Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard I have been experiencing problems with the Cisco VPN Client (see workaround http://gamboaworld.com/home/?p=25), but finally I found the time to get it fixed permanently by using Snow Leopard’s very own VPN Network interface. Next are the steps on how to get it done, say goodbye to the ugly workaround and remove the CISCO VPN client permanently.
- Go to System Preferences and open Network
- On the left side you should see Airport, Ethernet and FireWire
- Click the + sign
- select VPN interface
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Pronoun test your team / organization
It is well known how critical in this day and age is to have employees engaged in what they do. But a question that I have heard a lot is:
How do you know if your team or organization is engaged or not ?
In the August issue of Canadian Business Magazine, the Opinion article by Richard Branson mentions how important is to monitor the conversations of the team members and detect whether they use the pronoun “They” or “We”.
By coincidence, I was also reading the “Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” book by Daniel H. Pink, where there is a reference to Robert Reich’s “Pronoun Test” to assess how healthy is an organization. When visiting a company, he applies this test by asking some questions to different employees and based on how often they use the words “They” vs “We”, he gets a clear indication on how healthy the organization is.
The rational is simple. Employees that are engaged and feel part of the purpose of the company perform better and do more than those that are not engaged. Engaged people make reference to “We”, as they feel part of what’s going on; while not engaged people tend to make references to “They” accentuating the fact that they are not engaged.
So, since many companies are in mid-year reviews, pay extra attention at the pronouns used by your team and perhaps you will get a better sense of how healthy is your team.
Give it a try in some conversations next week and see what you find, it may surprise you.
For the last few months Facebook has been the spotlight of privacy. Anything that FB users post can be shared permanently and if the security settings are not adjusted properly the postings are vulnerable to search engines.
Ann Handley (@marketingprofs) posted a great article in OPEN Forum related about Social Media remorse stating that: “54% of users under 25 years old have posted something they regretted while only 27% of users over age 25 years old have posted something online they regretted”.
In addition, she mentions some of the urban legends that have been created around poor judgement of online postings as well as some advise on how to stay out of trouble.
read more…
Is your IS Organization designed for success ?
I have been involved in many different IS organizations for over 15 years, and there are always trends and theories that do add a lot of value such as ITIL v3 or improving an organizations CMMI level. But what about the organization structure, is it really defined to maximize business value and leverage technology ?
Setting the Stage
Let’s position ourselves as the VP running an IS area in a large corporation where IS is not the core function of the company.
The IS area services multiple business units, has resources in multiple locations
Mission Statement
“To add value and enable the business to execute their strategies through the effective use of Technology.”
The Question
Is your IS Organization aligned to deliver as per the mission statement ?
Mission Statement Analysis
To answer this question, let’s first analyze the mission statement and divide it into two segments:
1) “To add value and enable the business to execute their strategies…”
This can be interpreted in such a way that the business and the execution of its strategies are the reason for the IS organization to exist. Which makes sense; after all, if there is no business, then there is no IS area.
Taking this concept to the next level, the key role in the IS Organization is the one that liaisons the business with the IS organization, the Customer Relationship Manager.
2) “…through the effective use of Technology.”
If the first part of the mission statement gives the IS organization a reason to exist, this second part of the mission statement gives the IS Organization its function; to effectively use technology in support of adding value and enabling the business to execute its strategies.
At this level is where we can use all the traditional and common IS goodies, such as ITIL v3, Project Management Office, SDLC, Architecture Groups, etc. It is the What needs to happen, the How to make it happen and the Execution and Control to make things happen.
The Approach
In order to truly align an IS Organization to deliver and support such a mission statement, the organization needs to be defined and built around the Customer Relationship Manager (CRM).
In future blogs I will describe a CRM-centric organization and how it is well positioned to deliver as per the mission statement.
Recently Las Vegas hosted the Garner Business Intelligence Summit 2010; although I was unable to attend, a lot of interesting things have come out of there, where Gartner presented the 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms
Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI
Next is a high level view of the offerings from IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, SAS, MicroStrategy and Information Builders
Excel can be categorized as one of those applications that people either love or hate. From the users’ perspective, it is a love affair, as it enables them to analyze data with no involvement from systems people.
On the other hand, IT people dislike Excel when it is used for production activities. In other words, relying on Excel for critical analytics or having to run Excel in a server as part of complex batch processes.
For years I’ve seen and actually have been part of the battle to free production environments from Excel spreadsheets, but like a zombie in a bad horror movie, just when you thing you are done, it comes back and it is there again; spreading like wildfire among users, and every now and then in a production server.
I have to be fair that Excel does some pretty good things and nobody can deny its importance as a Business Intelligence tool, and now Thanks go Cloudcel, Excel can harness the power of the cloud with the potential of making Excel a force to be reckon with, as it can analyze and filter real-time data.
Coudcel seems to be on to something as their purpose as they puts it in their website is: “… to bring the full power of advanced data mining and analytics, realtime stream processing, and massively parallel computing to everyone”.
This has the potential to be a disruptive technology that reshapes the BI landscape, and definitely something to keep an eye on.
First, to understand the differences, let’s look at how these are defined in wikipedia:
Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like a public utility.
Grid computing is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains for a common goal.
The closest definition to virtualization in Wikipedia is that of Virtual private server (VPS, also referred to as Virtual Dedicated Server or VDS) as a method of splitting a server. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted.
Second, from those definitions and personal experience, I define each term as following:
Cloud Computing is a set of shared resources (hardware, software etc.) that provide services on-demand.
Examples of this are salesforce.com, workplace.com, gmail, google apps, yahoo email and most SaaS applications. Note how in many of these services, the users getting the services don’t know anything about the infrastructure running behind the scenes.
Grid Computing is putting together a group of computer resources to work together on a common goal or set of tasks. It is the evolution of distributed computing.
An example can be seen in highly computing intensive applications that require tremendous amounts of computing power (dozens or even hundreds of cores), such as the hedging environments in Financial Institutions to run complex mathematical models.
Virtualization is the creation of servers that host other servers. For example, if you had a physical 48-core wintel server, you can use virtualization to create and host multiple ‘virtual servers’ on one single physical server.
The best example is server consolidation and the industry leader is VMWare.
Conclusion
Cloud computing utilizes techniques such as Grid Computing and Virtualization to provide services on-demand.
I am a firm believer that managing people is a two way road. It is more than just leading a team to deliver results and add value to the company, managers also service the employees they manage.
Melissa Raffoni from HBR recently posted a blog about “Eight Things Your Employees Want From You” . Based on her blog, I came up with my list of 10 things employees look for in managers:
- Set expectations. Strong managers clarify roles, responsibilities, goals and set the direction and rules of the game. They clarify the scope and boundaries and answer questions such as “Do I work for you or for the company? and how will it impact my performance if I do things that benefit the company but not necessarily support your personal goals?”
- Motivate through passion. Great leaders let their actions show the excitement of working in a company; their passion makes people excited and make people excited about their jobs, projects, deadlines.
- Be transparent. Few things make such a high impact as being transparent. From the way decisions are made that impact employees and projects, to the way compensation and performance appraisals are done. This is especially important with GenX and GenY employees.
- Impress me. This is one of those skills that differentiate managers from leaders. Leaders impress employees through their courage, leadership, actions and beliefs; and they show it with their actions. Respect from employees is not granted by the title, it is earned.
- Give me challenges and autonomy. Keep the job interesting and give employees the opportunity to face new challenges accompanied with the autonomy to decide how best to tackle them.
- Put me in a position to be successful. Manage the projects and goals of employees; so that each of them has a true opportunity to exceed expectations. Some will and some won’t, but all need to have a shot at it.
- Give employees an opportunity. It is well known that a key moment in the lives of people that have climbed up the corporate ladder was the day a manager believed in them and gave them an opportunity.
- Promote my brand. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. For some people it is not a job, it is a career. Doing things for the sake of doing things is not enough, and they need to know they are going somewhere and there is a reason to do things in the long haul. In addition, great leaders ensure that as they move or leave, their employees are well taken care of and management is aware of the value each of them brings to the table.
- Don’t complain. Managers that complain to their employees or communicate negatively just reduce employee morale and performance. Managers are responsible for providing a positive environment that enables employees to unlock their potential.
- Remove roadblocks. Leaders don’t have to know all the answers, but ask great questions that facilitate finding the correct answers. When employees face roadblocks or problems, leaders provide direction on how to overcome them and continue moving.
Is there any other key characteristic that a manager should have from an employee point of view?
How often do you run into managers that exhibit most of what is covered in this list?
Information Agenda
In recent years IBM has assigned considerable resources to its Smarter World initiative. At the core of this initiative is what IBM calls “Information Agenda”.
Information Agenda as defined by IBM is “an approach for transforming information into a trusted strategic asset that can be rapidly leveraged across applications, processes and decisions for sustained competitive advantage”.
What is interesting is the framework and theory that IBM has put behind Information Agenda to support it, and how it puts the Business in the driver seat making IT an enabler rather than driver. To do this, IBM has defined the following categories that make Information Agenda happen:
- Strategy – Establish an information-driven strategy & objectives to enable business priorities
- Define & Govern – Discover & design trusted information
- Road Maps – Accelerate information-intensive projects aligned with the strategy
- Information Infrastructure – Deploy open and agile technology and leverage existing information assets for speed and flexibility
The key factor and biggest challenge is the Governance and the Information Definition. Understanding and defining the information that is to become a strategic asset is no easy feat, and required collaboration from multiple business areas and records management. Next are some of the questions IBM puts on the table:
- What information do you have?
- Where is its level of accuracy?
- How is it used?
- What is the actual value of this information?
- What information do you keep and for how long?
- When do you retire that information?
It is no surprise that these questions sound logical and at a certain degree familiar; after all, what they do is define the strategic asset lifecycle.
On the other hand, at the governance level, the top-down approach is mandatory as business processes and even the culture will change at a certain degree. This makes setting up a governance model the number one priority in setting up an information agenda.
Next is a link to IBM’s Information Agenda
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/information-agenda/leverage-information.html
What would be interesting is finding out the equivalent propositions from Microsoft, Oracle and perhaps SAP; as well as the big consulting firms as this is more of a business process improvement / data Analysis and optimization initiative.
In conclusion, the CIO is in the job of moving information and being the custodian of information across the enterprise. And when a CEO asks his CIO what have you done for me lately, wouldn’t it be nice to answer “…transforming your information into strategic assets that give your company a competitive advantage…”.
Not bad eh!
Is SaaS right for your Organization?
Is SaaS right for your organization ?
Recently I was reading a blog by Yoon-Sung Lee entitled “Uncovering the True Impact of SaaS“. In his blog he recommends organizations to take the following steps in addition to evaluating the benefits of a SaaS solution:
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Investigate costs.
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Pursue a pilot.
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Communicate to your users.
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Consider a phased rollout.
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Don’t forget about the IT staff.
Although I agree with his approach, there are two significant areas that can make or break the attractiveness of a SaaS application from IT perspective:
1. Do an Information Risk Assessment.
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This exercise will help determine the level of security required as well as the risks related to the SaaS application
2. Assess the effort required to integrate your existing systems with the SaaS application.
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Will you require single sign on or will the SaaS application have its own security mechanism, and in case of the latter, it is important to define how to manage an accurate list of active users
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Depending on the SaaS application, it may be require to either push or pull data from it in order to share it with other applications. There needs to be a preferred approach defined to guide how this integration will be handled. For example, is it going to be allowed to have two vendors exchange information between them, or perhaps it is preferred to have an in-house application that acts as an ETL to bridge the data flow between two or more vendor applications.
3. It is all about the Process, the Business Process that is.
- One of the key features of SaaS is that they are configurable, but can’t be customized. This means that for the most cases the business users will have to change their procedures in order to leverage the real potential of a SaaS application,
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Some of the major players in the SaaS space offer best in class applications that implement best practices; so it makes sense to stay as close as possible to their functionality.
4. Service Level Agreements.
It is relatively easy to get an SaaS application up and running for your organization, but some items require extra attention, such as the following
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Change management
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Performance metrics
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License fees and price changes
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Exit strategy