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The Enemy Is Out There – And Complexity Is It’s Name

I read an interesting article today that I thought I’d share. It dealt with complexity in IT, and how the more complex a project is, the higher the risk of failure is. While that is not in and of itself shocking, the actual statistics were. Projects/systems under a million dollars have a 75% chance of success, and projects over $2 million have only a 40-50% chance of success.

OK, I realize that if you are reading this, you are most likely not contemplating a multi-million dollar project. This blog relates to small businesses, for which I still think there are learning’s to be had here. Basically, the bigger and more complex a project, the more chance of failure in introduced. The author also points out that for the most part, cloud computing is an ADDITIONAL layer of complexity, and therefore should be planned for as such and not assumed to be a simplifying factor.

When planning projects, the goal is to break them down into the smallest logical pieces possible and then execute on those as individual projects. After all, that 75% success rate for ’small’ project is not really acceptable either is it? If the goal is to find a place where we are at 90+% chance of success, we need to really break our projects down to pieces that can be measured in as close to real time as possible. Daily and weekly checkpoints are relevant and important, and of course, having the big picture identified and managed to across projects is also critical, and not a skill that one should assume every IT staffer will have. Make sure that project management skills are carefully vetted when selecting a project team. Measure twice and cut once, as the saying goes. Or, perhaps more accurately, make sure you are not firing before aiming.

As you break down your large project into smaller projects with a higher percentage chance of success, you create a new risk – the increasing risk of not properly managing project interdependencies. That is why a documented project plan is required that captures the big picture, and shows how the individual parts nest within the greater goal.

Anyhow, follow the link above and take a look at the article. While the answers are not simple (nor are they given in the article) it is indeed an interesting issue and something that one should keep in mind as they plan out their IT needs this budgeting season.

Plan large, execute small.

Words to live by.

Happy Computing! (also words to live by)

Richard Brunke

BPOS is Dead. Long Live Microsoft Office 365!

Microsoft has decided to kill off its poorly named BPOS (business productivity online suite) product and re-brand it under the name Microsoft Office 365. However, they have not reduced the product complexity at all, and continue a long trend of creating purchasing nightmares for anyone who does not have a PHD in Microsoft Product Configuration.

The first key point is that the full client version of Office will NOT be available in the cloud with Office 365. Office Professional Plus desktop version will run on a PC and not in the cloud, but will be packaged in Office 365 enterprise version which runs for an expected $24 per user per month. The cloud portion of the bundle will include online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Lync (office communicator) and Live Meetings.

Following so far? Basically, Office 365 is combining and repackaging the existing BPOS offering along with the existing offline Office product suite and bundling it up for a monthly fee. So, the Office product is not really in the cloud in any way yet, but is bundled with the apps that are in the cloud.

Makes perfect sense.

Now, on to the more arcade details.

There will be a small business version for companies up to 50 employees. This will run an estimated $6 per user per month and will come with the following functionality:

• Office Web Apps for viewing, editing and sharing documents
• Exchange Online
• SharePoint Online
• Lync Online
• 24×7 moderated community based support (peer support)

The Enterprise version will run $10 per user per month and will add 24×7 direct support from Microsoft over the phone, web, or email.

The Super Duper Enterprise + Plan (my name, since I can’t find an actual product name yet) will run $24 per user per month and will include the desktop full version of office (as mentioned above).

And of course there will be a version for Education, but I’m not even delving into that one.

I suppose the real story here is that Microsoft is driving forward on its initiative to be a leader in cloud computing, but again, much of the real functionality of these bundles still sits on the desktop. Until the full office suite is available via the cloud, I don’t think it is really there. Bundling and per user per month pricing is great, but just adds more complexity for IT manager to sort through in figuring out what their Microsoft licensing approach and budgets should be.

They do state that 99.9% uptime is guaranteed. I suppose I should be comforted knowing that in a 52 week year of 8 hour days, I will only be unable to process email and use my collaboration tools for a couple of hours. There was an outage of several hours a month or two back, so I wonder if that means the rest of the next year is guaranteed at 100% now? I would guess it does not work that way.

I am happy to see progress on these products, and do indeed think that cloud computing is the future, but again, the key applications need to be all cloud based, and SOMEONE needs to help me understand how these apps will integrate with my line of business applications like they do today!

Well, I’ll keep waiting for that answer, but for now -

Happy Computing

Richard Brunke

IT Labor Budgeting

Every year, sometime in October, an annual tradition takes place in businesses everywhere. No, it’s not Oktoberfest, though that sounds like fun… that annual tradition is the kick off of budgeting season. October presents that cold splash of reality in the face that reminds us we are about to run out of year, and we have to do some planning for next year.

So, I thought it would be a good time to post about some best practices to help you with your IT budget. The challenge over the last few years has been ‘right sizing’ IT infrastructure and staff in an world of business downsizing. That has created additional challenges to what is already a painful process. Even more challenging is the fact that business ‘right sizing’ may have IT expenditures off kilter, and perhaps badly.

The first question to ask yourself is what is the right staffing and spending level.

Although there is no secret sauce to IT budgets, there are guidelines that may help you identify issues with your current spend. In the typical small to medium business, there is one IT staff person per 27 regular employees. As companies grow, this ratio grows until it reaches about 1 to 40 for large businesses. From a spending standpoint, IT labor should be about 3-4% of total labor on average.

Where this gets challenging is for those companies that are 10 people, or 20 in total. A 10 person company should have about 1/3 an IT person, or if the average employee in that company is about $65,000, should spend about $21,645 or just over $1,800 a month on IT labor. Granted, various things can shift this around, such as high maintenance users (you know who you are!), complex environments, etc. However, after quoting hundreds and hundreds of companies for IT services, these numbers work really well for estimation purposes.

The next challenge in setting your IT labor budget is ensuring that you have the right resources available for the money. If you plan to hire IT, what position will they be in, what skills will you focus on, and what are the gaps? In general, IT is not different than any other expertise, and no single person can know and do everything, so plan carefully on whether you hire a generalist, and outsource the high level expertise (often a wise approach, as those skills are used the least frequently) or whether you hire an expert and outsource the generalist work (I see this with firms that have specific skill requirements around an internal application most frequently).

I’ll likely post more details on other aspects of budgeting in the weeks and months to come, but simply figuring out labor is the most important first step. In my experience, it is also the area for biggest savings, as companies often over hire in IT as they seek to capture key skills on staff that are then badly under utilized.

It is a fine line, not underspending, and not overspending. However, start with a goal in mind, and work diligently to move your model to that level of spend. Then over time evaluate your internal service levels and satisfaction and adjust accordingly. It does not matter if you have internal IT, or an outsourced provider, but each year you should sit down (with your employees, or provider) and talk about your business, your needs, and your budget, and ensure that IT is a partner in your business, with a full understanding of your expectations, and budgeting requirements.

Ask your provider to help you with a budget! Spending several hundred dollars to build out a budget together may be the most useful thing you can do with an IT provider. The same applies with internal IT. Challenge them with budgetary figures and requirements along with service level and expertise requirements and see if they are able to meet your needs.

At the end of the day, IT is another tool that exists to support and enable your business. It should not be a scary black box that you are afraid to look into, or where the employees do ‘obscure and unknown’ things that must be critical to the business. Take some time and dig in. Make sure you are getting what you want, and ask questions, be demanding. You deserve to not only be happy, productive, and supported by your IT provider, but you also deserve to understand and control your spending levels.

Happy Computing (and budgeting)

Richard Brunke

iPhone Rises, BlackBerry Cracks

Interesting bit of news today: Apple has come out with a statement that 80 of the Fortune 100 companies are testing or supporting iPhones.

Perhaps more interesting is that banks, the hallmark of conservatism, are starting to make moves towards the iPhone (and perhaps droid devices) and away from the long term champ BlackBerry. Credit Suisse, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase are three major examples of Wall Street Banks that are experimenting with, or phasing in iPhones.

Why is this? For an answer, think about the Oldsmobile. Why? Simple, what happens when a beloved brand loses its ability to target a younger demographic, or becomes viewed as ’stodgy’ or ‘old school’? Simple, it dies (though death can happen slowly). Apple has managed to get their sleek devices in the hands of young professionals in huge numbers. In fact, many BlackBerry users (their work phone) also have iPhones for personal use. Over time, these users start wanting to consolidate devices, and want that device to be the cool, sleek, device, not the one that the company gives away for free that looks like a piece of tile with keys on it.

Does this mean anything to small business owners? Well, no, not really. It is just a signal that change is coming, and that IT managers and professionals need to not push back on these changes, but embrace them and ensure that best practices are upheld in areas of control and security.

And, as I’ve said before, put the customer first, put the employee second, and put process and routine IT policy somewhere way, way back in the background. Be flexible, and keep up with productivity and employee satisfaction opportunities.

Happy Computing!

Richard Brunke

Boggled by Google

Have you Googled something today?

If not, you should. Google rolled out instant search this week, and I am not sure that my brain is ready for it. As you type, Google guesses where you are going and results stream along as you go. So, as you type in your keyword, things keep moving around. Want to check on the most recent Seattle Seahawk news? Be prepared for a dizzying array of ever shifting links about Seattle, Seattle news, Seattle Weather, then finally Seattle Sounders and at the end, the Seattle Seahawks to appear.

It seems clever, and Google says it will save me 2 to 5 seconds per search. That may be true, but in a world where we are already inundated with information, it feels like they are simply begging me to get distracted. I save 2 seconds and then spend 5 minutes looking at the weather, and the news of the day, and yes, I even checked on the Seattle Sounders. It’s like they are screaming ‘LOOK AT ALL THIS STUFF YOU ARE MISSING!’

Enough already. Stop helping me. I’m getting a headache. It’s like they turned the internet on high. Let’s go back to low, it was enough for me. For the nautically inclined, it is no longer safe to search the word sextant. The destination is fine, the journey was a little X rated.

Happy Computing!

Richard Brunke

Compliance and the Cloud

I’ve talked a LOT about cloud computing, mostly pointing out the issues that are not yet resolved. Sometimes I feel like a contrarian, but the fact is, the mainstream media is focused on presenting the ‘next big thing’ and little things like facts and concerns are not going to get in the way.

To be sure, cloud computing is here to stay, and is destined to be large part of the future for IT, but it is certainly not the whole picture.  And, as I have stated, there are still issues to resolve (read prior posts). What I want to talk about today, however, is one key topic that there may be confusion (or just lacking information) about: Data Compliance.

There seems to be some belief that cloud computing will solve compliance isssues. Just move your data to the cloud, and those pesky, expensive compliance issues are someone else’s problem, right? Well, no, they  are not. And worse yet, they are not yet managable problems. There are two key points with regards to data compliance that you should consider if you are thinking of a cloud computing initiative:

1. You really won’t know where your data is, and in many cases with large providers, they won’t either. Data laws may differ regionally, and the fact is, where the data itself resides may have legal consequences. Most laws are written with the assumption that the data ‘owner’ has control over the location of, and decisions around, their data. This is a fundamental flaw in thinking when it comes to cloud computing, where even the provider may not be able to tell you where your data is, or even what region it is hosted in.

2. Cloud providers are not able to provide for your compliance because the simple fact is, they don’t know what data they are hosting, or how it is used. They are only looking at providing a medium to store and retrieve at this point. They can’t possibly know (and deal with) and legal compliance issues surround that data.

I believe that these can be real deal breakers. In time, providers are going to have to start understanding this need, and dealing with it. Providers will start ‘productizing’ their offerings to include specific compliance packages for specific uses. Costs will go up, and some of the ROI of cloud computing will be watered down relative to the costs of hosting internally. In fact, depending on the complexity and importance of various data compliance issues (take HIPAA as an example) I believe it will prove more cost effective to retain control and ensure compliance, and a quick risk/reward analysis will show the cost of a major compliance breach.

The problem with new technology advances is that the capability of technology to solve issues surpasses our ability to really think through the unintended consequences. A small medical office goes to hosted exchange only, knowing that hosting their medical records may not be the right answer for them. They attach documents through emails and… oops, now they have a HIPPA compliance issue as they can no longer assure that those records are secure, in fact, they don’t even know who can access those files, and where they are stored.

Many things to think about, and many things to talk to an IT pro about!

Happy Computing!

Richard Brunke

Partially Cloudy With a Chance of Frustration

This week, the Microsoft BPOS Cloud Suite (their cloud based offering for Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting) experienced intermittent access to the data center (thus intermittent access to their apps) over a two hour period between 8:30 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. Eastern Time.

In other words, for those that have moved to these cloud based applications, for about two hours they could not be productive, assuming that email or Share Point, for example, were critical to their productivity (I know email is critical to my productivity, and that of my company).

This service comes with a 99.9% uptime guarentee. Well, that gives them about 2 hours a year of downtime, and that’s all been used up. The problem is, of course, that 2 hours does not seem so bad until it happens in the middle of a busy day, or during peak order times, etc. The other problem, of course, is that it is completely outside of your control.

Does this mean that cloud computing is doomed to failure? No, of course not. It is just a reminder that cloud computing, like any other IT choice, has its advantages, and its risks, and these should be thought through carefully and realistically. It continues to be my belief that cloud computing has a number of hurdles to overcome, most of which it will, given time, however, IT departments and business users need to continue to understand what all the issues and options are before making a choice to go to the cloud.

That way, every surprise can be a pleasant one.

Happy Computing,

Richard Brunke

Employees Asking For iPad’s?

Since it’s inception, the iPad has garnered no shortage of attention. It most certainly is a fantastic device with broad appeal and a wide variety of useful functions.

The question is, is this a business device worthy of investment? Will it increase productivity for your employees?

I’m going to start off with my answer right off the top instead of keeping you waiting. No, the iPad is not a natural laptop replacement, and it is not likely a smart investment for most businesses at this time.

Not to say it is not a great device, but it is a device pointed at the consumer market for mobile entertainment, and social networking. The following is a list of the issues I see in using this as core business device:

1. No built in printing capability. You need to buy an app to print. Granted, that is a reasonable workaround, but integrated printing would be a primary feature of any device that is intended for business.
2. Availability and compatibility of business applications. The vast majority of applications for the iPad are for personal use, not business. Key line of business applications are most likely not compatible.
3. Device is not designed for heavy typing. Business use would require adding an external keyboard, which then becomes awkward for moving about and storing. Multiple unattached devices are not convenient. Better to use a small notebook computer at that point.
4. No flash support. Many websites and other presentation type materials use flash.
5. Wireless only, no wired office support. Not a huge deal, but if your office is not wireless, it will be.
6. Not file centric, but document centric. The way we think about computing in the office is at the document level. PC’s are setup around documents that then launch the application. This allows us to focus on the content, not the application. Mobile devices are application centric, which means you open the application to get at the files. While subtle, this becomes an issue when dealing with multitudes of files and file types during the course of a day.

Is this to say that an iPad is not worthy of purchase for business use? No, of course not. It can be a great addition to the tool set of any employee, as long as you understand it is not going to replace other workplace tools such as the laptop, but will be in addition to them. One of my employees purchased on for personal use and says that it is very handy for showing diagrams and brief presentations with clients. Could also be done on a laptop screen, but the flat device is easy to sit around and look at for quick presentations with small groups. He also admits that it is not a great business tool for him beyond that.

So, the final call for me is to hold off on iPad purchases for business as an investment, unless it is an investment in employee satisfaction, as surely your employees would enjoy having such a device. Just don’t expect productivity to increase, or other equipment costs to decrease. Considering that the tablet is just coming into its own, it is a certainty that most, or all of the above issues will be resolved by one product or another in the years to come, and that tablet devices will become a routine and required part of business in the future… but not yet.

Until that time,

Happy Computing!

Richard Brunke

Mobile Device Security

I recently wrote an article for the WSCPA (Washington Society of of CPA’s) about Mobile Device Security. The article was not focused on the newest device flaw, or any particular fan-boy approach to the best or the worst device, but included a general approach to treating mobile devices with the same care you give towards managing laptop users.

Perhaps in the future I will re-post the entire article, but for now, here are the key points to developing a policy for mobile devices:

1. Require that passwords be used. Password protection is a standard feature of mobile devices, yet few users utilize it as they find it inconvenient. This simple step is the most effective way to ensure the data on a device stays secure until it can be remote wiped.
2. Turn on encryption!  All the common devices have the ability to transmit data in an encrypted fashion, so make sure this is turned on with any device being used for email!
3. Enable remote wipe! Ensure that your IT department gives itself access to every device so that they can remote wipe any lost or stolen device.
4. Be clear on intellectual property policies! Business email and data transmitted to mobile devices is indeed intellectual property, and mobile device users must have clear policies outlining this fact, so that they understand the rights of the company to secure that data.
5. Turn Bluetooth to hidden mode. Limit exposure to hackers who may discover your device if it is in default always on and discoverable mode.
6. Have an acceptable use policy for applications. Applications are a big part of what owning a mobile device is becoming about… but they also can create a lot of issues, and they may present specific security risks. These applications can enable data theft, password theft, or other issues.  If someone wants corporate data on their personal device, they may have to submit to some controls over what types of applications they run. If you are concerned about security, it may be important to limit the ability to load applications, or to require that applications loaded be vetted by IT first, as you can’t trust that the various places these come from (iPhone store, etc) can properly police all the applications presented to ensure that they don’t harbor malicious code or spyware.

Happy (mobile) computing!

Richard Brunke

The Catch Up Game

Normally I post about tech trends, but today I want to talk about what appears to be the beginnings of a business trend in the Puget Sound area. The fact is, the gloom seems to be lifting, and IT spend is coming back into the market at levels not seen for a while. Granted, much of this is driven by projects held off for, in some cases, several years too long, but the fact is, the economy no longer feels as much like the great black hole that may swallow businesses whole, and pragmatism is taking hold.

It is very difficult to know in real time where the bottom of an economy is, and when we are heading up or down, but at the end of the day, there are things we have to do to keep the doors open such as pay our employees, pay rent, and keep our computing infrastructure running. And more importantly, there comes a time when we realize that we don’t just want to keep the doors open, but we want to grow and thrive.

My experience is that many smaller businesses stretched their dollars by holding back on IT spend by holding off on upgrades and routine maintenance. This generally has little impact in the short term, but has an increasingly growing cost the longer you wait. As it has become increasingly evident that, while the business environment is challenging, it is still driven by the same requirements it always has, and putting off investment will hobble growth, productivity, and competitive advantage.

Due to this, project spend is on the rise, and rather rapidly. It’s the old catch up game as businesses realize that they are overdue for moving off of XP, for moving off of old versions of Microsoft Server or other core applications, and for updating hardware, upgrading networks, etc.

As all of this pent up demand hits the market, it becomes a bit of a feeding frenzy for qualified resources. As you plan for getting the help you need to catch up in IT, ask yourself a few key questions:

1. Am I ready to increase my fixed costs in IT, or should this be variable project work?
2. If I am ready to increase long term fixed costs, how do I do so in a way to maximize the quality of support and quantity of support I get for that spend?
3. Have I kept up on technology offerings to the extent that I can make solid decisions regarding upgrades, changes, and purchases to ensure I don’t waste any money short or long term?

Make sure that you invest in IT the same as you would invest in any other aspect of your business; thoughtfully, carefully, and with foresight and after doing your homework.

This is a great time to slow down a bit and assess where you are in regards to your technology and your business needs. Slow down long enough to develop a plan for your IT spending and make sure you evaluate options. Otherwise, working from old upgrade plans may bring about wasting money on plans which are no longer appropriate from a business and technology standpoint.

It’s been great to see more energy and enthusiasm about IT spend, as it is part of a general increase in confidence in business, and often goes hand in hand with hiring. Just make sure you step back and validate your plans and realize that a small investment in planning now may save you a lot of money over the next few years, and, if in doubt, call us and ask for help!

Happy Computing!

Richard Brunke

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