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Staying Out Of Holes February 18, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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1 comment so far

Since the dawn of computing, we’ve worked really hard to make technology easier and more accessible.  Computers started out in protected data centers, with mere mortals kept far, far away from actually using the machines.  Today, we’ve pushed powerful tools into the hands of end users that enable them to do all sorts of amazing things on a regular basis.

As users become more comfortable with these tools, they try to acquire more of them.  That’s a great thing, until those well-meaning end users get in over their heads and wind up holding a technology tiger by the tail.

Let’s be honest: computers, especially enterprise computing systems, are inordinately complicated.  They are not easy to buy, install, configure, or maintain.  It takes a a team of experienced professionals to make sure that a company buys the right systems, deploys them correctly, and maintains them for maximum business advantage.  When end users try to take that on themselves, disaster invariably ensues.

Every CIO can tell a story about some non-IT organization that tried to buy some cool system without bringing IT into the picture.  Typically, the first call comes about halfway into the implementation, when the project is behind schedule, the gory details are being exposed, and the poor users have no idea how to get out of the hole they have dug for themselves.  By the time IT gets involved, lots of money and time has been wasted, and the cost of recovery far exceeds the project estimates and often outweighs any potential benefits of the system.

It is easy to blame these scenarios on the users.  The real blame lies with IT.  We need to build trust with our users so that they feel comfortable turning to us when they need a new system or have a problem to solve.  The worst situations occur when IT is so inaccessible and arrogant that users prefer the pain of a bad implementation to the pain of dealing with IT.

Beyond earning trust, we also need to educate our users so they understand why our systems work the way they do, and how we integrate new technology to benefit everyone.  Systems architecture is of little interest to end users, but we must teach them how we fit all the pieces together so they can see how we bring all these conflicting systems together.

Finally, IT brings a lot of non-technical benefits to any technology acquisition.  In my experience, users make a good effort at finding a tool that has the right featurs to meet their needs.  Where they completely miss the mark is with the contract and service details around the purchase.  Users have no idea how to negotiate good pricing, or how to see through the smoke a vendor may be blowing their way.  They don’t know about service level agreements, or good maintenance pricing, or how to write a contract that indemnifies them against a product failure.  They don’t know how to evaluate a vendor for financial stability, or to know if their solution is a risky leading-edge idea or an outdated platform on its last legs.  We know all these things, and we need to provide that assistance to our users.

Like almost every other aspect of our job, it starts with communications and trust.  Begin by reaching out to users when they aren’t facing big problems.  Calmer times give you the opportunity to explain what we do, why we do it, and how we can help.  When users do reach out to us, bend over backwards to help them navigate the world of technology.  Respect their needs and take time to figure out what they really need.  Work hard when users aren’t in a hole, and you’ll eventually keep them from digging a new one.

Wireless TV February 16, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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4 comments

In the fall of 2000, our family moved into a new house in a new neighborhood.  Since we were living in a construction zone, cable cuts were common.  As a result, reliable television and internet connectivity was not a given and we would lose our signal at the drop of a hat (or backhoe, as the case may be).

As you may recall, there was a heated election that fall, and it took thirty days for Al Gore to throw in the towel.  He was scheduled to give his concession speech at 9 PM on December 13.  I was determined to see the event, having waited so long to see what should have happened a month earlier.  (I had no idea that his concession would ultimately lead to the horror of global warming, but that’s a topic for another post).

I turned on the television around 8:30 and was presented with a blank screen.  No! Not another cable outage!  Knowing that it could take hours to fix the cable, I began to look for alternatives.  I ran to the garage and grabbed a spool of wire, pulled the TV away from the wall, and began to rig a quick antenna.

My kids thought I had lost my mind.  Muttering to myself, I stripped the end of the wire, screwed  it to the 300-ohm antenna jack, and draped it across the shelves in the family room.  I switched the TV to the ANT-1 source, clicked to channel 5, and got a decent, somewhat snowy, picture.

My kids were stunned!  They gazed, slackjawed, at a modern miracle: television from thin air!

Until that moment, it never occured to me that my kids had never experienced television that was not delivered via cable.  They’d never tuned to a distant UHF channel, never been stuck with three channels, never used a paper television guide to see what was on.  They had never even used a TV with knobs! They had no idea that television signals ebb and flow around us all the time, free for the taking.

I like to share this story when the conversation turns to rapidly changing technology and the generational divides that result.  As we deploy new stuff at an ever-increasing rate, we need to keep in mind that not everyone understands why things work a certain way, or why some ideas may or may not be worth revisiting.  More importantly, we need to remember why we didn’t do certain things, to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

Social Media Killed The Internet February 11, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
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5 comments

In the beginning, the internet was about sharing and collaboration.  Before the web existed (imagine that!) people used the internet to share and refine ideas, collect information, and make it easy to learn about new things.  The interfaces were primitive by modern standards, but the information flowed and great ideas were born.

The early internet was organized by topic.  That is, there tended to be one place you could go to find out everything about that one topic.  If you were interested in a particular subject, you could find a mailing list or a Usenet newsgroup devoted to just that topic.  Everyone that shared your interest came to the same place; anything important regarding that topic generally found its way to that spot.

The Usenet newsgroup hierarchy was the pinnacle of this structure.  Endlessly tweaked and debated, wrapped in a community-designed change protocol, the newsgroup structure neatly found a home for everything, like a Dewey decimal system for the internet.  Interested in movies? Go to the rec.arts.movies group.  Some obscure operating system? You’ll find it in the comp.os tree.  On and on, every conceivable topic was parked somewhere.

If multiple sources arose (a competing mailing list, or a similar newsgroup) they were quickly merged and consolidated.  Gateways existed to route messages between groups and lists; the Usenet social order realigned errant groups with great fervor.  The focus was on accurate, consolidated information.  Who provided that data, while interesting, was of secondary importance.

As the web evolved, this topic-centric model evolved with it.  People developed pages that became reference points for specific topics, and everyone linked to those pages.  I developed a page on creating transparent GIF images that still circulates today, although rehosted on other sites.  The Internet Movie Database (which I also had a role in creating) supplanted the rec.arts.movies group.

With the advent of social networking on the web, the internet is being reorganized by person, instead of by topic.  Now, people develop a central repository about themselves and what they know (or don’t, which is the real problem).  It is easy to learn everything about a person, and much more difficult to learn about a single topic.  For example, my recent cell phone acquisition caused me to search the web for everything I could find about a Samsung Epix phone.  Long ago, there would have been a newsgroup called comp.phones.samsung.epix that provided everything I needed to know.  Now, there are dozens of blogs that contain conflicting or incomplete information.  Collating these sites and finding what I need is much more difficult, if not impossible.

This person-centric view eliminates the most important part of the old model: peer review.  Before, a single errant posting would be immediately corrected by the collective audience, and the data that remained was usually detailed and accurate.  With the experts now isolated on their own islands of information, this review and collaboration has diappeared.  Except for concerted efforts like Wikipedia, we’ve lost the essence of the original internet: a collectively managed shared information resource.  The new individually managed information resources are far less useful.

The ego-centric internet is just a reflection of the ego-centric, celebrity-driven world that we live in.  We’ve lost something as a result, I think.  But somewhere, Andy Warhol is smiling.

The Demise of Print Media February 9, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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7 comments

As a long-time subscriber of PC Magazine, I was distressed to discover that, as of their February 2009 issue, they were abandoning their print edition and moving to an all-digital online publication model.  I’m the first to admit that it seems a bit odd to complain about an all-digital magazine in an online blog, but hear me out.

I’m all for nifty modern conveniences like computers and electricity, but paper provides a delightfully tangible user experience.  The feel of the paper, the sound of the pages, the weight of the magazine, even the smell of the ink: all contribute to the complete sensory experience that is reading.  While you can shift the glyphs to a screen of some sort, you cannot replicate the complete feel of reading.  As more and more publications move to electronic distribution, these non-visual components of reading will just disappear.

I like to read magazines cover-to-cover.  I don’t jump to articles, I get there in time, working through the magazine page by page.  You never know what you’ll find as you read your way to the main body of a magazine. A well-edited magazine places all sorts of interesting tidbits in your way, rewarding your sequential trek through the pages.  Letters, reviews, product announcements, and the like decorate the linear path through a magazine.  Digital magazines have no such meander available to you; you are expected to click (and click and click and click) to go directly to the stuff that interests you.  You may find what you want, but you often miss what you need.

Just as important, magazines go everywhere.  Planes and trains, cars and boats: you can read them anywhere.  When I backpack, I stick a magazine in my pack, to be read by headlamp in my tent after everyone else has gone to sleep.  It’s tough to get a connection in the woods; indeed, the whole point of the trip is to get disconnected.  I don’t want to drag a “reading device” with me on these trips; I just want to bring paper covered with words.  Plus, you can start fires with a magazine in a pinch.  Its name to contrary, no one is going to be burning a Kindle any time soon.

Finally, there is my visual impairment.  I suffer from a vision condition called “getting old.”  Teeny letters on teeny screens were much easier to deal with ten years ago.  Now, by the time the font is big enough to be seen, I can only fit a handful of words on the display.  Constant scrolling is the true enemy of comprehension.

So farewell, PC Magazine.  You shall be missed.  I hope PC World can stick it out a bit longer, but I am not banking on it.  I’ll hang on to my anachronistic role as long as I can: an agent of digital change clinging to ancient media.

Any Questions? February 6, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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3 comments

I do a lot of public speaking.  I am that rare person that enjoys public speaking.  I get energized by being in front of people, and there is nothing more rewarding than a captive receptive audience.

For me, the only unpleasant part of the experience is at the end, when that last slide appears: “Any Questions?”  At this point, the opportunity for public embarrassment climbs exponentially.

The worst thing that can happen is… nothing.  No questions, no feedback, just crickets and uncomfortable rustling in the audience.  We’ve all been in these audiences, immersed in the palpable relief that the presenter has finally finished speaking.  Initial relief that questions will not prolong the affair is replaced with awkward embarrassment for the speaker, who wraps things up with a lame joke and heads off-stage, fighting back tears.  Usually, concern for the speaker’s feeling is not so great that anyone will offer a “pity question” to break the silence. We all just look away and develop a sudden great need to check our email.

It’s almost equally bad to get too many questions.  I don’t care how great a speaker you are, the audience will only tolerate four or five questions before restlessness sets in.  I can guarantee that even after Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, the audience would have been staring daggers at whoever asked a sixth question.  You’ve done it: the speaker has answered a few questions, you want to get out of there, and the request goes out: “Any other questions?”  Everyone starts darting glances at each other, daring some insensitive clod to pose another query.  When they do, you can hear the air go out of the room as everyone else gives a quiet groan.

My personal favorite is the unintelligible question.  A person may have a thick accent or may be soft-spoken, but for whatever reason the speaker cannot understand the question.  I’ve been here many times, desperately trying to lip-read from 35 feet away as an audience member takes a third crack at explaining their question.  And it’s never a quick question.  Oh, no.  It has a two minute set-up and three parts to it, and you lost track of the question a half-sentence in.  The best answer? “That’s a great question, but is probably better handled offline.  Can we talk afterwards?”

In reality, we all have a responsibility to make the Q&A successful.  The presentation is a solo act, but the questions and answers are a duet. Whether speaking or listening, be ready to hold up your end of the act, either with short, effective questions or direct, helpful answers.  Everyone gets to go home on time, with a minimum of embarrassment.

Any questions?