Technically Speaking

I know that there are still many IT Pros out there looking for work, or things to keep them up to date on the latest features, and even though the previous give away has ended, the Thrive Site is still going strong. It is packed with information to help you advance both your skills and your career.

The site contains webcasts of sessions to build your knowledge as well as links to valuable blogs and other sites that might be of value to you or those in your communities that are trying to grow in the Information Technology field.

Many statistics today focus on those who have been displaced from a career and are looking for work and thrive is moving this way at the present time as well, hopefully in the future some material or webcasts involving educational institutions and career offices to help those coming out of college find things in the IT field that will better their careers or skill sets.

I strongly encourage you to check out Thrive if you haven’t already. If you have been there, there are new links and resources coming every day to help broaden your skills and increase your career opportunities.

If anyone has any suggestions for things that might help improve the site or increase the resources available please post them in the comments and I will make sure to pass them along.

I read a great article this morning over on TechRepublic about try vs. do. The article got me thinking about how things get or don’t get) handled when it comes to commitment.

Being a one person IT shop, I am responsible for many tasks that need to get completed, and try to hold myself accountable to those tasks, but as time goes on, the less critical non-business stoppage tasks fall off the sheet until they surface again.

Partially due to a lack of commitment to see them through to fruition and partially because they aren’t mission critical tasks. Changing the tapes everyday is critical, skipping weekends and holidays, but needs to get done whenever there is new data to store. This gets done daily, with a few exceptions, and is very routine.

What happens though if I forget, or am so busy fixing a critical problem, that it moves on to the backup and cannot proceed because I did not get the tape changed? That is a problem. I am only to hold myself accountable for the success or failure of the task, but business could suffer in the long term (or in the short term if the network or infrastructure fails) and there is no one to blame but myself.

Everyone forgets things, even master list makers, but tying oneself to the accountability of the task with some means which could be painful if the task is missed, which was a key suggestion in the article, is a great motivator.

No I am not going to fork over my entire paycheck to the local food pantry if I fail to change the tapes, but perhaps a check for fifty dollars if the task isnt accomplished. Just enough to feel it if you miss your deadlines. Perhaps start a lunch fund for your team, put a bit of money in there to get it going, but then monitor outcomes of tasks within your team. When a task is not completed by its deadline, the person responsible has to commit 10 dollars to the lunch fund. Or perhaps each team member puts money up and when the task is missed, it gets in the lunch kitty, and the responsible person then puts up new money.

This might motivate those who tend to miss tasks to get them done. If members of your team like to goto lunch and miss things on purpose, consider using the money to send the accounting staff or sales team out for steaks courtesy of the missed deadlines fund. That will surely change the motivation.

As a leader, getting yourself and your team to stick to tasks and deadlines can help you improve both performance and morale among your team. This will be something management notices, maybe not right away, but they will catch on sooner than you think.

Check out the original article for more.

So the latest buzzword to pop up on the Internet is Cloud Computing.  What exactly is this thing called the “cloud”?  Your guess is as good as mine.

In a presentation at Tech Ed, Microsoft’s Simon Guest provides a great explanation of the Cloud and where it is headed.

The presentation is below… hopefully it will help you understand the cloud.

Booting from virtual hard disks (VHDs) can save time in both provisioning and operational costs, but how do you boot from a VHD?  In this article at Experts-Exchange.com I cover the boot from VHD scenario with Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.

Business Intelligence or BI has been a buzz word in the IT industry for quite some time.  But what does it really mean, and how can it help your organization better acheive its goals?

Business Intellegence to me is a method of reviewing organizational data to make informed decisions to benefit the mission of an organization.  Using the data that an organization is collecting and generating during its usual process, the business decision makers (and others) can be empowered to make better decisions.

During Tech Ed last week I heard a comment about business decision making and thought about how I have seen it done.  While it is true, that organizations should empower employees and value their input, the true test comes when an organization is faced with decisions that affect their comptetitive edge, and many times, those who work with the data directly are not included in the overall process of deicision making.  It is beginning to be seen that the more involved the employees are in decisions that affect them, the better for the organization the decision can be.  Making decisions in the executive suite, a.k.a. a vacuum, is usually not going to acheive the best results, but there are many organizations that continue to do things this way.

Tools to improve analysis

Many executives get reports from the employees who work with data and technologies.  To me, the executive summary is just that, a short discussion of how a dataset affects an organization at the 15,000 foot level.  But drilling into the details isnt something that happens at that level.

Using technology like Sharepoint is great, but if the reports shown to decision makers in their current form arent really being considered when decision time rolls around, what good will the tech do?

SharePoint is a technology that improves visibility of existing data to make analysis easier to handle for the employees who dig in enough and are familiar enough with the data to make sound decisions about it.  For executives, it serves more to improve visibility, not analysis necesarily.

Take the tech to the analysts

In deciding how to improve BI within an organization, work with those who are in the trenches to prove the concept of an application like SharePoint.  Once the capabilities of the application are proven and can be shown at the user level, then the discussions about licensing and cost can begin.  If the approach is reversed, there will be no effective way to prove the usefulness of the application and a salespitch is not the best way to gain more BI and technology.  The overall ROI may be low, and the benefits may be huge, but attacking the issue from the top down may well be a death sentence for the project.

If you take the time to pilot the idea with the users and analysts who work the data, your results may be tangible up front and convince the right BDMs that this technology will improve business, not just give IT a new toy to play with.

The last few days have been insanely busy and updates have not been very top of mind.  Preparing for my first trip to Tech Ed and to participate there, help make the experience as good as possible for the attendees, has been fun and a bit draining all at once.

The overall experience of Tech Ed has been wonderful.  Lots of sessions (too many to get to everything) but a little of something for everyone.

Unable to attend Tech Ed this year?  Never fear, the majority of sessions and content are being made available as a subscription at Tech Ed Online.

There have been some great sessions about Windows 7, specifically for me App-Locker and Bit Locker to go.  New features of Windows 2008 R2 have been introduced, File Classification Infrastructure (more on that soon).

The sessions have been great.

So why attend Tech Ed or get access to Tech Ed online?

Tech Ed allows learning from SMEs and the ability to meet with both Microsoft employees and third party experts who can help you solve issues that you are having.  Because the content from sessions is downloadable making it tangible and available whenever you need it.

Sure, it is only Tuesday and there are three days left of Tech Ed, but there are lots of reasons to make the investment in Microsoft Tech Ed.  The sessions will teach you technical and functionality, but they can also help you deal with Business Decision Makers and getting them on board.

I will be looking at Virtualization in my organization using some of the things I learned and worked with TechEd.  Thanks Microsoft, the opportunity was amazing.

Like it or not, when you accept the responsibility of an IT manager position, you will get to do some type of support for your internal customers.  Even if that is just to rally your team because someone in the office is escallating cases to you.  How you handle these things will reflect on both yourself and your team.

What about external support?  You know when you have to call in outside help becasue application X or device Y is not doing what the manual and the Internet claim it should.  I have been in that position a time or two and it is getting better, but I think my attitude toward the situation may be only partly to blame.

Recently in two separate posts for TechRepublic.com I stepped through two very cool support scenarios.  One dealing directly with a help desk call and the other dealing with the use of Twitter to get help solving an issue.

Please give them a look and leave a comment about any experiences you have had with either.

TechRepublic: When the help desk actually helps

and

TechRepublic: More than ’social’ Networking – don’t count out twitter as a useful support tool

I look forward to seeing your thoughts on both of these articles.

So the Windows 7 release candidate hit the Internet for TechNet and MSDN subscribers this week.  The download was quite an experience.  Busy servers isn’t even close. But as they say, the third time was a charm and from there, things went quite well.

After downloading Windows 7 I couldn’t wait to get the OS installed.  I ran it over night and the setup was smooth and required only a few pieces of information from me, Timezone, product key, and the usual stuff.  My installation was an upgrade of Vista Ultimate, after taking an image of my existing setup, in case I needed to pull this one off for whatever reason. The upgrade was great.  All the existing applications work without a hitch.  There was a bit of stumbling around at first looking for new features and things, but outside of that the initail experience with the Release Candidate was immediately positive.

Then there was the tablet part…

I flipped the screen around on my notebook to check out the tablet PC features of Windows 7 and that too started off great.  After a bit of use, I tried going back to the standard laptop use and the keyboard seemed to be gone.  Using the tablet features worked great, but seemingly the keyboard had gone away.

Checking the hardware for the keyboard, Windows 7 reported the device as working normally.  Because this is beta software I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt about “This device is working properly” and continued tinerking with things.

I am now of the thought that there was a latch somewhere that was stuck or something.  Seems that this was the issue or it decided to mess with me and Murphy was around during the upgrade.

My experience overall with Windows 7 has been amazing. The interface is great and very friendly.  The performance of the system and responsiveness is very good, and will surely get better as things move forward.  I have not found all of the new features or played with it long enough to have tried everything yet.

The Release Candidate will be available for public download on May 5th.  Based on my first impressions, this is going to be a great OS and I am excited about using it.  I strongly encourage anyone reading this to check out Windows 7 as soon as possible.  Way to go Microsoft.

Its all about perspective.  Being an IT Manager can be both interesting and quite frustrating, working on problems of all sizes at all hours day and night.   It may seem like the biggest issue in the world that a printer is not working quite right or that there are problems with some Group Policy Object somewhere on the network, but what about the true size of these issues?

Unless you ar working on a project or in a company where lives depend on the success and failure of IT, there is no reason to see a project as quite that important.  The users will be alright if it takes a few days to get an issue resolved or an upgrade completed.  They likely do not see it that way, but it is imperative, for your health and sanity (and technical problem solving ability) that you keep these issues in perspective.

Recently I had been working on a software upgrade that was just frustrating as ever and seemed to have Murphy riding copilot.  Every possible bump in the road seemed to jump into my path.  Something that might have been a 4 hour project went on for over a week and was quite the experience.  The air near my office was colorful to say the least.  However during the middle of this upgrade, a close family member had a stint in the hospital, and suddenly there are much bigger problems than why the .Net component of my upgrade is failing.

For me, this has been a huge eye opener.  Yes I am still passionate as ever about my job and what I do, so things do frustrate me, but when looking at these things in the grand scheme of life, they are very small.  Important, sure, but not nearly the huge catastrophe they started off to be.

How to gain perspective

You do not need to wait for a huge and traumatic life event to look at your life and put things in perspective.  Sure it sometimes seems that way, but there are other ways to look at these issues:

Reflect – take time at the end of the day/week/project to reflect on that period and make notes about your actions and the outcome.  Look at the results to see if you achieved what you hoped you would, and find places where you might have done things differently or improved.

Be objective – take yourself out of the equation and try to see things ffrom multiple points of view.  Looking at it from the point of view of the end user asking the question or from the point of view of an uninvolved person might help you see where you could handle a situation differently.

Take Notes – carry a notepad and a pen with you and write things down.  Whether just a list of items you would like to get someday or notes to help you understand an issue, they will keep you focused and prevent the brain drain of trying to remember everything.

Taking notes can also help prompt questions to others and allow you to listen actively.  This will also show your co-workers you are doing everything you can to help them.

Relax – take the time to do something nice for yourself and your family.  You do not need to book a week long vacation to the Alps, but a nice dinner out (or in) on a Sunday afternoon with no phones, laptops, or digital distractions would be a nice way to engage with those closest to you, and to give you a few minutes to unplug.

These things are helping me to keep things in perspective.  Sure I slip off the wagon sometimes, but I can always pick myself up and keep right on going.  I have also found that unexpected or random kindness works too.

Thinking outside of the technical arena and the workplace, there are always those who could use a little of whatever help you might be able to offer, even if it only involves holding the door open for someone.