Midwest IT Survival

Are Corporate IT Patents the on the Rise?

Many times in the course of a corporate IT project, new and innovative technical solutions to challenging problems are developed. Many of these solutions are related to the hoops one has to jump through to get company specific legacy systems and legacy decisions to integrate with new technical products or capabilities. Thus, are these solutions truly innovative? No, most are not if they are viewed in the context of “from outside the company”. “Inside the company”, they could be a miracle of cross-team, cross-department partnering and vendor product limitation mash-ups. “Outside the company” observers would be wondering why such a convoluted approach was needed for a seemingly simple interoperability challenge. Yet, every once in a while, a technical approach to solve a problem that isn’t truly unique to that company occurs.

Geez, IT is so mature these days one has to wonder why there aren’t fifteen vendors clamoring to demonstrate how they can solve these problems with their products. The vendor landscape either hasn’t recognized that their customer base has a problem they can sell a solution for or the problem is created by vendor solutions that provide a core capability but don’t go the last ten feet to cross the finish-line of a fully mature feature set. With all this being said, the question that seems to be coming up more and more is:

Is that innovative corporate IT technical solution worth getting patented?

My first thought that always comes to my mind in these discussions is:

Why is it worth it to patent something corporate IT-ish when the business’s core competency isn’t delivering IT products and services?

It is easy to understand why, say, Apple, Google and other tech companies are rushing to patent new and innovative techniques such as in the mobile device functionality space. The monetary compensation surrounding having to pay a competitor licensing fees means you win, revenue-wise, when your competitor sells a large number of devices. Imagine if you were the patent holder of something used in the Apple iPad 2. If you licensed that invention to Apple for a mere one cent per device, in the fourth quarter of 2011 alone, you would net $154,000.

Thus, it seems that corporate IT does not get to generate direct revenue through patenting solutions. So why do so? The strategy here appears to be one of investing in a solid defense as opposed to an aggressive offense. That defense appears to be at least two fold.

Vendor Leverage Reduction

Vendor products are so pervasive in corporate IT it is next to impossible to avoid the sometimes painful contract negotiations. I’ve written quite a bit about the corporate IT management/vendor relationship in the past in a series starting here. If a vendor becomes aware you are using your own approach to a solution they have patented, the company can lose significant leverage in the contract negotiations as the raw legal sparing can trump the best sales/customer relationship. These negotiations can turn even worse if the company is trying to switch to a competing vendor.

Non-IT Company Product Battles with Competitors\

More similar to the classic tech company patent wars such as between Apple and Google/Motorola, non-IT based companies have similar legal battles over non-technology product patent infringements. In addition to holding the non-IT patent, having an additional IT-centric patent that complements the original product patent infringement helps strengthen the case of that patent holder. Thus, not a clear cut win for the patent holder, but clearly a legal strategy to make the claimant have to invest in an even larger, more expensive and time consuming case.

So, can everyone expect a rush to apply for patents for innovative corporate IT solutions in non-IT centric companies? I wouldn’t say rush, but as technology become an ever more important and strategic component of traditionally non-IT centric companies, look for a steady increase in patent applications as part of a holistic business strategy to be in a strong position to go head to head with a competitor in a patent infringement suit.

Hooked on my PlayBook

As I was skimming through my regular list of blogs in my news reader I came across an article by Brian Hopkins of Forrester entitled “Are Your Employees Doing This?” where Brian describes his coffee shop interactions with a young woman. The young woman was using a 5×7 tablet and a smartphone feverishly. Feel free to read Brian’s article for the full details of the exchange, but what struck me is how quickly I identified with the notion that as tablet computing improves, the need for traditional laptops loaded with productivity software will rapidly diminish. I already find myself leaving my netbook in my laptop bag for days at a time in favor of my tablet rather than booting that netbook at the start of every day.

As I posted a few weeks back here, I finally made the leap into tablet computing. I picked up a Blackberry PlayBook tablet and linked it with my Blackberry Curve 9330 phone and put it through its paces. I then described my positive initial setup experience prior here. Now that I have been using it for a few weeks, I thought I would expand upon my initial thoughts on how the introduction of tablet computing into my daily routine is panning out.

In a phrase: I am completely hooked and would be hard pressed to give up my PlayBook.

I am very surprised at how quickly I’ve adopted tablet computing into my daily routine. I pretty much take my tablet everywhere. As I mentioned prior[], I have a brief train ride as part of my primary office compute. That train ride now flies by as I am reading and watching all sorts of Internet content while crammed in my seat. Time passes so quickly that I need to force myself to check what station the train is arriving at in order to make sure I don’t miss my stop. The Internet tethering speed at 3G isn’t blazing fast, but reading web content is quick enough that I don’t particularly mind.

Beyond the daily commute, I now take the tablet with me to all meetings and take all notes on the tablet rather than carry my paper notepad portfolio I’ve used years. I have completely switched to full on digital note taking plus secure remotely accessing company email and calendar viewing without any negatives thus far. I still carry my old portfolio “corporate pacifier” in my laptop bag to and from work but I don’t take it out of the bag. I still take my netbook in my bag but instead of using it daily, I now only use it when I need to access data I haven’t yet converted to tablet accessibility.

Productivity-wise, I’m very impressed with the “apps” I’ve been able to add to my PlayBook to make it so useful. As you can probably tell from my blog posts, I’m a pretty basic user of computing resources and have yet to feel compelled to install any games or pure entertainment “apps”. Below are the primary additions to the basic tablet functionality that I’ve found have made the PlayBook such a useful device for me:

VNC

I found the free IMTVNC application to deliver exactly what I need when it comes to quickly remotely connecting to one of my home systems, seeing the screen display and supporting basic keyboard and mouse interactions. A touch device trying to emulate a keyboard and mouse device is clunky no matter what the device or remote program, but for basic checking in on a system and issuing a few simple commands, it does the job.

SSH

With the addition of the Telnet/SSH application, I am able to use my all time favorite, simple open source ssh client putty. It appears as if all of the functions of putty have been replicated in this app. I am even able to connect over the Internet to my home Ubuntu server and tunnel in VNC and web browser requests for complete, secure remote access to my home systems. Once connected, the Telnet/SSH app runs in the background and maintains those secure port to port tunnels just like putty does on a regular desktop/laptop system.

RSS

After experimenting with multiple web based and native application based RSS news feed readers, I’ve found WebReader to be the excellent. The native application very much takes advantage of the touch based tablet user experience. The complete synchronization with Google Reader allows me to move between WebReader on the PlayBook and Google Reader on any laptop/PC and manage subscriptions as well as what I’ve read, not read yet and flagged for later reading. The article reading is highly optimized for the low bandwidth tethered connection on the moving train. The app is highly responsive to my near spastic finger touches on the tablet as I skim articles and quickly navigate through marking the status of the flood of messages coming at me.

Twitter – Blaq

I haven’t settled on a native Twitter client for the long hall. I’ve tried quite a few and currently am finding that Blaq is exceptionally well done for following a single twitter account. The only current complaint is the near real-time Twitter updates are great when I am caught up and ready to read the newest tweets. But, if I step away or navigate away from the app, upon returning, I seem to get stuck with no additional time-line updates. There is a good chance, as a user, I am doing something wrong, but I frequently find myself closing the program in order to re-open it to get caught up on missed and arriving tweets. I need a client that keeps your current place in the time-line, collects new tweets periodically and allows scrolling up/down through the time-line. I’m still using Blaq in the hope I will discover my user error, but if anyone can suggest another simple native client, I’d like to keep trying for Twitter utopia.

AIR Browser

For simple file navigation such as managing uploaded videos, music and podcast file, I’ve found the AIR Browser to be exceptionally clean and effective. It starts file navigation at the “media” shared folder level and doesn’t allow you to go into native system files. Yet, for simple file management, the clean interface and completely intuitive navigation makes this a must have for my file management needs.

I’ve tried a number of different apps but so far, those above are the main apps I’ve come to rely on for making my tablet computing so effective. As you can tell, I’m a very basic tablet user. I’m looking forward to the release of the PlayBook OS v2.0 in hopes that RIM has used their almost full year of development to significantly improve the PlayBook which I’ve come to rely on already as a must have, daily computing device.

Initial Foray into Tablet Computing

As I mentioned in a previous article, I’ve finally made the leap into tablet computing by procuring a RIM Blackberry PlayBook. For those interested in why I chose this particular tablet against the grain of the media coverage on this product, please read my commentary in the prior article. This article covers my initial experience of getting the PlayBook setup for use and my first week of integrating it into my daily computing routine.

Setup – Amazingly Simple and Efficient

The PlayBook comes out of the box with a wall charger, micro-USB cable (a nice one is included), sock-like cover, multi-language getting started manual and the PlayBook itself. The physical specs on the PlayBook itself are better covered by others including this tear-down of the exact internal components here. So, I plugged in the wall charger to the micro-USB port and pushed the small power button on the side.

The screen immediately came to life and within a few seconds, a full screen setup wizard began with initially finding my home wireless network and asking for the password to connect. This was my first interaction with the touchscreen keyboard and found the experience to be exceedingly similar to the Kindle Fire and other tablets of having an audible click plus a visual overlay of the key one is typing plus a brief view of the character being entered into the textbox followed by an asterisk replacing that character (regular password field entry masking). It took me a second to understand that the request to “swipe” to move to the next screen was to use your finger to follow the circle graphic movement on the bottom of the display. I couldn’t understand why I seemed to be going back and forth between the same two screens. Once I figured out the desired swiping movement, the intuitiveness became immediately obvious.

The wireless connection was immediate which was a nice initial confidence booster. I was wondering prior to starting the setup how frustrating it would be to have wireless problems on a device I bought specifically for wireless Internet use. Luckily, no problems here what so ever.

After picking the usual date, time and timezone details, I was asked to enter my Blackberry ID. Since I already had one I used to access the Blackberry App Store on my phone, I entered the same one. I’m glad that the phone and tablet are accessing the App Store using the same login details. This means one less on-line credential to manage.

Another nicety was an indication that the setup wizard could be stopped and restarted at any time. Some family distractions were taking place at the same time as my initial setup thus I had to hit the power button a few times to bounce between the setup and family duties.

The next step was a required system software update. Since my plan was to update to the latest anything prior to making serious use of the product, I was glad to get this step out of the way as soon as possible. Being a late adopter, I was hoping I would get the benefit of the latest software including as many bugs fixed as possible. I don’t recall how long this process took to download the 384MB update because I put the device down once the update started and did not return to it for over 2 hours at which it was already complete.

Upon returning to my desk, the device was asking me if I wanted to enable the “Blackberry Bridge” support. I did some pre-research enough to know this was RIM’s mechanism for having their tablet and phones communicate with each other. I had previously downloaded the free “Bridge” app for my Curve from the App Store and thus brought out my phone and went to turn on the “Bridge” support on the phone. Upon doing so on the phone and then also enabling Bluetooth at the same time via the Bridge App (nice that they included in the app rather forcing one to go hunt for the enable setting), I proceeded to indicate to the tablet I was ready to enable Bridge support there.

I was very impressed on how easy this process was all around. The PlayBook presented a QR image and told me to point the phone’s camera at the image. My phone was in camera mode already I assume by being set by the Bridge App and thus I pointed the camera phone at the QR code until the QR code filled the entire phone camera display and a countdown to connecting appeared. Within a few seconds, the phone and tablet indicated they were connected and the blue “Bluetooth” indication light on the phone started to blink. All in all, very simple and efficient process to get this “Bridge” option enabled.

I opted not to setup the Blackberry Desktop Software since my primary PC is Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows or Mac thus I skipped this final step. I was then forced to take two usage “tutorials” which my first reaction was “What? Why can’t I skip this step? I’m a smart guy. I want to figure this out my own way.” The tutorials were very brief and ensured one had a basic understanding of the specific PlayBook gestured needed to effectively interact with the device. In hindsight, I’m glad RIM made me complete those tutorial steps because I was instantly comfortable with gesture device navigation when I was given control of the device post-setup.

Initial Connectivity Impressively Efficient as well - Tethering Success

Having used multiple tablets briefly prior, I was familiar with the general usage of a tablet and was immediately browsing the web and App Store. Even finding needed details about the device was very intuitive and centralized in one menu structure for stuff like MAC and IP addresses, screen and file sharing passwords, etc. My first real challenge in my mind was to test how to tether the PlayBook to my Curve in order to access the Internet through the carrier data plan on the phone. Again, I have to hand it to RIM, I was able to easily disable the wireless and by pressing the image and model of the Bluetooth connected Curve, I noticed my Curve go into “modem mode” and the PlayBook provide status indication of dialing, connecting and getting an IP address. Now I am toggling back to a browser and surfing the web at 3G speeds and seeing the familiar network traffic indicators on my phone. All in all, worked great the first time I tried it.

Filesystem Connectivity

Next challenge was gaining file level access to the PlayBook. Again, very straight forward process that with, very little if any Google-ing for tips, I was able to setup the PlayBook to share it’s “media” folder as a wireless Windows share (account+password protected) as well as directly through a wired USB cable. Again, impressive to me how easily RIM has enabled this filesharing ability for me not using their Desktop Manager application but rather, low level basic networking functions in Ubuntu.

An interesting surprise was how, through the Bridge Bluetooth connection, the PlayBook was showing all of the media files I had on my Curve. Any option to open a file shows both a Curve and a PlayBook graphic that, once selected, shows the file system navigation on that device. It was intuitively easy for the PlayBook to source files from the Curve with me having to do absolutely nothing beyond that initial Bridge App setup.

Email, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes

Ok, by now, most of you are probably thinking “Hey, does this guy work for RIM? The media gave the PlayBook harsh reviews, what gives?”

As I mentioned before, my criteria for picking the PlayBook plus my existing Blackberry Curve mobile phone usage with RIM’s initial PlayBook design to work with a RIM phone seems to explain my initially positive experience. But don’t worry, things aren’t fully perfect if you read further.

One of the biggest complaints about the PlayBook from critics is that hard dependency on a Blackberry phone for email, contacts, etc. interaction. I can completely agree why the PlayBook would not be well received by an iPhone or Android phone user given no native email or calendar App support. But for me, the top left of the screen has indicators of new emails arriving and calendar alerts which were exceedingly pleasant and well integrated. As new emails were arriving on my phone, my PlayBook was indicating as such and I was able to touch the alert and be viewing my combined email accounts already setup on my phone. Near real-time updates were taking place between the two devices seamlessly. This seamless updating was happening on more than just email alerts and management.

Something I found almost creepy was how opening the same note in the MemoPad between the PlayBook and Curve showed near really time synchronous changes happening on the two devices. Type a character on the Curve and it shows up on both the Curve and PlayBook. If anyone has used Google Docs and worked on the same document at the same time with someone else, it was a similar experience of close to real-time changes.

This notion that my phone and tablet are constantly talking to each other and the tablet is openly sharing files like a file server wireless-ly to those near by really got me thinking about how highly connective our technology is these days.

The Bad – App Store

I was expecting to be disappointed with the PlayBook App Store selection but I was even more disappointed when I started searching for what I thought would be basic apps. No free ssh app? No free or paid integrated social media app (seesmic, tweetdeck, hootsuite, etc.)? Luckily I did find a free VNC client that works very well in connecting to and controlling vnc enabled systems. I also found a google reader app that allowed me to sync up on online google reader RSS reading to the PlayBook. Thus, I definitely agree with the media’s assessment of one of the biggest negatives of the PlayBook is the lack of the breath of native apps compared to the iOS and Android market. I’ll need to borrow my spouses Kindle Fire to see how Amazon’s set of Fire apps compares at some point.

Almost Bricked my PlayBook

Another interesting experience was locking up the PlayBook on my first attempt to play a media file. I copied over a WMA formatted brief movie as my first attempt trying out the media playing capabilities. Once copied, I started the movie and everything looked great: clear picture and clear sound out of the native speakers. Then, I naturally rotated the PlayBook to a landscape from portrait view and the movie visually froze in mid-diagonal re-orientation. The sound was still going but the picture was clearly frozen. No re-orientation nor swiping made any difference to the frozen picture. I then hit the pause button on the PlayBook and the sound stopped but no change in frozen display. Hitting the pause button to resume didn’t make any difference nor re-start the audio. With a bit of panic I check and I could still interact with the filesystem remotely so the whole unit wasn’t completely frozen. So, with some quick google-ing I found the need to hold in the power button for 10 seconds to reboot the device. My panic subsided when eventually I saw the same Blackberry logo splash on the screen that I saw when I first turned on the device. Once rebooted, everything seemed to work as normal.

PlayBook Rides the Train

One test that passed with flying colors was my goal to use the 20 minute or so train ride that is part of my daily commute to catch up on news via the Internet. Prior to having the PlayBook, once seated on the train, occasionally, I would break out my netbook and hard wire tether my Blackberry to access the Internet and use Bloglines.com to read through my collection of RSS feeds and the Seesmic web app to check Twitter feeds, etc. I must have seemed a bit silly as a 6’4” guy crammed into a small train seat with my over stuffed laptop bag, lunch bag and laptop with dangling cable and phone all hunched together. With my phone still in my pants pocket, I’ve now have my PlayBook out, Bluetooth tethered to the Internet and headphones connected listening to a podcast and swiping through news stories in a slightly less awkward seating arrangement.

Two thumbs way up on the easy of tethered Internet access and news/blog reading. Plus, just like those other tablet users, I’m jumping between the text-ish news feed over to richer web browser content, squishing and zooming the screen with deft finger touches.

Also, it might seem trivial to include a micro-USB cable and simple “sock” like cover, but the Kindle Fire came with neither and thus had to go find a micro-USB cable as well as procure some sort of cover to protect the Kindle from likely nicks and scrapes. With the simple “sock”, it isn’t fancy or exceedingly professional looking as a formal cover, but for me, being able to slide the PlayBook in the “sock” and then into my laptop bag for transport right away is great. Again, simple initial product accessory but really effective for basic users like myself.

OS 2 beta – Too Upgrade or Not Too Upgrade

Now, with all of the hype around the next OS 2 major upgrade from RIM that is presented to be “the way the PlayBook should have worked from the beginning” with native email, etc. clients, integrated social media extensions and build in Andoid App Market/App Player capabilities, the next big question is now that I have the PlayBook working pretty much the way I like for my immediate needs, should I go ahead an install the 2.0 beta and see what improvements have been incorporated … still considering to jump in early or wait for the final release.

AWS Makes Coding in the Cloud Easy

With all of the IT punditry talking about how everyone who is anyone is “moving to the cloud”, I thought I would take a serious look at what Amazon’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) has to offer for hosting applications in the cloud. Since I’ve already written about my perspective that “the cloud” is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, I thought I would roll up my sleeves and challenge myself to interact directly with some “cloud” services. What also helped propel me forward was discovering that AWS has a free “get starting” package that includes the ability to provision a server with Internet access, storage and all the AWS development packages and libraries pre-setup.

[Feel free to skip down to the source code if you aren't interested in the next section on business context]

Business Context

Now if you have read any of my articles on this blog you know I mostly cover the challenges of working in a large, corporate IT environment both from a staff and management perspective. So, this is a bit off the beaten path for me. But the rate of business groups pushing corporate IT to implement cloud solutions, especially in the on-line product space, is on a significant up tick. Now, especially in financial services, integrating on-line products with “cloud/SaaS/ASP” hosted applications as product extensions is nothing new. It seems almost as soon as financial firms had an on-line application, they were looking to integrate with existing partners that also were standing up on-line versions of their service offerings: think on-line banking and viewing statements electronically, etc.

The trend difference I’ve observed from the late 90s and early 00s of “ASP” integration to the present is the non-traditional “cloud” companies looking to work with banks. Prior, companies that were already working with banks to provide outsourced off-line services progressed to offer on-lines services. Thus, the maturity of the pre- and post-sales process was familiar to both parties. The ASP providers knew how to address data protection, regulatory compliance and complex/unique technology integrations. The new “cloud” application service providers are using all of the cloud infrastructure as a service (here is the tie-in with AWS) offerings to produce new robust products, but they are completely unfamiliar with how to architect a complete product and service solution for financial services. Thus, many are having to address retrofitting their solutions to be akin to the needs of regulated, conservative banking institutions including all of the security assurance overhead needed (think SAS 70s, penetration tests, security standards and procedures, site visits, lengthy contracts, etc.).

What does all this mean?

In summary, current cloud service providers such as AWS, offer a great suite of building blocks to stand up a robust application. But choose your technologies strategically, especially if you are planning to integrate your product in any way with financial services customers. Be prepared to have to transition to company owned and managed application infrastructure including data storage for the foreseeable future until cloud providers, such as AWS, are universally accepted by the financial services security community as “secure”.

Technical Stuff

Ok, now for a bit more fun technical stuff, I went ahead and signed up for the free AWS package which was incredibly easy. Just a few mouse clicks and I am sitting in the AWS web based management console. Without any serious investigation, I was off creating my own “bucket” of storage in their Simple Storage Service (S3). Next step was to provision a server to host my application experiment. The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) tab was equally easy to click through a wizard of picking basic server configuration options. I opted for the Amazon Linux Micro Instance (specifically the Amazon AIM platform as I assumed it would be optimized for using AWS services) in order to stay within the “free” parameters. At the conclusion I was provided all the pertinent remote connection details including a client/user certificate and literally the ssh command syntax to cut/paste and connect.

Since I am clearly taking AWS for a spin years after it first came on the market, I am assuming I am benefiting from significant end user functional improvements made within that time duration. It has been over a decade since any server I built or any code I wrote actually was deployed in a corporate production environment, so to say I have been relegated to a tinkerer in my technical career would be an understatement. But the simple wizard based configuration of the server and storage provisioning clearly allows even a novice technician to be exceedingly productive within AWS.

The Goal – Functional Application Running in AWS

Now that I have cloud storage and a cloud server I needed an application development challenge to solve. So after some thought, here is what I came up with:

Java based application service that will replicate my Dropbox files into my new AWS S3 storage “bucket”.

Note: Yes, Dropbox uses AWS as it’s back-end storage platform so I’m really duplicating my data within the same storage cloud so what am I gaining? Ok, real world, not much gained but this is a throw away experiment to begin with so just permit me this architectural short-sighting.

This experiment involves:

• Installing the Dropbox GUI-less client on the Linux Micro Instance
• Connecting all the Java AWS libraries together to access my S3 storage “bucket”
• Scheduling the application to periodically replicate the Dropbox files to my S3 “bucket”

By using AWS’s example “S3Sample.java” code from their Java SDK, in a matter of a few hours (those hours mostly spent getting all the correct jars linked together in the classpath), I was able to start copying files. Of course, after I reverse engineered how their sample program worked I ran across this article on AWS’s blog that hand holds you through everything.

I was able to follow the directions provided on Dropbox’s site I was able to download and install the Dropbox client on my Linux Micro Instance without a single hick-up.

As I mentioned above, it has been quite a long time since I cracked open an editor and started coding, so any comments on the lack-o-elegance of my Java is most likely very accurate. Plus, I didn’t go so far as add any mechanism to traverse directory trees to copy nested files. Additionally, all I achieved was a one way copy of all files rather than a true sync or any date/time check to see if a file even needs to be re-copied if it already exists.

Goal Achieved!

Here is a link to my (lame, err, not production ready) Java source here.

I welcome any comments around reader’s thoughts on cloud application development and AWS specifically.

Initial Foray into Tablet Computing

In keeping up with my personal trend of being an early technology investigator yet a late technology adopter, I finally made the leap into tablet computing. After following the blogosphere cover the literal explosion of tablets onto the consumer and corporate market, I finally decided I needed to try and commit to integrating a tablet into my daily computer using habits. After getting my spouse a Kindle Fire as a Christmas gift in a response to her request for an ebook reader and helping her get it setup, I knew I would have to make a product selection for myself. I immediately got the sense in handling the Kindle Fire that today’s tablet fits a computing need I really didn’t know I had. That need, for me, is filling the gap between when one is logistically barred from one’s primary desktop computer and yet equally inconvenient to fire up the laptop/netbook to access Internet content. And so, this week arrived a RIM Blackberry PlayBook to my door.

What? A PlayBook? Isn’t RIM the mobile incumbent vendor that has let the market pass them by.

Yes, thus permit me a few minutes to explain … here goes: I use a Blackberry Curve mobile phone with quite some time still left on my service contract and find the tethering option to access the Internet via my personal netbook invaluable in my effort to keep my personal computing pursuits completely separate from my full-time professional demands. In my mind, having a security related position ratchets up the need to fully and completely embrace all policies and standards surrounding using company resources for only company business. Thus, when I researched the tight integration between the PlayBook and Blackberry phones, that became a plus for me.

My primary intention for the tablet is for consumption of Internet hosted, primarily written, content. In other words, I’m not really interested in playing games or watching movies or even outright purchasing ebooks. These interests don’t seem to constrain anyone to any particular tablet manufacturer but RIM has been focused on the corporate user, rather than consumer to their suggested demise, and with the addition of having a strong security framework around mobile computing, I drifted towards the PlayBook with that in mind.

Then came the “fire sale” and the prospective of having a corporate designed tablet device with 64gb of storage originally priced at $699 for $299. It seems unclear as to RIM’s specific motivations for such deep discounting of a product that has taken a beating in the media since being announced last year right before a major upgrade (OS 2.0) next month (Feb. ’12). Add RIM’s significant investment in this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES ’12) showing continued investment in the PlayBook product and picking up a discounted PlayBook, still a gamble, owning one could be intriguing.

Learning that OS 2.0, from folks brave enough to install the development beta version, will include the ability to run native PlayBook apps as well as Andoid apps, thus even if RIM is unable to gain significant leaps in market-share and corresponding development investment to enrich the product’s capabilities, the product should benefit from enabling the Android Marketplace as a source of additional usefulness.

All things considered, the price point is what really pushed me over the edge to make the purchase. If RIM continued to leave the PlayBook 16gb entry level point at $499 I am pretty certain I would still be researching the vast tablet landscape.

So, after a few more days of use, I’ll post my initial experience of how tablet computing and the PlayBook specifically is working out for me.

Today's IT Projects Need Transparency to Change

For large organizations it seems that as technology grows more and more integrated, IT related projects become more complex and thus longer in overall duration. There is no doubt the rise in cloud/SaaS solutions has exacerbated this increase in overall IT project complexity. I’ve written on the impact of cloud in this manner prior here. Gone are the days of a large corporate IT shop having a project manager engage the same three or four familiar delivery stakeholders and with little outside involvement, execute the project beginning to end. This increase in technical integration means a project manager can no longer count on those three or four stakeholders having the cross systems knowledge and technical systems access to implement changes as crisply with few artifacts as to what the project has done/is doing/when/etc.

To help illustrate this evolving shift, consider the following hypothetical large corporate IT conversation:

PM: “Welcome everyone to the FlimFlam upgrade project’s twentieth weekly status meeting and a special welcome to Jim who is joining to help sort out all the changes that impact others outside of our core team.”

<General welcoming gestures and verbal niceties ensue>

Jim: “Ok, is there any diagram that captures all the flows of data in and out of the current FlimFlam system?”

Core Team: “Um, no, we just know them from working on FlimFlam for the last five years.”

Jim: “Um, ok, have you mapped out what new features of the upgrade are turned on compared to off and who would be affected? Or say, documented the link between the features and business requirements?”

Core Team: “Well, not documented, but we know HR wants the real-time instead of batch interaction and Operations wants better reports. But HR outsourced last year to a cloud provider and we have no idea what Operations is doing …”

Jim: <thinking to himself> “… oh boy, good people, but this project is looking like a train wreck already …”

Clearly a “business as usual” approach to this upgrade isn’t going to work any more.

In the past, with so few stakeholders having comprehensive access to the silo-ed systems impacted by these types of changes, the need for easy to digest transparency into what changes were going to happen when and how was not critical. Sometimes the only visibility to what such a small project team was doing was in the production change management review and approval process:

Change Control Board: “Ok, next up is change record number 72,578 which reads ‘Enable the employee web portal to support the time off calendar’. Anyone here have any concerns with this change? Hearing none, approved. Next on the list …

Today’s Problem: IT systems are too interconnected for lack of project transparency to change

Sounds like 72,578 is a simple change that an HR delivery team of the past could have easily implemented without much cross team impact. But today, that example time off calendar may need to interact with the HR system to record those time off days against how many the employee actually has as part of their compensation package. There probably is a need to support some management approval work-flow. Plus, there are probably other work scheduling systems and PMO resource planning tools that need a feed of that data in order to accurately support their user base. There is probably some single sign on/web access management technology involved to support all employees accessing the web portal, some central provisioning system to handle access plus some remote access needs to support today’s mobile workforce. It is probably safe to assume that some of those integrated systems are in-house and some are cloud/SaaS or a mix of all of the above.

Additionally, with matrix-ed internal and external project resources with contracted and off-shore delivery coupled with the “cloud” vendor resource engagement model, a simple change could have a variety of stakeholders in need of agreement on what is changing when, etc.

Thus, hopefully I’ve convinced you that something as simple as a web portal for employee time off entry can involve a number of different internal and external teams and systems that all need to coordinate changes to support the business objectives of this example project.

So how does this all drive the need for “transparency”? Isn’t this just a basic PMO 101 issue of dependency management and cross project impacts?

Yes and No

The project team needs to produce deliverables that don’t just get the core team in agreement to pass the next quality gate in the project life-cycle (never to be revised again); the project team needs to produce deliverables that outline, at a high-level, the following basic project elements:

• Scope of the project in a sentence or two
• What is changing from present to future state
• Who is impacted by the change (and have they been engaged)
• Lastly, what isn’t in scope (that a non-core stakeholder might assume is in scope)

… for non-core stakeholders to easily digest and understand … and update the material frequently to have at the ready anytime it might be needed.

Besides an effective communications vehicle, another subtle yet important aspect to this deliverable is its ability to build confidence in the effective management of your project in outside stakeholders. This confidence can lead to senior management getting the impression the project is “under control” and move on to another project for increased scrutiny rather than assigning all kinds of ancillary people to dig into your project to figure out why they don’t have that “under control” feeling.

Stated another way, large corporate IT projects today need to adopt a bit of “program management”, specifically, some of the enterprise reporting themes. A Gantt chart (which I’ve extolled the benefits of before here) isn’t the end-all-be-all here. A slide deck that contains a few slides covering these topics with lots of pictures and drawings where ever possible would be more effective in serving this communication need.

So if you are a project sponsor or a project manager, consider having a communication deliverable that is actively maintained, even if your PMO PLC doesn’t explicitly call for one, to provide simple and easy to digest transparency into key aspects of your project at the ready at all

For any of those in the Cleveland/Akron, Ohio, USA area the week of 1/22, I’ll be speaking at the University of Akron on the topic of Identity Management in “the cloud” and general career opportunities in the Information Security industry.  More specifically, the title of the presentation is “Identity and Access Management Reference Architecture for Cloud Computing” and I’ve already published the slides on SlideShare here.

I’m looking forward to good interaction with the students and faculty.  If you are in attendance, please stop by and say hello!

Statistics for 2011

Hard for me to imagine but 2011 represented another year for MidwestITSurvival.com. I thought it would be interesting to share some statistics from 2011 in the same format as I did last year:

(Per Google Analytics)

3,708 Total unique visitors

6,783 Pages viewed

Viewer traffic sources:

I enjoyed that 23% of visitors that come directly here to read articles and the additional 31% that come here from other sites that link people here which was statistically similar to last year.

The top 3 articles in terms of number of unique visitors reading them are:

1. Organizational Structure and Enterprise Architecture [502]
2. Is the Gantt Chart Useless in Agile Projects? [389]
3. Conflict Between Agile and Architecture [287]

A total of 33 articles were published in 2011 with a total of 33 comments submitted to those articles.

All in all, having no goal of X number of comments per article or Y number of unique visitors per month, etc., I continue to be pleased with the blogging experience overall.

In 2011 I changed employers and roles in late February and switched from a general development/delivery role to an enterprise architecture role focusing on information security. Thus, the content of my articles switched about a third into the year from the trials and tribulations of IT delivery in a large IT shop to general security issues facing all IT organizations today. IT delivery challenges tend to be similarly themed across industries and rather easy to generalize to avoid sharing any direct information about one’s employer. On the topic of enterprise security, I found it a bit more difficult to generalize on matters that allowed depth of material presentment while not exposing any specific employer information. Hence, blog posting frequency started strong in the beginning of the year and tailed off towards the end of the year. I am hoping to find more general IT topics to share this year.

On the positive, on certain posts, especially the ones surrounding the 2011 FFIEC Guidance on Internet Banking for Financial Institutions, the comment dialog significantly enhanced the material I was presenting by adding additional industry depth and opinions. I strongly encourage you to check out those articles if you haven’t already and read through the comments.

Here is to 2012 and all the new challenges ahead!

Produce a Business Case Deliverable

In the first part of this series on senior management communication for those more comfortable with grep-ing an exception log or tracing through lines of code to find that elusive bug the conclusion was:

No matter how technically proficient you are in your respective discipline, not investing in effective communication skills will limit your over-all effectiveness in your organization.

In the second part of this series, we used an example of engineer Bob recommending his company invest some cash and resources into an operating system upgrade. The initial logical conclusion that a sequence of facts surrounding how awesomely technically cool the new OS is would convince anyone to make the investment. Yet, spewing facts isn’t as compelling as it is to:

Relate the facts and figures to senior management’s goals/vision

To do this, structure a presentation into a story following this sequence:

1. Describe the Current State including gaps/challenges/issues/problems
2. Describe the “Optimum” Future State
3. Describe the Roadmap to get from Current to Future State
4. Outline the immediate next steps to get started on the Roadmap
5. Throw anything ancillary or supporting to the above 4 steps in Appendices

In the Bob’s case, consider “telling the story” of ultimately what aligns to senior management’s goals/vision in this example context: computing capability at reduced cost.

Using the above sequence as a template for Bob:

1. Current State

• Number of servers running prior OS, server count over time
• CPU utilization
• Maintenance costs (total cost of ownership if it can be computed, support contract costs)
• Indicators when “bad news” like special support contract costs, etc. show “doing nothing” is a negative
• Intersection with any other projects that need capabilities provided by your Future State

2. Future State

• All servers running new OS phased in over timeliness
• CPU utilization
• Maintenance costs

3. Roadmap

• Upgrades broken into simple chunks
• Chunks representing some useful grouping (rather than random)
• Testing or other functions supporting the upgrade
• Costs over the duration

4. Next Steps

• $$$ approved to buy hardware
• $$$ approved for 2 resources
• Initial steps within your organization to get a formal project going

5. Appendices

• Data showing why 2 resources are needed, what happens if you get 1 or zero or 12
• Any other data, facts, figures around “hot button” issues that might come up like a trend to out-source or in-source work, strategic vendor partnerships, etc.

Your goal in telling this story is to have a compelling deliverable in the form of your presentation that conveys to anyone that it would be just plain silly not to execute your roadmap. That “anyone” needs to be both technical and non-technical people. I am certain your technical peers are going to be 110% behind anything that involves implementing new, cool technology. What techie holds the position of “nah, I still want to be a Windows 98 shop.” At the same time, the more holes that can be poked in your analysis the more likely your great idea is going to get trampled by the masses and not acted upon.

Sure, others might suggest not putting this much effort into a request that “should just stand on it’s own to support action”. A recent (how timely!) tweet from @rands suggests as such:

And although it might seem highly desirable to be able to convey your technical request in words and have immediate understanding and support, those veterans of large corporate IT shops know there is a big complex organization with overlapping, competing and sometimes contradicting priorities that can easily mount a campaign against your plan. Thus, those quick to dismiss the value of a slide deck deliverable in corporate IT might be missing a critical element of this series: producing a deliverable.

Sure, once you have a deliverable out there others can still mount a defensive. But, you also empower your management with a strong case to move in your direction that can be forwarded along and forwarded up. The more compelling your story, the more it stands on its own as a viable business case to make a strategic company investment the more the financial/business minded in IT will be able to comprehend and support your plan.

So, before you write-off the value of putting the effort into crafting a story deliverable that compels the non-technical decision makers to act on your plan, consider the alternative: a verbal request to spend money on some cool technology? If you are planning to invest a significant portion of your own money, do you want to buy some cool technology or act on a strategic technology investment with data backed returns?

Speaking in the Zone

Recently, @rands posted a very timely, for me, article on what goes through the conference speaker’s mind as he or she is about to get in front of a large audience and give a presentation. Everyone that presents at a technology conference, no matter how frequent a speaker, probably goes through the same thought processes that I found myself going through. I recently presented at a technology security conference. For fun, I’ve sequenced that thought process below:

Topic Submission/Call for Papers

Did I have a compelling enough topic that I will get selected?

Do I seem credible enough as a presenter in the first place?

The submission forms are usually well structured, but since the selection process is usually blind to the submitter, you really have no idea what the selection committee is prioritizing for topics and speakers. You may think you have the most brilliant topic but unless you have an inside source, you are completely at the mercy of the selection committee.

Speaker Acceptance

Awesome, I’m going to get present!

Holy cow, I have to put together a presentation!

It is quite exciting to find that a topic you proposed actually has enough merit for some folks, who are pouring through submission form after submission form, to actually select it. It is also a nice boost to your ego that you and your topic are compelling enough for a conference presentation time slot. This excitement is quickly followed by the immediate realization that you have only just started this very public commitment. You need to pull together a compelling presentation to justify the honor of being selected to speak. I would be fibbing if I skipped mentioning the slight panic that follows the boosted ego moment that you are going to have to actually give this presentation.

Presentation Submission

Geez, did I get everything I needed into the presentation?

Did I spell check everything?

Did I even come close to what I originally proposed that got me selected?

No matter if you start your presentation before you got the official selection notification or if you procrastinate till the night before your sides need to be submitted, there is still a moment of panic immediately following your presentation submission. Just after you hit “send”, you wonder if you really got everything just right. Sure, in a moment of panic you can beg and plead with the receiver of all speaker materials to replace your original submission with a last minute revision, but do you really want to annoy the masters of the conference agenda? They could put you right after lunch on the last day. That slot is probably one of the most challenging given you have the entire conference to sweat about your pending public speaking including the very real concern that very few conference stragglers will actually come back to your session after that last lunch with planes to catch and general conference fatigue in full affect.

Tip: I have found that starting immediately on your presentation and then leaving a few days prior to submission to make final corrections to be the most effective for me. In between I make it a point to ensure I have a few days to completely ignore the presentation all together. I am amazed at when I pick back up after that break how many “What was I thinking; this doesn’t make any sense?” review moments I encounter.

Conference Start

I have plenty of days/hours. I’ll survey the room, take in a few sessions and size up my peers.

I still have a few hours, I’ll find a quiet stop and skim my notes.

Holy cow, I’m speaking in 10 minutes. Where did the time go?

It seems time both slows down and speeds up. Sitting in sessions makes you wonder if you have prepared enough. Reviewing your notes with tons of time remaining becomes a struggle to focus. Lastly, you find all the time you thought you had just zoomed by and your session is about to start.

Waiting to be Introduced

I am totally going to bomb.

Someone is going to throw me off track with a unexpected zinger question.

Why did I submit this topic in the first place. I could be sitting in one of those attendee chairs just zoning out right now.

Speaking in the Zone

In hindsight, I always wonder why I was stressed out at all. It seems for me, once I get started speaking, the process of giving the actual presentation just flows out smoothly. In volunteering to present on topics of which I’ve researched and have actual experience with, I am reminded that I really do have some solid knowledge in what I am presenting. “Zinger” questions are an opportunity to have a healthy exchange with the audience in a way that breaks up the sometimes methodological bullet point by bullet point nature of the slides.

All that stress evaporates as the session comes to an end replaced with a deep sense of a job well done. Feedback, of course, is the ultimate verifier of a good presentation. Most recently, someone came up to me at the conclusion of my session with:

“Great presentation. It was the only session worthwhile out of all I attended today.”

That one comment made all the hours of work and stress prior completely worth it … and I was  the last speaker that day.