CIO Mind

I found an intriguing article from The Tech Zone via Business Innovation Insider.

I will just quote from the article:

IT people (e.g. analysts and programmers) exhibit a lot of blue collar characteristics, e.g., repetition in types of work performed, they do not dress or act like professionals, and regularly punch in and out of work with little interest in going above and beyond the call of duty. [...] Blue collar workers can perform technical tasks as well as manual tasks, such as those found in manufacturing and assembly; and although they are classified as exempt workers paid a salary, they tend to behave like hourly workers instead. Further, there are plenty of blue collar workers who were just as educated, if not more so, than a lot of the programmers and analysts on their staffs. One executive even went so far as to tell me about a couple of craftsman machinists he had with MBA degrees…

What do you think? How do you feel?

For any manger solving problems is an everyday job. One can apply various methodologies. I propose you a simple approach guaranteed to solve all problems:

Ok. Enough joking. Take a look at this post by Carmine Coyote on the Slow Leadership blog:

If the sh*t was a random event, your job as boss is to reassure, comfort, and display undiminished trust and loyalty. Doing anything else proves the asshole bit.

The attitude under stress will show the real character of people. If you can stand up, take your part of the blame then you are a man of character.

If you can protect your people, if you can take the blame of the organization for them then you will earn the loyalty of your people.

What is you problem solving methodology? Leave a comment to tell us.

I found a little gem on “Project, Process & Business Improvement” blog:

Lesson One
An eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing.
A small rabbit saw the eagle and asked him, “Can I also sit like you and do nothing?”
The eagle answered: “Sure, why not.” So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the eagle and rested.
All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

Management Lesson #1
- To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.

Read the full article here.

There are three types of computer science students: the zombie, the academician and the hacker.

The zombie

He feels early the need for more real life action and go out in the wild for a job. Usually they get a job as junior programmers and starts spiting out forms in VB (or Java or .NET or whatever). With little fundamentals they transform soon into zombie programmers. In the extreme version, the zombie knows nothing about algorithms, about system analysis, about how to learn. They may become stuck with a specific technology or programming language.

Eventually they end up as master programmers writing programs like this one (see the master programmer section).

The academician

He takes great pride on their theoretical knowledge. The academician loves to build cathedrals: huge applications, with mountains of specifications and documentation. Unfortunately, a hundred years later when the cathedral is finished, the city is no longer there. Remember La Sagrada Familia? The cathedral construction started in 1880 in an empty field over a mile away from urban Barcelona. Today it’s not finished and stand in the centre of modern Barcelona.
The same thing happens with huge applications: they are never truly finished, and moreover the business changes condemn them to irrelevance.

The hacker

He never really understands “Waterfall” methodologies. He learns and program using “Extreme” methods. He hates cathedrals and love bazaars. He takes college as an opportunity to learn many new things. If teachers do not provide the hacker learns on its own.

He knows the world is changing every day. First thing he learn is how to learn. He is natural born lazy: always looking for simpler ways to accomplish results (see “Guru Hacker” here). If you have the guts, always hire hackers. They will come with solutions, with prototypes, with code reusability.

Our education system does not provide enough real life connections for those in danger of becoming zombies.

Our education system does not provide enough “extreme” learning for academicians and they become cathedral builders.

Our education system does not provide enough challenges for aspiring hackers and they may fail their career by becoming zombies.

PS: What am I? Just an executive…

PPS: This was inspired by excelent post of Kathy Sierra about education on Creating Passionate Users:

The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning.

The master Tom Peters posts a wonderful article on his blog.

The reality is messy, non-linear and defies most attempts to cram it into a detailed plan. The world today rewards the doers, the ones doing things.

The long-term planners missed each and every one of recent opportunities: from electricity to Web 2.0.

The competition is no longer a parlor dance but a guerilla war. And Marshall Petain said:

Nothing is more dangerous in war than theoreticians.

It’s all about “Think vs. Do”.

PS: Be sure to read also the excellent presentation accompanying the article.

Oracle press release on Oct. 25, 2006:

Today Oracle announced that it would provide the same enterprise class support for Linux as it provides for its database, middleware and applications products. Oracle starts with Red Hat Linux, removes Red Hat trademarks, and then adds Linux bug fixes. […] Oracle is offering its Unbreakable Linux program for substantially less than Red Hat currently charges for its best support

I saw this announcement on two blogs: BusinessWeek Online — Tech Beat and Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type.

It is very interesting to compare first the titles: “Oracle Drops the Bomb on Red Hat” versus “Larry Ellison and the business of social production” and then the comments.

While Steve Hamm is a journalist from title to the last line:

It’s a ruthless and brilliant act of capitalism.

Nicholas Carr plays the analyst card:

It illuminates a much broader and deeper tension in the digital world, a fault line that runs not only through the software industry but through every industry whose products or services exist, or can exist, as software.

Nicholas Carr analyze this from a product industry perspective. Readers of “The Magic Cauldron” of Eric S. Raymond will recognize the mistake: most of the open source related business models are about services not products.

It is not about providing a better mousetrap; it is about learning people how to catch mice.

If RedHat sees it’s core business as providing services then it stand a chance. If not, not!

What do you think? Is RedHat doomed? Is Oracle move an attack to open source philosophy?

Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Make them read this post on the Creating passionate users blog.

“Better Beginnings: how to start a presentation, book, article…” is about presentations, about good presentations. It is not about graphics aids (for this read Presentation Zen) it is about content.

Five advices:

1) Do NOT start at the beginning!
2) Show, Don’t Tell
3) For the love of god, DO NOT start with history!
4) DO NOT start with prereqs
5) MYTH: you must establish credibility up front

I like very much the first advice:

Do NOT start at the beginning! […] Start where the action begins!

The second one is simply wonderful:

If you have to TELL your audience that they should care, you’re screwed. The motivation for why they should care should be an inherent part of the story, scenarios, examples, graphics, etc.

The article has many valuable “IDEAS FOR BEGINNINGS”.

This is a definite must read for every presenter.

Usual staff turnover for white-collar workers is around 3%. In Romania for IT professionals (geeks ) is much higher. I just reviewed figures for my team (120 people): 0,18% for the last 12 months. Not bad, isn’t it?

What makes geeks tick? Are geeks different? Do we need special skills to manage geeks?

I always said that a good people manager can manage any team: geeks or not.

Take a look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (quote from Wikipedia):

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: the four lower levels are grouped together as deficiency needs associated with physiological needs, while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs. While our deficiency needs must be met, our being needs are continually shaping our behavior. The basic concept is that the higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus once all the needs that are lower down in the pyramid are mainly or entirely satisfied. Growth forces create upward movement in the hierarchy, whereas regressive forces push prepotent needs further down the hierarchy.

Read Linus book “Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary“:

There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life – for anything that you or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order.

The higher the abstract level of a job the higher is the importance of the upper level motivational factors. Geeks happen to work at a very abstract level: computers and anything around them are highly abstract.

After basic work needs (reasonable salary and job security) are fulfilled, geeks place an inordinate amount of importance to other factors: environment, colleagues, management style, type of work, and many other factors.

If you work a lot on other factors can obtain significant savings in his payroll budget: within the right environment you can pay below the market and still enjoy very low turnover.

Do you think this is achievable?

Sometimes CIO is the Chief Information Officer or Chief Innovation Officer or even Chief Intelligence Officer.

Not according to Nicholas Carr. In a recent post he announces another step on the road from CIO to CEO (Chief Electricity Officer).

Nicholas blogs about an announcement from Sun: a data center in a container. The data-center-in-a-box is a readymade data center in shipping containers at a starting price of a half million bucks a pop. And Nicholas comments:

In many ways, the containerized data center resembles the standardized electricity-generation system that Thomas Edison sold to factories at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Manufacturers bought a lot of those systems to replace their complex, custom-built hydraulic or steam systems for generating mechanical power. Edison’s off-the-shelf powerplant turned out to be a transitional product – though a very lucrative one. Once the distribution network – the electric grid – had matured, factories abandoned their private generating stations altogether, choosing to get their power for a monthly fee from utilities, the ultimate black boxes.

Something similar will happen – is happening – with computing, but how exactly computing assets end up being divided between companies and utilities remains to be seen. In the meantime, commodity data centers, in various physical and virtual forms, should prove increasingly popular to companies looking to radically simplify their computing infrastructure and reduce the single biggest cost of corporate computing today: labor.

Nicholas seems to wander between hardware, software and information. Modern IT is as much about process as is about information (and much less about hardware). Nobody says that a wide area networks really adds value, but one should not place process modeling and simulation (for example) on the same plateau with operation system installation.

Back in 1960’s having a computer up and running was a great achievement on it’s own. Today It is muuuch more than that.

Depending on your definition of IT, IT may or may not matter to an enterprise. Unfortunately Nicholas still uses a 1960’s definition of IT.

What do YOU think?

Today I was invited on “The Money Channel” at their Sunday “IT&C Show”. The topic: open source.

I had an interesting discussion with two smart gentlemen. I told them about how my company uses various open source solutions and how we selected them. During the discussion two interesting aspects of the open source world came to our attention.

Open source vs. world

As a CIO I was asked countless times: “Do you use open source software?” I don’t see the point of this question. I am not using a development model. I use specific solutions, specific pieces of software, chosen based on their merits.

When I analyze a potential solution it is never “open source versus Microsoft Windows Server” or “open source versus Lotus Notes”. I always compare “Linux versus Windows Server” or “sendmail versus Lotus Notes”. One cannot compare a development model with a specific piece of software.

The Che Guevara selling methodology

There are many “Che Guevara” in open source community. They come waiving flags and preaching about changing the world. They are convinced that only open source revolution can avoid the …. (fill in the blanks with your favorite apocalyptic scenario).

I can only tell them that I don’t want to save the world; I only want a decent solution to my IT problem. Corporations want solutions to their problems. The “suits” usually left world rescue to Mattel super heroes.

Don’t came to corporate speaking like a knight on a white horse. Please come armed with NPV, TCO and ROI weapons!

PS: I am a BIG fan of open source solutions! I am only sad when I saw attitudes that create bad perception about very good solutions.