IT Outsider

Welcome to the perils of popularity, Steve.

2008-07-11T18:32:00.000-07:00

I can't help but smile as I read a number of posts about the growing iPhone/iTunes mess, because I don't really care about the iPhone. My wife informed me that there were at least 100 people lined up outside the local Apple Store when she went mall walking today and there was a smaller crowd outside an AT&T Wireless store I passed on the way to the office. Personally I still haven't bought into the Apply mystique and until their software runs on hardware from multiple vendors as cleanly as it does on proprietary hardware I think their commercials and fans are a little idiotic. I'm toting around a new BlackJack II and I'm very happy with it, a touchscreen would be nice, but then I'd fingerprint the heck out of it; I don't surf the web on it except to occasionally check e-mail or to check the NWS radar. I don't need to be plugged in 24/7 and I can get wireless at Panera or McDonalds for goodness sake on a screen that doesn't give me a migraine! Enjoy your weekend Mac-nuts, and I feel for all the worker bees at Apple trying to sort it all out.

SMB and IT

2008-07-11T17:57:00.000-07:00

Vlad Mazek has a pretty interesting post on his blog about the direction of his company, OwnWebNow; Vlad and his company are top-notch, but probably not someone you've heard about unless you travel in the SBS communities. He is also one of the most generous and intelligent folks in the IT industry and does a ton of good stuff on his blog. I know quite a few people in small and medium business and his hosted infrastructure model is a homerun for what many of them need. He cites Sharepoint as one of his biggest hits this year and being a fan of Sharepoint I still wonder if Microsoft every thought it would be as big as it has gotten.

Where did this white collar come from?!?

2008-07-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was taking a long walk with my wife and something I said made her turn to me and ask "since when did you become white collar?" You have to understand that I was raised partially on the family farm around the most salt-of-the-earth, hard-working, blue collar people in the world; and both my dad and stepfather were trademen and shade-tree mechanics with calloused hands and fantastic work ethics. Don't misunderstand me, from my uncles, my dad and my stepdad I got that same work ethic, a generous nature and a practical view of the world; but at some point a took a turn onto a totally different road.

I dropped out of college to start a family, I had wanted to be an engineer but at some point I realized that it was mostly about sitting behind a desk and doing math (I still haven't figured out a practical use for all that calculus!). I got a job in a factory at a very minimum wage and started getting my hands very, very dirty; but even though I started out doing the dirty work, eventually I was given a production department to run, then a shipping department (vendor management 101) and finally they stuck me with the computers. Even my humble beginning in IT, pulling Cat5, managing a small network and building reports and databases for everything under the sun, meant getting dirty and sweating alot. You'd find me hanging out with the machine operators and floor supervisors that I'd worked with for years, laughing about our maintenance department or the crazy company that bought us out. I still considered myself a regular Joe and viewed most white collar workers with a certain sense of superiority; those twelve years of my life were very good ones, although the pay stunk.

Then I took a big leap and went from jeans and steel-toe shoes to khaki pants and collared shirts working for an Internet bank's mortgage division; I had to clean up my language and shave everyday, and I had to communicate with a much more educated user community. My Access, Excel, Monarch and Crystal experience made me a very effective reporting analyst and my God-given talent with computers made me very popular in a company with a very unresponsive IT department. Eventually I got the chance to become a systems administrator on the company's servicing platform, which turned out to be a great new challenge even though all those reports I built followed me. I had the extreme privilege of working with a veteran manager who had started as a secretary in the mortgage industry and worked her way up; and who worked very hard to dump all of her knowledge into my head (and I still call her regularly for a second opinion).

Providence smiled on me again as the bank began to become one of the early victims of the housing crisis, I was looking to move back to my home state and the state housing authority just happened to need a systems administrator with my skills. It's rare that I get my hands dirty any more, but I feel like the work is more tiring than it ever was working in a 100+ degree factory where I used to sweat my keyboards into early retirement. But I still find myself chafing at my white collar, and I think of the song that says "a better class of losers suits me fine"; but I've also met a lot of great people along the way and every day is a new challenge. But I bet some of my co-workers and more than a few of the managers in IT get a little nervous when the rompin', stompin' good ole' boy gets tired of the bureaucracy and politics and speaks his mind.

Of Projects, Programs and Initiatives

2008-07-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

When I talked about the business's love/hate relationship with IT, one of the items was never-ending projects. But yesterday I was talking to one of my key business manager customers and her take on that was that it was executive management, not IT; when executive management grabs on to every "neat" idea or "trendy" direction and leaves last year's initiatives to whither and die, nothing does get finished. This is where I think good project management, kept in check, is a very good thing, unfortunately the PMO needs executive backing to keep things under control. I guess all that project management, program management stuff that I hear about constantly is more than the bureaucracy that those of us in the trenches think it is...

Head in the Cloud

2008-07-06T19:46:00.000-07:00

Up to now I had largely dismissed the whole Web 2.0/Cloud Computing thing and I still believe a large percentage of it is vendor/IT journalist hype. However, I took a big step away from Microsoft Office today and embraced iGoogle, Google Apps, etc. As previously mentioned, I'm testing out Remember the Milk for my GTD lists, I use Google Calendar to share my calendar with my wife and Gmail has been my home e-mail for year; but I've only dabbled in Google Docs and Google Reader. I've been a Newsgator user for a long time and I proudly remember Office 95 (although I was first introduced to computers on WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, on DOS!), but syncing things between work and home and in between has always been an issue.
The Google Gadgets on iGoogle sold me once I found one for Remember the Milk and a good NWS radar Gadget (we're about to get hammered with thunderstorms), I even set my wife up with her own that included her daily comic strips. Having my Google Reader feeds in my face was just a bonus and I'm trying out Google Notebook. Hopefully this will unburden my thumbdrive a bit and let me push my Blackjack II a little further.

Love IT or Hate IT

2008-07-06T19:08:00.000-07:00

Last month I saw this article by Susan Cramm on BusinessWeek's website about "8 Things We Hate About IT" and the scary thing was I think it was written about the shop I work in! Althouth my experience is that Number 2 is more often excellent technology knowledge with a total lack of understanding of the business. Number 7, IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks, was a revelation to me since I consider myself an uber-geek and often wonder what is the deal with my co-workers. I would also add Number 7a, IT Geeks are one trick ponies, maybe it's asking too much, but too many geeks have one area of expertise and are incapable of thinking outside that box. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect an ETL guru to be able to help me with an RJE connectivity issue (yes, we still have RJE); but I do expect him or her to be able to troubleshoot how an ETL job relates to other data in a database.

In fairness, Susan posted a follow-up article, "8 Reasons You Should Love IT" that addressed each of the items, but it sounded like a very arrogant CIO wrote the "rebuttals". Why did I think that? All the buzzwords were there:

governance
IT-enabled investments
stakeholder value

Then there's the general tone:

"Tackles difficult projects and figures out how to (ultimately) deliver (most of them) without adequate resources and involvement from the other parts of the business. "
"Provides OTJ training to an ungrateful user community even though much of this tedious work could be eliminated if they mastered the basics of the systems that support their business. "
"Works long hours supporting old technologies that the company can't afford to upgrade."

The problem is that our customers are more than aware of this arrogance and no matter how much governance we provide or stakeholder value we create; we're a cost center and generally not a revenue generator and we exist to serve those pesky users. I'll get off my soapbox now, I've been reading too much Vlad....

Trying to Get Things Done, aka GTD redux

2008-07-06T19:02:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been "playing" with GTD and other time management "systems" for the last year or two; David Allen's "Getting Things Done" is by far the most comprehensive system, although I also enjoyed Thomas Limoncelli's "Time Management for System Administrators" and got some good ideas out of it. The hard part is the tools, PDA or Dayrunner or Web, although now that I'm doing a full reimplementation of GTD I'm finding that one tool just won't cover it all; David Allen says as many buckets as you need and as few as you can get away with.
I started out with Outlook, my Blackjack II Windows Mobile device and an old Dayrunner with only task sheets and a blank pad. I also have a a physical inbox and tickler file at work, an inbox at home and reference filing systems both places. I started my lists in Excel, with tabs for each context (@work, @home, @errands, etc.) but I had used Remember the Milk previously and today I moved the items from Excel into that site. My primary reason was that you can have one master list and use the tags to break it out into separate views by context. Time will tell, but I look at my boss, my coworkers and the folks I support and at least I know I'm lightyears ahead of them.

Getting Things Done

2007-08-30T19:09:00.001-07:00

As a system administrator, there are always way more tasks than time and priorities change hourly if I'm lucky. At some point a fellow techie recommended David Allen's "Getting Things Done" and initially I didn't recognize the value of the book. Earlier this year I re-read the book, then I bought it on Audible and listened to it again, then I read it again; slowly David Allen has taken over my brain. In fits and starts I tried to implement his ideas and now I really feel like I'm getting the hang of it.

It's all about the tools, as a geek I wanted a fully electronic, preferrably web-based system for implementing GTD. However experience has driven me to a more blended approach using Outlook and a set of tickler folders for the paper; plus a few web tools like Zoho Notebook. But the sense of control you get from GTD is worth every second spend on implementation and now I'm becoming an organization snob with others. Of course I have to temper my critcism because I've misplaced one of my tickler folders in transit and misfiled several in haste, created a few moments of panic.

If you look at Getting Things Done, here's a few tips from my experience:
-Buy the labeler, it's really worth it. In fact my wife and kids keep stealing mine so we may have to invest in a second one.
-Take the time to do the initial collection "blitz", I've found things I missed and had to attack those areas piecemeal and wasted a bit of time doing it.
-Don't be afraid to change your system, I went from 100% Outlook, to a spreadsheet, to a Outlook/paper hybrid and I'm sure I'll change again.
-Read the book, listen to the book, re-read the book, seek out GTD articles on the web. Lots of different types of people are using GTD and there are tons of folks blogging on it as well. Start with 43Folders.com.

Projects, programs and PMO's

2007-08-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

As a humble IT staffer and amateur project manager (I openly admit that all my skills are by the seat of my pants), Enterprise Project Management (or Program Management these days) is a dirty word. We have a brand-spanking new Project Management Office (PMO, put it in your glossary) and so far it's been nothing but a headache for the rank and file. I've worked in organizations with PMO's before and my general experience is that it creates an ivory tower of project managers (PM's) that only work on "important" (read high profile) projects. Our new PMO has both PM's and Business Analysts(BA's) taken from ITS, all under a new assistant director (don't get me started on manager to associate ratios) who was a consultant advising us on project management lifecycles (another dirty word).

The first thing that happened upon the formation of the PMO was that the PM that specialized in the business area that I support came to me and bailed on my project. A major vendor has been upgrading our LoB app from mainframe green screens to a nice web app, we've gotten two major modules in two years and are gearing up for number three. Each release requires quality assurance testing, user acceptance testing and general project management of communication and issues. The new assistant director decided that this project was undeserving of a PM and that I could run it fine on my own. Never mind that I'm already at task overload with other projects and my normal duties, I needed one more thing to get me to jump off the parking garage.

The icing on the cake was in a staff meeting we lowly IT pions (we work directly with the business, so therefore we're pariahs) would have to strengthen our business analysis skills because the BA's of the PMO (alphabet soup, anyone?) were too busy. I don't mind new skills, unfortunately I'm already learning a whole new business application that was dumped on my plate and trying to bring it from the brink of neglect to the point where the server does require a daily restart.

Needless to say, I'm in love with the whole Enterprise Project Management concept, since it looks great on paper and centralizes resources as far away from where they're needed as possible. I personally believe that IBM, HP and all the other IT consulting heavyweights have a conference each year and come up with the "next big thing". Be it ITIL, SOA, or Web 2.0, I think it's all a conspiracy to drive the IT rank and file insane so we can be more easily offshored. Personally I believe in ITIL, I just haven't seen anyone implement it any further than lip service and mountains of procedures that are ignored.

Program management is a whole other post.

IT Outsider

2007-08-29T18:35:00.000-07:00

Just a quick comment on the name of the blog. I've been in Information Technology for quite a while now, and my wife will attest that I'm 100% geek; however, I've never really identified with the whole IT mindset, I'm more of a business guy and I often see things from a business point of view. I don't believe technology can fix every business problem, usually a good swift kick in the pants works better. I do believe that technology can often improve business processes, but you have to understand the business before you can improve the process; otherwise you're headed for failure.

I work in a mid-sized company, we are far from cutting-edge, but we do some things well and some things horribly. I'm far from perfect, but I consider myself ahead of the IT crowd because my business users tell me so; even after I drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I see behaviors in both business and IT circles every day that most people recognize as stupid, but often won't take on; I'm not one for letting stupid decisions slide and anyone will tell you I'm not shy with my opinions. So I started this blog in the hopes of sharing some of what I learn day to day, and some of what I screw up so others can avoid it.