Tribal knowledge, what is it?

Posted on December 9, 2011 by bfitzhugh

It’s things in your head now that you haven’t written down because you are reading this. It is the issue you resolved quickly yesterday that you told yourself, “That’s taken care of, no one will need to do that again”. It is the description that you didn’t enter when you closed the ticket out. It is the resolution decided in a hallway meeting. It is the received email that uses improper nouns referring to that things only you would know about. It is that workaround that was so ingenuously constructed that only the creator knows how it operates. It is also, that clattering noise indicating that something is wrong that only you can recognize because you’ve listened for 4,745 days and never heard it before. It is the patterns of those around you as well as the meanings of those patterns. It is the oops, that could have been prevented if there had just been “prior knowledge”. It is the files that are trashed because they are “no longer needed”. It is the information you wished you had, but can’t read, buy, steal, or quickly glean from those around you. It is the false alarm, that you know is a false alarm and not something to be worried about. It is that port on the panel, that did that weird thing once. It is the meta that is never archived. It is the thing, that without it, will makes you feel like it is your first day. It is why you recreate the wheel. It is the knowledge, that if you had now, would probably keep you from trying to improve things. It is the weight the bears down upon those who haven’t shared their knowledge and cages them in. It is the thought you had last week about the repair that you told so-and-so about that was never confirmed. It is the undocumented day-to-day, and the oil our business machines cannot function without.

If you care to share..
Posted in Technology | Leave a comment

How is it all connected?

Posted on November 27, 2011 by admin

Thought that this was a timely find since many of us would be seeing less tech savvy family and friends through out the holidays.  It is a short documentary by Ben Mendelsohn as to how the Internet and digital communications converge into many interconnecting hubs around the world.

Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors from Ben Mendelsohn on Vimeo.

If you care to share..
Posted in Technology | Leave a comment

What do Those Exchange Recipient Icons Mean

Posted on October 11, 2011 by bfitzhugh

This is probably a “captain obvious” post, but I’ve never paid attention to the icons in the Exchange 2010 EMC.  Wondering what about their meaning, I searched around and figured it out:

This icon simply means that the mailbox move request is still lingering.  If you clear the old move request the icon will change to a mailbox without the green arrow.

This icon without the arrow is the standard user recipient mailbox icon without the existence of an old move request.

Obviously a group

 

A room

If you care to share..
Posted in IT, Technology, Tips and Tricks, Windows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

IT as a Service and Realistic Expectations

Posted on August 3, 2011 by bfitzhugh

The other month Read Write Web posed the question, “What is IT-as-a-Service and how do you determine its value for the enterprise?”  My response was:

IT-as-a-service is yet another broadening phrase used to describe the commoditization of information technology resources. Over the years we’ve seen the IT products and services industry market themselves in ways that liken their products to familiar proven resources such as telcos and electric companies. Now the IT industry is leveraging these comfortable commodities to smooth over rough edges of IT as a whole and sell the world the whole shebang. When company X brings you “IT-as-a-service” they aren’t just bringing “storage as a utility” or “software as a service”, they are saying that they can do it all; top to bottom. While there is inherent value in having one throat to choke, and possible reuse of common resources there may also be downsides. Put another way, it is entirely possible that those touting themselves as providers of IT-as-a-service may be just saying, “We’re the jack of all trades, but master of none.”

My response was among the many which did not win, but it did get me thinking about the topic of IT-as-a-Service.  Many of the traditional PC technologies that organizations are accustomed to consuming are being rolled up into a single annually renewed line item.  In some scenarios these agreements hit the nail on the head by the wholesale offloading of some component in which an organization does not have the resources to address.  In other cases, these agreements can leave business line staff holding the bag if there isn’t a technically savvy staff member to own and oversee the agreements.

Personally I’ve seen both sides of the coin.  There have been scenarios where my company was the sole provider for all technology and services needed by our customers.  I’ve also been one of those customers and have been in the position to chose which resources were to be handled by staff and which resources were to be managed externally.  While I would bet there are many who have found a reasonable balance between outsourced services and internally managed resources, I have never witnessed these agreements pan out completely without concessions or compromises having to be made by some or all of the parties involved.

This is not to say all of these services agreements were bad; far from it.  What I mean is, with agreements such as this, there will be times in which the customer has to own some component of the outsourced service they were looking to offload; or the service provider has to provide some varying level of support which does not fit the cookie cutter template they had intended to sell.  I mention these points not to sound like “sour grapes”, but to convey the fact that setting realistic expectations is in the best interest of all involved parties.

If you are in IT or are responsible for managing some aspect of a hybrid services agreement, how do you weight the option of handing IT over to outside parties when the outsourced technologies are requirements of your core business operations?  If you are not in IT, but facilitate your operation’s tech resources through agreements like this how do you find the services agreements that are right for your business and your staff’s ability?

 

Thanks Michael Babb for the review of this post.

If you care to share..
Posted in IT, Service | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

When do you scale?

Posted on July 2, 2011 by bfitzhugh

When do you scale up or down?  This is a struggle we all deal with in our personal lives and jobs on a regular basis.  Sometimes the answer is simple, for example, if you starving at the end of the week and the cupboards are bare, you should probably scale up you grocery shopping quantities.  On the other-hand, if you have food spoiling in the fridge at the end of the week you should probably scale down your quantities.  Common sense will most likely steer you in the right direction in these scenarios,  but what happens when common sense still leaves you scratching your head?

If you have ever had to make the decision to shrink or expand some aspect of your job, you have most likely weighed a number of the variables to make the decision.  At their core, these variables often boil down to: resourcefulness versus the need to acquire resources.  To put it another way, decisions often occur around how resourceful an asset is versus the perceived  need for resources.  Unfortunately this common sense approach leads many to loose focus of the critical aspects that influence the need to scale and ultimately results in a lesser deliverable.  It is not unusual to see short sighted approaches like this unfold in the manner outlined in the diagram below.

 

The cycle typically unfolds like this:

(1) Asset with an abundance of resourcefulness is able to (2) supply the work required to address the needs at hand.  When the asset’s ability to satisfy the needs are recognized (3) the demand for yet more deliverables rises.  This is natural when we recognize a valuable asset that is able to produce.  Unfortunately there is a tipping point in which the demand will overtake the asset’s resourcefulness forcing a (4) need or requirement to obtain additional resources.  This is a point where one of two things should occur; either the demand is reined in or additional resources are obtained.  What does not need to occur, is the re-tapping of existing inundated assets.  Re-tapping of existing assets and resources creates a cycle which should not exist in the first place; a cycle which fools many into thinking needs are being addressed.

The need to scale cannot be thought of in a circular manner.  To put it another way, you can’t scale up by tapping already taxed resources and you can’t scale down by continuing to use unused resources.  Attempting to scale in a circular manner is much like Einstein’s definition of insanity:  doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Scaling occurs in a spiral like pattern.

If we force ourselves to consider the supply and demand aspects that impact resourcefulness we can easily realize that the decision to scale is not much of a decision at all…either change to scale is made or you are stuck with cyclical insanity.

If you care to share..
Posted in Essay, IT | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment