some of the latest and greatest technologies and was eager to spend some money implementing them to reap the benefits of the cutting edge.

But this was also the era of Nicholas Carr's seminal "IT Doesn't Matter" article, and a realization, provoked in part by the excesses of the dot-com bubble, that for technology to fulfill the promise of greater productivity and efficiency, it would also have to abide the same economic disciplines as other components of the business. Exciting it may have been, but successful it largely was not: my notes cite a Wall Street Journal article of the time that found that some forty-two percent of technology projects were abandoned prior to completion, and of those that were completed, some sixty percent failed to provide any significant return on investment. Heady times for implementers, but heartache and pain for accounting departments tallying the numbers and users who had to deal with partial implementations and "we'll have that working soon" promises over half-baked technologies.

These realities informed the thrust of the briefing, which argued essentially that the primary role of the IT department was in risk management. The benefit a company realized from a good CIO or IT manager was not in accelerated technology adoption leading to competitive advantage in the marketplace, but rather reduced wastage on poorly considered or implemented projects. The CIO manager was there to say "no" when expensive, unrealistic propositions were made by vendors or pushed in by executives without technical skills. Successful information technology operations were those that bled the least along the way, preserving capital and deploying it strategically where risk was lowest and ROI highest.

If you are a regular reader here, you will recognize that this is a long day's ride away from the advice that I give now. I thought it might be worth going through what has, and has not, changed in my overall perspective of information technology for the business, and what shifts in the market place support those changes.
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Hot tip: stay safe by not broadcasting your secrets to the world

ComputerWorld maligns today's FCC decision that Google's wifi snooping in conjunction with roaming photography for StreetView is a broadly legal activity. John Mello says it "sets a horrible precedent" for anyone hoping for assurance of government protection of the privacy of their home wireless networks.

I don't have any inclination to defend Google's motives; I think they are just as "evil" at this point, if such a term can be applied to a corporation, as Microsoft ever was. But honestly, should anyone expect the government to protect them from the laws of physics? A wireless broadcast is a broadcast... you are actually throwing your information out beyond your walls for all and sundry to pick through. If you don't take steps to confine the signal to your property or to encrypt the contents, you may as well be putting up a billboard and demanding that no one look at it.

The widespread availability of wireless devices and the limited spectrum available pretty much ensures that most people wandering past your home or business are engaged in some form of activity similar to what Google was doing. It's ridiculous to demand the government attempt to prevent this. Without a dramatic crackdown on wireless devices themselves, it's simply not possible, and it's particularly silly when all anyone has to do to prevent it themselves is stop blaring their private data out into public places.

The IT end-run

A common complaint from IT departments and CIOs these days is that other departments and end users are doing an end-run around their traditional evaluation and procurement role by bringing in personal devices for business use or entering into direct contracts with SaaS providers. IT might never even know this is happening until or unless there is a problem. Technology companies have not been slow to recognize the benefits of selling directly to end-users and unsophisticated corporate executives, Apple being perhaps the most prominent, and successful, example; the iPhone has almost single-handedly opened up the enterprise market to the consumerization trend.

Apple, and most companies, have been taking advantage of this wedge between IT and business users primarily through marketing and a casual disregard for enterprise IT concerns. However, some salespeople are apparently taking things a little further, actively reaching out to bypass IT departments to sell to other departments directly, as CIO John Halamka found recently via a letter sent to his CFO, offering him a sweet deal on some fast, highly-available storage that Halamka's IT department inexplicably passed up previously.

This is a somewhat unusual example because it doesn't involve a technology that would seem immediately appealing or useful to non-IT staff. It's not unusual, however, for CFOs to be the ultimate decision makers in business IT... almost half of US CIOs are on a leash held by the accounting department. I don't think that's the reporting structure Halamka is in, but it isn't an unreasonable assumption on the part of the sales rep, and going over the head of a primary procurement agent who doesn't want to listen to a pitch is nothing new.

Halamka finds the tactic despicable but that may ignore a few realities in the current state of Information Technology management. First, this is just what salespeople do; they want to close a deal, they want to talk to someone in the client business who can make that happen. Their entire economic motivation rests on that. Expecting them not to be slimy is like expecting fish not to be wet. It's a tight marketplace and these tactics work often enough to be worth their while. And that's the job; take a moment to examine the proposition in reverse: as the client, would you refrain from talking with the vendor's competition if you thought you could get a better deal for them? Or a different salesperson at the same company, to make the scenario even closer... if they could get you a better price, would you not take it? If you wouldn't, are you really doing your job? The salesperson is in the same position, just on the other side of the table. Relationships and honor still matter, but they don't trump economics.

Second, unfortunately, there are quite a number of IT departments that are poorly lead and function as real obstacles to more efficient business technology that is available in the market today. And CFOs and other executives are not unaware of this; their frustration with technologies they don't understand that are constantly held over their heads by CIOs and IT managers who are threatened by change is exactly what creates the opening through which these sorts of pitches fall. They are hungry for options and they hear about competitors who are doing it all cheaper and faster, and if they are not getting those options from their own CIO, they're going to be receptive to hearing it from salespeople.

And this goes toward answering Halamka's ultimate question, which is, how do you handle such end-runs as a CIO? It takes two to tango here; we are all bombarded with sales pitches all the time, and we disregard them until they strike a nerve. If you are the CIO, you need to dull those nerves in your organization by providing excellent service, opening up options for users, and bringing them into the decision-making processes your department uses. A frequent complaint I hear from CIOs is that users and business leadership don't understand the challenges in IT. Unfortunately, "just trust me" isn't a workable strategy for dealing with this problem, because too many CIOs can't really be trusted. The only answer I have found is to deeply integrate IT and business decision-making, which spreads both understanding and ownership of the various issues that rise out of procurement decisions.

Microsoft banning iPad purchases: why bother?

The kerfuffle this morning on TechMeme is mostly over a purportedly leaked memo from Microsoft's Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, & Operations Group banning iPad and Mac purchases by employees.

There are a predictable range of responses to this so far. Some folks point out that, considering that this group includes sales teams that are supposed to be out there pitching Microsoft products, it only makes sense that you wouldn't want them to be seen personally using competing products. That's pretty simplistic; the group also includes a lot of folks who aren't out selling directly, and even among those who are, Microsoft still makes plenty of software that runs on Macs.

Considering both that and the fact noted in the memo that there are apparently relatively few of these purchases already, you have to wonder why they bothered putting out a memo about it in the first place. Bureaucratic caprice? Petty string-pulling? Because it was almost sure to leak, and the impression it was sure to give was that Microsoft products are so crappy compared to Apple that the company can't even get its own employees to use them without banning the competition.

I don't believe that is true; there's not a huge epidemic of Mac adoption amongst Microsoft employees that I have seen. The company could have easily ignored what little of this there is and focused on combating that with more aggressive employee discounts or flat-out itch-scratching feature delivery.

Instead, they sound threatened, which only makes Apple look more formidable.

Defining the cloud

Before you run away screaming, don't worry: let me assure you I do not plan to offer yet another definition of "cloud computing" to join all those hundreds of other divergent definitions running around out there.

But I will point you to Dave Linthicum's and Joe McKendrick's musings on the subject.

They both cite the current NIST definition of the term:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Which is not the worst definition I have heard today. But then both Dave and Joe argue that it doesn't go far enough. I'm not sure how Dave squares that with his earlier assertion that "extensive overuse and misuse" have rendered the phrase nearly meaningless... it seems to me that "overuse and misuse" are just a result of other folks broadening the definition in ways that he does not approve. He goes on to say:

The concept of cloud computing is about the ability for organizations to stop solving all IT problems by themselves. It's certainly about sharing resources, such as storage and compute services, but it really should be more about sharing solutions and pushing risk out of the business.

Really? Outsourcing is now also "cloud computing?"

I tend to agree with Joe when he says "Ultimately, the term may disappear, vendors will move on to hyping the next big thing, and we’ll remove the “cloud” from “cloud computing” as it simply becomes a ubiquitous method by which applications and services are assembled and accessed." The hype, however, is coming as much from these columnists as vendors, and all seem equally culpable in my view of distorting and diluting the term.

Which is why I will continue to avoid using it inasmuch as is possible.

The Great Google Shark-jumping Competition

Like everyone else, I was reading over James Whittaker's blog entry this morning on why he left Google to return to Microsoft. The post comes off a little whiny, but that's the nature of these things; when you feel a little betrayed about something you once believed in, you tend to glorify that storied past and bemoan the benighted present. I've cranked out a few of those myself.

Whittaker points to the surge initiated by Larry Page to compete with Facebook as the source of these ills, and to Google+ as an example of all that is now wrong with the company. That's not the first place I've seen this argument in the past few weeks. Paul Graham makes a similar point, tangentially, in his list of ten ambitious startup ideas. One of those ideas is "start a new search engine." Google, having taken its eye of the search ball and become embroiled in its pointless losing fight with Facebook, is vulnerable in what once was its core strength. And even as the company has narrowed its portfolio to focus on social, I was reminded of how the few remaining product lines still receive short shrift as I look over complaints about Apps, or the horrible changes that have been jammed down onto Gmail and Reader in purported service of this larger social good.

Google has always been two different businesses (in the sense that they actually function as a business; this doesn't include their various digressions and experimentations, even the most popular of which have never had broad adoption or generated significant revenue): internally, as Whittaker points out, they are an ad company, and an extremely successful one; externally, to their users, they are a search company, and they had been extremely successful at that until recently as well. Whittaker attributed this to "good content" but the content isn't, and never has been, Google's... it is generated by the rest of us and Google's particular and appealing genius was to index it and make it accessible, while throwing some unobtrusive ads up alongside it to support the whole experience.

The company has long attempted to break out of the search box in the minds of users, looking for something more sticky and valuable to serve them with, but has made a poor job of it at every turn. What is happening with the Google+ social push is even worse, however. In desperately attempting to shoehorn existing properties into the big Google+ family, the company has diminished, rather than enhanced, their value to users. I can no long frequently recommend Apps as a solution for businesses, for example, because the company is not only divorced from core Apps services as a revenue stream (this was always true and always a moderate risk), but is now visibly desperate to somehow make everything "social" at the expense of core functionality. The "Search Plus Your World" tinkering with search is a frightening and potentially damaging example that could mark the beginning of a steady deterioration in the very business that users turn to the company for.

Graham compares Google's obsession with Facebook over Microsoft's with Google and I think that's apt in most respects. Microsoft saw Google's philosophy of computing services as a threat and made the mistake of thinking that Google itself was the threat, and attempted to mimic them to compete, making a poor job of it. Google seems to be taking the same tack with Facebook. This isn't necessarily to condemn either Microsoft or Google; the philosophies they are up against are existential threats to their existing businesses, and it's always a tough call to find a way to reinvent your business without cannibalizing it. Microsoft, despite several mis-steps, may in fact be doing a better job of this than Google is. One can only hope Google will similarly find a workable solution to their own dilemma.

Unlike Microsoft, however, Google doesn't have the advantage of a massively entrenched product infrastructure that would take decades to supplant. Moving ad dollars and searching eyeballs to a competitor is the work of minutes. If their moves have a whiff of desperation, it's desperation well-earned.

The Front Lines Redux

Sixty Minutes ran a segment on Stuxnet and cyberwarfare in general recently (here's the clip, courtesy of ZDNet). There's nothing in the report that doesn't reflect information that hasn't previously been published elsewhere on the Internet, but they do interview some of the key players in tracking it, and a number of other experts discussing the potential impact of similar efforts with other targets. These represent the usual gamut of fear-mongering conspiracy theorists with extravagant, devastating scenarios.

I don't want to lend substance to the more dramatic predictions but I do want to point out that the acceptance that computer attacks will be an increasing component in state and non-state conflict is gradually entering the mainstream. There are real and expensive and potentially dangerous outcomes that can be associated with such attacks, certainly. But the point the piece makes that I want to reinforce is that the consequences, whatever they may be, are not going to primarily be faced by government professionals or the military. They're going to be faced by businesses and individuals.

Critical infrastructure for the Internet isn't run by the government. It's run by businesses. The techniques for attacking it are, today, frighteningly distributed, primarily across domestic computers run by private businesses and citizens. Although botnets may be controlled by malicious actors outside our borders, the actually machinery and code that will be involved is our own. In a hideous betrayal, our own poorly secured systems are likely to come to life and betray us. And this is not a danger that the military or some faceless government agent can protect against. This is a responsibility that rests on the shoulders of businesses large and small. That's not a patriotic call to arms, it's simply the reality of this sort of conflict. And right now, most of us are very poorly prepared to deal with that reality.

So the next time you think security is someone else's problem, that no one cares about your PC or your small business, consider the larger forces at work out there, and go upgrade your anti-virus!

A new Windows logo

If you're like me, you've already seen this, and you really don't care. Normally I agree with Joe Wilcox but I think he's dramatically off-base when he calls it "a disaster." The new logo unveiled last week by Microsoft for their core Windows franchise is almost utterly irrelevant to the product and brand impression among its core customer base: geeks.

I'm not saying that geeks don't get brands, we do; it's just that "branding" is not about visuals and color schemes and such, but about functionality and capabilities and other practical matters. There's no doubt that Windows has a brand image in the IT world. It just has nothing to do with what has always been a pretty lame logo.

Neither am I saying that geeks are the only people that run Windows... quite the contrary, in fact. Geeks tend to run more sexy and robust operating systems. But geeks are the ones who generally decide, in some way, shape, or form, what everyone else ends up buying for their day to day use. Whether it's the geeky IT manager who sticks with Windows because it's the safe choice at work or the geeky teen who would love if his parents ran Linux but knows that Windows is the best possible compromise for them, geeks drive Windows adoption. And geeks, among their many other fine and noteworthy qualities, just aren't noted for their taste and style perception. I mean, really. You've seen how we dress, right?

Is innovation related to execution?

We've all heard about ideas that are ahead of their time: Leonardo and his flying machines, for instance, or Apple's Newton, perhaps. I suppose most people might agree that innovation is innovation, even if society or technology aren't quite ready for it yet. Wes Miller has put up a blog post that has attracted a little attention arguing that big old boring, copycat Microsoft is in fact an innovative company by this measure, but all of its innovation has been ahead of it's time. Miller provides an impressive list of Microsoft products or initiatives that bear more than a passing resemblance to other products that have become successful since.

This causes a gut-check for many Microsoft critics, because it forces a re-appraisal of what it means to be innovative... if the Newton was innovative, then why not Microsoft Reader, or the original tablet PCs?

Miller partially defeats his own argument with respect to some of the products by diving down into the technical details of what killed them. In many cases, it was the technology. As one commenter put it, it's not that Microsoft is a premature innovator, it's that it's a mediocre implementer... the ideas were good, the execution was poor. And if it's the ideas we are judging, then few companies today in the technology sphere can be considered innovative... the broad strokes of all these neat gadgets have been imagined and laid out in science fiction for decades now.

Those ideas are not unimportant, but it seems clear that genuine innovation requires more than just ideas. There is some level of execution required. I would argue that this is a necessary component for real innovation. The market may spit on innovation every now and again, but when you consult the long list that Miller provides and consider how many similar products have ultimately been fielded successfully by other companies, I think you are forced to conclude that Microsoft has not often risen to the level of genuine innovation. They've had good ideas, which isn't surprising considering the legions of very smart folks they employ over there, but the company as a whole has become too conservative to launch genuinely innovative products.

Quick Link: Clients and perspicacity

There is some crossover between this recent topic published on our Agile Operations blog, "The Relationship between Agility and Perspicacity" and plain old consulting practice, so I am posting it as a quick link here. Briefly, if you've ever wondered why some clients have more trouble than others, it may have something to do with what Paul Graham calls their "conversational resourcefulness"... which I choose to view as "perspicacity."

Apple invading the corporation?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is making inroads to the vast bureaucracy of General Electric, now with official backing from the massive, PC-dominated company. While GE, like many enterprises, was pretty much forced into offering the iPhone as an alternative to company-issued Blackberries some time ago, my read is that users are not quite so fanatical about their Apple computers as phones. If that's the case, then this could represent the real progress of an honest-to-god legitimate enterprise strategy from Apple. In turn, this might help pivot the company into a more business-friendly posture for all customers, including SMBs.

There have been hints of efforts within Apple to jump-start a corporate strategy for some time now, going back all the way to the roll-out of the Xserve in 2002, but those efforts have been inconsistent and incomplete... possibly the worst sins possible from the enterprise perspective, which prizes certainty and stability. The consumerization factor that has benefited them with the iPhone can't really be counted a part of that effort and in some ways works against their ability to enter corporate IT through more normal channels.

But it's possible that, with the recent leadership change at the company, they are shifting in a more business-friendly direction on some fronts. The last time I was in an Apple store, I got chatted up pretty hard by their new business support team. Since support has been one of the primary drawbacks for business users of Apple products, that effort, if sustained, represents a major shift. Is that what GE is seeing?

It's not entirely clear to me that this is in Apple's best interest overall. The company has an excellent focus on consumer products and a proven track record of delivering products that people want. There are compromises inherent in operating in the corporate environment that could serve to dull that focus. Admittedly, the real danger probably lies in the opposite direction: consumer-orientation will likely continue to cripple enterprise-oriented features and services. Still, the guerrilla strategy that has served to put the iPhone into most corporate offerings could work the same magic with iPads and computers, given enough time.

Godaddy virtual includes fix

You may have noticed some pages on the site recently that have not been working properly; a message reading "An error has occurred while processing this directive" appeared at the top and some of the links didn't function correctly. Surprise, surprise... I just noticed this myself!

As is often the case when something is wrong with the site, this was the result of a cock-up at GoDaddy, where it is hosted. Other than the blog, this is not a particularly dynamic site... it pretty much just sits here and coughs up marketing text. Since that's not terribly demanding, technically speaking, it's not really worth hosting at a better service. The price I pay for this trade-off is one I have decided is affordable, but it is still sometimes annoying, which is that the company makes random changes in their server configuration which then break parts of the site that had been working just fine, untouched, for years and years and years.

This one was something to do with how GoDaddy is handling server side includes (SSI), one of which I use to insert the same snippet of Javascript on most of the pages here. The line '#include virtual="/includes/page_management.js"' sits in the head element and pulls in the function when the page loads. Only, suddenly, it wasn't!

I found this puzzling because there are several other includes that I use on most pages, and they have been working just fine. Inserting the actual Javascript from the file into the page at the same location also worked properly. Finally, GoDaddy lists files with ".js" extensions and being acceptable to Apache and claims they should be served normally.

But it turned out it was the ".js" that the server had decided suddenly to have problems with. I simply renamed the master file with a .html extension and changed the reference to '#include virtual="/includes/page_management.html" ' and everything started working again. This is only pedantically irritating (in that the file does not actually contain HTML and so is mis-labeled) and serves as a quick workaround... until the next random change.

Quicklinks: Office 365 vs. Google Apps

The University of California - Berkeley has decided on Google Apps as their e-mail and productivity platform of the future, which is not, in itself, news; Apps migrations are continuing apace and large institutions electing to realize significant savings by migrating to SaaS solutions is no longer particularly remarkable. The Google Apps versus Microsoft Office 365 decision is one that any organization in that position has to make. Berkeley, though, has provided a handy assessment matrix that helps clarify their decision-making process. That's useful information for anyone considering moving to either of the platforms.

It also provides an interesting perspective on a recently released report claiming, once again, that Microsoft is well-positioned to deal with the threat from cloud-based solutions. If you only look at the considerations reflected by the report, then it's absolutely correct; on paper, Microsoft has all the resources and capabilities to take on Apps and other threats and win. But if you look at it from a customer perspective, as Berkeley's assessment does, you see all the reasons that just having resources and capabilities doesn't matter if you don't have a viable plan for deploying them.

What exactly is your CIO prepared to do about the European crisis?

What? You hadn't thought about that yet? Well, you'd better get on it, according to Gartner: ZDNet has the headline that sums it all up, "CIOs must address Euro crisis now to protect enterprises: Gartner."

It's only noon right now, but that's easily the most goofy thing I have heard today. I expect the record to stand.

Call your CFO if you are worried about Europe. If your CIO barges in explaining his "...proactive approach when it comes to setting up safeguards regarding risks over financial defaults, bankruptcy, as well as employee and customer distress, among many other issues" you should throw him right back out of your office again. Gartner stretches to tie this all together by suggesting that IT will find itself in a lead role due to "contractual obligations, business continuity, and regulatory compliance" but that both minimizes the scope of the potential issues and overstates IT's capability to address them.

It's great that we want to boost IT's relevance in strategic matters, but jousting at windmills isn't going to increase anyone's confidence in us.

Gates not to return to Microsoft... fortunately for all concerned

Fortune has published an extraordinarily speculative (wishful?) article discussing the potential of Bill Gates returning to helm Microsoft and mentioning that the world's richest man is considering a return to the saddle.

The idea was quickly shot down by a Gates' spokesperson commenting on other articles. However, it represents yet another in a series of increasingly desperate rumors suggesting that the company is so far off course now that radical intervention will be required. From calling for Steve Ballmer's ouster to calling for the company to be split apart, investors and fans alike are grasping at straws for ways to prevent something that few will yet admit: the company's increasing irrelevancy outside a narrowing spectrum of divergent operations.

Those hoping for Gates' return are no doubt envisioning his famous "Internet Tidal Wave" memo that spun the company like a top and pulled it off a similar course toward rapidly outmoded CD multimedia technologies and into web-compatible products and services. That bullet looked a lot like the one the company is now trying to dodge with respect to consumerized products and rapidly developed SaaS solutions; what is different is that it is more or less clear that no one in the management structure now has a clue how to position the organization to survive as a market leader even when they see what is coming. Bill, one imagines, could pull that off, if he were to return.

Of course, while it might breathe some much needed life and direction into the company right now, it wouldn't be a positive move for the long term. Microsoft needs to figure out a systematic way of adapting to market pressures and getting these things right, not to lean on a single historic figure to bail it out whenever it gets in over its head. And, frankly, Gates' work now through his foundation is vastly more important than running a software company (albeit one that formed the basis of most of the funds for that foundation) and he seems to realize it. Stepping away from that to give a fish to Microsoft to sustain it through the current crisis would be wrong on any number of levels. Better to hope the company can learn to fish on its own and eat for a lifetime.