Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Apr 14, 2010 @ 05:56 AM
If you’ve been in project administration for any amount of time, you know that the sheer administrative tasks surrounding your job can, at times, be overwhelming. If you’re not on top of your game, your projects can fail, and fail miserably. If they do, your company is going to lose valuable resources, both in time and money, and you’re likely to be out of a job.
Fortunately, you’ve got what it takes to be a successful project administrator. You just need a little bit of encouragement and advice along the way. Here are 5 project administration tips that will help you keep your laser focus and make sure your projects come out on top.
1. A project’s implementation methods can’t be separated from the project’s nature. In other words, the type of project you’re administering will strongly influence how exactly you manage it. Take, for example, a project that utilizes commercial licensing. The way you govern your project will be heavily influenced by external factors, including things like corporate strategy, the structure of the organization, the organization’s financial priorities and even existing, established procedures.
2. Finances are key. Money makes the world go ‘round, and it's also what makes your projects get approved in the first place. Know from the start what costs are allowable and which aren't, know what to do if there's an overexpenditure, understand any cost sharing requirements and keep on top of fiscal management.
3. Stay in compliance. Yes, compliance is more important in some industries than others. However, issues like conflicts of interest or auditing requirements are just as important as, for example, things like OSHA. Follow your organizations policies and the laws governing your industry to an exacting specification. Compliance isn't just about covering your hid or protecting the company, in many cases it's about safety, saving money and serious liability.
4. Remember the human factor. Ultimately, whether a project fails or succeeds has a lot to do with the people involved. Keep on top of the HR area. If there are personality conflicts on a project team, do what you can to minimize them or to at least manage the fallout. While vendors can become territorial, even personnel from different departments within your organization may decide that they need to jockey for position or credit. Keeping people in line is at least as important as keeping to a schedule and a budget.
5. Vendor management. One of the most important aspects of your job, and the reason you're doing the job instead of someone else, is because you have skills at managing vendors. You need to be able to work with vendors to contain costs, to keep schedules and to keep in compliance with your project requirements. Vendor management is easy when you've got a good vendor, but can be a nightmare when a vendor falls through or lets you down. Knowing when to drop a vendor is nearly as important as being able to select the vendor in the first place.
Unitiv's Project Services include:
- Temporary staffing and implementing specific solutions
- Integration, testing, staging of equipment and installation of software before delivery, or onsite before you deploy the asset (this includes software configuration)
- Upgrades to your data center systems
- Proof-of-concept support for new technology or platforms
- Program and project management services
- Specialized staffing
Click here for more details.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Feb 10, 2010 @ 08:23 AM
While it isn't 1990 anymore, it's not 2000 either. The fact of the matter is that technology has moved at an alarming rate in the past decade, and 2010 is shaping up to have its own significant challenges for CIOs. As the technological landscape changes, an effective CIO needs to reevaluate her priorities and bring them in line with what's going on it the world around her.
Here are some of the most essential focus areas for the successful CIO in the 2010s:
1. Cost reduction. If Y2K was the high point of technology spending, 2010 is quickly becoming the low point. CIOs are expected to provide greater functionality to their users on a fraction of the budget they had a decade ago. The recession hasn't helped this situation, and even though the economy may recover just fine many organizations will be hesitant to reopen the flood gates of IT spending. The effective and successful CIO will need to find ways to reduce IT costs all while providing improved levels of service. Your organization expects you to work miracles, so you need to find ways to do just that.
2. Alignment. There was a time when IT was on its own. It may have been a small little hungry monster living under the Finance Department's desk, or it may have been tucked away in operations. Today, however, that's changed. The fact that IT deserves an officer-level executive is testament to this fact. Still, many IT departments find themselves at odds with the organization's business focus. Bringing your area into alignment with the overall organization's goals and processes is key to being successful. It will also make it much easier to provide business justifcations as you struggle for funding.
3. Strategic planning. To be sure, in a down economy it's easy to become more tactical or even go into survivalist mode. However, you still need to have the big picture in mind. You need to be able to look forward five years and have a realistic picture of where your organization's IT needs are going to be, and then make decisions today that contribute to the organization's long-term health and goals. Even when you're forced to use stopgap measures, you can't lose sight of how things ought to work out in the end.
4. Process re-engineering. Even though tech changes at a breakneck pace, people don't. They like to do things the same way over and over again. Even your true cutting-edge engineers fall into old habits when it comes to business processes. Regularly reevaluating and improving your business process lets you run a tight ship and keep thing effecient.
5. Security. While it may not be 2002 anymore, security is still a top priority for successful CIOs. New threats, particularly in the realm of cyberterrorism, pose problems for your organization. Evaluating your organization's overall security strategy and integrating physical along with informational strategy are essential to keeping your organization safe from the kinds of threats.
Reduce Costs with Strategic Rightsourcing
The Forrester Whitepaper, Reducing Cost with Strategic Rightsourcing, discusses these new models and offers guidance for:
- Which services to outsource and which to own
- How to focus your staff on mission-critical projects
- What steps to take to keep your rightsourcing under control
Click here to download
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Feb 03, 2010 @ 07:00 AM
This post is taken from Mike Workman's recent blog post, Pass the Morton's Salt.
When I was quite a bit younger some really great folks at IBM gave me the opportunity to help start a Hard Disk Drive OEM business. I was part of the Storage division in San Jose California. At the time we built proprietary, non-standard products with all custom mechanical and electrical parts.
The writing was on the wall, the future lay in using high volume, and hence lower cost parts. Not only did this amortize engineering costs (NRE), but tooling and test process costs could be amortized over a much larger volume as well. The idea was – use custom parts only where they provided a distinct competitive advantage. Then, build designs that could be sold into many products, not just one.
IBM wasn’t alone in this, the rest of the world was trying to gain leverage by producing standardized components as well. Seagate was building an empire out of providing 5.25” standard form factor drives to everyone, including the IBM PC (AT back then). But IBM had invented the disk drive, and its leadership was furious about ceding the high volume low cost drives to the likes of Seagate, and Conner Peripherals. Besides, it was clear that before long, the mechanical advantages of smaller form factors and advancing technologies would obsolete the “big drives” that were sold two or four spindles to the refrigerator sized box.
The IBM AS400 group had the same idea: Build smaller drives with advanced IBM technology to sell to internal customers like the AS400 and IBM PC groups. While the AS400 came from the “custom” world, the IBM PC guys new that they needed best of breed cost in all their components, and the thought of being locked in to some over-transfer-priced HDD from another division was repugnant. The Rochester team made an “almost standard” product: Little things like non-standard mounting holes were rendering their drives incompatible for PCs inside or outside of IBM.
I was asked by “The Chairman” and a few San Jose execs to build an entrepreneurial program inside IBM – the goal of which was a) To build a standard form-factor and interface HDD, and b) Build one packed with enough technology like MR heads to allow even the high-end storage guys to incorporate it into a modular version of the product. Unfortunately the IBM Rochester team was heading in a similar direction, so a political battle ensued in which after a squabble, I landed in Rochester, Minnesota. As my California friends said at the time “He really must have pissed someone off to be sent to Minnesota”. From Rochester (home of the Mayo clinic) I managed what I named Allicat – an enterprise class drive in reliability and performance that fit Industry standard electrical and mechanical specifications. The “Alli” in Allicat came from the Alliance of San Jose and Rochester. At 2GB, 5400 RPM, SCSI and IPI-2 interfaces, the drive was the beginning of the OEM HDD storage team within IBM. We went from about $0 top-line revenue to about $4.6B in the next 11 years.
Disk drives today are indeed labeled as a commodity. Lots of definitions of a commodity exist including simply something that is bought or sold. I maintain that when most of us think commodity, we think about a product that has minor differentiation against others that are adequate substitutes. Table salt for example: Nobody says “Please pass the Morton’s Table Salt”. Instead, salt is salt, and rarely is anything but “Please pass the salt” heard at any table. Likewise, gold is gold, wheat is wheat, etc. Differentiation of one commodity over another is usually at the fringes -- fringes which are desperately held on to by manufactures (But when it rains, this salt still pours!).
Moving up the food chain buyers of PCs and Servers that incorporate HDDs always make sure that their commodities include two or more sources. Same for muffin fans, chassis, cables and connectors.
What about storage arrays? Well the more complicated the system, and the smaller the volume requirements are for a system, the less easily it is commoditized. After all, the how many Golden Gate bridges are needed in the world and how standard is the interface between the bridge and the terra firma it sits on? So the truth is, while buyers try and push arrays toward the commodity spectrum, it is difficult to substitute one array for another at some level. Training, management, interoperability, application APIs are all different enough that one vendor is much easier than three, and disparate types of arrays at some level cost the buyer money by shear reason of their differences.
What are some of the consequences of commoditization in the storage business? Here are a few, I am sure that many of you can add to this list:
- Disk will continue as a commodity.
- SSD will become a commodity. Manufacturers will struggle valiantly but much like the HDD business, that large OEMs will drive toward standardization and multiple sources as volumes increase. One might argue that we are nearly there already, but firmware maturity is still disparate amongst manufacturers.
- The number of manufacturers of SSDs will grow for awhile, and eventually decline as margins force consolidation.
- Flash memory used in SSDs will become a commodity. Today there are still some differences but there will be a convergence.
- Plug-in Cache modules (PCIe based Flash Memory) will converge into a commodity. Right now many players are striving to differentiate themselves, but the pace will be fast and furious and largely decided by large volume OEM’s wins.
- As SSDs reduce in price and increase in capacity, there will be larger and larger a substitution of SSDs for HDDs.
- A trend toward SSDs over HDDs will cause all storage arrays to be re-architected. Today’s arrays are not built properly for maximum utilization of the performance benefits of SSD. This will affect everybody in the business. Pillar’s advanced Axiom architecture is already under development. This will be fun.
Oh, and I like Minnesota, really. Sure it is cold, but that wasn’t the real problem. Rather, it was how long it was cold. And thank goodness for the commoditization of salt, because they use a heck of a lot of it.
- Mike Workman, Chairman & CEO, Pillar Data Systems
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Dec 23, 2009 @ 08:00 AM
The marketplace for Enterprise Storage Management (ESM) is changing rapidly. Storage utilization is growing in many enterprises by as much as 60 percent to 100 percent each year. Experts suggest that the ESM market will continue to grow by at least 10 percent a year for the foreseeable future. For your business to keep up with these trends, you need to not only know what’s going on but also know what types of solutions will best fit your business’s needs.
It’s important, first of all, to recognize that ESM encompasses more than just technology. Your people and the processes your company uses are also an integral part of ESM. Implementing a new technology is futile if it doesn’t fit your company’s culture, the way it does things, and even its business purposes.
ESM and Business Continuity
Some of the most pressing issues in ESM right now are the twin imperatives of disaster recovery and business continuity. As data need grow in volume, the ability of backup systems to keep pace without demanding network or SAN resources is no easy task.
Still, an effective ESM solution has to take disaster recovery and business continuity into account. As many as 90 percent of companies that experience a significant data loss due to a disaster will go out of business within five years. Just under half of businesses never open their doors again after a disaster. Effective ESM can greatly improve the odds of your company to survive these kinds of trials.
ESM and Heterogeneous Environments
Another significant problem for ESM right now is heterogeneity. Today’s enterprise is typically no longer a one-vendor shop. Enterprise IT personnel recognize that you need best-in-class solutions for many business functions, and that a single-vendor solution is almost never the most efficient way to go.
This is, of course, a challenge in many IT areas, not just ESM. Heterogeneity affects performance management and data sharing as much as it does ESM. However, an effective ESM solution is one that’s able to serve multiple environments and still keep utilization and management from becoming a logistical nightmare.
ESM and Legacy Data
A third issue facing ESM today is the issue of legacy systems. When you transition a business function from one environment to another, you will ideally pull archived data along with the transition. In cases where this isn’t possible, you not only need to maintain the legacy system, you need to provide an effective storage solution for that data.
A workable ESM solution takes into account legacy data. If the ESM can’t offer legacy data to both old and new systems, it still needs to be able to preserve the data for whatever archival purposes are required by business process or by industry regulations.
The Right ESM Solution for You
When you’re choosing an ESM, you need to focus on several factors. All of these issues should be addressed in the process of evaluating solutions:
• Necessary data performance throughput,
• Availability of business-critical data and applications,
• Scalability,
• Backup and Recovery,
• And, of course, your budget.
Download the HP Storage Essentials Data Sheet.
Find out how to optimize your business intelligence outcomes with an easy-to-use
interface that provides powerful query, analysis, and custom reporting
of heterogenous storage and infrastructure assets.
Posted by Dan Webber on Fri, Sep 25, 2009 @ 06:00 AM
As a CIO, I have been through 32 mergers, acquisitions, and dispositions and have thrown away countless other opportunities - I believe 68 of them. The following are tips from my years of experience:
1. KISS - Keep it Simple and Succinct. Yes I know the final "S" is usually something else. Stick to the basics and make sure your decisions are aligned with the business objectives.
2. Listen. Listen to the business. Listen to your peers and other members of the executive team. Listen to your staff. If new to the organization, send out a survey in the first week and understand the good, the bad, and the ugly. Perception is reality.
3. Communicate. Let everyone know realistically the costs, the timelines, and the expectations. Communicate often, openly, and in the language of the customer.
4. Stay close to and know your key employees. Identify them early. Nurture them. Grow them. Praise and celebrate the wins, no matter how small.
5. Inventory. Know what technology is in place and how it aligns to your key set of applications. Understand what monitoring systems are in place. Review the knowledge base of the help desk to see where there are the opportunities. I know this sounds simple with today's technology, but many organizations still do not do the basics.
6. Renegotiate licensing and maintenance terms with your vendors.
7. Get your applications under control. Understand what guidelines are already in place, adapt and communicate your standards and manage to that expectation.
8. Institute a sound governance model. Ensure that the demand funnel matches the capacity of the organization and is communicated in a standard format. Utilize strong project management principles.
9. Continually assess and evaluate. Don't sit still. Make appropriate changes along the way.
Every challenge is different. But if you start with the standard guidance. You can easily adapt, so that you can Plan the Plan and Work the Plan.
Dan Webber is a CIO in Atlanta, GA. He delivers his unique
perspective as Chief 
Information Officer on technology, business, and
the Atlanta IT industry. He is a recent recipient of Oracle's CIO of the quarter award.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Thu, Aug 27, 2009 @ 08:33 AM
This article will answer the question, “What is an IT assessment?” An IT assessment is a comprehensive and thorough review of a company’s technology systems and environment and will result in a written evaluation and recommendation. The assessment will appraise how the technology helps or hinders the core business and recommend how to use technology to meet the business goals and objectives. The assessment can include, but is not limited to, network and systems performance, software audits, concept testing and development, strategic evaluations, technical reviews, and risk management.
An IT system isn’t just technology for technology’s sake. Technology should help meet specific business goals and provide value. An IT assessment can make sure that the technology is meeting these goals, or provide a blueprint for improving the technology and a specific and measurable template for achieving business objectives. It can also ensure that technology and security is in compliance with government guidelines and best practices.
Any business in today’s environment is running on a network of connected computers, servers, printers, and other hardware. The network is the backbone of the entire enterprise and can be a major bottleneck in business applications. An IT assessment will provide a network performance review and make recommendations based on traffic, errors, packet loss, and conflicts that can bring a business network to a halt. Investing in the latest computers and servers is a waste of money if it is attached to a sub-optimal network.
Software that is out of license compliance or copied illegally can cause huge fines and penalties to a business. An IT assessment will evaluate the existing software for compliance and create an audit process for future software. A software audit now as part of an IT assessment is much more cost effective than an audit later by a software company.
Security of data is key to any business. Proper security measures not only protect the data from outside hackers, but the ability to demonstrate good security is essential for new sales and customer retention. An IT assessment will evaluate and make recommendations to close holes in security and help create a bulletproof computing environment for critical data.
Finally, business continuity is a significant part of any good business plan. In the event of a disaster, the technology must be able to continue operating so that day to day business can continue. Proper backup procedures, redundant systems, and recovery methods must be in place. An IT assessment can provide a disaster recovery plan to ensure that the business continues in the event of anything from a small electrical problem to a major disaster.
Is your company in need of an IT Assessment?
Unitiv offers assessments in all areas based on your needs:
- Systems Performance
- Software Audits
- Network Performance
- Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
- Much more
Learn more about Unitiv's IT Assessment offer
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Sun, May 24, 2009 @ 09:17
I recently came across some very interesting statistics regarding females in engineering. According to The National Engineers Week Foundation only 20% of students in U.S. undergraduate engineering programs are women. A study done at Purdue showed that out of the 6,400 engineering majors, only 1,275 were women (20%). This number rose from 18% between 1994 to 1998; however, there has been no change since 1998.
Since I have a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science (and still remember my college days), these figures came as no big surprise. I was about to start reading another article when it hit me...why aren't more women pursuing careers in engineering and technology?
The final conclusion of the Purdue study indicates that there is no single silver bullet to explain the lack of female engineering majors. However they also concluded that the image of engineering and technology careers conflicts with the goals of most young women. What is this goal you ask? Simple, they want to "help people" or "make a difference." A noble idea no doubt, however are we engineers nothing more than cold, calculating destroyers of the world? More about that later.
So what exactly do women want (I'm only discussing careers here)? The Association of American Colleges say that 47.8% of first year medical students were women. This statistic directly attacks the old idea that women are not good at technology. However according to the AAC women need their future careers to have some "social relevance" more so than men.
Returning to my previous point about the image of engineers in society, why can't we make a difference? Of course we do, we are just far more subtle. For example to all the difference-making ladies entering the medical field, where do you think all those x-ray images are stored? When a hospital patient needs urgent attention, how are all the doctors and nurses notified in real time without human intervention?
Well I'm sure you see what I'm getting at, but it seems that it is not so obvious to everyone. It seems to me that people (mostly women) see technology as not just impersonal, but to some extent evil. To that I say, technology is not sentient (not yet anyway) and it is what we make it. So while it pollutes and destroys, the main focus of virtually any new high-tech invention is to improve quality of life. Perhaps technology (and engineers) needs a better publicist or perhaps the field just needs more ladies in order to make it seem warmer and more personable.
So what is being done today to change the demographics of engineering and high-tech careers? The first thing that I can think of are the IBM commercials which frequent my favorite TV programs. I'm sure you know the ones...they talk about reducing pollution by changing traffic patterns, building smart cities and becoming IBMers. Not a bad start, however according to Kristen Lamoreaux the founder of SIM Women (Society for Information Management) it will take much more than that. She states that there aren't enough female success stories in the IT industry for women to relate to and that successful women should do more to share their stories with the younger generation. Lamoreaux also states that women in IT have not yet found their "Hannah Montana" that speaks to this younger generation.
For now it seems that the female demographic in engineering is not going to increase, however at least engineering is starting to be talked about in the context of humanity and society.
For more information, go to www.Unitiv.com.
xfa273p8hv