Making IT Happen

An amusing article on The Register Channel site - the site is required reading for the thinking reseller. "Now might be a good time for CIO Magazine to stop bugging chief information officers and IT managers about their IT spending plans. Its surveys are killing us."

Good article in todays FT about companies that give people an allowance to buy their own laptop rather than being given a corporate standard laptop. I think this is inevitable for some (often younger?) users - but I do think that others will still prefer to be given one by their company.

By the way, the technology company promoting the idea for their own employees? You guessed it - Citrix.

Much reaction to Steve Jobs saying "There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk." Most of the news sites interpret this as Jobs saying that sub $500 computers are junk, but that's not the way I read it - he's just saying it's not his sector.

I think netbooks will grow and grow - RM are shifting huge volumes of their RM Asus miniBook in the schools market, and it's clearly not junk.

This is why Microsoft's announcement of Windows Azure is so interesting. They seem to have half thrown in the towel by accepting that more and more software can be cloud based - but that there will still be a need for client software and (my implication, not theirs) powerful PC's.

My view?

Corporate users need to be able to use MS applications - Outlook, Word and Excel - on the move. Netbooks aren't beefy enough to support these - we have users with 2GB mailboxes, and those who use 20MB spreadsheets.

If connectivity was good enough this wouldn't matter - they could just run their MS applications on the server and access them from a netbook. (almost all the rest of our corporate applications are server based) But it isn't. We've been running 3G cards for 6 months now and they are flaky unless you stay in one place with good connectivity - it's a bit like using a mobile phone in 1992.

Better connectvity will drive smaller form factor devices like netbooks, and support the shift of applications to the cloud, but it will take 3 to 5 years for these trends to fully materialise.

It's Ron Bonig's golden rules, which are below. But first, some background.

On the one hand I hate trite statements of 'values' but on the other hand, when something goes wrong in our IT team it is usually because someone has broken one of the 'rules' - or didn't know the 'rule' in the first place. About two years ago I tried to write them down as I was fed up with the same mistakes getting made over and over again.

This led to a howl of protest from some of my colleagues, who felt that this was imposing a culture. Others thought it was a good idea - a baseline of expected behaviours. The whole thing imploded into a sort of hippies v control freaks debate. I decided the whole thing was too divisive and quietly let it drop.

Two years on. And the same mistakes still get made. And I'm still not happy that the culture is right. Time to dust this off.

When I looked at this two years ago I found an excellent article in CIO magazine - in particular a list by Ron Bonig of George Washington University. "As long as you operate in these parameters, you will get your job done," he says. "We can correct any honest mistake." I completely agree.

Ron Bonig's Golden Rules

Rule 1 Production is job number one.

Rule 2 The first part of job number one is to "protect the data." Backups are sacred. Even scheduled production can be interrupted to get a clean backup.

Rule 3 Nothing I say regarding deadlines, projects or special initiatives should ever be construed as permission to deviate from Rule 1 and Rule 2.

Rule 4 Standards and procedures are your safety net. If you follow them, you can be virtually guaranteed that no mistake you make will cause a disaster (the procedures include peer review, testing and validation).

Rule 5 If you don't document it, it didn't happen. Keep it online and in several places. If you write it down on paper, it's obsolete before the ink is dry! (Especially for documentation, configurations.)

Rule 6 The most important part of the plan is the back-out strategy. If it all turns to "soup," you can get back to a steady state if you have planned it.

Rule 7 There is no such thing as an inconsequential change.

Rule 8 Never say no to a user--just put a price tag on the yes.

Rule 9 Nobody is indispensable...but all the systems administrators are forbidden to cross the street at the same time.

Rule 10 To borrow from Mark Twain: "Put all your eggs in one basket, then guard that basket!"

Rule 11 And to also paraphrase von Clausewitz: "No plan survives intact the first contact with the users."

Rule 12 You can put the square peg into the round hole, but you have to use a big hammer. It is easier to recruit and hire for the skills you want in the first place.

Rule 13 It's only money. If it is critical, we'll have a bake sale.

I've only got two to add to this list:

1 - If you agree to do something by a given date either do it by then or tell whoever you didn't get it done.

2 - The Rule of 20's for projects - mentioned in a recent post

I'd noticed in the past few weeks that the volume of unsolicited e-mails in my inbox from contractor recruitment agencies had doubled. Checking my junk e-mails folder reveals a similar increase from previous, now junked, senders. So this afternoon's Computer Weekly story about reduced contractor vacancies doesn't surprise me, other than that it's only 11% down.

It does have a good link to an IT Professionals Survival Guide that is both amusing and accurate - I particularly like the video it links to.

I have been reviewing two projects lately - one that is going well and one that is going badly, and I was reminded of my rule of 20's for successful 'IT' projects - a succesful project delivers 80% of the requirements, is no more than 20% late and no more than 20% over budget.

Of the various aphorisms I have wheeled out over the years at Executive Committee this is the only one that has been repeated back to me by other directors - and in a positive way. My conclusion - close isn't always good enough, but it is sometimes, and it's always better than a complete miss.

The Register are running pics today of what's supposed to be RIM's first touchscreen model. I like the look of the rotating 'keyboard'. RIM won't confirm the story.