I really do hate my Microsoft EA

Our Microsoft EA is up this summer. We have started doing a review of our EA agreement, and I am looking to cut it back or eliminate it. Here are my motivations:

• It is the largest single line item in my IT budget, making it a prime target
• We tend to upgrade to the latest and greatest stuff because we own the rights to it. I want to do fewer upgrades moving forward, as we spend a huge amount of time upgrading stuff that could be better spent adding new value to the business
• Speaking of adding value, compared to my cloud apps, the pace of innovation is snail like. For example, we recently finished an Exchange upgrade to 2010. Combined with Office 2010, this gave us maybe half a dozen new features that are visible to our user community. Six features every three years, and you have to spend a few man-months of effort to take advantage of them. Shame on me. By contrast, SalesForce gives my users about 20 cool new features every four months! And I don’t have to do anything, they are just there.  GoodData gives me new stuff at least monthly, if not sooner. Bottom line; the pace of innovation in the cloud is just orders of magnitude faster than what we get from MS (and our other tradition software)
• Microsoft makes the whole thing just too damned hard. The “Product Use Rights” document (PUR) is 138 pages. Really. Only the Government could make it harder

I’m sure I’m forgetting some stuff, but you get the idea. I am even likely to take us to Gmail (from Exchange) later this year. After all, Google has given their users nearly 200 enhancements to messaging in the last year or so. I think I would rather be on that train than run over by it.

And for anyone is having trouble sleeping, here is a link to the MS PUR http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/product-licensing.aspx, and the 26 page document that explains it J

When is a cloud not really a cloud?

...When you stick the word "private" in front of it.

I have a pretty cool data center. State of the art, IP storage, Virtualization, you name it, we are fully buzz-word compliant. When I was describing to some of my peers at a CIO conference not long ago, one of them said "You have a private cloud!" with much enthusiasm. It took me by surprise, as I had never thought of it that way before. I said that I guess you could call it that. Later, after much discussion and wrestling with the idea of a private cloud, I decided there was no such thing. Sure the modern virtualized data center has advantages over the old physical world, but it also comes with its own set of challenges, and my internal IT group still has to deal with physical infrastructure, and more critically, maintain and upgrade apps.

With my cloud applications (the real ones) I never have to worry about the apps, they are just there. Most of them give me cool new features, stuff that adds value to the business, multiple times per year. In contrast, we just spent many man-months upgrading our MS Exchange system. Sure there are a few cool new features, but if I had put that much energy into adding new business value, it would have been much better spent.

I still maintain that I am not moving to the cloud for clouds sake. I am solving problems for the business. Most of the new things we do these days are in the cloud, but we choose them because that seems to be where all of the innovation is these days. When was the last time you really saw something innovative from one of the traditional big software vendors?

And on a similar note, taking you bloated, traditionally in-house application and running it on public infrastructure is not the same thing. Using my Exchange example, you'll still wait three years between batches of new features.

Our IT Road Map

We publish a monthly IT road map. It highlights upcoming changes to our infrastructure or systems, and more importantly, new value we are going to be delivering to the business, and when to expect these things. Here's is a page to give you an idea of what it looks like.

I have been surprised at the response. We publish this via Salesforce Chatter, our internal social media platform, and it goes to all employees. This level of transparency has helped us prioritize, and keeps everyone plugged in to what we are doing. Publishing via Chatter gives the employees an easy way to give us feedback; just reply to the post, and gives us an easy way to track who is looking at it.

It has also helped us be a bit more realistic about what we are going to do. If we haven't done at least basic scoping or allocated resources, it probably doesn't belong on the road map. Setting a date to something that is just a dream at this point just sets false expectations, and leads to us disappointing the business.

We are going to add a "Futures" section that will be a place for us to list the things we are thinking about to give a sense of our IT vision.

In short, keeping the business in the loop with IT initiatives helps keep them in line with the needs of the business, which is a good thing. 

A Short Rant

My wife and I went to the First Night celebration in Portsmouth New Hampshire on New Year's eve. We were enjoying cigars as we walked down the street. For the first time ever, several folks gave us considerable grief about our smokes, including one teenager that was way too young to be so grumpy. What ever happened to New Hampshire? This used to be the Live Free or Die state. It is the main reason I moved here 23 years ago.

It is a bit ironic; if these busy-bodies hadn't lobbied to ban the cigar bars they never went to, I would have been there enjoying a scotch and a cigar.

Why does it seem that folks just can't but the hell out of others lives anymore?

See the rock, hit the rock!

This is really yet another post about how important it is to focus on the right things. I have been involved in many discussions with peers lately, and many seem to be focused on what I believe to be at best secondary concerns and at worst dangerous distractions (see my previous post on architecture). Here's a story, unrelated to the world of business, that is a pretty good illustration of my point;

The Rocks!

A few years ago I had the pleasure of attending a winter driving school in the New Hampshire White Mountains. We went through many exercises, from skid control, accident avoidance, braking on ice, you name it. The final stages were some relatively high speed runs on forest logging roads. One of the things the instructors stressed during the early classroom sessions was to focus on where you want the car to go. They said near the end of the class the would show us some things that would prove how important this was.

On the last break of the class, they took us for a walk out to the forest road, with some shovels, and knocked down some of the fluffy snowbanks along the edge of the road. During all our runs, no one had gone off road on the forest course, and it turned out to be a good thing, as under the soft stuff was an almost unbroken wall of granite boulders! They said they purposely covered them with snow, because if we could see the rocks, we would hit the rocks, as that is where our focus would be. This was something they learned over years of teaching these classes, and was not the way they started out. To further illustrate the point, we walked back to the skid pad circle, a place where several people had gone off over the course of the two days. As it turns out, of the 11 cars we put into the snow bank, all but one of them was right in front of a large tree that could be seen over the bank. we would come around the circle, see the giant tree, focus on it, and head right for it.

The point of the story is that you'll get what you focus on, which may not be what you really wanted in the first place. In our wonderful world of IT, there are a lot of things getting focus these days, but not all that many of them are adding value to our businesses.

Small Company Thinking - the art af being "Folksy"

My last company was small by most standards; about $40mil in annual revenue. We had been struggling, and were eventually purchased by a private equity firm. Of course private equity does not usually buy healthy companies, they buy sick ones and fix them, or dissect them and divest of the assets if the numbers are in favor of that. We were lucky in that our owners brought in a new CEO that was a real sales guy, and knew that the key to success was a true focus on the customer. Seems obvious, but so few companies truly get it.

To make the long story short, we had great success fixing the company, and it was eventually sold to a very large software company. As is often the case, we were culturally at odds with the new company. They were very internally focused, much more concerned with the proper paperwork being completed than with doing what was right for the customer. Very heavy process centric approach to everything. We were often scoffed at, with our "small company thinking" approach to things, and were repeatedly told "that is great, but it would never work in a big company".

As an example; I used to do lab tours for visiting potential customers. Deal win rate when getting the customer to visit and take a tour was near 90%. Within days of the acquisition close, this stopped. When I questioned a visiting exec as to why we no longer did customer visits, given the high win rate, I was told "That just wouldn't scale. If all of our sales teams sent every prospect here, you would be completely overwhelmed". True I said, but we went from three per week to zero, and we could easily support five. If we had more requests than that, we would figure it out, maybe tape it and use video for the smaller deals. "Small company thinking" says he. Nonsense. An excuse from big a process guy for not taking action.

When I arrived in my current position I was part of the management team brought in to help turn the company around. Yes, we have the same private equity owners (see a trend?). This company was bigger than our last success, by about eight times in revenue, and maybe four times in number of employees. As we started making changes, and refocusing the company on our customers, we heard much of the same thing; "That may have worked at a small company, but it will never work here".

Ha! It has worked. And not just as it relates to IT stuff, but everywhere in the business. It is harder to make it work in a larger company, and it is critically dependent on having the right people, particularly in the leadership roles, but it is very effective when it does work. We now find ourselves operating as a more or less independent division of a much larger company, though still under the same private equity ownership. Our larger siblings have called us "Folksy", saying that the way we do stuff works in a little company like ours, but big sophisticated companies do it their way (which usually means with an army of consultants).

To all of you that run "folksy" business, please keep it up. It works, and the folksy businesses are much more fun to work at and to do business with.

IT Rocks! - Part Two, a collection a silly sayings

In reality, some of them may be a bit corny, but they all have real meaning in the context of getting IT to rock. the first, and most important, is "There is nothing more important than our customers". This is how we run the entire company. Of course in IT, we have lots of different customers including external customers (the most important ones, as they keep us in business), partners, and the rest of our internal folks. This sounds so simple, but so many organizations miss it completely. We really take this literally. Any of our customers, whether external or internal, come before any of our own IT priorities. Our help desk tool offers self service to our users, but contrary to the way most folks view self-service tools, the goal of this is not to deflect human contact, it is to let folks interact with us in the way they choose. We encourage our help desk folks to call, or better yet, go see their customers when they work on tickets for them. Think about it, how nice would it be to see a smiling face show up at your cube; "Hi Bill, I'm Don from the IT service desk. I am just checking in to see if you are all set with your mail issue"? At the last place I worked, this would have caused heart attacks. They actually did not have the help desk folks listed in the corporate directory, purposely so you couldn't call them up. No wonder they were universally despised.

Another saying; "Try it, fix it, try it". This sums up our approach for continuous improvement, and also for our iterative approach to adding value to the business. We are not big on grandiose plans that take many months to execute. Business is too fast these days for that. We need to quickly add value, and evolve it over time. This one is also kind of a cousin to "I reserve the right to be smarter tomorrow than I am today", which really means we are not tied to a decision, and can change our minds to adapt quickly to a changing environment. Those that can't adapt will get left behind.

Next, we have "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". Sometimes when working to solve a problem for the business, we can envision a beautifully elegant solution, and the only problem is that it really can't be delivered in pieces, so it would be months before the business saw any value. This is actually one my developers struggle with, as they would sometimes like to build the "big thing". The reality is that we can often do something simple that solves 80% of the problem very quickly.While this may be only good, it is often good enough for the business, and they are delighted with the speed of delivery.

The last of my sayings for today, is "Saving money won't get you good IT, but good IT will save you money". This is really about focus. Be careful what you decide your organization is going to focus on, you just might get it. See my rant on Enterprise Architecture. If you loose your focus on the business, and shift it to Architecture, budget reduction ITIL, etc., that is what you'll get, an ITIL shop with great architecture, with barely enough funding to stay alive, and still be hated (and I do not think that is too strong) by the business. By focusing on what was important (Customers First, Enable the Business, and Showcase our Products), we became a valued partner to the business, with a seat at the executive table (I report to the CEO). In the process, because we stopped doing stuff that was not important, we have reduced our spend by just shy of 20% over the last two years (while doing and SAP upgrade, I will add).

I'm sure there are more sayings we use, and I'll try to remember to write them down for another silly sayings post.