Going Green

There has been a great deal written lately about organizations going "green" or at least trying to. It has finally become financially worth looking at conserving energy in any way you can. Most organizations are looking to the data center as the first likely target for savings. But there might be a better place to look.

The federal government has long had a program underway to promote telecommuting among its employees. Recent releases indicate that a majority of federal workers do not know that they are eligible to work from home much less having done so. Other recently released statistics indicate that enterprises (95% of them anyway) have gone to great lengths to make mobile applications available to their employees in addition to traditional remote access methods. Having grown up in the Washington, D.C. area I can attest to the need to reduce the traffic there as much as possible. With gas prices as high as they are and going higher why are more workers not pressing to work remotely, at least part time?

The answer is management. It turns out that most of today's managers have not become proficient in trusting the people they hire enough to empower them to get things done without being visible in an office somewhere. The best example of this is AT&T both pre and post the merger or buyout with SBC. AT&T used to be a big advocate of having employees work remotely, but as of the end of last year that was all but over. Now it seems that the management of SBC ( now named AT&T) thinks that everyone should work in an office somewhere. This causes more gasoline consumption, more emissions to deal with, and higher costs and growing dissatisfaction on the part of their employees. There is no indication that it was being done for any other reason other than "we do not trust you enough to have you work remote". This is clearly a management failure and not a technology one.

With rising cost, concern about the environment, and employee retention it would seem that this one would be an easy situation to solve. Not every job requires working out of an office, nor do they require constant contact with other coworkers who would most likely email you from their desk 30 feet from you when you are in the office anyway. Telecommuting is an easy strategy to get underway. Most enterprises have the infrastructure to accommodate it, and most workers have access to the tools necessary to make such a policy work for employers.

No new hardware or complicated implementation programs, just good common sense.

The 2.0 mentality

We have heard the term "2.0" applied to lots of things these days, including Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and the like. Web 2.0 is a state of mind that speaks to the maturation of the Web as an information delivery medium. The term Web 2.0 is akin to a parent admitting one day that their child is no longer a toddler but is now a teenager and is growing up and ready to take on more responsibility. Hosting of data and applications traditionally done at the desktop through the Web are two good examples of this maturity.

Enterprise 2.0 is a recognition that we have moved beyond communications technology merely replacing paper business processes with paperless ones. When you can facilitate new business processes that are additive to business generation activities you can admit that you have moved into the Enterprise 2.0 mindset.

Unified communications is another example of a "2.0" evolution. At its core, UC is a recognition that communications can happen in many forms. UC means that an infrastructure should not be the limiting factor in crossover applications such as delivery of images to mobile devices rather than fixed ones, and that voice and data can be one in the same in certain instances.

Web 2.0, as a state of mind, can be utilized as part of a UC strategy or "toolkit" and can become part of Enterprise 2.0 if applied correctly.

In many ways the "2.0" mentality is intended to provide you with permission to think differently than you have before.

Trends as viewed by Gartner

A friend of mine, Mike Doyle, is a former CIO and long time IT professional. In a recent post on his blog he included a list of predictions made by the analysts at Gartner for the upcoming years. Included among the predictions was one that struck me as being particularly important to note. The prediction states that "By 2010, end-user preferences will decide as much as half of all software, hardware and services acquisitions made by IT." My thought is, why is this not true today? We in IT have always had customers, either internal in the case of a captive IT organization, or external, in the case of an IT service provider. Why would your end user preferences not enter into your sourcing decisions? You will note in previous posts that I am a big believer in gaining your customer input on new IT projects, the earlier in the process the better.

This prediction seems rather easy to make and hard to argue against in light of the fact that as IT professionals we have an obligation to please our customers. Giving them what they want and making it work is part of the job. We will discuss later the task of making sure that your customers are making a well informed decision on what their preferences are.

Unified Communications-The next big thing?

Ok, so you have heard this new buzz phrase shortened to "UC" and you have decided to develop a strategy to integrate UC apps into your infrastructure. What are some steps you might take to develop a good plan for now and your organization us up for future additions?

The main goal of a unified communications strategy should be to facilitate an innovative business process regardless of the communications medium. Given this as an assumption the first step in formulating such a strategy is to fully understand your current business process and to incorporate the input of your business partners into that strategy. Answers to questions like "what portion of our business human resources is mobile?" or "what are the current barriers to communications?" would be important to know and understand early on.

Those who are responsible for the formation of your UC strategy might consider becoming "embedded" with your business partners for a while in order to understand what their pain points are and how your UC strategic planning might assist them in the performance of their duties. Doing a good job of investigation early on and rooting out the "needs" of the business will save you time and disappointment later on. You may also find that your priorities insofar as picking anchor applications and infrastructure elements might be different than the ones you envisioned once you understand better what business problems you are trying to solve.

The next step would be to outline a product or service road map that would let the business know what you are working on and in what order. Starting out small with your roll outs tends to go better than "revolutionary" changes throughout and entire business infrastructure. Plan on communicating your successes throughout the entire business so you can ease into some of the changes that might be disruptive later on. "Build a little-Test a little" strategies are often appreciated by the business partners as it affords them an opportunity to participate in small programs and provide valuable feedback.


Picking infrastructure elements that will not preclude the addition of "best of breed" providers later on has proven time and again to be a winning strategy. There is little need to narrow your options too early in a process only to be disappointed later on that certain functions can not be added due to infrastructure limitations. The more standards based elements you can utilize the better things will be later on.


Gaining credibility with your business partners on small projects that are deemed helpful to them in the performance of their job functions is also a proven methodology. Say you can eliminate the use of Fax for taking orders from customers where no one can remember why they are doing by fax in the first place. They will thank you profusely and give you half a dozen other functions to automate for them. Your strategy is now working!

Winging IT

For those who know me well this post will be a review. Those not familiar with me or my career will come to realize that the title of this blog is not intended to imply that anything dealing with IT should be left up to chance. Having been a pilot and a flight instructor for nearly three decades I can tell you that every flight, regardless of the destination, needs to be conducted with the utmost professionalism and purpose. I have approached the business of IT in much the same way.

I have enjoyed a career in IT that spans quite a period of innovation, from the first PC and a network to go with it (NorthNet) to Ethernet to ATM on up. I have had the good fortune to work with some of the first adopters of Wireless LANs for commercial, public access at airports around the United States among many other innovations. Along the way I have been responsible for developing business cases for technology adoption, something I have discovered does not come easy for most organizations. Winging IT is clearly not the right way to win over senior management of an enterprise, regardless of its size. A good solid business case goes a long way to achieving the "buy in" of senior leadership as well as securing the funding necessary to procure, install and service new infrastructure, applications and tools. What is good for the business is most likely good for IT as well.

I will be using this forum to generate discussion and ideas on how to raise the bar for the IT community in dealing with some of the more difficult IT management tasks and issues we face today. I look forward to your comments and questions as we explore and demystify technologies and management issues IT professionals are faced with today.