Who's Your Data?

Today I write about a topic near and dear to my heart, as it applies both to my personal and professional lives: New technology and the price we pay to procure and implement it.

Last Sunday morning, I woke up at 4:30 AM at my house in Virginia, got dressed, filled up two heaping mugs of coffee, and set out into the frigid darkness with one intent in mind: To obtain for myself (That’s right, I don’t have kids old enough to appreciate it) a Nintendo Wii.

For the previous two weeks I had been coldly snubbed with laughter and pointing at my meager attempts to procure one by simply showing up at Best Buy at 9AM. Today would be different. First, during the week I interrogated the kids that work at the local game store to find out the where and the when of the next available shipment and was told that Target on Sunday was my best bet. Next I did a little web research to confirm that I was not being led on a wild goose chase and finally, having completed my extensive research, both on the specifics of the system and the easiest and most likely place to procure, I set out.

I was fully expecting with my insider knowledge to be the first person there, and to sit in my car working on my laptop until I saw another human being and then and only then braving the 27 degree morning (That’s Fahrenheit, not Celsius).

At 5AM at the Target in Leesburg Virginia, I was the 18th person in line…

I had a decent time in line, met a lot of fellow techies, folks in IT, and a lot of really great parents who must love their kids a ton. For the first hour however I had no idea if the store in fact had any Wii’s or if they had enough where I would get one. By 6AM my hot coffee was gone. By 6:30AM I had my answer from the store manager that they had 70 units and all I had to do was wait. By 8AM when the store opened, my feet were frozen, my lips and the rest of my face chapped, and my bladder most certainly tested to its limits, but I got my Wii, and I must say, it was worth it.

Now how does this relate to my professional life? Simple.

Bleeding edge technology, wherever it exists is cursed by two things: A lack of knowledgeable experts and resources, and a lack of reliable support due to the fact that users, more than designers, determine how an application or device will be used in production.

First of all, best of luck finding reliable resources that go past the product marketing to explain how the thing really functions from an architectural perspective. Most likely the product was developed by a small start up and then was purchased by a large company who now has plenty of sales people that can give the give the elevator pitch but not nearly enough people to deliver a highly technical overview of how the product functions. At this point also from a support perspective you also now have what weeks ago was a small company capable of supporting a state or two with a couple of critical customers now supporting a global effort without the appropriate amount of time to train technicians. Finding good information is difficult, strictly due to growing pains. The other and more directly applicable aspect is the manufacturing crunch and delay for hardware for bleeding edge tech both for units as well as replacement parts.

Second, as the product evolves through maintenance and feature packs, who knows if it will continue to focus on the aspects of the application you deemed worthy of purchase as an early adopter, or if the user community will drive development into a different direction? Also, as an early adopter, at some point, the tech will do something that neither you nor its creators expected it will do, either by filling some new tangential purpose or by totally hosing production.

No one expected someone to accidentally throw their Wii controller through their $3000 60” plasma television, but I’m sure if you are reading this blog you’ve already read that article somewhere. I think we can all agree in the world of IT it’s a small step to call this a mission critical system failure. I also have no idea where Nintendo will take the Wii, or if a year from now development will decide that they really want to focus on games for toddlers and octogenarians.

So that’s the tie in, and I apologize for taking such a long time to get there, and while it may certainly sound like I’m promoting fear of the new and saying its not worth the risk, I am happily endangering my Plasma right now and could not imagine life without the bleeding edge features that were so costly for me to research, acquire and implement. I’m also finding that my best source of support (much like bleeding edge tech) is the rest of the user community, which is always growing. :)

Posted by Tom Tittermary at 12:00 AM | | Permalink | Comments (1269)

Fast forward 10 years: CIOs now manage their own agency's SLA for services they 'buy' from the prevalent IT utility-the Federal IT Grid.

Instead of developing and managing individual agency financial, HR and even some agency specific citizen focused systems, Civilian CIOs shepherd the process between the Grid providers and Grid users to ensure agreed to service levels are provided at a fair cost. The idea isn't even that revolutionary. Instead, it is the evolution of OMB's Centers of Excellence and Lines of Business with their shared service center concept. If there is anything at all revolutionary about the Federal IT Grid, it is the positive change this could bring about in the agency budgeting process and the pooling of funds to buy more.

Although somewhat varied today agency to agency, the CIOs role in the budgeting process would change. Instead of gathering or writing OMB 300 businesses cases, the CIO would collect and then express Agency IT business system requirements to OMB through Federal Business Architects.

These architects are charged with delivering government wide horizontal services and will work closely with CIOs freeing CIOs to finally do what Clinger-Cohen put them in business do: manage information, people and processes related to the best functioning of the Civilian agency they serve.

Now come back to the present: it is happening today! Apart from the change in the budgeting component, DoD through the Global Information Grid (GIG) essentially provides a metered Grid service today and saves the DoD money by doing so. Chargeback mechanisms exist and we all know the money is being spent.

Civilian CIOs who have the energy and vision to stay abreast of these trends---along with reductions in organic government workers, increasing use of IT contractors and then a squeeze on this very cycle-will be the ones who can shape the policy and perhaps the law around the mandated use of the Federal IT Grid in the future.

Posted by Gary Danoff at 12:00 AM | | Permalink | Comments (38)

It’s a day of firsts, this being my first day working at Symantec as a Systems Engineer, the first day of the launch and availability of whosyourdata.org, and as may become apparent as you read on, my very first attempt at a blog.

What’s this site about you might ask? It is, and will continue to be, the logical progression of the radio show we had on WFED, where technical professionals can come to not only get no holds barred practical technical information, but ideally also get a laugh out of the phenomena we all have in common in the world of IT. If either of these elements is not present, we are not doing our jobs. There should also be healthy serving of content that, while not directly related to IT, is stuff that we as geeks all happen to lean towards, with consumer tech and similar pursuits at the top of the list.

So what is on the menu in the upcoming weeks? There will be weekly comics, blog entries every couple of days, a mountain of tech info available for everyone, and frankly, we’ll add whatever the community wants, barring anything that could get us arrested.

My ultimate goal here is to contribute, and hopefully inspire contribution. My background is storage, but in a perfect world, we will have members and contributors from all of the major IT segments: OS, Storage, Security, Web, DB etc. I know I need to learn more about security; maybe there are security folks out there that could lean on me.

So bookmark this page, and register, and a month from now if you aren’t entertained and educated, we can break up and still be friends. I promise it won’t be weird.

Damn, I just made it weird...

Posted by Tom Tittermary at 12:00 AM | | Permalink | Comments (5)

My name is Matt Divens and I am, by trade, a systems engineer in the storage industry for the Quantum Corporation. That being said, this blog has nothing to do with storage.

Being in this industry means that I spend roughly half of my time awake every day connected, in some way, to the internet. Most of this time is spent in emails, producing various outputs for my job and data mining on the internet. What does that mean? Why do you care? Well, let me explain just a bit more.

My love of tech creates in me a very serious inner struggle since I believe firmly that you get what you pay for, but am a huge do-it-yourself fan. I love GPL and freeware and enjoy sticking it to the man any time I can by using (and supporting on many occasions) free use software for various needs. That being said, let’s take a look at my day last Tuesday.

8:00am - wake up, breakfast, read email
8:30am - open email from a friend recommending a certain freeware program
8:45am - download said program and double click
8:45am - 3:00pm - Spend all day trying to rid my computer of such terrible adware, spyware, and malware nasties that I have never known.

You get the picture right? I go to install some freeware, it turns out to be a huge lump of pure-evil, prepackaged spyware and malware. I try to relax and run both of my 'other' freeware programs to get rid of these nasties. Both programs help, but do not remove everything and I find that I am still plagued by pop-ups and a generally slow PC. So...I started scouring the web for reviews and recommendations of paid spyware removal programs. Finding one that I thought would be the most useful; I download the tool, pay the basic subscription price and run the software.

The results?

Go figure, it cleaned out all of the problems and I am back up and running at full speed. (Conspiracy theorists speak up now.)

OK, the paid program fixed the problem. Why? Was it because it had a superior algorithm, better GUI, larger known-issues database than the freeware programs? Possibly, yes, but it may just have been a luck thing. What I can say is that this program makes money through subscriptions and may possibly have had more resources to throw at the battle against these nasties that I was trying to get rid of.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to stop supporting freeware and run to my local store to replace all of my smaller software packages with pricey ones off the shelf. Many of my freeware programs still work fine, if not better than ones that require me shelling out more money. What I ‘am’ going to do is curb my enthusiasm a bit and do some more research before deciding to entrust process X to any Joe Schmo that thinks he can write a .exe to do what I need it to do. Yes, this sounds obvious and easy. But, like curling, it’s a lot harder to do than it looks.

And so, I again learn this lesson in my life of tech. There is always a tightrope walk between saving money upfront and saving money in the long run. Utilizing either may or may not get you to the other side unscathed. The answer lies in the research and in following the advice of others who can share from their own experience and expertise.

Emboldened by this fresh eureka I throw all caution to the wind, embrace the power of my ADHD, I shout my ‘new’ war cry - Hooray for for-profit software companies!! AND VIVA GPL and freeware too!!

Now, where was that all-in-one graphics conversion, slideshow maker, espresso machine freeware program??

Click-click

Matt “I’ll-never-learn” Divens

Posted by Matt Divens at 12:00 AM | | Permalink | Comments (495)