Shane Schick's Computerworld

YouTube Fridays: All geeks on the dance floor!

Shane Schick — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:35:00 GMT

I've always believed that Friday nights were for dancing. This clip proves it.

I don't know if this was a celebration of a successful project being completed, a holiday part of some kind or just a really energetic staff meeting. But I do know this: these techies can move.

ICTC's Paul Swinwood on the promise of ComputerWorld Canada's IT Leadership Awards

Shane Schick — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:04:00 GMT

There's a reason we asked Paul Swinwood to chair our inaugural awards program for IT decision-makers.

The head of ICTC knows better than probably anyone else how desparately the IT industry needs not only skilled people, but people capable of leading great teams. In this clip to promote our ComputerWorld Canada IT Leadership Awards, he also points out a second essential element of this program: the fact that it will bring together, for the first time, nearly every major technology industry association together on one stage. Nominations are now open, by the way. Time to prepare your entry.

http://video.itworldcanada.com/?bcpid=7044989001&bctid=72106374001

Toronto's MFP scandal: IT issues that remain in the leasing inquiry's aftermath

Shane Schick — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:15:00 GMT

Justice is only denied if nothing changes. You can’t say the City of Toronto doesn’t operate a lot differently in the five years since the inquiry into its computer leasing practices came to an end.

You can see it in City Hall every day when Janet Leiper comes to work. The integrity commissioner, appointed late last year, responds to just one of the many recommendations made by Justice Denise Bellamy in her report in 2005, which examined the testimony related to a $43-million deal between the municipality and MFP Financial Services. You can see it in the appointment just a few years ago of the city’s first CIO, Dave Wallace, which indicated a renewed focus on IT strategy over questionable technology procurement practices. And you can see it, finally, in the fact we’re spending more time talking about how the city is beginning to pursue an “open data” approach than on whether its next upgrade will involve a lot of backroom deals and bribes.

This is not to suggest that Toronto came out of the leasing inquiry unscathed. While the coverage in the Toronto Star and elsewhere focused on Tom Jakobek’s supposed vindication, there has not been much emphasis on bringing true transparency to the way the city handles IT. In the last five years there have been ample opportunities to illustrate how its more recent desktop refreshes (there almost certainly have been some) were managed with greater controls and without exposure to conflicts of interest. Perhaps no one cares to scrutinize when things are above-board.

There is also the outrage that, after all this time, the OPP decided not to lay any charges. Given the nearly $20 million spent on digging through this scandal, critics grouse, shouldn’t someone pay the price? The real scandal here may be that, after going through the reported 800,000 pieces of documentary evidence, the whole thing may have become too complex to fully understand. Toronto’s goal from here on in should be that its procurement and upgrade process be simple enough to fill no more than two sides of a single page.

The ultimate barometer of whether the leasing inquiry and OPP probe were worth it should be whether Toronto’s technology-driven services perform any better than they did before. As recently as last year, NOW magazine gave a pretty poor report card: “When it comes to ranking the most cutting-edge cities in the world,” NOW said, “T.O. is a pretender – from the failure of city-wide wireless to the absence of big-name Web firms and the lack of work-friendly Internet cafés.”

I can think of more serious issues, actually. Toronto could probably develop better online channels for accessing and navigating city resources. The much-vaunted 311 service took longer than it should, and still needs to prove itself. If it managed to virtualize its IT infrastructure as so many other firms have done, Mayor David Miller could leave office claiming a legitimate “green” accomplishment. But these are just examples. Toronto still has an opportunity to show how a city mired in debt can innovate, to showcase efficiencies when the Pan-Am Games arrive here in 2015, and to empower everyday citizens with data. In short, it has the chance to prove the MFP scandal was an aberration and not City Hall business as usual.

Why we changed the rules for this year's 'Blogging Idol'

Shane Schick — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:40:00 GMT

It’s not just about eyeballs. It’s also about what they’re looking at.

We’ve quietly begun a two-week “warmup” period to this year’s ComputerWorld Canada Blogging Idol, in which we’re allowing contestants to get back in the game before the contest officially starts on March 22. After that date the judges will be taking a closer look at the posts, offering their comments and keeping track of the best posts so they can award a winner in May.

If you don’t remember any judges in Blogging Idol before, it’s because we never had them. When we first launched this program three years ago, we wanted to accomplish a couple of times. We wanted to drive the level of user-generated content to our site. We wanted to discover and support new voices. And, as always, we wanted to generate the traffic we need to keep advertisers and stay profitable. It seemed both easy and natural to base the winning bloggers on the amount of interest they attracted from their peers.

As last year’s contest went on, however, a strange thing happened. The posts about Twitter, the iPhone and other consumer-friendly technologies were scoring big. The more hard-core reflections on enterprise IT, not so much. When you look at the balance, I’m still really happy with our winners, especially Pedro Cardoso who has since graduated to his own IT World Canada blog, Making IT Work. But I felt that, as much as we tried to coach and encourage our contestants, perhaps we were sending them the wrong message.

In a Globe and Mail column published today, Roy MacGregor makes some valid points about how orienting a newsroom towards the Internet has a negative effect on quality:

Why search out something new when the old and tried work best? Why be a storyteller when a ranter will have far more traffic? Why be investigative when instigative is a far quicker route to success on the Web? . . . It is a terrible vision of what journalism could evolve into as it enters a world it so desperately wishes to own, but has little idea of what the available measures in this digital world actually mean. At its worst, "journalism" could become nothing but a rump world of contrarians slagging the same handful of celebrities and spouting off on the same long-polarized issues.

I am determined our editors and writers never reach this nadir and we don’t want our bloggers to, either. That’s why I decided to appoint judges, who will focus strictly on the quality of the posts based on a criteria that we’ll be posting to Blogging Idol’s home page (We’ll also be formally introducing the judges next week). Of course, traffic will play a role – I hope that some of the best posts are also among the most popular – but it is critical that that we prioritize relevance and value in everything we do.

It’s been a great pleasure to welcome back some familiar names to this year’s Blogging Idol, and I hope we attract a number of new contestants as well. And if you decide you can’t write, at least read what these bloggers are saying – help us prove that great content and great numbers aren’t mutually exclusive.

YouTube Fridays: Put a bunch of IT guys in a room . . .

Shane Schick — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:01:00 GMT

So this is what our readers talk about when their staff isn't around.

This looks like a fairly well-facilitated discussion. If nothing else, the candour expressed around skill sets and training suggests to me that the organizers had managed to achieve a certain level of comfort among the attendees. Perhaps some of the points raised here could become the jumping-off point for similar roundtables -- whether they're organized by a consultant or not.

How many IT auditors does it take to change an industry?

Shane Schick — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:05:00 GMT

I must say I’m impressed they managed to get someone to say these words about an IT certification: “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

But there it is, caught on film, in a video clip produced by the Information Systems and Audit Control Association (ISACA), which today celebrated a major milestone of 75,000 people who have obtained the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) credential. I can’t embed the video in this post, but it features CISAs from Kenya, Chile, Switzerland and elsewhere, all talking about how becoming a CISA gave them better job opportunities, better pay, and respect among their peers. Sure, it comes close to sounding like “I’m a sissy,” when you hear a series of them proudly proclaim, “I’m a CISA,” but 75,000 people can’t be wrong. Right?

At the risk of raining on this particular parade, the fact that so many people are how certified doesn’t mean IT audits have gained any popularity within the corporate enterprise, or that IT departments do anything other than chafe at their very existence. There are still many disputes between what various controls are and how they should be implemented. And despite all those thousands upon thousands, many firms still experience painful security breaches, data loss, and struggle under the poor management of the distributed systems they maintain. We may now have a worldwide base of great auditors, but companies may be failing to capitalize on what those auditors are telling them.

When I bring up COBIT and related frameworks to better deal with the governance issues surrounding IT, I sometimes see a funny look come over the faces of those outside the audit function. They don’t frown, exactly, but they sort of brace themselves against something which they know will tire them. They throw up their hands, figuratively or literally, at the complexity of governance even when the auditors are there to help them. Only once have I actually heard an IT professional say they welcome audits, because it allows her to learn something important.

I am speaking in broad generalizations, of course. I’m sure there are stories of good auditors, and good auditors. It’s just that no one tells them, because, much like IT security, you don’t pay attention to it until something has gone wrong. I’d like to suggest we begin to change that. Let’s have some of those 75,000 CISAs begin to share their experiences outside their peer group, in compelling ways that capture how their work actually makes businesses successful, rather than a necessary part of compliance. If there is strength in numbers, CISAs should start exercising some marketing muscle.

The dot-com bubble 10 years later: What it meant for enterprise IT

Shane Schick — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:08:00 GMT

The dot-com bubble didn’t leave a lot of room for IT departments.

Many media organizations on Wednesday took a look back at that moment of heady excitement when Nasdaq hit its peak of 5,048.62 and everything seemed possible, at least online. The best of the dot-com bubble retrospectives, at least pictorially, is not surprisingly on Wired magazine’s site.

This was the dawning of the “e-business” age as we knew it. It was also the point where everyone was talking about the marriage of content and distribution as “convergence.” (It would be years before that marriage crumbled so badly many firms probably wish they’d signed a pre-nup). The dot-com bubble meant big things for investors, for entrepreneurs and even for print media, which saw fatter issues than they may ever see again. For IT managers, I suspect the impact was far more muted.

IT departments didn’t necessarily see major benefits from the dot-com boom. They probably saw a lot more marketing – I would argue the boom benefited marketers more than anyone – but the process of setting up those first brochureware sites didn’t yield the kind of long-term benefits that, say, the rare successful ERP rollout did. A few firms probably got the go-ahead for online payment processing, where appropriate, and perhaps were able to bring on development staff for some portal-related work, but that’s about it.

More than one IT manager I knew at the time left the back office entirely to go seek out startup nirvana. There was also a certain concern over IT skill sets and the so-called “brain drain,” but I think that was more a result of confusion than anything else. If there was such a thing as dot-com skills, they were not necessarily the same as those required to manage a fleet of PCs, a data centre or a pool of storage resources. If there was increased labour market demand for technology professionals, it may simply have been because there were more firms sprouting up that needed the fundamental IT infrastructure up and running as quickly as possible.

In some respects, the bursting of the dot-com bubble may have been a boon to IT departments. In very short order, vendor choice consolidated among players who were easily able to supply their needs. Knowing that not anyone would buy anything just because it was offered through a Web site probably also made it easier to reset management priorities around IT spending. Over time, the real value of the Internet as a connecting point and repository of information would become more clear, which is always useful to the people who end up running this stuff.

One area of the dot-com bubble that changed IT? Mainstream perceptions about technology. Although the desktop PC had already revolutionized workspaces, dot-coms made technology, and those who were proficient in technology, appear much more creative, inspiring and connected to everyday life (Web 2.0 hasn’t necessarily managed to perform the same trick, social networking did for a while). And despite all those business failures, most companies today rely on their dot-com presence to reach customers, and on many other portals who act as suppliers, content distributors and provide other useful services. Sure, the bubble eventually burst. That doesn’t mean it was completely empty.

Help us find Canada's smartest IT department

Shane Schick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:45:00 GMT

When I hear the word “quest,” I think of a knight setting out on a long journey for a difficult prize, like the Holy Grail, which may never be found. Hopefully the Quest For Canada’s Smartest IT will be a little bit easier.

Launched earlier this year in partnership with Info-Tech Research, the Quest is a contest that, much like ourBlogging Idol competition, will rely on user-generated content from technology professionals, but oriented around their success stories and related to specific areas of IT. This includes business intelligence, virtualization, managed risk and green IT – in other words, the things that seem to preoccupy most of our audience.

Some backgrounder from the Web site:

In May of 2010 Info-Tech Research Group and the Quest for Canada’s Smartest IT’s sponsors will review applications from companies who have nominated themselves or been nominated to select those that qualify as the Smartest IT and/or Greenest IT. The criteria for selection will be based on the stories shared about how they have sustained innovation, provided solutions allowing for their organization to operate smarter or greener, and the ‘Wow’ factor that sets their use of IT apart from the competition. A select group of finalists will be chosen and an independent panel will meet with them to select The Smartest and Greenest IT winners.

The Quest will culminate at an event highlighting the stories we’ve collected from across Canada, highlight best practices, new ideas, and IT led innovation.

As one of Canada’s major market research firms focused on technology, Info-Tech is supporting the Quest with a number of additional resources: Webinars, assessment tools and video tutorials. I encourage our IT department readers to browse through these to help educate and inspire your teams. We’ll profile the winners, naturally, bringing some much-needed recognition to those who work behind the scenes at Canadian companies.

“Quest” is, in fact, a much better word for this contest than “search,” and precisely because of the challenges it implies. Innovating in a traditional firm is hard. Thinking beyond the difficult day-to-day realities of budget cuts and business demands is even harder. The Quest For Canada’s Smartest IT is really about putting the spotlight on your quests – the obstacles that have been overcome, and what you learned along the way.

As with ComputerWorld Canada’s IT Leadership Awards, which focus more on the individual characteristics of those who innovate around technology, the Quest is a vehicle for sharing best practices by celebrating achievement. There are plenty of examples of technology projects gone awry out there. Let’s start collecting the more valuable examples of technology done right.

YouTube Fridays: Poetic justice for the IT department

Shane Schick — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:01:00 GMT

Don't ask me what prompted this.

I'm not normally a fan of spoken word, but this is the kind of love letter IT staff doesn't hear very often. And not a bad way to begin the weekend. Enjoy.

The 'mesofacts' of technology and business

Shane Schick — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:18:00 GMT

The location of your head office may not change. That’s one kind of fact. The average server workloads may fluctuate wildly. That’s another kind of fact. And then there are the mesofacts.

Writing in the Ideas section ofThe Boston Globerecently,Samuel Arbesman coined the term mesofacts to describe those pieces of truth which are neither permanently fixed nor constantly changing. They do change, though, and sometimes at a speed with which we find difficult to keep pace. Some examples:

Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.

What may be even more astonishing and humbling are the mesofacts that do have an impact on your daily life, particularly where you move in IT. Most things in IT from a technology standpoint are expected to change at rapid-fire speed: updated versions of software and hardware, variants on malware, not to mention all the various acronyms and jargon. To some extent, re-certification and skills upgrades help take care of this i ss ue. The more slowly changing facts, such as who’s running a particular company or which vendor has bought what, are usually reported often enough (we try our best, anyway) as to keep most IT profe ss ionals up to date.

To some extent, mesofacts become mesofacts based on how in touch you are with the primary sources. Ardesman uses the example of mobile phone penetration, which was only four per cent in 1997 but reached 50 per cent by 2007. The average person throwing around this stat at a cocktail party might be quoting from an old copy of one of our magazines. An IT manager might not consider this a mesofact, because they probably hear more about how this market is changing. Things outside their niche – like the going rate for a family lawyer – might be more of a mesofact because they are more isolated from the flow of information about its evolution.

The mesofacts in IT may not, in fact, have a lot to do with IT. I think they will probably be more about busine ss itself. As they endeavour to become more strategic in their thinking, some IT managers are probably reading the latest busine ss books, or are pursuing training that help them understand the challenges of their departmental counterparts. Or maybe they’re just relying on whatever management philosophy they remember from their high school or college busine ss cla ss es, a ss uming they took one. Economics is probably taught a lot differently than when I went to school (it’d better be). In the same way, busine ss people may have antiquated, mesofact-laden ideas about what IT departments spend most of their time doing, if they haven’t been exposed to them. This could explain some of the disconnect we see in many organizations.

By continuously learning, paying attention and refusing to fall back on a ss umptions about what’s true, IT executives are bound to be more succe ss ful. They just have to get their mesofacts straight – at which point they will no longer be mesofacts, just recent news they’ve overlooked.

IT management secrets from the Grateful Dead

Shane Schick — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:36:00 GMT

Come to think of it, Jerry Garcia wouldn’t look out of place in the back office. The very, very back office.

I was intrigued by an article from Joshua Green in the March issue of Atlantic Monthly about the growing musicology surrounding the Grateful Dead and how many of their approaches to the business of being a band could inform the strategies of enterprise executives. Technology professionals weren’t brought into this picture, but just as IT managers try to become more comfortable with the business mindset it wasn’t hard to see where the lessons could be adapted. To wit:

Use good service to gain loyalty and buy-in: As Green notes, the “customer-first” philosophy wasn’t entrenched when the Dead first became popular, but there’s a reason for all those Deadheads. “(They) established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house,” he writes. IT departments can’t always provide the level of support they would like, but by concentrating on offering great feedback mechanisms and communication tools that create more comraderie among users, they might develop some ITHeads to call their own.

Add pragmatism to policy: Long before Napster and BitTorrent, the Grateful Dead were on the case. “Peace and love notwithstanding, (the band) did not hesitate to sue those who violated their copyrights. But they weren’t greedy, and they adapted well,” Green notes. “They famously permitted fans to tape their shows, ceding a major revenue source in potential record sales . . . it reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead became one of the most profitable bands of all time.” IT managers are often put in the uncomfortable position of corporate enforcer, denying access to Web-based services or programs that haven’t been approved from on high. Take a closer look at the tradeoffs – lower productivity, distrust or alienation among users – and see if there is an upside to introducing more flexibility.

Crowdsource the knowledge base: “Even with the recent renaissance, Dead scholars are few,” says Green, who describes the sizeable collection of information being donated to a U.S. library. “The bulk of the expertise lies outside the academy, with ordinary Deadheads. So Santa Cruz library officials have devised a novel approach (some would call it strategic improvisation) to curating the collection. They intend to post as much of it as possible online in the hope that Deadheads—zealous social networkers that they are—will contribute their knowledge, and perhaps material of their own, to help build up the record.” The IT environments of most organizations would be as impenetrable as many Grateful Dead Lyrics. Why not create wikis, forums and other intranet-style tools to help users track their compute needs, document the most common problems and brainstorm solutions?

If business managers can learn from the Grateful Dead, I see no reason why IT managers can’t do the same. Just be careful about citing them in strategy sessions. They might look at you as if you’re on drugs.

Welcome to Finance.ITWorldCanada.com

Shane Schick — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:16:00 GMT

The year 2011 still looks a long way away until you start looking at the work that moving to IFRS involves.

A while back I did a feature story for ComputerWorld Canada that examined the changeover from generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) to the international financial reporting standard (IFRS), which goes into effect Jan. 1. It means that for this year, as they get prepared, many companies will effectively have to run two sets of books, and deal with all the transition around technology and process that a new standard introduces. Talk about a pain point (More on IFRS from ComputerWorld Canada's Rafael Ruffolo).

This issue has been the catalyst for a new, vertical market approach to our audience that we haven’t really tried before. We’ve set up a group calledFinance.ITWorldCanada.com which will develop research, special reports, live events and online discussions specifically for financial services industry IT professionals or anyone in our community that is dealing with finance-related technology challenges.

Instead of merely reporting about the woes of the IFRS conversion, we’ll be using Finance.ITWorldCanada.com to hopefully help this group ease the pain. I’ve created a short, multiple choice, 10-question survey that looks at the IT requirements around IFRS. Although there have been a number of consulting firms and industry associations that have developed IFRS research, I’m not aware of a project that looks at this from an IT manager’s perspective. Here's a link to the IT World Canada IFRS survey.

In return for filling out the survey and opting into our group, we’ll be making a draw for a $150 gift certificate to Best Buy, along with a link to any other articles we develop from this, invitations to any related event and, of course, the complete report.

As it develops, I’m really hoping that Finance.ITWorldCanada.com becomes more self-organizing, where members identify the most critical issues, and give us an opportunity to either investigate answers or facilitate a conversation among peers to find them in a more collaborative fashion. Please help me make this research project successful. It’s in many companies’ best interest. The GAAP is closing.

Infrastructure management from a Microsoft perspective

Shane Schick — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:37:00 GMT

Just what you've always wanted: an hour of me -- and only me -- on camera.

Late last week I hosted a live Webinar for Microsoft's "Because It's Everybody's Business" (BIEB) campaign which looked at how properly managing infrastructure is getting more complicated in a world dominated by virtualization and cloud computing.

This is part of a series we're producing for Microsoft along with advertising features that are appearing in all our enterprise publications. Microsoft approves that content, and they hand-picked my guests in this Webinar, but the conversation was not scripted.

That's why -- although the discussion obviously leans towards a Microsoft-oriented view of the data centre -- I'm offering up this link to the archived Webinar. We were able to talk live to one of their IT manager customers, Patrick Plante of the CollegeSt Jean-de-Vianney, about his business case planning, deployment and early results. We also had on hand Brian Bourne, a longtime colleague who has blogged for this site and who gave some pretty frank (as usual) feedback on what clients are actually doing today.

The most interesting parts for me were looking at the issue of IT chargeback through effective infrastructure management and virtualization, as well as the response to a question from the audience about working in a mixed environment.

YouTube Fridays: The 'Toxic' IT department

Shane Schick — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:24:00 GMT

Britney Spears' lawyer will be in touch any moment now.

Although some of the jokes in this clip (and no, I have no idea where it came from, or the company it represents), are somewhat typical, there's a pretty down-to-earth execution and it might even make the IT department seem a bit more approachable. The best part really comes during the credits/gag reel, which runs almost as long as the film itself, and illustrate just how good an IT manager has to be at multi-tasking.

Why cloud computing deals need privacy level agreements

Shane Schick — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:52:00 GMT

There are some audience questions you can see coming a mile away.

I was hosting one of our ComputerWorld Interactive events this morning in Edmonton, where we were discussing IBM’s proposal that Linux is an ideal OS on which to develop a cloud computing strategy. Although most of the people in the audience have introduced some level of virtualization into their IT infrastructure, the concept of clouds was, to some extent, still new to them. I knew this because early in the Q&A one IT executive put up his hand and asked how any company could be comfortable enough with the privacy issues around handing data to a third party.

Although I let our IBM guest speaker tackle the question first, I followed up by suggesting that the IT industry has sometimes been too focused on the service-level agreements, or SLAs around the delivery of technology services through cloud providers and not enough on how data will be used or managed. This is particularly true in Canada, where provincial laws often prohibit any situations where local data is being housed in the United States, and therefore subject to the Patriot Act.

“What we need,” I said, “is to be more focused on setting up privacy level agreements that govern the data usage in a cloud environment.”

Yes, I just made up “privacy level agreements” on the spot, but I think the idea is valid. We have service levels because there are different demands placed on compute infrastructure depending on what’s going on in your business. Similarly, although enterprises collect all sorts of information about their customers, partners and employees, not all of it is subject to the same stringent collection, storage and disposal policies. There are levels of privacy.

A privacy level agreement, or PLA, would set out in contractual terms how a third party provider will ensure that the information it hosts will not be seen by the wrong sets of eyes. I would imagine there are already some provisions to that effect in certain cloud computing deals today. However the PLA would also include more detailed information about the escalation procedures should a privacy breach occur: how the breach would be reported, how quickly a report could be delivered to the customer and who would have responsibility for contacting the appropriate authorities. I would be surprised if this level of depth has been established in many cloud agreements today, if only because most businesses are too focused on simply shifting from a traditional model of on-premise applications and infrastructure. Privacy, as always, is something you deal with later.

Our event, which we called The Linux-Powered Cloud, didn’t dwell all that much on public clouds, because that doesn’t seem to be where the majority of the action is in Canada. But PLAs would still be a good idea in private cloud projects, as would a privacy impact assessment before the first virtual servers are deployed. If your SLAs – internal or otherwise – aren’t being met, you won’t be able to run your business properly. If your PLAs – internal or otherwise – aren’t being met, no one can trust you. You tell me which problem is worse.