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Can You Fix This? January 30, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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3 comments

I’m a gadget guy.  I’ve been fascinated by things with blinking lights for a long time.  Before I had access to computers, I built Heathkit radios.  Before that, Erector sets and Legos.  I love to tinker and figure out how things work.  It led me to computing, which has led to great happiness in my career.

I think technical expertise makes me an effective CIO when I deal with other IT people, especially on my own team.  I know enough to hold my own in technical discussion, and bring a lot of experience to the table as we try to design new systems and solve problems.  I think a non-technical CIO can be easily overrun by their people and make bad decisions.

But does all that technical expertise make me an effective CIO among other executives?  My management peers turn to me to solve quick problems with their phones, PDAs, and laptops.  I get asked for advice on televisions and home networking.  I never turn down such requests, if for no other reason than that it would be rude to refuse to help anyone.  But I worry that such help pigeonholes me (and other technical CIOs) as the nerdy A/V guy, forever destined to set up the projector and advance the filmstrip during class.

CIOs have fought hard to get real management visibility and recognition.  But we cannot ignore our technical roots. We have to strike a balance between our business skills and our technical skills.  Done right, we retain our management focus while bringing technical perspective to the discussion at hand.  Done poorly, we forever lose credibility among our peers.

Every CIO should seek to be seen as a good business leader with technology skills, not as a technology provider who happens to know a bit about business.  Sometimes, the only way to reinforce that perception is to let someone else set up the projector.

Never Secure Enough January 28, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.
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3 comments

Many are predicting that 2009 will be a big year for The Cloud, wherein many companies will move many of their applications to the cloud, away from premise-based servers and storage.  A lot of the conversation about this revolves around network speeds, processor virtualization, and storage aggregation.  Although all of that is important, I’m more concerned about security.  More specifically, who in the cloud can see my data?

When I host an application internally, I have extremely tight control over access.  Not just who can use the system, but how the administrators can access the system and the underlying data.  We have layers of controlled access with specific checkpoints and audit trails.  Every access must be justified, documented, and audited on a regular basis.

When I shift a system to the cloud, I typically retain the ability to manage end-user access, but have no control over administrative access at the other end.  Of course, the hosting company will swear up and down that every precaution has been taken to keep anyone from ever seeing my data.  In reality, I have no idea what they really do behind the scenes, and I have no way to completely verify their claims.

The recent Twitter hack is a great example of this.  An admin at Twitter used a plain word (“happiness”) as their password. This was hacked by a person using a simple dictionary attack, trying every possible password until they broke in.  Once inside, they had immediate access to the Twitter management tools and proceeded to gain control of a number of high-profile Twitter accounts.  Fortunately, Twitter is a lightweight application with no important data that could be compromised. Still, people were embarrassed and disrupted by the penetration.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  A system is only as secure as its weakest access point.  When you move your systems to the cloud, your data is only as secure as the worst password used by the least experienced administrator.

I believe I’ll wait a bit longer before moving to the cloud.

[tweetmeme source=”EffectiveCIO” alias=”http://j.mp/cio161″ only_single=false]

The CIO Is In January 26, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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1 comment so far

Like almost every other executive I have ever met, I have an open-door policy.  I look forward to talking to my team and appreciate those that take time to stop by and chat, on matters large and small.  I try to wander about as well, keeping in touch with people whenever possible.  In spite of this policy and my efforts, though, I still don’t get enough contact with my co-workers.  In short, being accessible is easier said than done.

A big part of the problem is that I have a hectic schedule.  I am often out of the office and hard to find.  When I’m in the office, I am often in meetings and unavailable.  Even if people wanted to talk to me, I can be hard to find and pin down.  For those who might be a bit reluctant to stop by, I am essentially unreachable.

To make myself more accessible, I started scheduling “Office Hours.”  Simply put, I promise my people that I will be in my office, otherwise unoccupied, for a set period of time each week.  Anyone who wants to see me can stop by and know that I will be available and ready to listen.  If no one shows up, I’ll certainly find other things to do; when they do, I set aside what I’m doing and focus on them.

When I started office hours, I laid out the rules so that people would know what to expect.  Here are the rules:

  • I will be in my office every Thursday, 1:30-3:30, except when I am on vacation or a serious emergency has occurred
  • Anyone can stop by to talk about anything they want
  • First come, first served.  If I am talking to someone else, put your name on a Post-It and stick it on the door.  I’ll call you back when I am available.
  • Except in rare circumstances, you cannot “book” time during office hours.  Just show up!
  • Except in rare circumstances, you can’t shut the door while we are talking.  I don’t want others to be put off by a closed door.  If you have a sensitive topic, we’ll set up a separate time where we can have some privacy and adequate time to discuss it.
  • Topics should be relatively brief (less than 15 minutes) to give time for others

Office hours have been a big success!   Many times, I am the pacing item on some project, for a signature, approval, or recommendation. People know I will be available for these kind of “quick hit” items during office hours, so they stop by and get things moving forward. Beyond these kind of items, people stop by for almost every imaginable topic: advice, personnel issues, venting, bouncing around ideas, and just saying hello.

Communication is crucial to our success as leaders and to our teams.  Office hours have had a big positive impact on communication within my team. What started as a quick experiment has turned into an important part of my weekly schedule.  I couldn’t imagine removing office hours from my schedule.  Give it a try; I hope you find it as useful as I have.

Change Is Good. You Go First. January 23, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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2 comments

Once again, a seemingly Minor Event in my life causes Great Consternation and, upon reflection, provides a Greater Lesson for us all.  In this case, the Minor Event was the arrival of a new cell phone.

Let’s be clear: I love cell phones, and PDAs, and any sort of handheld device that you carry about.  If it fits in your hand, needs to be charged, has a screen, and can be endlessly configured and customized, it is my kind of device.  In the spirit of clarity, I’ll also share that I am extremely picky about user interfaces and the user experience in general.  I will tinker endlessly to get the screen layout just right, or to optimize the sequence of clicks to perform some action.

Disclosures made, let’s move to the Minor Event. Last week, I upgraded from my wonderful Samsung Blackjack II cellphone to the Samsung Epix.  Both devices run Windows Mobile and sport dedicated keyboards.  The big difference: the Epix has a touchscreen and the Blackjack does not. I was excited to try out a touch interface, along with the Epix’s built-in WiFi.

I was astounded at how difficult it was to switch to the Epix.  I had been using the Blackjack for over a year, and my fingers had long ago learned the key patterns to accomplish everything I needed to do on the phone.  I had tweaked every nuance of the Blackjack, installed a ton of third-party tools, and had that phone perfectly configured.

After one day of the Epix, I was ready to give the it back.  I was absolutely inept with the thing.  The ringtones were wrong, the applications felt clunky, and my constant desire to click on a directional pad was thwarted by the fact the the Epix doesn’t have one.  The WiFi was indeed cool, and the virtual mouse touchpad was clever.  Even so, I felt clumsy and frustrated with every aspect of the phone.

Great Consternation had set in.  I took a deep breath, drew on my deep reserves of inner strength, and vowed to use the phone for another full day.  By then, things had gotten a little better: I found some decent software for the phone, reinstalled touchscreen versions of my favorite tools, and even found better versions of others.  I was acclimating to the phone.

After a week, I have come to really like this phone.  Some things still need some tweaking, but other features are too good to give up and go back.  So my beloved Blackjack II will be placed, gently, into my Drawer of Abandoned Devices, next to my RAZR, Palm LifeDrive, Palm Tx, and Casio Zoomer.  The Epix becomes my device of choice, at least until my contract expires.

Which brings us to the Greater Lesson: If this kind of minor, self-inflicted change is this distracting and painful, imagine how annoying the change that we inflict on others must be.  Those of us in IT like to see ourselves as agents of change, disrupting existing practices with new tools and processes for the greater good of all.  Let’s get real: we drive people nuts, making seemingly arbitrary decisions that turn their world upside down for no apparent reason.

We can’t ever, ever forget how painful change really is for our users.  Minor Events that we fully understand generate Great Consternation out in the real world.  Nonetheless, our job is to find and fix things.  As you go about doing that, don’t lose sight of how hard it is for people to put up with the changes we promote.  And if you do forget how hard that can be, I have an easy solution: go get a new phone.

Life On A Barge January 12, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.
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5 comments

My company ships some of our products by barge, up and down the Mississippi river.  When you ship things by barge, people are naturally inclined to ask things like “Where is my barge?”  Answering that question is more difficult than you might think.

Barges are extremely low-tech devices.  They are nothing more than an enormous steel bucket, floating in the river.  They are moved about by tugboats, and a single tug can have as many as 30 barges lashed to it as it moves up and down the river.  Sometimes a barge will break loose and float away, coming to rest in some nook or cranny of the mighty Mississippi.  Most barges are owned by a few companies, and you rent your barges from one of these companies.  You might rent a barge for a single trip, or for many trips over a period of time.

Being a technology kind of guy, I had an instant answer for the barge question.  Just attach a GPS transmitter to each barge, and collect position data in real time.  Put a snazzy web site in front of the data, enable authorized user access, and you’re good to go!

(This was a few years ago, so these days I’d include a barge Twitter stream, a barge blog or two, a barge-cam streaming live to Hulu, and an app [iBarge?] so you can track a barge from your iPhone.  If there was time, maybe even an app that would identify a barge using a picture you snapped from the shore using your phone.  Not to mention a search engine that looks for #barge hashtags on Twitter and aggregates them, along with matching Flickr barge photos, on trackmybarge.com. Web 2.0 really enhances the whole barge management experience in ways that Mark Twain could only dream of.)

I pitched this plan to the barge people, and the idea quickly sank.  First, barges have no power source.  This meant that the GPS unit had to be battery powered with solar charging panels.  Second, barges get banged around a lot, so the unit had to be hardened and waterproof, and would need to be welded somewhere on the top edge of the barge.  The rough estimate for such a unit was $1,000 each, which worked out to a $1,000,000 investment to outfit a fleet of 1,000 barges.  This didn’t  include the whole web and data infrastructure, or programming effort.  (Not to mention the blogs, webcams, and Facebook app that would soon follow.)

A bit miffed, I aked how they currently track the barges.  Easy: each morning a clerk calls each of our tugboat pilots on their cellphone.  She asks them where they are, and they reply with a mile number on the river.  She knows which barges are tied to each tug, and she writes each barge number and the mile marker on an index card that she puts on a bulletin board in the office.  If you want to know where the barges are you, you can stop by the board or call her.

Just as importantly, the pilots like to be called each morning.  It’s nice to hear from the home office, and a friendly voice on the phone is a pleasant way to start each day.

The clerk makes $25,000 a year.  My solution pays for itself in 40 years.  Analysis over; project cancelled.

As we get completely wrapped up in applying technology to everything we encounter, it helps to remember that some things work fine just as they are.  And in the end, processes that work because people like to hear each other’s voices are probably worth keeping, even if only for a little while longer.