Christmas: A time to switch off...

Over the Christmas period, there'll be very few people who don't "keep in touch" with work. Some will take it further and be unable to leave things alone disappearing from the family gathering for extended periods. The winking light on the phone, or the buzz from a blackberry as another email hits the mat has a huge magnetic attraction and it's hard to resist.

What is this obsession with allowing work to intrude so clearly in to our personal lives? Misplaced Loyalty? Self-Importance? Fear of failure? Fear of losing stature? A distraction from having to spend so long with the family? Probably some or all of the above. When the CEO seems determined to be able to communicate at any time of day or night, there's pressure on everyone else to do the same, even though they don't have the entourage to help.

Let's be blunt here: Unless you're being paid to be on call and responsible for specific systems and services that your company relies on over the festive period, you should feel able to switch off. If you're on holiday, you should be on holiday.

It's easy to blame the technology in these circumstance, but technology is just the conduit that enables us to allow work to creep in to our leisure time. We only have ourselves to blame! I recall a TV programme called "Why Don't You?" with the ironic signature tune lyrics of ""Why Don't You Switch Off Your Television Set And Go And Do Something Else Less Boring Instead." (interesting fact: Russell T Davis of Dr Who fame was a producer of the programme for a while). Every bit of technology has an off switch, we can use them, there's no reason why not.

Come on everyone, let's have a very merry, switched off, Christmas. Spending time with the family is important, we shouldn't be allowing the tech to get in the way of achieving that. Instead use it to bring the family closer together, for instance:

• Skype: Video conference with your family in far-flung places. It's great fun. Share present unwrapping with those overseas.
• Collaborative gaming: Most of the consoles now have multiplayer family friendly games to play. Start with Mario Kart on the Wii and go from there.
• Music: Load up the iP* with festive music and play it through the stereo.
• Pictures & Video: Use your tech to get creative and show others how your Christmas went, what about time-lapse photography of Christmas morning?
• Oh, and the first person to check their email pays a big forfeit.

Happy Christmas everyone!

UPDATE: The BBC today has a story stating that VW has decided to turn off email traffic to Blackberry devices when employee are not working. Well done!

Marry in haste, Repent at Leisure

It's a very old phrase, apparently first used in print by William Congreve, but it is ever more pertinent in the world of work. How many supplier relationships have started full of promise only to be foundering a year down the line. Most of the time, this is because the foundations of the relationship have been built on sand - an informal or thin-in-detail contract and neither party really knows what is being delivered or received.

If you want a good relationship with your technology suppliers, the effort is all in the prenuptials. Here are some ways to ensure that you don't end up in the divorce courts a few years down the line:

Choose Well: Making sure you have the right supplier for your company is a good start. Using a company just because a colleague from your chamber of commerce does is not a good enough reason. Your selection process needs to be rigorous. Don't ever allow a supplier to think they're in a one-horse race.

Be Clear: Make it very clear specifically what you want from the relationship, write it down and make sure the supplier understands what you want as well, get them to explain to you what they believe you want and if they've got it wrong go round it one more time.

Service Levels: If you don't agree your service levels, then this is going to be a major sticking point at some point in the future. If you don't know the rules to the dance, then you're going to be treading on each others toes. For instance, you need to know whether you can call them on a weekend and what service you can expect from them.

Communications: Once you're in a relationship, on-going communications is essential. Don't just leave it until something is going wrong. Meet regularly, have a fixed agenda to work through and a desired outcome. Review the reports, comment on performance. Above all, don't ignore your supplier because that's a sure way for the things to go west.

Relationships: Build relationships with the supplier, get to know them and make sure they get to know you. Face to face meetings, regular telephone calls, it all helps to build those relationships which means you gain flexibility and an improved service. Don't underestimate the value of a great relationship.

If you do end up repenting at leisure, don't hold on hoping things will improve. Initiate an improvement process with the supplier and if it doesn't work, terminate the relationship and walk away.

GreenBOLD can help you manage your IT suppliers, it's an integral part of what we provide to our customers. We help you build those relationships and get the most out of your suppliers.

Technology and Disaster Recovery

Yesterday, I stumbled across a rather scary statistic: 80% of invocations of a Disaster Recovery (DR) or Business Continuity (BC) processes were due to IT hardware failures. That is a scary and what it says to me is that there are many companies out there with a multitude of single points of failure in the IT infrastructure that they have not addressed. This is not perhaps that surprising; removing single points of failure from IT infrastructure usually costs money and it's hard for many CEOs to understand why they should pay for equipment that's just going to sit there idle waiting for a failure to happen.

I met a potential client recently who had invested over £100k on a completely new IT infrastructure. All that money and yet they still had a major single point of failure: Their main server. It was running multiple virtual servers and it sat in the basement of the office that had a history of floods. The cost of buying a small back-up server and sitting it on the 2nd floor of the office paled in to insignificance when compared with the amount of unbillable hours they would accumlate if the main server failed without a backup. I'm very disappointed with whichever company installed the kit in the first place, they should have known better than to agree to implement such a massive single point of failure in a brand new system.

There are 5 simple steps for ensuring your IT is ready for any Disaster:

1. Identify all the systems that enable the company to generate revenue
2. Analyse what type of risks you have within those systems and the consequences for the company should that risk become a reality
3. Evaluate your analysis and decide what to do, either remove the risks (buy more technology) or you decide to do nothing and leave the risk in place, but acknowledge they exist.
4. Document everything that you've found out and decided to do.
5. Maintain what you've achieved. This is not a one-off task, it needs to be continued and kept up to date.

Going through this process and producing a plan should at least make sure you're fully aware of your potential risk areas and be able to make prudent decisions on where to spend money and remove the single points of failure.

IT now plays a critical supporting role in generating revenue in the majority of companies. GreenBOLD provide a service implementing and managing DR & BC plans for companies. If you'd like to ensure your systems are always stable and available, get in touch.

To Cloud or not To Cloud, that is the question...

I attended the IPExpo at Earls Court the other week. There were clearly three trends: Virtualisation, Storage and Cloud. Virtualisation and storage are relatively easy to understand and recognise whether you need them or not, but the cloud is still a bit nebulous and can mean many different things to many different people.

As the CEO of a growing company, how do you know whether the cloud is a good idea or to be avoided right now? Whether to get in to the cloud or not is not an easy decision, it's a fundamental shift in technology strategy and philosophy. To get the right answer you need to thoroughly examine your company to see if it's ready for the cloud. Only if the company is ready will the benefits be fully realised.

Moving to the cloud when it's not appropriate could result in a costly failure.
My company, GreenBOLD have just released a short, easily readable, white paper giving some basic advice and some simple questions to ask yourself before you take your company's IT in to the cloud. It's downloadable here.

However, ahead of downloading it, three things you should think about are:

• Where's my data and who has access to it? Your data will be moving from the confines of your own environment to the custody of a third party. How comfortable does that make you feel? Data Protection means different things in different countries.
• What security is in place? Cloud solutions are accessed via the internet so you are wholly reliant on the third party's security systems to prevent anyone accessing your systems. Is that a situation you can manage?
• What would you do if access to your cloud solution suddenly failed? It's not impossible that the third party hosting company could go off line, whether it's a technical or financial disaster. In those circumstances what would you do? How would you recover?

The white paper has more questions that you should think about before you dive in to the cloud. Feel free to contact us to discuss your thoughts around the Cloud in more detail. GreenBOLD have experienced senior IT leaders who have implemented cloud-based solutions before and could help you make the right decision.

The conundrum of Social Media and Time-shifting

Two things people like:

• TV time-shifting a la Tivo, BBC iPlayer or Sky+. It's brilliant, pause/rewind live TV, record a show whilst watching another, you know how it works, we wouldn't be without it.
• Social Networking during TV shows, twittering about X-Factor, facebooking on how bad they're dancing on Strictly, whatever, it really does add to the experience. Again, increasingly people wouldn't be without it.

Now, here's the kicker: These two things people love are fundamentally incompatible. If you're watching a time-shifted show then the web2.0 experience is impossible. Even a few minutes pause for a quick toilet trip means social networking moves from being a great part of the experience to becoming a source of irritating spoilers.

Is there any way the two can come together again once the viewer has done any kind of time-shift? I can see the idea of time-shifting web2.0 experiences alongside the time-shifted show, but that's going to be a one-way street - certainly it can no longer be an interactive opportunity.

Acknowledging that read-only is possible, can the web2.0 experience be linked to the time-shifted show itself? When you start to think about it, the scope of the problem gets very big, very quickly because of the variety of ways in which time-shifting now happens and the sources from which people get their time-shifting.

So, the question is: Will people go back to watching programmed TV rather than time-shifted TV so they can take part in social media associated with the programme? Maybe, if its worth it. If I was a TV channel exec I'd be driving hard at getting the social media element of the programme because it's the best way to retain an audience in these fragmented viewing times. What do you think?

A Cloud Explosion?

Today, Hexus published an article on SME adoption of the cloud. Apparently, it's going great guns and SMEs are gagging to use it and once they are using it they want to increase their use of it.

The research undertaken by CompTIA found that 18% of UK SMEs use cloud solutions with a further 30% planning implementations over the coming year. Those that had already adopted the cloud were very pleased with the experience and a whopping 81% planned to increase their usage.

Wow! I'm currently writing a white paper specifically for SMEs and whether they should join the cloud bang-wagon or not. It looks like it's well timed. It's not quite ready yet, so in the meantime, here's a few things to think about when you're considering the cloud for your company:

• Service: The internet is not a guaranteed service, there are no service levels associated with it. It could go down at any time and there'd be nothing you could do. Assuming that you're happy with this, you then need to understand and be happy with the service levels being offered by the hosting company, do they fit in with your company's own service requirements, and for that matter your customers?
• Where's my Data?: Knowing where your data is and who has access to it is something you should be absolutely certain of nailing down. In addition, what governmental data-protection legislation does it fall under? For instance, the US has far less stringent data protection requirements than the UK, particularly since the patriot act.
• Security: If you're accessing the service via the internet, it's only the security of the hosting company that stops anyone with internet access getting at your systems. Knowing this, you should be ensuring that the hosting company has security of your systems front and center.

Above all though, if you think the cloud is for you, investigate things first. Don't jump in and preferably use someone who has previous experience to make sure you get the service you require rather than one the hosting company decides you want. GreenBOLD can help with this through a part-time IT Project Manager with hosting/cloud experience.

Be Successful at Projects in SMEs

The idea behind projects isn't complicated, but lots of projects still fail in both large and small companies. A project can be defined as bringing about change delivering something that you don't have now that is not business as usual. So far, so good, that doesn't sound that hard to do, how much could go wrong?

The truth is that there are a myriad of ways in which a project can go wrong. A lack of senior level ownership, no-one being held responsible for the delivery of the project, a continuously changing scope with very few requirements, nothing in place to show that the project has delivered what was required. The list goes on.

Then there's all those different methodologies that are supposed to enable you to deliver projects for you if only you follow them thoroughly, but in many instances they just add complexity to what should be a simple and easy path to follow. This is particularly the case within small and medium enterprises where a methodology would swamp the project and bog it down in red tape that really isn't adding value.

So, how do you up the odds on delivering a successful project? My company, GreenBOLD, has recently written a further one-pager in it's 10 Ways series which outlines ten ways to have a successful project. Nothing in there is rocket science, in fact some would say its common sense. If that were the case, why are all ten points so often ignored? It's not a guaranteed method for success, but at least by checking off the points it will make success more likely.

Ownership is first on the list, someone somewhere must own the project, orphaned projects are doomed to failure. There must be an interest in the project at a senior level, preferably someone on the board. Second on the list is Responsibility. Having someone responsible for the project is absolutely fundamental, they can then take responsibility for the rest of the items in our document.

Unfortunately projects are often given to people without the time to dedicate to delivering the project properly either through time pressures or through a lack of experience. This again most often dooms a project to failure. This is something that my company, GreenBOLD can help with: We provide as part of our service part-time project management services from people who have a wealth of project management experience in corporate and SME environments. Utilising a GreenBOLD professional will give you a far higher chance of success than anything else, check our website for details and tell us about your project via the contact form.

Details matter to fickle customers like me

I heard a story once about an airline that found it was losing customers to a rival airline because the rival airline had an additional sausage in their breakfast. I don't know if it's true or not, but I can well believe it. When customers can make a choice, they can be incredible fickle.

However, is it always best to go to this level of detail with a customer during a project, it's not always clear, particularly when you're trying to work out what your customer's customer will want. I guess the answer is: Sometimes. The problem is knowing when that "Sometimes" actually is. I've just witnessed this whilst on holiday and I'm struggling to understand how it could have been missed when they got so much else right.

My family and I stayed in a family all inclusive resort - lots of kids of all ages. Very child friendly, ramps for prams everywhere, kiddie friendly pools, kids-clubs, soft drinks on tap, etc, etc. The whole place was geared up to accomodate families. Except in one fundamental area: The toilets, the male toilets to be precise.

In a male toilet, we men know that there will always be lots of urinals and just a couple of cubicals or stalls. These toilets were no different. The problem though was that all the urinals were at an adult male height, none could be used by children. So, the children had to use the cubicals. This led to frequent queues whilst the urinals stood empty. On top of that in one particular toilet, only one cubical was working, compounding the problem. Wouldn't you have thought that child-friendly urinals and wash-basins would have been a no-brainer. Apparently not.

It didn't affect the whole holiday, but we did have a few anxious moments as we waited for a cubicle to come free, naturally children never tend to know they need to pee before they *really* need to pee. In future though, and this is where I'm the fickle customer, I'd be very much influenced in to choosing a resort that had child friendly toilets over the resort we've just been to even if it cost more money.

Essentially they've potentially lost a customer because of one stupid little thing. They could have solved the problem by putting some steps in front of some of the urinals, but they've not even done that, I can't believe I'm the first to complain, or maybe I am...

Leadership courage: Changing your mind

I think I've blogged before about my love of cricket and how, particularly in the 5-day game, the captain of a side has to be a leader of men very much like in the workplace. England are currently playing India in 4 tests, if England win by 2 clear tests, they become the No.1 Test side in the world deposing India from that slot. This is a competitive series to say the least.

For non-cricketers this is difficult to explain, but by tea on Day 3, England were in command after much too'ing and fro'ing on Days 1 & 2. The ball before the tea interval gave India an opportunity to get Bell, the English batsman, out when he was doing very well. In fact they did get him out, but it wasn't in the spirit of the game and Bell had unwittingly been stupid and placed himself in a position where the Indians could exploit it and Bell was given out by the umpires.

Many captains would have stuck with their position, but MS Dhoni, the Indian Captain, over the interval actively listened to his players, sought their opinion, and also listened to the England captain and coach. He sought and found different views and opinions and on reflection, MS Dhoni decided he could change his mind and Bell was re-instated and was able to bat on.

A brave decision for any leader to make, but even more so considering the pressure situation and the dismissal was something that could have swung the game in India's favour once more. However, MS Dhoni listened to those around him and had the courage to change his mind in front of his team, a crowd of many thousands and the umpteen tv pundits all willing to give their view.

I'm not sure many leaders in work or in sport would have the courage to do that. In the end, the decision didn't affect the result at all, but most people acknowledge that MS Dhoni made the right one. It's a lesson for us all as leaders - have the courage to listen to your team and others and be willing to change your mind if you come to the conclusion you've made a mistake. Far better to admit to a mistake and quickly reverse it than stubbornly continue down the old path.

Well done MS Dhoni, I hope everyone learns something from your courage.

Groupnot (again)!

I blogged a while back about Groupon and the fact that I felt it was of limited life-span. Well, I'm glad to say that there appears to be a growing sense of reality about Groupon.

Earlier in June, David Heinemeier Hansson blogged about the Groupon IPO and how he was going to pass on the deal. My blog post was a view point, but he managed to put some actual figures on why it wouldn't work:

- They're spending $1.43 to make a $1.

- They raised $750m in the initial IPO and yet only have about $208m left after giving most of it to insiders and early investors and yet they're losing $117m per quarter!

- They've got 7,000+ employees and still growing

Will they ever manage to turn things around and make a profit? Not when they're chasing an ever diminishing set of small companies who actually want to do a Groupon deal. Amazon may well have taken years to show a profit, but at least it was investing in real-world stuff to enable it to do better in years to come. I remain convinced that this is not something I'll ever invest in...

I do however have a confession. Since leaving the comforts of corporate life, I am now involved in a web start up that has a group buying element in it and it's frustrating when you find yourself lumped in with Groupon and that whole business model. I know we're not a Groupon clone, but will our business opportunity be poisoned by Groupon's growing toxicity? I hope not...

A Perspective Change

A while back I blogged that it was likely I'd be leaving my current employment. In two weeks, that is going to come to pass. I'm fortunate that I'm leaving with a decent redundancy package and it's becoming quite a liberating experience! I also had to manage many redundancies in my team which is never easy, although I think it could have been a lot harder if I had not kept my team informed of what was going on throughout the whole process. If I had one piece of advice to leaders in similar circumstances it would be that you can never do enough communication and treating people like adults is critical.

The redundancy package has enabled me to take a completely different view on what to do next. I don't have to immediately go and get a new job, instead I'm looking at higher risk opportunities that, if they work out, will have higher rewards. The opportunity I'm most looking forward to working on is a web business start-up. The founder is a friend of mine and I'm going to join him in getting the venture funded and in to profit by year 2, well that's what our business plan says anyway. I'd love to tell more at this stage, but it's at a delicate stage and it'd be a shame to alert potential competitors to what we're doing! What I will say though is it's a massive step-change going from a big corporate to an unfunded start-up, but one that is rewarding in a whole different way.

On top of that, I'm creating my own business that aims to provide business partnership services in IT and HR to SMEs and 3rd Sector businesses. That business is called GreenBOLD, and I've already got the website up and running thanks to Donna at DFDesign. Now, I need to find out what CEOs/Owners/FDs/CFOs in £10m-£100m organisations think of the proposiation, contacts gratefully received!

So, I suspect over the coming months, I may have plenty to blog about. I've never sought funding before (we're looking for £500k), I've never started my own business before, I've never been out of corporate life for more than 2-3 months since I graduated, I've never worked for myself before or in a very small organisation, I've never taken this level of risk before... The future has never looked more bright and more bleak all at the same time ever before and quite frankly I'm loving it!

The PMO is dead, long live the PMO?

I spoke at a forum the other day hosted by Virtrium. Virtrium has recently completed a white paper on the PMO and I was there to state the case against the PMO. I'm not in favour of PMO, the ones I've seen in action have dragged their programmes down, brought more cost in and given individual project managers a way out of being responsible for what they're delivering. I put the case against the PMO after someone who advocated the PMO and before someone who debated the middle ground. We sparked some lively debate amoungst the attendees. All well and good.

What was most interesting for me was a chat with one of the attendees afterwards. Her premise was that whilst I didn't agree with a PMO, my company had a few other things in place that essentially provided a very light version of the PMO. Namely, we have a business change board and I run a rigorous ITIL change process which means however mad the project environment gets nothing gets to go live and into production unless it's fit to go in (unless we end up with a JFDI from the Exec sadly).

Upon reflection and discussing it with her for a bit, I had to admit that there was truth in her argument. So, do I after all believe in the PMO? No, definitely not. If the processes that my company uses would normally be contained within the PMO that does not a PMO make, but I do appreciate her point.

For a fast changing business, a fully fledged PMO doesn't make sense - a change review board does. Having some massively formal team who, in my view, drive down productivity and make project management the most complex thing on the planet is far from needed.

Give a project manager sole responsibility to deliver, get the owner of the project to manage the PM and make sure the owner is responsible for the results of the project. That's what breeds successful projects. How the project manager and the owner go about delivering the project is neither here nor there, but the project will be focused on delivery and being fit for purpose and it encourages projects that won't deliver what's required to be killed off quickly.

As always, I remain open to having my mind changed, but so far, I've not seen anything that's going to change my mind on PMO functions right now.

What's the point in IT Strategy?

Should the CEO of a SME be as interested in a IT strategy as the CEO of a massive corporate? Does it help a business if there's a sound IT strategy in place? What exactly is the point of an IT strategy?

I believe every business can benefit from having an IT strategy, but only if that IT strategy is aligned to the business objectives. A CIO I worked for had the following strategy: "Make sure that IT supports whatever the revenue driving business units do." At the time, I thought that this sounded like a pretty awful excuse for a strategy, but over time I've come to appreciate what he meant and in the end agree with him. It provides a very decent generic IT strategy for any business big or small although I would now add something with the addition of "...and strive to do it for less without compromising quality." At the time, my CIO was in the fortunate position of having money thrown at his department - cost-saving piece was not on his radar - this was the man who would happily buy Alienware laptops as business tools.

Anyway, I digress. A strategy that says "Make sure that IT supports whatever the revenue driving business units do and strives to do it for less without compromising quality" is a strategy that should work in any company, big or small. The bigger organisations can afford someone, maybe whole departments, to drive this strategy, but for most smaller companies they won't have anyone who can devise and make this strategy a reality even though they desperately need it. Sure, many of them utilise third party companies to support and deliver their IT, but are they really going to be interested in helping their customer drive down IT costs when it will directly affect their bottom line? Probably not, and so the SMEs bumble along with their IT costing what it does, not really adding value to the bottom line, once more the necessary evil.

Now that technology is so central to doing business, an IT strategy is important to every company, big or small. The tough bit is getting the right person or persons to deliver it, particularly if you're an SME.

Communicating ambiguity is good

I leave my current employer at the end of June. The re-structure I wrote about previously is progressing and as I predicted my role is being moved up north and I'd rather stay down south.

The merging of the IT functions and it's migration up north has been on the cards for at least 12 months, but until recently it's mostly been rumour and supposition.

In such circumstances, gossip and rumour cause significant strife within a team and my team is no different. We own and run business critical systems so it was imperative that my team continued to perform despite all that they were hearing. I think looking at where we are now, I managed to achieve that. Certainly we're in a better place than many other teams.

To achieve this was all about communicating, treating individuals like adults and taking the risk that people could cope with stuff that wasn't black/white or written in stone. Companies are so often afraid to communicate until something is fully formed, signed off, rubber stamped, but during that sign-off process the vacuum caused by the lack of information is a significant killer or team morale. I filled that void with my own communications and for more than 6 months before the announcement I made sure I communicated regularly with the team so they had as much information as possible.

That was often unverifiable information, but I framed it carefully ensuring they understood that our discussions were private, my views were just views, but informed views and these discussions only possible because we were adults and trusted each other. The part of the meetings where we discussed the latest rumour mill were often the most enlightening and useful parts of the meeting. Bringing it all out in to the open and giving my opinion might seem risky, but instead my team seemed to benefit. They appreciated that their Director was happy to discuss and give his view on things they'd heard and it gave them the opportunity to make better decisions about their future and direction.

So, here's the kicker: People deal with ambiguity in their personal life and they can cope with ambiguity in the workplace as well. Far better to give a forum to that ambiguity and allow it to be discussed than surpress it so it festers and hurts the team. I urge leaders to put faith in their teams and, particularly during difficult times, make room to talk everything through whether it's concrete or ambiguous. Don't be afraid of giving a straight answer or a view of your own. You and your team will benefit.

GroupNOT

Why is Groupon the darling of the online world right now? What on earth made Google offer them a billion dollar deal? What on earth made the Groupon board reject the deal? Surely they must want to get out quick from a business that's got a very limited lifespan.

It's got a limited lifespan because it's got too high a cost base, it's clients (those providing the deals) will get tired of providing such heavily discounted items and Google will write the same functionality into their search engine with Groupon-like deals showing up in the same line as search results.

Groupon survives on getting cut-price deals for its customers and taking an additional, but not insignificant cut from the price customers pay for the deal. So, should a successful business use Groupon as a way to drive up customers? Not unless they were mad. Say there's a restaurant that is busy most days. A Groupon sales rep pops in and suggests they run an offer, say 50% off a meal for two. Groupon takes a cut too so the restaurant gets say 40% of the actual normal cover price. The offers can be taken up over an agreed period of time, 6 months isn't uncommon. So the successful restaurant that has no problems getting customers is going to have a load of customers through its doors in the next 6 months for whom they're only going to get 40% of the normal cover price. A great deal for the customer, not so great a deal for the restaurant, it's not even going to boost their trade over a short period of time that might normally be quiet, it's not that predictable. Resturant owners are fully aware of the many and far less expensive ways of getting additional footfall through the front door. 60% of the cover price is a huge slice of margin to give up and to take up such an offer would surely smack of desperation. Only a restaurant in deep trouble, desperate to get people through their doors would consider a Groupon offer as a good deal.

It's obviously a great deal for the people buying Groupon vouchers and it's obviously a great deal for Groupon, but for Groupon's clients - those actually providing the deal - it can't be that great. This is not a symbiotic relationship, it's almost completely parasitic for the clients.

I cannot understand why Andrew Mason turned down the billion dollar offer from Google. As I said at the beginning this is a business model that will be absorbed in to a search engine with group-based offers appearing alongside search results. It's not going to take Google engineers very long to replicate the service and kill off the Groupon website by putting the offers in the search results and it's not going to take very long before Groupon's clients see how much of a waste of time and margin Groupon is. And so with a dwindling client list, a ripped off business model and customers drawn away to Google's equivalent before they even hit a website like Groupon Andrew Mason will have gone from zero to hero to zero again in a very short timescale and spend the rest of his life wishing he'd taken Google's 3o pieces of silver.

Of course I could be wrong, anyone think I am?

Product Support Rant! :)

Many years ago, I had an old car. It had 120,000 miles on the clock, but it still ran and did exactly what I needed out of a car. Twice a year, I'd get it serviced. I'd hand over some dosh and it'd work just fine for another 6 months. Whenever I turned up at my garage holding bits of the car in my hands asking for help I got help. They never, ever told me they couldn't help because the car was too old and wasn't supported anymore.

Currently, I have some network appliances in one of my Data Centres. The kit was purchased in 2007. Apparently it's end of life, not supported. So, I've been told I need to replace these perfectly good units with some new units so I'm supported. The old units have never failed, have never gone wrong and we've never asked for support. The manufacturer has been getting money for old rope for the support contract. Now I need to spend a load of capex to deliver absolutely no benefit to my business whatsoever. I fundamentally object to these tactics of revenue generation and it can be nothing more than that. Today the appliances are working fine and are supported and do the job. Tomorrow apparently they're out of date, a security risk and shouldn't be in our network. What the hell?? Who decided that?!

Why isn't the IT industry be like the manufacturing industry? The thousands of Windows XP desktop machines on my network run just fine, but Microsoft is telling me that soon they'll be no longer supported. Why? It's because they've decided, nothing more than that. To get support, I must spend money and upgrade to Windows 7. There's little to no business benefit from doing so, but I'm being forced to change.

So, here's my idea: Why not enable third parties to support these products from the official EOL? How about just like in the replica and pattern-parts business for the car industry, IT hardware and software manufacturers allow 3rd parties to continue to support products with their own security patches, OS upgrades, hardware support, etc. The car industry seems to survive with all these other 3rd party industries around them supplying non-original parts for those of us with dodgy old motors so why not the IT industry? Or one better, why not just make it all open source? Keen volunteers keep Linux up to date, why not enable the same to happen for Windows XP, or the firmware of an old Cisco box?

Then perhaps I'll have an opportunity to make the upgrade decision at a time convenient to me when I can provide a business case to the board that makes sense rather than the lame "Er, well, X company have told us we have to because they don't support Y product any more". Please, it's embarrassing for me and you. Stop it, now. Get creative, do something about it before someone else does.

The End is never The End

So, my company has announced a complete end-to-end restructure which will result in a large number of job-losses, particularly in central services such as IT that are being merged from their multiple existences in to one. It all makes perfect sense, actually I'm a little surprised it's taken this long to happen but there we go, one of those things.

Why would any company want more than one department doing the same thing for a sub-set of the whole company? It would appear careless to end up in a situation where there are multiple departments doing similar things, but when you consider that my company is made up of a number of seperate companies that have all been acquired and brought together in a very short space of time, it is perhaps less surprising. What may be surprising to some though is that even with all this internal duplication, we still made a decent profit!

Anyway, now that a lot of consolidation has happened with the technology, it is a convenient moment for departments and companies to be merged together in to one company, one set of departments and one culture. Out of all this, by far the culture is going to be the hardest to change, particularly when one part of the company is dominant and has an entrenched culture that does not fit in with the proposed new culture. Sadly, in my opinion, unless it does change the new culture will fail as well and it will cause significant issues for the future of the company.

We will see. What I do know is that it's highly unlikely I'll be inside helping, I think I'll be outside watching. That's because I think I'm going to move on and find something else to do somewhere else. Sometimes it's good to get a prod that enforces a review and a change in direction. I'm hoping I'll have a bit of padding that will help me be a bit more adventurous than I might otherwise be. 2011 is going to be an incredibly interesting year. Watch this space! :)

Predictions and Broadband

Are predictions in the IT sector ever worth it? I was at an event the other day where a number of predictions offered. A lot of research had gone in to these and they were all good, nothing extraordinary, nothing too far fetched. However, I was surprised by an omission that I believe is staring us in the face.

In essence, my prediction is that broadband must move to a utility model, customers paying for what they use, pence per Megabit. We pay for electricity, gas and the telephone in that manner, data has to be next, unlimited packages don't have a future. Customers want to download movies, tv, use iPlayer, watch YouTube, listen to internet radio, share pictures, play multiplayer games - it's all taking more and more bandwidth and let's face it the media companies serving up all this fare are highly unlikely to pay for what their customers download or stream. ISPs usually run at 96% to 98% utilisation, why wouldn't they, but now with ever increasing bandwidth requirements, they need to invest in their back-haul and that's very, very expensive. Then there's fibre - more kit, more expense. Someone has to pay and if the companies peddling the content won't pay then the customer has to pay.

ISPs should be making plans to move to a utility based model as soon as possible otherwise we're going to see under investment in the network, mass customer dissastisfaction and a government forever wailing about lack of internet access for all.

I don't understand why people think that delivery of the internet is easy or cheap. It's not, it's massively complex and massively expensive. Just to stand still, continuous investment of many millions of pounds has to be made and ISPs just cannot afford to make the step-change that's needed to deliver the bandwidth that people are buying through all you can eat packages.

Again, all this tells me that ISPs must move to a utility model. At the moment though they're all waiting to see who blinks first because their shareholders and analysts judge them on customer volumes and churn rather than data shifted. Who's going to be the brave one first? Come on, someone.... Please?

Is Facebook the new corporate website?

The development of the browser provided easy and simple access to websites for anyone/everyone. Before then, whilst the language (Hypertext) existed it was not easy to provide a user-friendly front end to sites that people would easily and quickly adopt. Once that easy access was provided, the world and his dog very quickly hopped on the band-waggon.

As did corporates. they saw their customers going online and knew they had to follow. Today one of the first things most new companies do is get a domain name and set up a web presence. Shops and services sprung up more or less taking over the DIY personal space website that had existed previously, even the government got online!

Now, post browser, we're seeing the next broad spectrum access tool arriving on the internet: Facebook. Almost half of the world's netizens use Facebook everyday already and it reminds me of how the web was at the beginning: lots of individuals creating their own little websites where they talked about themselves and their hobbies with maintained centralised lists of websites worth visiting. Not quite as interactive as Facebook, but not really very different. Already forward thinking companies are getting in on the act and setting up facebook pages that people can visit, like, link to or friend (a somewhat odd idea friending a corporate entity, but there we go). Right now, it's clunky, it subverts what is meant for the individual to the corporate requirement and it lacks an easy way of enabling someone to create the equivalent of a corporate website within Facebook. Establish this capability within Facebook and corporations will I'm sure move their online presence to Facebook and follow their customers. Why would they not, particularly when you consider the wealth of information on their customers that they'd gain access to, it's a salesman's dream!

There's work to do to enable corporates to have the same rich environment they have on a website, but it can't be that hard to achieve. Give it three years and it's quite likely that the idea of having a website for your company separate from Facebook could well be as out dated and old fashioned as the land-line. What this will mean for Facebook infrastructure and the very structure and intent of the internet itself is another massive question, but there's nothing as fickle as a customer and they really don't care about how it all works as long as it works and it gives them what they want.

I wonder which corporation will be the first to close down their website and convert to a Facebook page?

Ashes Retained

I could have blogged about how well the England cricket team were doing down in Australia a few weeks ago, but that would have been tempting fate. The fickle finger of fate has seen to it that an English defeat has been snatched from the jaws of certain victory too many times on previous occasions. And oddly, I'm a very superstitious cricket fan, so silence was the best option. Any crowing ahead of the final result would almost certainly have mucked things up for the Andrew Strauss and team.

But now, with a 3-1 victory in the bag, the Ashes retained, nay won again, I can talk about it. What a result, my goodness, I never thought that I'd see such a result in my lifetime, let alone such a turnaround in 5 or so years. Considering it was 2005 when we received a 5-0 drubbing, this is remarkable.

Some would say that it's due to Australia no longer having the side that it did and there's a grain of truth in that. However, even if Warne, McGrath, Lee, Gilchrist, Hayden & Langer had been in the Australian side this time, England would have prevailed. It would have been a closer series, but England would still have the ashes, no doubt. They are now a unit to be feared - ruthless, determined and focused like no other English test side I've ever seen. As a result this was a drubbing, a white-wash. Australia only had opportunities when England failed and that only happened on maybe two days. Those two days lost England a test, but it was the only opportunity Australia had, we allowed them that through our failure, not their expertise and capability.

It's interesting to note that 6 out of 11 England players were there in the 2006/7 5-0 series defeat. Flintoff, Giles, Harmison, Hoggard & Jones are not in the side in 2010/11, but no-one can say that those players weren't world class in 2006/7. So, what is the difference?

This is where I can justify blogging about cricket on a IT management blog. I believe it's down to the leadership and preparation. In 2006/7, we had a leader who was not really a leader (Flintoff), more a lieutenant. The management team was not as cohesive and the individual players were not well managed - take Harmison, widely reported as suffering homesickness and lacking the desire to play overseas, he never really recovered from that first ball of the first innings of the first test. Careful management and leadership would have helped, but I don't believe Flintoff had the characteristics or tools to enable him to provide that support. As a consequence once things were going wrong, there was no recovery mechanism or understanding of how to recover things. So, the series was lost.

The Flowers/Strauss team has shown how important it is to have a cohesive team driving a strategy that's clear and understood by everyone with everyone pushing hard to deliver that strategy. That's not only the on-field team, but also the back-room team, everyone. Everyone knew what had to be done and drove hard at getting there, working together, supporting each other, individuals stepping up to deliver the goods when someone else couldn't.

Ah, enough of the analysis, what a result. What a brilliant, amazing result. Well done, lads! Thank you!!