Making IT Happen

We are seeing examples where software companies are looking to shift from processer to core based licensing, and to apply this retrospectively so that existing processor licences become new core licences. We've fended this off so far by referring back to small print that refers to physical processors (for once, the small print has been on our side!) Anyone else seeing this?

I'm a big fan of ITIL and PRINCE - we use 'lite' versions of each to run our IT services and IT projects. Truly the OGC are the unsung heroes of global standards.

One thing occurred to me the other day. Why does PRINCE cover all project types, whilst ITIL only covers IT services? Could ITIL be extended to become SIL (service infrastructure library), and so extend this wonderful example of common sense across all types of services?

We achieve excellent availability of our systems, and whenever we do have an outage the first question is 'what's changed?' Most of the time, we then find the outage was caused by one of two things. First, our ITIL based change management process wasn't followed, or second, and more subtly, it was, but the final tests that were defined and applied didn't pick up the issue that caused the outage. So how do we ensure we define better final tests of changes to production systems? By no means exhaustive, but here's a rough checklist for defining tests to ensure changes have worked:
1 - chances are the change will work - it's what else it breaks in the process you need to worry about.
2 - don't second guess the people that use the system - work with them to define and agree the tests.
3 - the test should be very clear on timing of the tests relative to when the change is done. Don't change in the evening and then test at 7.45 the next morning if your call centre opens up at 8.00am...
4 - try to use separate people to define the test, apply the change and test it. There's a slight conflict of interest. End users are a useful source of testers.
5 - assume the change will fail the test, and have a plan for extricating yourself from the fine mess you have now created.
6 - make sure you've got people lined up to fix the problem or apply the escape plan. There's nothing worse than knowing it's gone wrong but not being able to get hold of the best person to fix it.

VMWare is now valued at $19Bn following its IPO last week. An amazing investment by EMC, who bought it for $635M in 2004.

We use the product extensively for our test and business continuity environments and are increasingly looking to use it to support production environments. As a solution it almost creates a perfect storm of benefits - quicker and easier to manage environments, much better value from server and hosting spend, reduced environmental impact. If you don't use it yet then certainly worth a look.

A superb story from San Fransciso (well used to legal oddities following the twinkie defence). Essentially a network manager for the city had refused to hand over admin passwords for the city's routers and configured them all to wipe themselves if they are reset.

He's now in jail but the possibility exists that he still has other means of access to the network and the city are spending c$1m to try to secure the network. (Doubtless they are using Cisco, who probably never paid for stealing their name)

Truly network managers and DBA's are the most powerful people on the planet.

We're currently trialling HSPA as part of the iPass mobile office service. Other elements of the service, including a nice little pc client that manages all your connection options, are good. HSPA access is a long way behind GPRS in terms of coverage, and makes the solution very unreliable if you are on the move. I'm told that it will switch to GPRS if 3G not available but my own experience is that it doesn't. It does work well if you are in one place and have reasonable coverage, and there is great WiFi coverage under their pre-paid all-you-can-eat agreement.

Analysts such as Analysys Mason are forecating a huge uptake in HSPA over the next few years - from 70 million in 2008 to 2.1 billion in 2015.

My test of a truly smartphone is 'could you go on a three day business trip and just take it, not your laptop?'

The launch of a T-Mobile phone with Google's Android mobile operating system is a key stage in the development of the corporate market for 'smartphones'. Whilst some corporates have used mobile devices for specialist applications they have not had a huge impact of general corporate applications - except of course e-mail, calendar, contacts and other MS Outlook type functions.

Having another big player in the market can only help the process of making smartphones a more credible replacement for laptops for people on the move.

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.

An article in today's FT reports the unsurprising conclusion of some recent TechMarketView research - that corporate IT spending has fallen this year.

What I found more surprising was the finding that "80-90% of annual IT expenditure is devoted to maintenance and minor upgrades of systems installed in the last four years". I'd estimate that for us about 60-70% of spend is to "keep the lights on", and 30-40% is on new projects that add new value. I'd be worried if I thought it was only 10-20% (in fact I'd sooner it was 50%).

Gmail's outage yesterday was reported by the FT as raising questions about cloud computing. We had a very frustrating issue a couple of weeks ago with our hosted e-mail filtering service.

It seems to come down to poor change management (in this case to do with active filtering but the details hardly matter). End result was that important e-mails started bouncing.

What really struck me was the helplessness. For services we run ourselves, we can quickly look at and identify issues, not go through some painful process of trying to convince someone else the fault lies with them. As usual my excellent team dropped everything as the problem manifested itself (at 7pm on a Saturday) but there was no way we could hope for that level of response from our supplier.

More fundamentally, we spend a lot of time and effort drilling into our own team that EVERY CHANGE goes through the change committee and is carefully considered, whereas a cloud supplier can do anything without you even knowing.

Main points for me? 1 - I'm becoming increasingly wary of software-as-a-service - how can you get true accountability? Do I think that the individual made this unauthorised (by us at least) change has had the error of his or her ways creafully pointed out? Have they learned from it? 2 - I want want some money back - I'll let you know how I get on.  

We've just been through a big exercise to consolidate the number of agencies we use (from around 10 to 2 preferred suppliers) and renegotiate margins.

Don't want to discuss exact margins, but we were targetting nearer to 10% than 15%, and had a successful outcome to the process.