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Do You Speak “IT”?
I was reading an article on CIO.com and watching the video clip that accompanied it entitled Enterprise IT’s Top Enemy: Its Own Arrogance this morning and after watching the video, I had a minor epiphany. Minor only because it is not a new concept. I hear it from our customers all the time, but the video really brings it home.
We all hate it when someone who knows something we don’t lords it over us.
Yes, and more-so, we hate the embarrassed feeling we get when someone speaks over our head and makes us feel dumb for not understanding.
It is a trap we all fall into, myself included. At the end of the day, what IT has to keep in mind is that you have needs, but they are not technical needs. Technology is the tool by which your need will be fulfilled, but you should not have to do the translating, nor should you have to sit and listen to all the translations, unless you want to. The job of IT is to interpret business needs and translate them into technology solutions, then communicate back, in plain English, how you will experience your new solution as a user. You really do have the right to not care about the technical terms.
This is something I talk about a lot with my teams – the concept of being an invisible provider, when that is what the customer desires. Our importance is defined by our success in keeping employees productive and supported, not in our ability to mystify and impress with techno jargon. I often think that IT, at its best, needs to behave like the electric company. Our users don’t thank us when things work (I know I did not call the electric company this morning to thank them for my lights turning on). Nor do our users usually want to understand all the difficult technical ’stuff’ we have to do to make it all work (yeah, I know something goes on beyond that little outlet in my house, I just don’t care what). And when something goes wrong, they just want it fixed quickly and efficiently without having to understand all the details. Fix it, and do what you can to assure me it will have as little downtime in the future as possible.
So take note – I get it. We get it. While the desire to explain the work we take such pride in can be overwhelming at times, we understand that you reserve the right to not hear all the details. Whomever you work with in IT, tell them how you want to be communicated with. Just be honest and let your IT know what you do and don’t want to know. After all, it is the job of IT to work to meet your needs; technical, business, and communications.
After all, you just want the stuff to work, right? If you wanted to understand it all, you’d likely be doing what we do!
Happy Computing!
Richard Brunke
In: Business, Technology
Office 2010: Pros and Cons
Every time Microsoft develops a new release of Windows and/or Office, the questions begin around upgrading. CIO Online recently put out a great high level summary of the Pros and Cons of Office 2010 for Business. Follow the link and take a read. In a nutshell, if you are an office users, you are likely going to want these upgrades. The increased integration with Sharepoint and simplified ability to share and edit Sharepoint content coupled with a slew of new features, including many that integrate social media sites such as LinkedIn via the Outlook Social Connector make this a really innovative and valuable release.
But don’t forget the challenges! As more and more users switch to 64 bit from 32 there may be real compatibility and integration issues, and you should speak to your IT professional about these issues and how they will impact your business. While integration and upgrade issues will drive complexity, the upgrade to 64 bit enables many things such as much larger Exel workbooks for example.
As always, the choice to upgrade will be divided between the desire to have the newest and coolest, and the need to balance productivity gains with upgrade costs. I think this particular release brings some new innovations and ideas that will begin to change the way we look at productivity suites, and bears some careful thoughts when planning your IT budget for the next year!
Happy Computing
Richard Brunke
In: Business, Technology, Uncategorized
My Blackberry has been Bing’ed!
If you are a Verizon Blackberry user, you may have noticed that suddenly, and without warning, your default search options were changed to Bing earlier this week. When you search via your BlackBerry ‘Start’ or ‘Go to’ page is now Bing.
First of all, don’t panic. You have not been the target of malware, or a prank, or any other bit of random reprogramming. All is as Verizon intends it to be.
Clearly, Microsoft and Verizon made a deal of some sort, and clearly not everyone loved the idea. I’ve certainly heard some feedback in the last week about the change, most of it simply related to having the choice taken away. Take note, you can still enter ‘Google’ or any other search engine you want to, but it is an additional step. In the grand scheme of things, while having choices reduced generally does not make anyone happy, this is most likely not the worst thing that will ever happen in the world of technology.
This type of behind the scenes marketing deal makes sense from a dollars and cents standpoint, I am sure. It just feels a bit intrusive. That being said, it is hard to believe that this will reduce the functionality of anyone’s Blackberry in any way, after all, although we all love having more choices, either Google, Bing, or one of several other search engines will serve perfectly well to deliver up the information we are looking for.
I think it is safe to say, that in a world where consumers are subject to marketing in everything from the internet, television, and even their movies, it is not a surprise to see marketing enter into the ubiquitous world of smart phones. As these types of partnerships and marketing programs mature, it seems likely that we will see a lot more sponsored links, preferred vendors, and pre-loaded applications on our smart phones.
In: Tech Education, Technology
From the ‘Technologies to Think About’ File…
With the proliferation of data from multiple sources, hard drives are filling up faster than ever. Frankly, even with reduced costs of storage, content is being created at unprecedented rates, and the cost to store and back up this mountain of data is becoming a real concern to business managers. Stack on this the increasing need to find green IT initiatives, and you have real issues – but at least these issues have real solutions available!
The answer, which is rarely spoken of in small business, but commonly utilized in larger companies, is data deduplication. Data deduplication is, at the simplest level, a process undertaken by software or a hardware device to find duplicate data and replace that data with a marker pointing to the original data. Think about a file or segment of a file that is saved in 30 employees personal file folders. The deduplication process finds the original, then puts a pointer in each of the other locations, cutting the space to 1/30th approximately of what it was on the storage device with no change to how the user experiences their data.
The benefits are significant:
- Has been shown to reduce size of back ups by up to 90% in some environments
- Reduces required disk space thus reducing disk expansion costs
- Reduces energy costs as less hard drives are utilized, less heat produced, etc
- Restore times reduced due to less actual data in data or disaster recovery
If you are interested in data deduplication as part of a cost reduction, a ‘green’ initiative, or just as a sensible way to manage growing data stores, talk to your IT staff or IT consultant about it. There are numerous choices on the market with different costs/benefits to fit your business needs.
Personally, I think that the combination of reduced hard drive requirements coupled with the positive impact on total data being backed up alone would be a motivator to take a hard look at these solutions!
If you would like to learn a bit more, take a look at HP’s data deduplication page for some additional information -
Happy computing!
Richard Brunke
In: Tech Education, Technology
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