Fun with Gadgets

I confess it has been a while since I blogged, and although I am trying to get the energy to put together a post on innovation (or lack thereof) in Enterprise IT, that requires more energy than I have today (smiley).   So think I will just talk about my latest gadgets. 

I have a BB Z10. It is actually a very good device. Blackberry (nee RIM) has built upon some of the concepts of the Playbook, and the entire “hub” concept that integrates all of your mail services, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al is a very effective approach. In its heart, that is what the Z10 is.  A device that focuses on communication, and assumes that people who use it are active across many channels.  The swipe gestures are crisp and effective, and there is no question that BB10 represents multi-tasking much better that IOS or Android devices. 

I guess the key question in terms of BB10′s success remains applications. Will those actively communicating folk be satisfied with a device that facilitates real time communication, or will they want apps? If so, Blackberry is still in trouble. Now they have made a big splash about application partnerships at launch, and there are some positive signs(Amazon Kindle is finally available!). But I’m not an app fiend, and even I remain unhappy about availability of things like Trip-It,  ZIte, etc.  Can Blackberry attract enough developers? 

The other challenge in the short term is I cannot access my corporate email from the Z10. This is both Blackberry’s fault and a challenge for the firm where I work.  The BB10 server requires build out of a Microsoft ActiveSync infrastructure integrated with the corporate email environment, which my firm is just doing now.  However there are also some missing security capabilities in the BB10 server that most regulated enterprises must have, and that will not be available until the next software release in April/May this year.  Complicating the entire matter is the BYOD issue. Blackberry provides a “dual persona” capability called Balance which is quite good,and separates enterprise data and applications from personal applications. But it is again different than the tools most firms are currently using to support BYOD (Good Enterprise, AirWatch, Mobile Iron, etc) and adds complexity that negates any intrinsic advantage Blackberry had by already being massively present in so many firms. 

So, I like the device. I’m going to use it as my personal smartphone for a year. But I am certainly not smart enough to tell you if this will be a game changer for Blackberry. 

The other device I am playing with is a Microsoft Surface RT. People are surprised when I tell them that I see similarities between these devices. Clearly they are radically different in terms of form factor, but Windows 8, and it’s spiritual cousin Windows Phone, also tries fairly hard to manage all of your communications in an integrated fashion, and with “Active Tiles”,  to become a real time hub for the individual.  RT does an ok job at this, but is not as effectively as Blackberry. 

There are things I love about Surface RT. The hardware is beautiful, in many ways more attractive than IPAD. The box opening to install experience is seamless and automated, and gets you in a place where you have a Skydrive, Office ( very cool) and a reasonable set of applications. and a great browsing experience! At this point I was really impressed. Then it started to go downhill. 

As you get into setting up all those email and Social Media connections, the process is harder, slower, and much more prone to failure than the BB10 process I has just gone through previously. Finding all of your messages is a mixed bag. The tile interface makes it easier, while at the same time there is a bit of the traditional “Windows” experience pulling you back towards confusion and complexity. But I can live with that. Where it gets painful is at the App Store. SImply put there are not enough applications. Maybe another place where Blackberry and Microsoft share some characteristics. 

All that said, I am happily carrying around the Surface RT and having a generally pretty good consumer tablet experience. Not enough in truth to have me switch away from IPAD, but quite good. 

Again connecting to work life is problematic. CItrix has a client for RT but it requires a version of their back end servers that my firm, and many others, does not operate yet. Other critical firms, such as Good Technology, have not released a client for RT yet. 

Therein lies Microsoft’s problem. As it stands I think RT is a pretty good consumer/SMB device. It also has the potential to be a great BYOD device in large, regulated firms but the access and security applications need to be available.  The paucity of apps in the App Store, and the reluctance of software firms to embrace RT, will hurt Microsoft a lot. 

And for those who think Surface Pro is the way in to large enterprises, think again! Most firms are approaching exhaustion in Windows 7 upgrade battle, They do not want to hear about Windows 8 inside the firewall. 

Citrix & Amazon are showing Enterprise why cloud is important

Check out the two links below announcing Citrix capabilities associated with Amazon.  I suspect I was more sure of this when I started writing this blog, but still believe that there is much import in these announcements for Enterprise IT pros.

http://www.citrix.com/content/citrix/en_us/featured-partners/amazon-web-services/overview.html

http://www.citrix.com/news/announcements/may-2012/citrix-delivers-netscaler-10-for-amazon-web-services.html

 

To summarize

1. Citrix is making it much easier to operate their desktop virtualization services in the Amazon Cloud

2. Citrix and Amazon are making it possible to operate a virtual Netscaler access environment so your staff could access virtual desktops hosted at Amazon.

3. And Citrix’ project Excalibur is both integrating XenApps and XenDesktop, and more importantly making it easier to host all Citrix services in virtual server environments.

So why is that important?  Will large enterprises start hosting their virtual desktops in the cloud. Not initially. The traditional wisdom that the virtual desktop/application should be hosted close to the business application servers still holds true. Primary production virtual desktops will stay in the enterprise data centre for now.

But one of the largest inhibitors to large scale virtual desktop deployments has been cost, and a large part of that cost has been Disaster Recovery. If you put all your desktops in a data centre then you feel compelled to worry about what happens if you lose the data centre, so you end up planning to duplicate  the environment at your alternate data centre. Well that blows the business case in a hurry. Virtual desktops have to be a lot cheaper than legacy, physical desktops if you are going to install two virtual instances to replace a single physical instance!

That is where I think Amazon can make all the difference.

4. In truth, most firms might be willing to take a performance hit in a disaster mode, so hosting your backup virtual desktops at AWS, at some distance from your application servers,  might be a viable risk.

5. And in truth, Citrix licencing provides something to help.  If you run Platinum licences, you already own the right to operate their virtual WAN accelerator in virtual appliances at your data centre, and in the CItrix Receiver on your virtual desktops (or virtual servers at AWS). You can defeat much of the tyranny of physics and distance!

6. And at a fraction of the cost of building out virtual desktop infrastructure yourself. Let’s face it Amazon’s scale, cost, and speed puts all enterprise IT to shame.

and if you’re doing  it for Disaster Recovery, test, development etc you are enabling large scale desktop virtualization at minimal risk. This is the future of desktop virtualization. Embrace it, lead, or become irrelevant.

 

 

ITSM Tool Projects are the ERP of Enterprise IT, and that ain’t good

Sigh, I just realized how many acronyms are in the title of this post, and felt somewhat guilty, so

ITSM = Information Technology Service Management

ERP =  Enterprise Resource Planning

So ITSM tools become the systems that IT teams use to manage service quality. Once known as trouble ticket systems, now we tend to refer to them as tools to manage key service processes called incident management, change management, problem management, etc. These days that means software from providers like HP, Remedy, IBM. and the like, and a big dog in the SaaS world ServiceNow.

ERP systems are the integrated tools that manufacturers, consumer goods, and other large firms deploy that integrate finance, inventory, purchasing, order management et al.  Think SAP, Oracle, and the like.

Now when SAP first started selling integrated ERP systems to replace a bunch of fragmented legacy systems at manufacturing firms the landscape was littered with $multi-million project failures, ruined CIO careers, and unused software. And also by the way with high priced SAP consultants making a great living off all the complexity associated with these ERP systems.

Central to the thesis of my post today is the belief that as large enterprise IT finishes what has been for many firms essentially a 10 year consolidation effort of the distributed computing environment, pulling staff and accountabilities together, shutting down data centres on the edge in favour of large scale centralization, etc etc..we have realized a need for radical retooling and improvement of ITSM processes, which then drives a need for new ITSM tooling and customization to support those improved processes.

There be dragons there!  My personal experience, plus dialogues with my peers in many large firms (mostly financial firms to be truthful) would indicate that these ITSM process improvements are taking on the cost and complexity profiles of ERP projects. I am seeing project budgets that start in the $2-$3M range and quickly balloon to between $5M and $10M.  You want further proof? There is a flourishing ecosystem of consultants developing to help firms port their processes to ServiceNow,  which is perceived as the industry technology leader these days. This for a service offering that goes to market as easy to use and customizable by the end user!  Hmmm wonder how many of these consultants used to be SAP consultants? (smiley)

Now, large ITSM projects at the scale of ERP may or may not be a bad thing,if they are being managed as such. But I don’t believe that Enterprise IT leadership is going into these projects fully aware of the cost and risk profile. There are a lot of reasons for this.

1. Most IT infrastructure leaders view ITSM as a commodity and don’t put out best people on these processes, tools, or projects
2. They also remember when we were using multiple smaller tools in a departmental framework and have not internalized the cost/complexity of building large enterprise ITSM tools.
3. Or worse, they have taken the worst of all approaches and moved accountability for the ITSM tool to CIO’s and application support teams, on the premise it is an application. Fatal mistake! As bad as most Infrastructure teams are at running ITSM tools,  deployments where the application team owns ITSM are the real stinkers!

This lack of awareness, and failure to get the right quality of staff and accountability assigned to ITSM tool projects, may also be contributing to the high cost of these projects. In the absence of strong, focused leadership, the various IT teams protect the “mandatory and unique” nature of their requirements, ballooning the amount of customization required and thus the cost.

We’re truly repeating all of the mistakes of the ERP era.

My prescription? Understand that properly designed and automated ITSM is the lifeblood, core system for an IT department. It truly is ERP. Treat it as such!

 

4. Put excellent people on it

5. Be brutal about simplicity. ITSM processes do NOT need to be unique for each firm. Accept the basic workflow of your tool provider

6. But recognize that even simple ITSM processes require high capability tools at scale, and will need to be connected to other systems and tools. Plan on big multi-million $$$ projects, and manage them accordingly.

Why do IT Infrastructure teams fail to measure client experience?

If there is an area where I feel I have failed personally in my career as an IT Infrastructure professional,  and where I believe most infrastructure teams fail , it is in the area of monitoring and improving end user experience.

There are so many examples of  failed deployments of email, Sharepoint, Citrix application/desktop virtualization, remote access, AD driven policy tools, etc where great ideas were torpedoed by poor execution, and the Infrastructure team were not even aware how slow the given tool/infrastructure felt to end users, or how many errors were occurring.

And it is not as though there are not tools to measure this. Aeternity and Knoa are ISV’s with great tools, the usual suspects IBM and HP have tools, and in truth one can prod Microsoft into making SCOM, part of their System Center deployment, into a decent user experience tool.

Yet somehow we never find the energy to invest in such tools, or in truth to make experience, response time, etc critical elements in our deployments.

In fairness, very few internal applications are instrumented very well either.

Yet most firms do a very good job at managing and measuring customer experience for their external websites, whether they use their own tools or a third party monitoring site.

If employee productivity is one of our most important measures – why don’t we measure the impact of technology on that productivity?

 

A cranky rant about practices that continue to make desktop management too complex/costly

LOL. I guess I’m just grumpy as I write this. Most of my energy around desktop management has been on the positive changes we can make, whether that is virtualization, automation,  or BYOD. But there is a reality that there are certain practices or issues in the desktop environment that  are endemic in most organizations, and that just really complicate things and make it difficult to optimize costs and/or service.

So that drove me to come up with five must do practices that everyone must start NOW.

1. Move application/data integration off the desktop and to the back end. Client based integration may seem easier but it introduces complexity and as multiple applications do it, it makes desktop management costly and frankly ineffective. No more Office Plugins! Integrate at Exchange/Sharepoint/SQL.  Learn Web Services!
2. Move application clients to the browser. Developers, learn HTML5. End user folks – learn to love Office Web, OWA, Web access to Lync!
3. Join the 20^th century when it comes to authentication. All accounts/passwords need to be in Active Directory. If you need third party access (ASP, SaaS, etc) then ask Infrastructure, learn how to federate AD
4. Solve the problem of client installed applications.  This is a disaster in the current desktop management environment. If you don’t lock down the desktop, end users install applications that cause outages, security breaches, and extra support cost. If you lock the desktop down then you end up packaging and supporting hundreds of applications across the enterprise that have limited business value but radically increase desktop support costs. Then your boss asks for a benchmark to explain why you are more expensive than the theoretical Gartner model (smiley). We must break out of this paradigm, and even centralized desktop virtualization, my solution for all problems (LOL) does not help. We must

• Make the business declare that nothing but a core set of enterprise apps are allowed. (good luck with that)
• Make the users install these apps on their own machines (BYOD)
• Use client side virtualization to create an enterprise partition and a user partition, where they can install apps but are not supported
• Or solve it with one of fancy client application solutions emerging, like AppSense Strata, which in theory lets end users install applications without heightened privilege, and by using virtualization (App-V) minimizes support and DLL conflict issues

Bottom line. Application proliferation is making a mockery of good desktop practices, and increasing support costs, making it much more difficult to upgrade Windows OS and Office, and  inhibiting centralization, thin client, etc. Most desktop teams seem to be just mired in this. Time to stop the bleeding!

5.  Solve desktop roaming!  Windows roaming profiles have never worked and yet many use cases for shared machines still exist.  If you just use standard Windows practices you will find you’re delivering poor service, installing applications on machines where you don’t want them, etc.  You need to use more strategic techniques

• Use end user virtualization/profile management environments
• or ensure all applications are virtualized and streamed so no footprint is left on a machine an end user roams to
• or only allow people with virtual desktops/apps to roam

 

There, I’ve got it all off my chest. I feel better…

Two Leadership Books that “Talk to me” Right Now

Hey, it is my blog. I can write about anything I want (smiley)

I just wanted to share two leadership books I have been rereading lately that really seem to be impacting my thinking. Both are successful books, by proven authors, and have no doubt been reviewed by folk far smarter and more qualified than I..so if you want to professional view, seek them out.

I suspect most leadership books, and perhaps most wisdom, resonate with us when circumstances have us primed to access that wisdom, and for me right now:

1. A Sense of Urgency by John P. Kotter.  Mr. Kotter of course is the guru of large scale change management and transformation, and I guess you could read this book with that as context, but for me this book talks about the life many of us are living in large, still successful and viable enterprises.

a.  we cannot seem to change our overall processes and culture to reflect the constant acceleration in the pace of change. Science, technology, client expectations, and the lifespan of corporations are all caught in a flow of exponential increases in the speed of change, the time to obsolescence, the cycle time of a product or process, etc.  And yet most companies seem trapped in processes increasingly less effective or relevant, that seem excruciatingly slow compared to what is happening around us, and that we either can’t change or don’t even know need to change.

b. Add to that the enormous amount of “churn”, pointless, false urgency around the issue of the day, and the grinding caused by staff who seem to have a vested interest in destroying shareholder value,

and I think you can clearly understand Kotter’s core observation about most enterprises- that they are rife with complacency (we’re doing all the right things) or worse, false urgency, where there is massive activity but it is not focused on building value or aligning teams to get to a better place. Sound familiar?

Kotter’s book is great, and his solution is structured around one strategy, and four tactics

- Strategy.The case for action or change must incorporate both head and heart and stimulate urgency. No strategy can work on an intellectual basis alone. It must capture hearts.

- Tactics

Bring the Outside In

Behave with Urgency every day

Find opportunity in crisis

Deal with No No’s

The key learning for me is “behave with urgency every day” . One of Kotter’s key observations is that a full appointment calendar is the enemy of urgency. And that strikes home for me. Most of our calendars are absolutely filled with meetings, all of them I guess important at some level, but not focused on the critical urgent goals.  My day is incredibly busy, but not focused on the urgent. And I am going to change that!  It will be difficult at first turning down meetings, or extending lead times to schedule a meeting to months versus days, but I am going to make it happen!

Check this book out! It may well change your life.

2. The second book really “speaking to me” right now is the “4 Disciplines of Execution” by Chris McChesney and Sean Covey. I know many people are cynical about Franklin Covey but there is much practical wisdom in this book, particularly in these times where we need to be much more effective in executing on priorities.  This book may not deliver stunning new intellectual content, but the 4 disciplines, as simple as they sound, are things that we seldom do as we try to execute on goals and projects:

a. Focus on the Wildly Important

b. Act on the Lead Measures (versus trailing measures)

c. Keep a compelling Scorecard

d. Create a cadence of accountability

as you explore this book you will find yourself slapping your forehead with how obvious these recommendations seem, how easy it is to see they would make a difference, and how seldom we do any of these things.

Check it out. I am going to contract Franklin Covey to come in and teach these techniques to me team.

 

Cloud, Technology Change, and The IT/Business Relationship around End User Computing

It is perilous times for Enterprise IT folk in the area of end user computing.  It seems that challenging economic times, continued demand to strengthen security and compliance, and a changing technology landscape has many IT teams confronting their user communities to reduce consumption, eliminate entitlements, and constrain usage at the same time that business leaders are truly becoming aware of the disruptive cost/functionality offerings of Cloud Providers, SaaS, and alternative technology.

Can there be a better example than email?  Most enterprise IT teams struggle to provide a 1 Gigabyte mailbox to employees for an average $15 per month, while consumer email offerings at least talk about limitless mailboxes for free, and services like Microsoft’s Office 365 are trending to $25 gig mailboxes for $5 per month.  Enterprise IT can’t deliver the scale, struggles with overheads and productivity/automation challenges, and is locked into non competitive technologies like complex network attached storage infrastructure while the cloud providers have embraced commodity hardware, software defined networking and replication, and become orders of magnitude more efficient.

It is not clear how internal IT can respond

1. We vested so much energy in getting at least a modicum of control over storage and backup by centralizing it and abstracting it away from OS and application software we can’t seem to let it go when the tide is clearly turning to cheaper, software driven approaches

2. We feel compelled to be the conscience of the firm and limit storage available to end users, force them to delete data, categorize data, move to it specialized archives, etc when the commercial trend is massive mailboxes and powerful search engines to find needed documents.

3. Worse, the whole idea of IT/business alignment, which has many positive aspects, has suborned Infrastructure behind CIO’s and application owners, so that we now compete for project funding with those business applications, making it much harder to invest in the very technologies that might allow a viable internal alternative to SaaS offerings.

This same dynamic is being played out in unstructured data storage (Windows folders and Sharepoint), Mobility, and Collaboration technologies. IT is championing service and entitlement restrictions that could in fact save the firm money,  but always involve reducing end user capability or forcing more effort to manage usage, when the commercial SaaS/Cloud alternatives continue to reduce cost while offering what is always perceived as MORE – more capacity, more functionality, more freedom.

IT’s battle for responsible cost management, if it remains uncoupled with technology change to reduce costs, will doom us to irrelevance.

Windows Surface – Not Sure what I Believe

Well,  many professional technology pundits are disagreed on Windows 8 and Surface, so I guess there is no reason to think the “Confused Pundit” has the answers. (smiley)

What I will tell you is I have had a few opportunities to mess around with the Surface, and I like it. The hardware is cool,  although I don’t love Windows 8 its ok, and it looks live Microsoft is going to do some very interesting things with Xbox Music, and Games.  I believe there is a natural audience for Surface RT, defined by people who already participate in the Xbox Live ecosystem.

I believe that is the core point about tablets. Given their use profiles it is always as much about the ecosystem as much as hardware and software features, and that is why I’m not sure the Surface is for me. I take it on faith that key applications for me like Kindle, Zite, Flipboard, et al will be available on Surface, but there is a reality

1. The Apple ecosystem is key for me. I-Tunes, I-cloud. I-Books, etc are very ingrained in my life .

2. And I mess with Android because of the openness and sense of adventure. Some amazing stuff just bubbles up out of the chaos of the Android world.

3. And as hard as my kids have tried, I have never become an Xbox guy, even though I am blown away by Kinect.

And so I do believe Surface will achieve a solid following in the consumer space.

It is the enterprise space that I am truly perplexed about. In all honesty, I see the Surface RT as a great BYOD tablet, and tis BYOD I believe in for tablets at work. Surface will support Citrix, Good Enterprise and the Container/MDM solutions regulated enterprises need, while Office, Office Web et al will make it a powerful adjunct device for less regulated firms.

It is the Surface Pro that really confuses me. A lot of people I respect have bought into the idea that Surface Pro will be a powerful tablet for enterprises, and become that single device as it docks when you get back to your cubicle. I have to confess I have real doubts.

4. I wonder how responsive a tablet it will be by the time enterprises do what we do to all cool hardware we must manage. Encryption, anti-malware, forensics software, GPO’s, etc …all of that overhead would kill any chance of a responsive tablet experience.

5. and don’t forget that in all those regulated industries we have to block a lot of the personal/fun stuff unless you can achieve dual persona on the device…and I have not heard Microsoft even hint at that sort of capability (albeit a virtualization approach would probably work)

6. and lets not forget that there are few enterprises eager to start managing Windows 8. Most of us are still desperately struggling (and failing) to get off Windows XP  in favour of Windows 7..and that is not going all the well (smiley).

So my believe remains that Surface must win in the consumer/prosumer marketplace, and that they cannot of traditional enterprise deployments. BYOD will be the way into the enterprise.

I think Microsoft can reestablish their brand with many consumers…but they are going to need better commercials than the trendy dreck they are showing us thus far.

RIM should “re label” the Playbook a “Mobile Companion”

Continuing to call it a tablet puts it in competition with Apple, Amazon, and Kindle; and as much as I still love RIM I don’t believe they have the capability to compete at the OS. hardware, or content level with the big three.

But as much as friends and colleagues mock me for it, I continue to prefer the Playbook as a adjunct to my work life. I have an IPAD and an Amazon tablet, and they handle my personal computing needs very well. When I want to do work related things that I cannot handle on my Blackberry, I reach for the Playbook. BB Bridge works pretty well for those times I need to look at an attachment (although the 2meg size limit is irritating). And if I need a specific application or Intranet application, the Citrix Receiver on Playbook, although it never lived up to its early promise, is more than adequate for the occasional use I put it too.

I can’t actually explain why I prefer Playbook to the IPAD, which has a very good Citrix client, and that adequate Good Technology client. but I do.  It is however a limited. work related use case for me. My digital content. social networking, et al is mostly done on IPAD.

In my mind the BB Bridge use case is the maturation of something that was all the rage in the mid 2000′s, the idea of the mobile companion to a Smartphone. One example was the Celio Redfly, but there were many others.  Essentially KVM for a Smartphone, the aim of  these devices was to eliminate the need to carry a laptop around, by providing a marginally larger screen and keyboard to overcome the smartphone form factor limitation.  They never took off for a variety of reasons, mostly related to complexity, small companies, etc.

But the Playbook solves all of that.  BB Bridge is a marvelously simply way to connect to the Blackberry and see email. The Playbook has huge strengths in supporting BlueTooth keyboards, mice and in HDMI output to larger display screens.

As that Mobile Companion, at a reasonable price point, it should attract a lot of firms wanting to reduce laptops without necessarily dealing with BYOD or managing more complex platforms like IPAD or Android.

Not saying it would ensure RIM’s success, but it feels like a more viable model than competing head to head with IPAD as a tablet that consumers will consider.