Technically Speaking

Social media has become huge on the Internet over the past months and is something that IT Managers and staff are dealing with, or certainly will need to at some point.

A friend of mine, who I first met using Twitter, did a guest post for a local business about key ingredients to Social Media. 

Read his post here.

Sure, mileage may vary when using or getting into Social Media, but understanding the potential value for an organization, its employees, and brand building is huge.

Before you block Twitter and Linked In, look at it through a marketers eyes and see if there are ways to make it a useable part of your business.  You might be surprised.

So the football season is getting closer and this time it appears it will happen without Brett Favre.  Sorry Minnesota, but the grueling schedule and physical demands seem to be enough that the veteran quarterback will not be returning.

Somehow, it is for the best, and not.  Sure seeing #4 playing for Minnesota this fall would have been both good and bad, but hopefully the decision is made and everyone can move on.

Many times there are situations where good people leave companies and things are a bit less than perfect for either side. 

Note: I am not using the Favre example for that reason other than to say this kind of thing happens elsewhere everyday.

Look at your job, or the positions of your staff, and really think about the opportunities that have come along in the last year.  Did you look at them as though they could be the next best thing?  Or did you pass them off without a glance just because the timing wasn’t perfect?

All opportunities should be seized enough for review… at least think about the email for the new product line or the management position before shooting it down.  Considering the state of the economy these days, all opportunity could be the next best thing potentially.

Do your staff members a favor, help them consider opportunities.  This way they will know you support them, and can make a solid decision.  There will be times when the best decision is not to change and times when the decision to change is the only one that fits. 

Without a serious consideration, neither party will give the effort needed to make the best choice. 

Remember the biggest reward for doing a good job as seen through the eyes of your boss is more work.  The better you perform and achieve the goals set out for you, the more likely it is that you will be asked to take on more responsibility and then be expected to perform at a high level. 

Perhaps the bigger workload labeled reward isnt a promotion or huge office, but it might be a negotiating point in the future and when that time comes, there may be a reason to pass on the opportunity, but without consideration, a good decision cannot be made.

I had to tie the Favre saga in here somewhere just because I was a bit shocked that he decided not to play (maybe the commissioner will pull his re-instatement and make retirement permanent) and it struck me as funny the number of situations the rest of us find ourselves in that are completely similar to this albeit on  a much less media frenzied scale.

Opportunities that cause change come along all the time, make sure you as a manager encourage your staff (and yourself) to look at the opportunity before avoiding it.  You never know where it may lead you.  I hear there is an opening at quarterback in Minnesota…

Working in an IT shop of any size boils down to helping people with computer issues.  This simplification bothered me for a while because there were many different avenues that support or IT related activities could take, but helping people has been a root function of IT shops probably since the dawn of IT.

I still find myself cringing at some email subject lines or voicemail messages, or I did until recently.  Sure sometimes it still happens, but it is very rare as of late.

Community service, in both the technical and non-technical communities, has been floating around my brain for a while now and seems to be a good way to both give back to the community and to put the helping people portion of IT pro work back on the front page of the agenda.

Surely all of you who read this are glad that it is the 22nd of July so the sticky post about the Seminar I am participating in can hide from view, but it is this seminar that got me thinking for this post.  It is funny to admit that I haven’t been in this good a mood about giving a presentation ever.  Putting this seminar together and participating in the class to help attendees create (or update) their resume has been a great experience.  I have met and gotten to work with some great people and am in the hopes that tonight’s class goes well enough for future workshops to be discussed.

Is community service or pro-bono work a huge effort?  Yes.  Does it help to change your perspective on helping others?  Absolutely.  I hope to not only help those attending the class, but change the way I work with others at my job to help make their experiences better as well.

One event will not likely change all these things or improve all my typical IT faults but it is a star.  Not to mention, helping others just because you can, feels pretty good.

As an IT Manager, community service is a great thing to look for in a staff member.  Suggesting this to employees will likely cut into some time for other things, but can be worthwhile for all involved.  It might even become something you or your staff members begin to enjoy and look forward to.

Have a meeting with your team and discuss the possibility of community service if you aren’t doing so already.  The experience may improve more than your standing in the community.

Being an IT manager is much different than being on an IT staff, unless of course, like me you are the IT staff.  Sure the role of manager gets some benefits, like pay or sometimes delegation to employees, but overall many of the ‘perks’ are more work than perk.

I was reading a blog post recently about not caring about some things.  The post outlined a philosophy of not caring and pointed out that this is ok in some cases.  We all have things we do not care about and others around us will not care about some things that are seemingly near and dear to us or cause us worry.

This hit home for me in terms of IT management because some fires, no matter who they are for are just not that important.

A document has a bad font in the header and gets printed.  The individual printing the document runs over to the help desk and announces their worry about the font issue complaining that it needs to be corrected.

Does the document go to a customer?  Or is the document getting filed for later (or never again) viewing by someone here?

If the document goes to the customer it should be fixed (unless it is known perhaps that the customer doesn’t care) and if it is going to a box in the recesses of an underground bunker never to be seen again, who cares what the header looks like.

While this philosophy cannot be forced on others, like the employee running over with the problem, simply showing that you do not care may get the problem resolved.  You’ll likely have to explain why you don’t care and show that the fix is unnecessary and may well end up fixing it anyway, but the not caring stance may make the whole process less stressful.  If you do not care about the issue, it doesn’t matter either way the outcome, so you needn’t worry about doing it or not doing it.

This isn’t intended as a way to get out of work, but to look at the things you get asked objectively rather than subjectively.  These things shouldn’t cause you worry and loss of sleep because you do not care about them, certainly not the opposite tons of worry and sleeplessness because you didn’t get to the task.

This afternoon I was asked to help prepare some video for a sales meeting.  I am not sure if the video was intended to be motivating or not, but I think the target audience of sales staff could easily have been replaced with IT staff.

Some IT Manager and staff have likely taken the approach that the problem will come to you when it needs to be fixed, I sure have.  Waiting until the fire has started and could burn out of control at any moment rather than trying to work with the users as soon as there is something they find that isn’t quite right.

Sure in some cases IT is reactive, you cannot fix a problem if you don’t know its there, but there are some problems that can be fixed simply by being active in your organization and doing some managing by walking around.  Hearing how the users interact with each other and the IT staff and seeing how they use their computers might be a clue to an upcoming problem.  Being able to solve the problem either before they mention it to the help desk or as soon as they do might take the opinion of the IT staff through the roof as being extra helpful.

The video clip simply got me thinking about doing the work rather than planning to do the work.  Yes some planning needs to be done, but if all of the time is spent planning little to no work is getting done.

Spend time building procedure and getting the right process in place as soon as possible to reduce the overall work required to fix problems.

I thought the clip really drove home the idea that we as IT people should get out there and do the work and help those around us.

Have you guessed the clip I watched? – Here is a link (NSFW) Video Clip

Do you think the approach to sales in the clip was too harsh or that it might have been right on target?

For about a month now Microsoft’s new foray into search has been popping up all over. The service, Bing, is dubbed a decision engine, in that it will help users find the most relevant content closer to the top of the returned results. In this article, I plan to do some binging and put this new engine to the test and offer a few first impressions after using the service for a few weeks.

Note: I have not been exclusive to Bing since its release as I find myself visiting Google out of habit.

Search throughout the Microsoft.com properties has been replaced by Bing. The old live search is gone and Bing is the wave of the future, and with good reason. The idea is that the queries entered by users need to bring back quality information before worrying about the quantity of links returned.

This gets done reasonably well; when I search for Ice Cream Sandwiches in Google I get a result of 17,700,000. The same search at bing.com returns 10,700,000 records, many of which are the same.

Figure A below shows the result count at Google and Bing.

Figure A

17 million and 10 million results for ice cream sandwiches

The results, while still massive are more focused when relevant queries are entered, the ice cream sandwiches search was to show the sheer number of results returned. For example, suppose I am going to visit Oshkosh Wisconsin for the EAA this summer.

When I enter Oshkosh WI into Yahoo I get a link to the city website and a few other links at the top of the results. I also get a pane of sponsored links that organizations pay to have show up first. While these might be quite helpful, I would rather see things relevant to visiting the city like the weather and things in the area than just the businesses who pay the most money,

Entering the same Oshkosh WI into Bing produces a different experience. Sure I still see search results and the city of Oshkosh website and a few sponsored links on the right (albeit far fewer links), but there are also related links in the left hand pane as well as links to list restaurants, businesses, the newspaper, maps, and other things that might make my trip to Oshkosh more pleasant. Figure B shows the Yahoo and Bing results for Oshkosh WI.

Figure B

The Yahoo and Bing search results for Oshkosh WI

Big deal so the search works, what makes Bing better or at least different from other sites

From using Bing I have come to notice the little things that just appear on their own. For example, recently I was traveling to a major city, when I connected to the Internet to look for someplace to have lunch and read the news; I noticed that the news page on Bing had the local news pulled off to the top right. The significance of that, for me, was that I did not need to tell the site any information about where I was located. Using my IP address (or the public IP address of where I happened to be connecting) it added local news. Finding a restaurant was also quite nice as Bing returned several results based on where I was located.

Using my Oshkosh WI search from above, I clicked the link for restaurants, and a list of local places with their phone numbers is displayed at the top of the screen. Figure C shows the restaurant results for Oshkosh WI.

Figure C

Places to eat in and around Oshkosh Wi

What else is there… search and?

Bing also allows a user to preview video from any sites if the video is returned as a result. The easiest way to show this would be on the news site. When a video appears in the list of results, clicking the window for the video will play the video right from the search results.

Bing also has a travel section which can help travelers find affordable fares when flying around the world. Using technology from farecast.com and MSN travel, Microsoft has created Bing Travel. This site will help users find the best prices for moving around the world that are available on the web. Figure D shows the opening screen for Bing Travel.

Figure D

Traveling with Bing

Even though the name of the site sounds like a startup created by characters in a 90’s sitcom, the search decision engine created by Microsoft really does get quality results. I encourage all of you to put Bing! Through its paces today.

In the past few years, IT managers have been forced to keep a very solid count on the applications within their environment compared to the number of copies owned. Auditing has been around since there has been stuff to audit, but the BSA and other organizations are doing their part to ensure that those of us working with licensing know they are around.

I am not saying auditing for internal knowledge of what your organization owns isn’t a good idea, in fact far from it.  I am currently shopping for new tools to aid in keeping an accurate record of what my organization owns against what they are using.  Sure most companies are in compliance when it comes to licensing, but let’s face it, organizations do not run out and get another copy of Office or whatever the app may be when one more user is added to the staff.

Typically, a specific number of licenses are purchased, say 5 or 10 at a time to avoid one off calls to the reseller for another copy of an application and when there is a need for the set minimum copies, another order is placed.

Is this the perfect way to handle licensing, not at all.  Is it recommended? Nope.  However the reality is that there are companies trying to keep up and this is the best way they know how with the budgets they have.

Is it acceptable for an IT manager to refuse to load Office for the new Sales person because they are out of licenses?  Probably not, but should a one off copy be purchased because of the new hire?  Probably not, depending on the budget for IT.  The issue isn’t if an organization will buy the applications they use, in most cases they will.  For me the issue is timing of spend.  If I am working with a budget, I will know when the budget is prepared how much I can spend on licenses early in the year.  Once I have used all allotted monies for applications,  a one off purchase can be quite challenging to handle.

How to manage the audit issues

There are several applications available to help with software counts and tracking, but the most important thing is that the project gets tackled and reviewed regularly.  Since licensing is evolving with every release and companies have to watch their cash more than ever in this economy, knowing where you stand with application licenses could be a great way to invest and save money long term. 

Note: Normally I would review a product to aid with license auditing and compliance, but having not selected on myself I cannot yet provide a review.

We are looking at a couple products:

IQuate – IQ Netscan

GFI – Languard

And I also keep the information I know in an excel spreadsheet.  Hopefully once we have an auditing solution in place, the maintenance of the Excel sheet will be far less intensive.

What to watch for

The biggest thing to keep track of is the number of licenses that your organization owns for each product they use.  So if you have 25 licenses for Office, keeping track of that number and modifying it as more are added is beneficial for sure.

Also, make sure you know how many copies of an application are installed.  This will likely be the hardest task without some help, but getting this number figured out is important.

These two pieces of information will be extremely useful in determining the discrepancy between owned and installed licenses (if any).  This way you can determine how many licenses you’ll need to buy to match the install count. 

Another useful thing to note is the cost per license of the application.  This way you can approximate the cost of the licenses needed and weigh hard numbers against the cost of not being in compliance.  Surly purchasing licensing is more affordable.

Good luck in the realm of License management and hopefully the links and tips provided can help you keep your organization compliant.