Day 7 – Uxbridge

‘Pete darling, it’s ten minutes past six.’ ‘Bloody Hell!’ I am late.

Perhaps Stuart & I need a bigger alarm clock...

I set the alarm last night after returning home from Madrid but I didn’t turn it on. I am now over an hour late. I normally get up at 05:00 when I am working in the UK, and aim to leave my house by 05:45 to miss the morning traffic. I live 45 miles (approx 70 km) from the Uxbridge office in the countryside north of London. My choice of course, but it does make for a difficult journey in the rush hour traffic, hence the early start to do all I can to avoid it. I just hate sitting in a traffic line. But now I’m late.

My mother once said to me: ‘You were born two weeks late and have never quite caught up!’

I manage to get out of the house and on the road in under 40 minutes. I eventually get to the office a little after 08:30. The work I have planned to do between 07:00 and 08:30 will now have to be condensed into the morning as we have the Rally this afternoon. I am not very good at condensing. I pop in to see Stuart in his office and tell him of my alarm problems. He did exactly the same! Arriving into the office 1 minute ahead of his 07:00 call with the team in APAC. We both admit to having slept like babies irrespective of the problems with our alarm clocks.

We are back in our ‘home office’ venue of Uxbridge and much of the morning is spent catching up with people in our teams who we haven’t seen for the best part of two weeks. Electronic communications, email, messenger, BlackBerries etc. are all fine but still do not compete with face-to-face interaction.

Here's the photo of me (aged 5) that my wife dug up and Stuart put into a slide for all to see and sing to

Stuart and I have lunch together – as if we haven’t spent enough time in each other’s company over the last couple of weeks. I must admit that getting this amount of time with Stuart is terrific. He is constantly analysing this, reviewing that, initiating another idea or expanding new thoughts. Keeping up and at times helping to grow and contribute to all these things really start to happen when you spend time talking as we have.

The rally starts at 2:00pm in a room with nearly 300 teammates – very different to the ‘up close’ sessions earlier in the week in Milan and Madrid. Row after row of teammates are waiting and expecting to be informed and entertained! We do our best.

Emma is taking the middle section of the rally today – her first chance to participate in the global rally so far. The session between Stuart and Emma had been interrupted by a surprise… for me. Monday the 22nd is my 49th birthday. Because I am travelling, the team in Uxbridge – in a plan coordinated with my wife – produced a slide with the below photo and a huge chocolate birthday cake. All 300 teammates sang “Happy Birthday”. It was a real pleasure for me and a big surprise.

The session closed with a Q&A session. Tomorrow is a busy day, as we have the Rally in Sheffield in the morning and in Manchester in the afternoon

Firms looking to make strong headway when the bad weather finally passes will need to get as many hands on deck as possible – a tough ask given that few are carrying the same complement of staff they were a year or so ago, and that fewer still can afford to be carrying any passengers right now.

Consider also that the very subject of this continuing iQ Special Report – the New IT Economy – is gestating in
extraordinarily fraught and changeable market conditions, and there’s even more for businesses and their people to think about.

Add Whitehall’s ambitious plans and initiatives for Digital Britain into the equation and the need for technical,
competent, highly skilled staff is clear. But what are the right skills? Where do they most need to be deployed?
And where do we start?

David Chan is Director of the Centre for Information Leadership at City University London, an experienced CIO,
and the former Head of Business Systems at the BBC. He believes that we have now entered a critical period
in which businesses have to be thinking about their IT skills mix in a wider, more enterprise-centric context.

Despite the global economic storm threatening to blow itself out, the seas in which most businesses now find themselves remain at best squally and tricky to negotiate and at worst mountainous.

“Demands for IT skills must change to meet the demands of the enterprise, which is indeed navigating through turbulent times”, he explains. “(Moving forward) demand for high-order technical skills will be coupled with a growing need for technologists to interact and influence business decision makers; thus putting good
technologists’ soft skills at a premium. Already there are signs of this occurring in the labour market where
salary levels for enterprise-level architects in professional services firms are advertised at a similar if not higher level than those for CIOs.”

An interesting and perhaps appropriate working model for the new IT economy is that of the construction
industry, he suggests, in which there are three recognised and quite distinct professions: the architect, the civil
engineer, and the constructor. “Perhaps the information industry might evolve along similar lines – each discipline contributing in different ways to its development.”

And as Chan obliquely hints, it’s not only the upper echelons of the enterprise that ought to be contemplating
their HR navels. With employee behaviour changing at a fundamental level, a root and branch rethink of skills and practices appears to be needed from very lowest reaches of the business upwards.

In employees’ mushrooming use of non-sanctioned tools and applications for example. “We know that workers are using these applications to help them get their jobs done, with or without approval from their IT departments”, says Rene Bonvanie VP of worldwide marketing at Palo Alto Networks, which recently commissioned a international study into the use of social networking and collaborative applications.

The research turned up some surprising results – including the fact that the uptake of such tools is happening much faster than had been anticipated. And it’s “naïve to think that old-school security practices can handle this deluge”, warns Bonvanie.

“Organisations must realise that banning or allowing specific applications in a black-and-white fashion is bad
for business. They need a new approach that allows for shades of grey by enforcing appropriate application usage policies tailored for their workforces. This is a radical and necessary shift for today’s IT security professionals.”

Read more about securing the right IT skills for your business

Waste not want not? 10 basic ways your IT function is probably wasting money…

1. Recap on Recycling
Not enough business view recycling as a serious source of potential savings and even revenue according to Malcolm Watson, general manager of not for profit IT disposal experts Remploy e-cycle. Almost a third (29%) see no real barriers to reducing, recycling or re-using their IT equipment according to Remploy research, and yet almost half (40%) still have nothing in place to exploit this. A similar number of businesses (42%) replace or refresh kit yearly and yet around 80% have never received money back in exchange.
www.ecycle.remploy.co.uk

2.  Reverting to Hype
While technology vendors often have slick, practiced, marketing engines, their solutions aren’t always as good
as they claim (how could they be? Ed.). Accordingly, firms believe unadulterated hype and take claims at
face value at their peril says Steve Smith, MD of risk management specialists Pentura. He advises full due diligence and that companies remember that it’s not what products look like that’s important, but what they deliver. A fantastic looking GUI is all very well, he says, but irrelevant if the technology doesn’t deliver where it matters.

3. Purchasing Power
Few IT departments realise their own strength when it comes to buying power, but harnessed properly it can be a powerful tool in leveraging supplier discounts and negotiating more favourable contractual and payment terms. Businesses can maximise this potential by bringing all or most of their technology purchases under the control of the IT function, to facilitate substantial bulk discounts and drive greater visibility over what is needed, where, and when.

Where possible, purchases should also be timed to coincide with the times of year at which vendors cut prices to boost headline sales figures. And it’s always worth negotiating hard upfront, as quick-fix, hastily arranged
long-term contracts are a common source of financial leakage: marry in haste, repent at leisure.

4. Bandwidth Bandoleros
Multimedia content is rich, compelling, and more and more commonplace. But it’s also extremely bandwidth
hungry, with high-resolution images often using up to ten times as much bandwidth as slightly lower resolution
alternatives, says Richard Barker, CEO of Sovereign Business Integration. Networks that allow private user content to move around unchecked or unmetered can be similarly profligate.

Indeed, the implications of multimedia file-sharing and downloads on network performance are extraordinary.
Barker cites one organisation in which a single user’s music files took over 48 hours to travel around the network, causing huge productivity delays and major associated operational costs.

5. Storage Savings
Doing more with less is a virtual mantra for today’s IT director – and a daily battle. Consolidating and virtualising your storage can help of course, but few businesses seem to grasp that only 10% of their data is used on a regular basis, says Andy Hardy MD of International Sales with tiered storage evangelists Compellent.
“This being the case, many smarter businesses are cutting costs and upping efficiency by pushing the remainder of their data off on to cheaper, but cleverly and dynamically tiered storage media.

6. Telecom TCO
Even these days, with many businesses running conjoined voice and data networks, telecoms can be a major culprit when it comes to wasting money and resource, claims Simon Stockdale, MD of Pandala Telecommunications – and identifying how and where can equate to instant savings. Too many active but redundant phone lines; live lines at unoccupied desks; over-supply; non-optimal call packages; and personal network usage for instance – there’s no harm in a quick call to the other half at lunchtime, but frequent and/or prolonged personal calls to mobiles or overseas numbers can add up fast.

7. LAX Licensing
Software licensing is an increasingly high-profile issue and one that can give rise to significant wastes of IT budget; including two that often go entirely unnoticed according to FAST IiS Chief Exec John Lovelock: firms continuing to pay for software licenses even after machines have been decommissioned, and over-licensing to avoid breaching software license agreement terms.

Both are easily avoidable with the right policies and processes or the use of Software Asset Management
tools. Additionally, argues Lovelock, software licenses should be seen as assets that can be written off the
books after a year, rather than overheads. www.fastiis.org

Software Asset Management Solutions

8. Networking Niggles
With bandwidth consuming as much as two-thirds of the average networking budget, understanding, controlling, and streamlining utilisation and “right-sizing” circuits is vital in avoiding waste, according to network performance management firm NetQoS.

In fact, with the right visibility, and troubleshooting and performance management capabilities, the company claims that it is possible to cut network downtime and its attendant costs by as much as 45%. Here too, identifying potential network issues and nipping them in the bud quickly will prevent problems needing to be escalated to more expensive areas of the IT support ladder.

Networking Solutions

9. Project Priorities
While it is more important than ever to identify and focus on the most critical issues facing the business, “IT department’s often waste time and money by not prioritising the ‘key’ projects that have high strategic value to the business”, says David Dunning, Operations director of Corporate Project Solutions.

“Instead, human instinct dictates that we ‘do the easiest and quickest job first’”. As such, companies must utilise “portfolio, programme, and project management solutions” to make sense of the tasks they face and the business benefit versus the resource available; and to properly prioritise, plan, and manage change and workloads.

10. Paying for the Wrong Option
Come renewal time it can be all too easy to issue a PO committing you to another one, two, or three years of
the same technology without really thinking about it, says Pentura MD, Steve Smith. But what if the requirement has changed? What if the solution no longer fits? Are there newer, better, more appropriate, more cost effective kids on the block? Making sure you’re not paying over the odds or for the wrong option means staying up to date and shopping around just as you would for you car or household insurance.

It’s also important that IT departments operate as a single entity, rather than as a group of diverse, disparate
elements – networking, software, security, applications. Maximising budget means taking a holistic view of IT
needs so that vendors with multiple functionality can be properly leveraged and point products with no integration capability can be avoided.

Storage against the machine. Under ordinary circumstances, describing any technology as being in flux would be a lot like nodding sagely and saying: “That William Shakespeare bloke – hell of a writer apparently.” Well der. No **** Shylock. But when a technology that has remained essentially unchanged for decades begins metamorphosing before the market’s very eyes, it’s surely a case for comment. So it is in data storage and data management right now – disciplines that, from consolidation and virtualisation to cloud computing, have seen greater change in the last five years than in perhaps its previous 50. Make no mistake, these great cornerstones of modern-day computing are shifting in their very foundations.

But why such a massive change in storage? And why now?

Last year IDC reckoned that the known “digital universe” had, by 2007, grown to 281 billion gigabytes. Consider that it’s widely predicted to reach 10 times that size by 2011, and you have one answer: the continuing explosion in the growth of digital information. Consider also that the operational, logistical, and legal demands being placed on data retention, availability and secure storage are now more onerous than ever before, and you have another. Then factor in the myriad financial constraints being placed on firms by the economic downturn (on the back of a decade of almost reckless, arbitrary storage consumption), and the move to innovate better, smarter, lower-cost storage and security technologies makes even more sense. As we’ve often pointed out here on iq.insight.com, necessity was ever the mother of invention.

“Last year IDC reckoned that the known “digital universe” had, by 2007, grown to 281 billion gigabytes. Consider that it’s widely predicted to reach 10 times that size by 2011…”

Put simply, the laissez faire, “keep everything” approaches to storage and data management that saw capacities doubling year-on-year during the good times had to be quickly curbed as we hit the bad. Such an unautocratic approach simply wouldn’t do for a truly secure storage infrastructure and efficient data management system.

The answer?

A return to scrutiny of the days when data storage was too expensive to approach at all lackadaisically. Now more than ever in storage, it’s not what you, do it’s the way that you do it.

6 degrees of segregation

Gone are the days when “proper” data storage was the preserve of enterprise businesses; today, every organisation needs big, fast, easy to use, secure storage capacity that doesn’t require a PhD to deploy and manage. But what, dear iQ Insight readers, characterises the ideal smaller business storage platform?

Support for multiple operating systems and communications media to give users and management an assured, secure path to data whatever they’re using, wherever they are.

Security – An insecure data storage infrastructure is a useless storage infrastructure. Look for strong reliability, data protection, and off-site back-up capabilities; built in fail-over and power redundancy for the most favorable storage and security capability.

Capacity and scalability – With files sizes and the use of storage-hungry multimedia data such as video, audio and images exploding, capacity, upgradeability, and scalability are vital factors in storage and security

Accessibility – Fast, easy data access is increasingly business-critical operationally, financially and legally in data management.

Density, performance, compatibility, value – Density is nothing without speed and performance; speed and performance are nothing without compatibility; and none of them are anything without value. Today’s midrange data storage solutions must deliver on all counts to optimize data management efforts.

Future proofing & investment protection – Short-term storage and security solutions must deliver long-term answers: upgrade paths, easy-to follow technology roadmaps, smooth future integration. Look for topologies, technologies and brands with longevity for optimum secure storage capacity.

More on Data Storage and Data Management Technology

The launch of a major new operating system is massive news by anyone’s standards, especially when it is a new Microsoft OS, and even more especially given the extent to which that marketplace has shifted and evolved since the launch of its predecessor. In fact, so much had things moved on in the technological landscape into which Windows 7 found itself parachuting, that its relatively soft touchdown has been all the more remarkable. In asking why, the simple truth is that Windows 7 ticks a great many of the boxes that Microsoft said its next Microsoft OS would and a few more besides – not least in giving users a range of exciting Windows 7 features, which are more than enough compelling reasons to upgrade.

“…there’s a lightness of touch to Windows 7, which feels responsive, even sprightly. ”

Sprightly
It is faster and more reliable; while Vista could seem listless and ungainly even on high-end hardware, there’s a lightness of touch to Windows 7, which feels responsive, even sprightly. We at iQ Insight also think It’s friendlier (and prettier) than Vista; there’s an enhanced sense of user control. In fact, the Windows 7 features incorporate significant improvements over its forerunner everywhere from navigation to backwards compatibility. You name it, the Microsoft OS has addressed it. In many ways though, all this misses a vital point.

Performance
It’s wrong to view any solution solely through the veil of another’s shortcomings, and this is especially the case with Windows 7, which incorporates a great range of tools and features that deserve recognition in their own right. The new Microsoft OS has productivity enhancing elements like jumplists, aero peek, stacking, libraries, and direct access; quick start-up and extended battery life; powerful backup and security facilities; energy saving and smart power management. So the list of valuable new Windows 7 features goes on.

Capability
Windows 7 features larger icons, no clunky text tags; thumbnail enhancements, and a search function to rival Mac OS X’s Spotlight. Windows 7 should run well on low-end hardware too (it’s even being pitched as an alternative operating platform for netbooks), while the platform’s touch capability will also help win users over. Add all this to The latest Microsoft OS’ undoubted ability to enable major cost savings, and you finally have the Windows upgrade path your users want, your business needs and your infrastructure craves. Now that’s a vista worth checking out, so make sure you get regularly updated on Windows 7 via iq.insight.com.

Rest software assured
According to independent commentators like analyst IDC, one tool effective in helping businesses derive more value from their software investments is Software Assurance – which drives cost savings on the services and tools needed to support software, train workforces, and plan long-term software strategies.

IDC’s total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis based on IT best practices, compares organisations with Software Assurance (SA) and those without to evaluate SA’s impact on IT labour costs. The model found that:

» Standardising on a single version of the desktop PC and server operating system and Microsoft Office via the New Version Rights benefit reduces IT labour costs by 30% to 35%.

» Using Training Vouchers and E-Learning benefits reduced annual software training costs by 69%.
» Packaged Services support cut desktop PC deployment program management costs by 36%.
» The Home Use programme reduced
- User training costs by 9%
- Training time
- Downtime and help desk issues
- Users’ non productive time by 29%
- Deployment-associated service desk calls by 19%

Download Reasons to Upgrade to Windows 7, the latest Microsoft OS