The Enemy Within

I have in my time had the displeasure to work in a couple of companies who have outsourced parts of their IT organisation (whether it be support, development). Whatever the relative merits of outsourcing, IMO, outsouring brings very few real benefits in the medium to long term. Obviously there is a percieved short term value proposition which leads companies down the outsourcing path in the first place (i.e. by reducing headcount) otherwise companies wouldn't do it.

As a result many IT people fear outsourcing, especially when cheaper offshoring is mixed into the equation. I used to be in this camp and a few years ago I believed that the best personal survival strategy against this trend was to move up the IT ladder into the 'talking' and 'thinking' space and distance myself from the 'doing' bit. I now don't have these worries.

Why? Well I recently had the opportunity to look at a large company that had outsourced almost its entire IT operation 5 years ago. The only elements not outsourced were the IT executive ('the talkers') and an enterprise architecture function ('the thinkers').

Their problem was that they had stopped delivering anything meaningful to the business. Why? Well there are a number of reasons but the one I wanted to focus on here is my belief that the outsourcer ('the doers') had effectively morphed into a fifth column working inside the IT shop. The resisted change at every opportunity and driven by the nature of the SLA's in place had redefined their role 'keeping the lights on'.

So did the business take this lying down. Of course not. It simply can't afford to. What it does is it effectively insources IT, usually covertly. Five years down the line they had more IT architects employed directly by the business than were left in central IT.

Your call is important to us ...

Most large companies spend millions of dollars implementing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software in order to 'know and understand their customers better'. CRM was one of those industry buzzwords that came out of nowhere about a dozen years ago. So here's a question for you?

Is the customer experience now better than it was in say 1990. No, I didn't think so.

So what's it all about. The obvious answer is that CRM's go hand in hand with call centres and the means a lower cost per customer interaction transaction. So the question is "Do you have a relationship with your call centre?". No, me neither. Any ideas what we should be calling CRM?

Induction Blues

A few years ago I got inducted. To be more precise I have attended the company's compulsory 1 day induction course. It was a cut down version of the three day course that all executives attended the previous year.

One part of the course concerned meeting etiquette. We were instructed that a meeting organiser we would always have to produce, in advance, a meeting agenda and somebody would also need to take minutes.

So, given that everybody in the company from the executive down had already attended the course, how many meetings actually included an agenda and were minuted. Yep that's - buckleys.

What's in a title ...

For my sins I have worked previously as an IT Architect. However, I've never been entirely comfortable with this title as applied to IT. To me architects design buildings and bridges and the like.

So it was quite refreshing when I had a recent conversation with one of our 'Data Architects' when he admitted that he only applied for Architect jobs because they paid better than other IT jobs he was qualified to do (i.e. Data Modeller).

Which leads me to my point. In my last job I managed a small team of Solution Designers. To all intents and purposes the role was actually that of Solution Architect, but because the department already had another team of 'Architects' (Enterprise in this case) it was decided to call us Designers. So what's the difference - same job, same job description, different title - about $300 per day - according to the recruitment agencies I dealt with.

Redundancy Blues ....

No not that sort of redundancy ....

I used to work with files and hierarchical databases on mainframes before I saw the light and chose to focus on relational databases. I was an early adopter and technology convert/evangelist. I can hardly believe that I used to voluntarily read UNIX and RDBMS books as I'm just not that much of a nerd.

Which leads me to the point of this post. One of the big concepts at the heart of RDBMS is the adoption of third normal form (3NF), and one of the key fundamentals of 3NF is that a piece of data should only be stored once and once only (i.e. with zero redundancy).

So I'm happy to report that 20 years down the line we're happily working away with our single 'corporate database' reporting on our 'single version of the truth' becuase it would be mad if we'd just swapped technologies and repeated all the issues we used to have with the legacy technology. Just mad.

Think of the environment ...

... before you print this email.

I hate this common addition email signatures. It's right up there with the "Honk if you had it last night" bumper sticker in my books. More to the point some recent analysis suggested that Google Mail expends the same amount of electical energy in sending an email (Google is known how have some of the worlds largest data centers) as it takes to boil a kettle. Google contest this suggestion, which is their perogative.

What I'm suggesting is that perhaps people should think about sending the email in the first place rather than worrying about how many sustainable trees were cut down to print it. Speaking of which I wonder how many cups of tea I've used up in this post.

I think therefore I am ....

... a Project Manager.

Years ago I used to respect PM's. On the whole they were experienced, grey haired, time-served IT professionals. You couldn't bs a decent PM. Nowadays, most PM's I work with only need to have two attributes. The first is to be pushy and the second is a laptop with Microsoft Project.

The Third Trojan Horse

I don't profess to be an industry guru. I bought into the whole concept of Network Computers and JavaStations (remember them). I couldn't understand why anybody wanted a Blackberry. I dismissed the original iPods as expensive pieces of platic that would never take off. What I totally misread though was the timing, the importance of the user experience for successful adoption and the completeness of the end to end solution - namely through the provision of content via iTunes. The rest is history and the iPod became the Trojan Horse that wormed its way into the pockets of millions and went a large way to restoring Apple's fortunes and coolness. IMO the iPhone has pickedup the gauntlet and is proving to be a worthy successor.

So here I go making another prediction - the rumoured 2010 release of the Apple Tablet (could they possibly resurect the name iBook or Newton name?) will be huge. So in 2001 when Bill Gates predicted that the tablet PC would be the most popular form of PC sold he wasn't entirely wrong. His timing was just a bit out, the user experience was woeful and there was no end to end compelling argument to change. I don't think Steve Jobs will repeat those mistakes.

It's progress init 2!

A couple of months ago I was made to attend a computer seminar. I try to avoid these things as they are normally snoozefests but in this case my boss ordered me to attend. The theme of this conference was trying to better manage some of the complexity of modern IT. Amongst 6 major themes pushed by the conference one was virtualisation.

In laymans terms virtualisation means replacing many physical servers - currently clogging up your data centres - with a big server and then through the magic of 21st century software hosting lots of virtual servers on the single box.

If only sombody thought of this forty odd years ago we could have saved ourselves a lot of effort. Now what did I put that VM manual again?

When I was a kid ...

When I was a kid I wanted to be a pilot. Of course I ended up in IT, but that's OK because most of the time I quite like the challenge of programming. Most programmers do. My poser to you today is "Who grows up wanting to be a software tester?".

Layer Cake

In my first ever job in IT I worked as an COBOL Analyst/Programmer. In the development section there were precisely 4 roles defined in a simple top down hierarchy. The roles were: Development Manager, Project Manager, Project Leader and Analyst/Programmer. Funnily enough we got stuff done. Lots of stuff done.

If I wanted or needed advice I could seek out my Project Leader - who I knew had started off as an A/P and over the years had accrued a fair amount of technical experience.

Next time you're in an IT Development meeting ask yourself how many of these people around the table have ever cut a line of code in anger. In my experience I'd say you'd be lucky if it was more than one in four.

The BodyShop suffle

Early in my career I remember my first ever experience in dealing with external IT consultant. My bosses boss paid a flat twelve hundred quid daily rate (a lot in 1992) for they guy to fly up to our office sit in meetings for 6 hours and provide some quidance to a specific performance issue that we were having with their software at a client site. The said consultant was experienced, eloquent, convincing and as it turned out dead wrong in his analysis and diagnosis of the problem. Of course our advice was ignored cos it didn't cost 1200 smackers.

So a number of years later when I joined a large professional services company I asked myself whether I thought I was good enough, would clients really pay exhorbitent rates for my advice and counsel. As it turns out the answer was yes and I had a good and successful stint. But at least I asked myself the question.

Over the last 10 years I've dealt with many consultants. I don't think many ask that question anymore.

eXPerience

Like many of you I earn my daily bread whilst sitting infront of a PC running Windows XP. I have nothing against XP per se except that it's 9 years old. Almost a decade in the maelstrom of change that is the IT industry is like a century in other professions. So the question I'm asking is why haven't we upgraded to something more modern. Of course the obvious answer is that until the launch of Windows 7 there were no viable alternatives - Vista - you cannot be serious, Linux - too nerdy, etc.

Which brings me to my point. The last time I worked for a company that upgraded all their desktop OS's (in this case a large retail insurance company with 1000 pc's in head office) from Windows 95 to NT the project burned through 8 PM's, blew out from 6 months to 2.5 years and upset just about every employee from financial controller down in the organisation. The IT Director at the time admitted that the desktop o/s rollout caused more anger, bitterness, frustration and confusion in the business than anything she had ever witnessed in her many years in business.

Volunteers for Windows 7 Desktop Rollout please form an orderly line ...

It progress init!

I currently work for the Department of Hopes and Dreams (not their real name) and like many out there I have to complete a weekly timesheet for project accounting purposes. Whist it's never much fun I recognise that it is a necesary evil.

However my real bugbear here is the timesheet software that we use, let's call it Opacity (again not their real name) which is a commonly used application that has been sold extensively worldwide. Here's the problem.

How many clicks/keystrokes should it take to enter my start time, end times and breaks for 5 days. Have a guess. Maybe 20, 25? Wrong. I counted it this week. It took 73 mouse click and 20 character presses. This raises more questions than answers.

How can anyone write a user interface so bad? How could anyone demo this package and go home and sleep at night? What idiot actually sat through a demo and selected this software?

Answer please on a postcard to ....

Me and my blog

Welcome to the very first post on IT Journeyman. The purpose of this blog is to share stories, anecdotes and observations from the wonderful world of IT - as I see IT. Am I qualified to write this - well I suppose so is the simple answer and more the the point you can't stop me.

About me - I've been active in the world of IT for the last two decades and have had exposure to a wide variety of platforms and systems - everything from mainframe to micro and transactional applications to data warehouses. Among others I've worked for software houses, consultancies, banks, insurers, media and telcos, government and sometime for myself.

So welcome to my blog and enjoy. If any of what I write strikes a chord within you feel free to share with your contacts.