Enterprise Initiatives

In part 1 of this series I asked the question, "Are you running IT like it's your business?" Then I highlighted five barriers for preventing IT leaders from being able to transform their IT shop into a well oiled, cost effective machine?

• Resistance to change
• Lack of resources (time, money, and human capital)
  
• Lack of tools
• Lack of metrics
• Lack of process

In part 3, I will focus on Lack of Tools.

If you owned your own construction company, would you equip your workers with hammers or nail guns? Many IT shops create budgets that focus mainly on business demands and infrastructure but forget about funding tools and initiatives that increase the staff's overall productivity.

Human labor makes up a large part of IT budgets. So why not invest in tools to allow your IT professionals to deploy faster, provide more visibility into operational efficiencies, provide better access to information, and automate administrative and repetitive tasks?

If you don't want IT to be viewed as a cost center, then look for ways to make your resources more efficient. There are vendors like Mercury, Rational, and many others that provide a suite of tools from project management, to development, to testing, to change management. These tools allow you to enter requirements, automatically generate test cases, and provide visibility into requirements traceability. These can be time consuming and error prone tasks without the use of tools. If you are a .Net shop, investing in MSDN, Visual Studio Team System, and the new Silverlight product provide tremendous productivity gains. If you are developing with Java, Ruby on Rails, or a variety of other open source technologies there are a ton of great development tools and they are free! But don't stop there. There are tools for configuration management, source control, defect tracking, modeling, and the list goes on and on. If you have home grown systems to perform these duties then you don't understand the term Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Why build and maintain these types of applications when there are companies and open source communities that have massive amounts of resources and R&D efforts to continually improve these products while ensuring they meet standards and keep abreast of modern technologies? Although some of these tools can be expensive, nothing is more expensive then having IT professionals performing tasks that can be automated by these suite of tools. And let's not forget testing automation. If done right, regression testing can be fully automated and executed as part of your daily build process. How many times has development delivered a build to SQA only to have it fail simple regression tests? I have seen several days wasted as build after build is failed by SQA and returned to development. With automation, all builds should have already passed regression testing before even showing up on SQA's door step.

Investing in PPM (project portfolio management) and problem management tools gives IT professionals the ability to proactively manage projects and production support. By having visibility into the progress of projects and the health of production systems, IT can prevent issues from occurring or at least address the issues early before they become catastrophic.

Access to information is an extremely valuable tool. This is often known as Knowledge Management. Tools such as portals, collaboration, wikis, blogs, and knowledge bases, are great tools for sharing best practices, training materials, standards, and various other forms of documentation. Investing in quality search technologies can be a huge productivity enhancer. Here is an article that claims that employees performing ineffective searches and wasting time looking for information can cost companies up to 10% in salary expenses. Ten percent of your staff's salary can easily justify the costs of search technology. Some enterprise portals, like BEA's Aqualogic UI, are implementing many of the new Web 2.0 features like tagging and ranking which are an extremely effective way to present relative information to IT professionals.

And finally, how many times have you seen your development staff rapidly develop and test some new feature only to have it take days or weeks to labor through a whole host of manual processes and procedures in an effort to deploy the functionality. All of these processes should be automated through work flow, including the approvals and audit trail. The work flow provides visibility into the status of the request and can automatically deploy the features if designed correctly.

In summary, when looking at tools think about the TCO. The more effective your staff is, the lower the cost of deployment becomes. In addition, by increasing speed to market you also create more throughput. More throughput means more business value. One last note. If you are still scared of using open source for enterprise applications, there is no better place to test open source's value at low risk then with development tools.

In part 4 of this series I will discuss metrics. Stay tuned.

In my last article, I talked about how the younger generation’s usage of the internet was driving a lot of the technologies that make up what is now called Web 2.0. The Gen Y and Internet Generation’s desire to stay connected with their friends has led to many social networking sites like MySpace and Flickr. Their need for chatting, instant messaging, and video has changed the way people interact and communicate through the net and through wireless devices. Blogging and tagging have become a widely popular mechanism for sharing and searching for relevant information. Kids’ websites, like Webkinz, have introduced very young children to online collaboration, rich media applications, and online shopping.

All of the above items are driving up the popularity of rich interfaces usually created in Macromedia Flash or by using AJAX. Now that developers are able to build robust, fully functional browser based applications, the desktop is becoming less important (Microsoft is Dead). I ended the discussion warning that managers need to “think like” or pay attention to what the younger generation is doing on the web.

Why? Look how technologies like portals and instant messaging started. Plumtree Portal (now BEA Aqualogic), was founded by then 25 year old Glen Kelman who spawned the portal idea from his usage of My Yahoo pages. Instant messaging, which is now widely used in many corporations spawned from internet chatting. Do you see where I am going? Today, blogging and tagging are already catching on as great tools for knowledge sharing. Many folks in management who are not up to speed with the world of “Web 2.0” look down on staffers who use these types of tools because they don’t understand the significance of it. If managers would start paying attention to what millions of people are doing on the web they would realize that technologies like social networking will soon start revolutionizing the way companies communicate with each other. It might take a few years for this to catch on but it will.

So I conclude this two part article with this message. Start thinking like the younger generation and go out and explore the tools that millions of kids are using on the net today. More and more companies are starting Web 2.0 initiatives so start educating your management now before they get left behind.

For more info, the best blog I have seen by far on this topic is Don Hinchcliffe’s Enterprise Web 2.0.

I have been consumed in research on the topic of Web 2.0 the last few weeks. All of my research keeps bringing me back to the generation of kids born in the 80’s and 90’s. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I was born as a Gen Y (1978-1990’s)[1] or Internet Generation (1994-2001)[2] child. Much of what is driving Web 2.0[3] is the online expectations from these two generations. My two kids, ages 10 & 8, are Internet Generation kids. Here is my assessment of their generation in terms of their online expectations and abilities:

1. Technically savvy – I am probably the only member in my family who is more capable of using technology then my kids. From the web, to IPods, to cell phones, to Tivos, etc. My kids could use almost all of the features of these technologies before they knew how to read. As a matter of fact, and I am embarrassed to admit it, my daughter at age 6 had to show me how to use the “mouse” feature of my Nano when I first bought it. So much for my dual computer science degrees!

2. Technical from birth – This is slightly redundant from my first point, but I do want to point out that they resist nothing that is new. When they see something new, they embrace it. When I look at my parents’ generation, when they see something new they run from it. Do all of the clocks in your parents’ house still flash 12:00?

3. Short attention span – If it doesn’t work, if it’s too complex, or if it takes too long, they are gone.

4. Advertising is break time – They are accustomed to fast forwarding the TiVo, Adblock, and various other technologies that don’t force them to sit through or click through commercials.

5. Independent – They don’t need assistance, directions, or user manuals. They are very resourceful and learn with their eyes.

6. Low budget – Actually no budget. They don’t have cash, and they know that if they want something they have to perform some painful duty (takeout the trash, clean their room) to earn it. So they are accustomed to doing things at no or low cost.

Now take a step back and see how these characteristics apply to Web 2.0. Throw in Gen Y’s social networking demands[4] and you have described many of the characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies. Now look at some of the statistics of internet usage by age in the US[5] and the UK[6]. As you can see, the younger generations are heavy users of the web.

So why do I care? I care because I think most of corporate America is missing the boat[7] when it comes to embracing technologies like instant messaging, blogs, tagging, social networking, and AJAX to name a few.[8] How many of you have a magazine rack full of paid subscriptions to various trade magazines at your work? Do people actually still read these things? The younger generations and those of us who are “web 2.0 aware” use RSS feeds[9] to get the news that we want. If you depend heavily on main stream news and paid subscription services, you probably don’t really know what’s going on. These sources are controlled and influenced by big money. Blogging is free and Democratic. Here is an excerpt from Paul Graham’s article Web 2.0:

The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news. I never look at any news site now except Reddit. I know if something major happens, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? Reddit's like an RSS feed for the whole web, with a filter for quality. Similar sites include Digg, a technology news site that's rapidly approaching Slashdot in popularity, and del.icio.us, the collaborative bookmarking network that set off the "tagging" movement. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough and free, these sites suggest that voters do a significantly better job than human editors.

The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection of ideas, but their production. I've noticed for a while that the stuff I read on individual people's sites is as good as or better than the stuff I read in newspapers and magazines. And now I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.

My experience of writing for magazines suggests an explanation. Editors. They control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing—95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down. 5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."

On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it's large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.

Even the startups are different this time around. They are to the startups of the Bubble what bloggers are to the print media. During the Bubble, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was blowing through several million dollars of VC money to "get big fast" in the most literal sense. Now it means a smaller, younger, more technical group that just decided to make something great. They'll decide later if they want to raise VC-scale funding, and if they take it, they'll take it on their terms.

I will continue this topic in part II of my next article where I discuss how IT management, who are typically in their late 30’, 40’s, or 50’s, need to start thinking more like their kids’ generation and start embracing Web 2.0 before they become as outdated as their old bell bottom jeans.