Is there anything better than a good steak?

I really like eating a good steak, but honestly good steak is very hard to find. And even though I live in Boston – a major city in the U.S. - I can count the number of terrific steak restaurants on two hands. That said, there are a few really good ones and I was especially excited last Saturday, knowing I was going to one of them; Grill 23. I was so excited, I tweeted: “Dinner tonight – going to one of Boston’s premier steak and seafood restaurants - @grill23andbar. (Top 5 in my opinion).” 

Well, to my surprise, I received a tweet back from Grill 23 and they said: “@ValaAfshar we will do our very best to make sure you have a great time, so that we can stay high on your top 5!!”  Being in the customer service business, and adopting a social enterprise mindset, I was delighted to receive a prompt and welcoming reply from one of my favorite restaurants.  In fact, at this point, they had achieved a milestone – a satisfied customer. But the story does not end here.

I arrived 30 minutes before my reservation and normally when you represent a larger party – 6 in my case – you would wait by the bar before your entire party arrives, before you can be seated. Not tonight. I was promptly greeted, given the option to sit at the table, and had arguably the best services that I had ever received throughout the course of the evening. Friendly staff, engaged management, attentive service… absolutely brilliant. To be fair, the service is always very good, but for this particular evening, the service was exceptional. 

Now I have no insight in terms of how Grill 23 prepared for my arrival, given the social media correspondence, and whether that influenced the quality of service, but I like to think that it did. At this point, Grill 23 achieved a second milestone – a delighted, perhaps committed customer. I might even consider moving them to a top-3 position on my ‘restaurants in Boston’ list.

I really like a good steak. But what I love even more, is a superb customer experience. Thanks to social media, and Grill 23’s customer engagement strategy, I was able benefit from both.

Well done Grill 23 (for the record, I like medium rare; I bet you already know that).

Practicing What You Preach (even if you are not quite ready)

Recently, one of our (Enterasys) Solution Architects published this white paper on "Managing BYO Device Programs". Of course a bunch of my enterprising users immediately contacted the service desk asking if this was now policy, and when they could bring in their devices from home. Of course, while we have been working on this, we are not really ready to fully support this. We have been trying several things, looking for the balance that meets user needs, is not prohibitively expensive, and that will still provide us with reasonable security.

Here is where we are at:

• We evaluated full remote desktop type VDI, both from VMware and Citrix, and dismissed it, as at our user counts, it cost about as much per user as a good laptop, and left us with more infrastructure to manage
• We are allowing a limited set of folks to direct connect, and using our own NAC capabilities, limiting access to web resources. By using our SSL VPN portal, they can then get to internal web resources. Several folks have been doing this for quite some time, and it seems to work for them
• We are actually moving as many of our applications as possible to the cloud, which offers access from anywhere. As a side note, shame on you cloud providers that sell access from anywhere yet force your own employees to VPN in to access your applications. You know who you are
• We are in the early stages of deploying a cloud identity management solution (Okta) that will soon offer two-factor authentication, which will meet our security requirements going forward
• We have started evaluating the new HTML 5 Citrix client in an application virtualization deployment, and this one shows great promise
• We already allow employee owned Active Sync devices to connect to our Exchange environment as long as the user sets a simple unlock pin, and grants us the ability to do a remote wipe if necessary to protect our data

I have come to the conclusion that a single strategy is probably not enough. For some users, the guest wireless solution will be sufficient. For others, they will need a bit more access until we have more stuff in the cloud. At some point, I believe the only folks that will still need access to non-web internal resources will be the engineers that need to access our labs. Everything else will be on the web, and most of that in the cloud and accessible from anywhere and any device with internet access and an HTML 5 compliant browser. I attended a Google Enterprise event a few weeks ago where they presented there 100% web vision. I'm not sure I'll ever get us to 100% web, but I think 80% within the next two years is doable.

If our solutions team keeps writing white papers, I may have to do it sooner :). As we get closer, BYOD becomes much easier, thanks in large part to our NAC deployment's ability to classify the end devices and then allow only appropriate access.

Unlocking Your Full Potential

To unlock the full potential of your organization, business leaders can focus on 5 critical success factors (CSF):

1. People – Hire, empower, train and retain the best. Recruit smart, creative and passionate professionals with an unquenchable thirst for growth. A balance of both IQ and EQ (emotional) is important – a deficiency in either will certainly hinder your full potential.

2. Process – Stand still and you will fall behind. Measure or you will not improve but measure for the sake of improving behavior. As S. Covey noted, begin with the end in mind. And most importantly think big but act small and often – adopt a Kaizen approach of incremental change for the better.

3. Innovation – Outsmart the completion with the best and affordable tools but remember a lean process is the first step before you focus on the right tool.

4. Structure – Remove boundaries, flatten the hierarchy, and be adaptable. Structural elasticity can strengthen functional alignments (i.e. services and engineering) and propel you closer to reaching your full potential.

5. Culture – I was very fortunate to attend a luncheon with General Colin Powell as he shared his views of the importance of a purpose driven mindset. It’s good for organizations to have performance goals but it’s even better to adopt a purpose driven culture with emphasis on execution velocity, rejection of mediocrity, transparency, respect and enthusiasm for hard work and creativity. Our company’s mantra is ‘there is nothing more important than our customers’. Our purpose is to become our customers trusted advisor and favorite vendor to do business with.

To begin the journey of unlocking our full potential, I would like to focus on the first CSF – people. Hypothetically speaking, if you were given a choice to hire between two candidates, would you hire the ‘fast and sloppy’ or the ‘slow and good’ candidate? I know what you are thinking but assume you had no choice but to hire one of the two candidates. If you have ever competed athletically or coached then you might gravitate to ‘fast and sloppy’ because experience tells you that you cannot teach fast. On the other hand, if you subscribe to the ‘do it once, do it right’ school of thought then ‘slow and good’ is your choice. The challenge is to find the optimal balance that produces fast and good results.

Flat organizations are likely to place their employees into 3 categories: the thinkers, the doers, and the watchers. Your A-players are a combination of thinkers and doers so in order to unlock your team’s full potential you need to stop watching and do. The strength of your leadership, at all levels of the organization, will enable you to seek the optimal balance. Your hiring process is very important but the key to unlocking your team’s full potential is to retain and fully engage top talent. Once you have achieved a balance of fast and good, then you must work hard to develop an environment that fosters continuous improvements and growth. A flexible (telecommuting friendly) but challenging (performance score-carding) environment with market competitive compensation, accessibility to training, and most importantly a culture of inclusion will bolster your employee retention. Remember, no one of us is as smart as all of us so seek to understand before you are understood.

Recent industry data highlighted contact center average annual attrition levels at 27% (and north of 40% for offshore outsourced services). Since 2005, Enterasys has recognized less than 2% annual voluntary attrition levels in our customer support organization. It is worthwhile noting that the benefit of hiring and retaining top talent is real. In 2010, CRM Magazine recognized Enterasys as 1 of only 5 companies to earn a Service Elite distinction. Enterasys was the only technology company to earn this distinction and the only company to be recognized for multiple award categories including workforce optimization and enterprise feedback management. Check out the article here.

And finally, for what it’s worth, if forced to choose only one candidate, my choice would be ‘fast and sloppy’. I can expand more if you are interested but before we start to debate it’s important to note that even the best coaches and teams sometimes have to trade players to further improve. The management philosophy of ‘top-grading’ is one of guiding principles that has proven to optimize our recruitment, hiring, and retention success – http://www.smarttopgrading.com. As long as you maintain a flexible, decisive and fair mindset then you can take comfort in knowing that an iterative process will ultimately provide your organization with the balance you seek.

There will be future editorials regarding the other 4 critical success factors in a series of discussions that speak to improving organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Is there another critical success factor(s) to consider? I plan to add a 6th CSF in our playbook but I am curious to learn about your success stories and pursuit of achieving full potential.

My Twitter contact: @valaafshar

Geek of the Week (it's a good thing)

One of the things we have started in our quest for cool IT is what we call Geek of the Week. It is given out to folks that demonstrate some special "geekiness" that week. I actually kicked this off before I opened the "Are we cool enough?" can of worms, and folks seem to like it. Even other departments have heard of it and asked if they could join in.

I've kept it simple; people submit nominations to me, and I am the sole judge. Folks can nominate anyone, including  themselves. Nominations can be for any cool new bit of tech, or a new application of some existing tech that they have discovered and want to share. It is especially good if it solves a problem the business faces. A good example from a few weeks ago was the discovery of Tungle to share free/busy information externally. Many of us use it now, and it solves a real problem.

Of course you don't win much. I announce the winner via Chatter, and you get to keep the Geek of the Week certificate in your office until the next one is awarded.

I am interested in other ways folks have found to bring thought leadership to the surface.

Come on you Geeks!

Are We Cool Enough?

This question was prompted by this article on "What Motivates Your Top IT Employees". I posted the question to my management team, and ended up with a somewhat livelier discussion than I expected. I do push the team to do cool new stuff, and it often frustrates a good part of the team. While we are not done with this discussion, I have come to some conclusions:

• Cool for the sake of cool is silly. it still needs to enable the business
• What is cool today is status quo tomorrow (or maybe the next day). That doesn't mean it is not good, cutting edge stuff, and something to be proud of, but it does not give you a pass on cool new stuff
• I truly believe that thought leadership can be found anywhere; all levels of the business, customers, partners, etc. In order for us to capitalize on it, people need to bring their ideas forward. Encouraging this has proven to be a challenge
• We are in a major technology shift, specifically the shift of many business functions from traditional on-prem applications to the cloud
• This shift is causing considerable stress on the team, and managing through this change is another big challenge
• Many folks feel they are too busy to spend time finding cool new stuff. I am not completely buying it I find cool new stuff, and I am a pretty busy guy
• In order to give folks some more time to find the clever new solutions, I am trying to pick things we can stop doing. I am shocked at how hard it is to get people to tell me where they spend their time so I can pick stuff we will stop doing, or figure out how to do them more efficiently. If folks really do want to work on the cool stuff, they need to tell me what uncool stuff they spend time on so I can fix it

Of course we are pretty cool. We use our IT technology to enable the business considerably better than most companies I have contact with. Being an IT vendor ourselves, we also spend considerable time showing customers how we leverage our technology, and also upgrade to the latest beta (and sometimes alpha) versions to better support product development.

Another Long-time Vendor Causing Great Pain

This time it is RIM. We have been having sync issues with our blackberries for some time now. We believe it to be somehow related to our Exchange 2010 upgrade, as they started around the same time. RIM support has been no help. They now believe they understand the problem, but don't know how to fix it. They throw a lot of "try this" at us, but it is pretty apparent they don't have a clue as to how to get us relief.

My iOS and Android devices are nearly perfect when it comes to staying in sync, and they are much nicer devices to live with. The only reason we still have blackberries at all is are the slightly better corporate features that some of the users want. However, the most important thing sync, and if you can't get that right, you need to go.

So, I am going to pull the plug. I made and announced the decision to start a slow purge of the blackberries last week, and I am going to use my RIM support dollars on something that actually adds value to the business. I know the loss of my 450 user BES support contract is too small to make much of a difference to RIM, but I'll sure feel better when I am no longer sending them our check.

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.

IT Rocks! - Part One

This is kind of a longer rant, so I'll break it up. Given my somewhat unconventional approach to IT, it is probably not surprising that I wasn't always an IT guy. I have really had several careers, and those experiences, plus a couple of strong mentors along the way have formed my approach. More or less in order, I spent eight years in the US Navy (Submarines), three years in commercial nuclear power, three years as a small business owner, two years writing technology sales proposals, and 12 years in software quality.

At the last place I worked (by acquisition, not by choice), the IT group was horrible. They we not the least bit interested in helping the business move forward. All they cared about was compliance with their policy and procedures. Those procedures were often at odds with the needs of the business, and even though I would find folks in the IT group that agreed with me ("You're right, it is stupid") no one was ever willing to work to change the rules. This was quite the shock, as prior to being acquired, we had an IT group that was pretty supportive of the business.

 I was senior enough to have contact with enough of the executive team to know that I wasn't the only one that thought IT sucked, but that it was a common perception. The thing that struck me as odd, was that everyone seemed to believe that you had to live with it, and that big corporate IT just sucked by its very nature, and that all you could do was squeeze their budgets so at least you could pay the minimum for their suckiness.

I was convinced that IT could be done better. It was my belief that if the business felt they were getting good value for their $, you wouldn't be getting squeezed at budget time. Hence, the IT Rocks! theory of IT management was born.

The first day I had responsibility for IT here, I met with my ops director, and talked about how I wanted to approach our delivery. In that first meeting I had two things I wanted to start on right away. First, my new, single metric, if you can call it that, by which I was going to judge the team, was customer satisfaction. How I would measure it, was simple; if I asked any employee in the company, from the CEO on down "How's IT?", the target answer was "IT Rocks!". Minimal acceptable was "They are pretty good". The second thing, and the most important thing in achieving the first, was to stop saying no. No matter what the request, if we thought the answer had to be no, I wanted a good analysis of why, and if it was just because of some policy of ours, I wanted justification of that policy. I even went as far as to say that the only person in IT that could say "no" to a request, was me.

The ops director came just short of laughing at me. It could best describe it as a strong mirthful grin. He said I was nuts, and that he would play it my way, but seeing that I was his fifth boss in three years, this too would pass. As I have related this story to some of my peer CIOs, many have said that that approach can't possibly work. How on earth can the CIO review every request? The reality is that I don't think I even had to review one in the first six months. It was obvious to the team that I wanted them to say yes, so they spent a lot more time understanding what our customers really wanted, that is the problem they were trying to solve when they made the request, and then offered alternative solutions that we could do, instead of jumping straight to "no".

I'll exapand on this more about how it has evolved over the last four years, but the bottom line is that it works. IT does rock. The business loves us. I do not have to fight for budget (there is an interesting budget side effect of IT Rocks that we'll talk about later). Not only does the business love us, but we have added real value, streamlining systems and process to drive more revenue and greater operational efficiency.

What does a good enterprise architecture get you?

Why, a good enterprise architecture, of course. Never mind that a good architecture is no guarantee that your IT environment will have any relevance at all to the business.

I presented at a recent CIO conference on our use of cloud computing, and the first slide in my presentation was a high-level drawing of our IT architecture. This one slide ended up in a discussion that lasted nearly my entire allotted time slot.

It started with the question "Wow, great architecture, how did you come up with it?"

I had to stop and think, as the reality is that I (we) didn't spend a minute thinking about or talking about architecture. We knew our existing systems were not doing a good job of supporting the business, and we started there. Of course for us to support the business, we had to understand it, and we kicked off a project (really driven by the CEO) we called TLC (Think Like a Customer). The goal was to look at the most macro of business processes, in our case lead-to-cash, analyze current state, and make changes in process and systems to streamline the business. In short, to make it easier to do business with us, for customers, partners, and employees.

Out of TLC came about 70 "quick wins"; small changes to process or systems that would make things easier for all. The key component here is that we not only identified them, we actually implemented most of them. We also identified some major gaps in process and systems, and set out to fix the business pain. Our cool architecture is the result. It is not a cool architecture because we set out to design it that way, it is because we set out to solve the business problem(s), and the architecture evolved.

I was asked by one of the attendees at the conference what my enterprise architects thought about the build it as you go approach, and I said that was easy, I don't have anyone doing "architecture" as their primary job. Certainly as things evolved we would ask the "how does this plug in" question, but our focus is always on solving the business problem which is #2 on my guiding principles of IT.

Which kind of leads me to those principles, which drive everything my IT group does:

Customers First
Enable the Business
Showcase our Products (we are an IT supplier)

If everything you do is around one of these things, you can't go wrong. Focus on architecture, or anything else not directly related to one of the principles, and you may succeed, but are just as likely to end up with a cool architecture, and still end up like so many IT departments, despised by a business that sees little value in the services you provide.

We be Chatting (or is it Chattering?)

So we may have just turned on what will finally be really useful social media in the workplace.


Thursday evening we turned on SalesForce.com's new "Chatter" collaboration tool. Maybe I should say pre-new, as we were able to convince the nice folks at SFDC to turn on the beta in our production environment. I didn't want to make too big of a production of it, after all, this is supposed to be social media for the enterprise, if the users like it, they'll figure out how to make it go. It is pretty simple, even dinosaurs like myself were chatting in no time.

We did make a simple announcement so folks were not wondering what this new thing at the top of the page was, and we gave them links to the intro videos. Other than that, we just turned it loose. I have been watching closely, and there does seem to be considerable activity considering it is so new. We had a few folks asking for something like this, and there appears to have been some pent up demand. I did figure the youngsters would like it, as it does look an awful lot like facebook.

Of course the real magic here, that makes it light-years ahead of Yammer and the like, is that the SFDC objects (Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, etc.) can participate in the news feeds. Even custom objects can play along. We have a custom project tracking application, and the projects where I am the executive sponsor will not chat to my newsfeed when something important on them changes. Pretty slick.

We did find a certain amount of humor in the email it sends when you follow someone; "Dan Petlon is now following you" is enough to scare anyone. That, plus a link to your SFDC profile is all it sends. We are calling it "Chatter Stalking"

Of course I already have my wish list:

• I want rules-based auto-following. for example, I automatically want to follow any new project that I am the sponsor for. The sales leads want to follow new opportunities in there territories. You get the idea.
• I want to be able to start following from my iPhone.
• I really need to be able to control the colors in the new UI theme. I like the default, but I have had a good number of complaints.
• How about a "Chatter Genius"? Punch a button and see chats similar to mine, or to those of folks I follow. I would think this would be a pretty good way to find folks with stuff to say that matters to me.

Overall, I would say we have a winner. It is early, and time will tell, but we already have a lot of engagement from the sales teams, who figured out following opportunities very quickly. They believe it will save on a lot of email.

I'll post an update as we chat on.

Our first baby steps into cloud-based application deveolpment

I attended a Salesforce.com CIO council meeting about a year ago, and came back pretty jazzed up to move some of our stuff to "the cloud". We did a pretty deep dive on what would have been the heavy hitter $-wise, and looked at moving from Exchange to Google Apps. We had a Google partner come in to discuss it. What I was hoping for was that as we brought up concerns, the partner would say "yep, we saw that at company X, and here is how we addressed it". What we got instead was, "yep, that is an issue". The bottom line was that Google Apps is just not ready to meet the needs of the power Exchange users.

Once I recovered from that blow to my cloud enthusiasm, we looked for other things to do, namely build some of our business applications on the force.com platform. I was considerably more tentative in my approach this time, but unless we tried it, how would we know if it had a place in our application landscape.

One of our challenges in taking these first steps was the cost of doing it. We have a very stable and modern in-house infrastructure. Many of the things the SFDC folks will site as to why app development is less costly on their platform do not apply to us. I have a virtualized environment, so I don't think about buying new hardware every time I need to spin up a new app. I have an established security model. Ditto for our way to approach the database. I already use an agile development methodology. I have a highly-skilled .net development team.

We still wanted to try it, and after struggling through putting a contract together with SFDC that made sense for us, we are finally dipping our toes in the force.com waters. We have two applications in production at this point. One that does very simple high-level project management, and another to manage our IT change management process.

Would I declare success? Sort of. I think I would borrow a term from our friends at Gartner and call our experience to date promising. There are limitations to the data models on the force platform. You can code your way around them, but if I have to write a lot of code, I could just do it in .net, and it would fit in with the rest of our stuff.

On the positive note, for simple stuff like the two apps I mentioned here, it is hard to beat. The change management app I built myself (and you thought VPs were useless). It took about an hour to get the basic shell and a few workflows done, and another couple of hours of tweaking once the users go hold of it. It is hard to argue with that kind of success - built by the business owner without sucking up development resources.

We have several other projects queued up; a test case/execution management app for our QA team, expense reporting, internal purchase requisitions, to name a few. So far we have just built apps for the IT department. I'll be ready to declare success when we have deployed an app (and yes, it actually has to meet a business need) to a much larger audience.

Be careful what you say

I was interviewed for an article in Information Week a few weeks ago, The article was published yesterday. One of my quotes in the article caused some mild embarrassment. here it is:

“So we were looking for easy-to-use BI tool, knowing the GM for our division is very good with spreadsheets—he really likes to get in there and slice and dice the numbers—but also knowing that the tool needs to be simple enough for our sales guys to use easily and quickly.”

This was one of those good thing/bad thing quotes. Good because it makes my boss sound like a spreadsheet genius, and bad because it sounds like the sales folks don't know how to drive a spreadsheet.


I got a few calls. Some accusing me of being a shameless suck-up (I am), and others from sales folks volunteering to do spreadsheet work for me.

The full article can be found here.

How do I take the "social" out of social media?

As an IT leader, I am getting more and more demands from the business for us to embrace social media. While I personally don't quite get it, I am trying to embrace it and find the business value. Our marketing folks tell me we have seen real results from our presence on twitter, but I find it hard to weed through the acres of "social" posts to find the valuable gems. I know they are out there, and have found a few. I am not sure they were worth the time I had to spend weeding through the days wardrobe, breakfast menus, etc. to find them. Once I find them, of course the gems are not really on twitter, just the links to them.

I found a few interesting folks that don't post a constant stream of mindless personal info (I am starting to think of it as social diarrhea). and will follow them and see if start to understand the value a bit more. I do think this is the key, for social media to be embraced by business, it must be relevant, and that requires some self discipline on the part of the posters.

This blog will be my attempt to capture my random thoughts on various topics. It is solely for my amusement, and for me to have a place to post something that may be of interest to others that can't possibly be done in a tweet.