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Archive for month: August, 2010
Business Intelligence: Stupid Questions at the Help Desk
We’ve all heard the tale of the clueless computer user who is told by the Help Desk to press any key and responds by asking, “Which one is the ‘any’ key?” And then there’s the newbie who thinks the disk-tray on his PC is a cup-holder. I’ve always supposed that these chestnuts and others like them were apocryphal stories, meant to make us feel better about our own sometimes-tenuous grasp of technology. But what if these users are real? SysAid Technologies, an Israeli IT service management provider, asked IT managers around the world for true and bizarre service requests. The company distributed a list of memorable responses, some of which appear below. Did these anecdotes really happen? The ones with names attached carry more weight with me than the anonymous entries, but you can decide for yourself. It may be that the high percentage of incidents involving women indicates the persistence of the old, misogynistic IT culture. Got a story of your own? Send it along, and we can create our own list.
See Slide show here
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Software Engineers Vs. Programmers
In the US, there is no universally-recognized, formal certification process required to be a programmer. Some programmers are graduates of CIS (Computer and Information Science) programs, some are engineers and many are neither.Novell and Microsoft have tried to create proprietary certification with their CNE (Certified Network Engineer) and MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineer) training.
Many states have made using such titles illegal because they mislead the public on who is really an engineer. Graduates of CNE & MCSE training are not required to have an ABET-accredited engineering degree or a PE (Professional Engineer) license so they cannot be called engineers.
This effort is in the public interest because software impacts public safety. By way of information, Ohio has rendered the MCSE and CNE titles unusable unless you are an actual engineer. Nevada also has strict engineer title laws.
The “science” of computer science has a long way to go. Few truly useful software development paradigms exist and the graduates are not adequately trained in their use or are even aware of their existence.
The professors themselves are ignorant of current software development practices and have little to offer their students in the way of helpful suggestions.
Having been a Computer Engineering professor at a large university, I can personally attest to the appalling lack of understanding of software engineering issues on the part of a few of my former colleagues. Scary, really.
Some organizations, such as Carnegie-Mellon’s SEI (Software Engineering Institute) are combating this widespread ignorance. Local SPIN groups (Software Process Improvement Network), an outgrowth of CMU’s SEI, are also assisting in this effort.
However, as long as time-to-market issues dominate software development (rather than safety or correctness), there will be little incentive to change.
Software engineers, on the other hand, have a lot more science and technology background than do programmers or computer science majors. Because they are degreed engineers, they have the ABET-approved engineering core which includes physics, chemistry, math, thermodynamics, material science, engineering design, etc. Software engineers, at the graduate level, also learn project management and other business aspects of the software design and production process.
Read more here
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CIO’s Guide to Great IT Budgets
Some CIOs always seem to be plush with funds and have great IT Budgets. This article looks at some critical factors which influence IT Budgets.
Year on year most CIOs are facing a downward pressure on their IT spends. IT surveys in last year and year before have shown that IT spends either remained the same or increased only marginally. Even the marginal increase mainly is attributed to increasing man power costs and costs of maintenance. However some CIOs always seem to be plush with funds and have great IT Budgets. Most others who do not fall in this category attribute it to organisation’s culture (IT savy), or great boards, amazing sponsors and many other things – other than the CIOs ability to obtain the budgets. However obtaining Great IT Budgets is a skill. This article presents a few principles on how to get approvals for great budgets. (Here we take into consideration only budgets approved during normal operations of the company. In special cases such during Fund Raising, IPO, M&A – getting budgets is a different ball game).
I do not like to oversimplify things. However two important principles which lead to great IT budgets are great projects and great selling.
Great Projects
Ask any CIO and he would have at least 3 to 4 large IT projects running in parallel (and possibly on miserably low budgets). The primary reason for the low budgets is that most projects which are selected and presented to the board (or committee etc.) don’t fit the requirements of strategic projects. If you look at the IT project classification grid – where does most of your IT Budget go? Most CIOs spenGrid2d maximum amount of budgets on “support” projects (mainly because these are critical for sustaining present operations), and on “factory” projects – projects which improve efficiencies. While these two types of projects are important – these will continually face a downward pressure on budgets as these are seen as ‘necessary evil’ rather than value adding activities. Great projects are the ones which fall in the category of “Turn around” and “Strategic”. These projects hold a promise of improvement in revenue – top line and bottom lines and becoming a great differentiator spiralling companies growth.
Indentifying Strategic Projects involves number of techniques – including innovation techniques such as Systematic Inventive Thinking (which I am great admirer of), brain storming, Deep Diving, strategic workshops, etc. I will dwell into some of these topics in some of my other posts. However one thing is sure that strategic projects can rarely be identified by looking at what competition is doing.
For any CIO, it is essential to first assess where his projects lie in the above strategic grid. Once he is sure that he has a great new project which is a strategic or a turnaround project, it’s time to move on to the next step – selling the project.
Great Selling
Most CIOs / CTOs require the approval of some committee, board, or sometimes a person for their IT Budgets. It is not enough to have a great project (or line up of projects) to obtain budgets. Many times the most promising projects are shelved because lack of budgets. What the CIOs generally ignore is that however great the idea – it needs to be sold. Here I give four simple rules by which you can sell your project effectively to your board.
1. TALK BUSINESS: Start with how the project is going to improve revenues and efficiencies. Present NUMBERS. Do not go through the usual rant of business requirements, approach, specifications approach etc. No one is interested in these. Talk MONEY, talk about CUSTOMER, talk DIFFERNTIATION. Do not talk specifications.
Read more here
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