Cincinnati Information Technology

See Part One here.  These deadly sins are not limited to IT Consulting in Cincinnati, but everywhere.  I wish that someone would have shared the list below with me earlier in my career.  It might have saved me a few grey hairs and sleepless nights.  I have to admit, I have been guilty of a couple of these in the past, but that’s why it’s called experience.

5. Blame it on Rio.  And I am not talking about the movie, I am talking about pushing the mistake/error onto something else like, the Operating System, another consultant or worse, one of the client’s employees.  While the problem could very well be any of those things, your job as a professional consultant is to find solutions and to set an example in leadership and even diplomacy.  While you may see glaring errors or mistakes and perhaps your way would have been the better way to do something it is best to keep the criticism and commentary to yourself. (See #3 in Part One)

6. Bubble gum and baling wire.  Many times consultants are brought in to fix something.  The last thing you want to do is to take a shortcut that you aren't sure will last. Band-Aids are fine if you know you are coming back to make a more permanent fix. But eventually, those shortcuts will fail and will need further attention and the time to failure is an unknown. It could be the minute you drive away or months later. This is not the type of chance you want to take. It frustrates the client, and it makes you look bad.  You also don’t want to make the client totally dependent on you.  A client told me once that Peter (not the real name) is very talented; the problem is he is the only one that knows how it works and can manage it.

7. Showing up, Gotta Go. (AKA I gotta hangnail).  Once you’re on a gig, most clients want to see you on some sort of regular basis and some might have a “core hours” expectation.  It’s important for both the client and the consultant to know what each should expect.  I once heard a client make a comment about another consultant that went something like this: “Larry(not the real name) runs out of here all the time and uses sickleave for a hang nail!” 

Here is another list that has some similar ideas here.  I’m sure there are others.  So go forth and sin no more!
 

I have a new client in Cincinnati. New clients are always interesting because you never know what issues and opportunities you will find. My client seems to have their act together. My application development friends will appreciate their setup; Maven 2 projects with built-in JUnit tests, a code coverage dashboard that show code complexity, code coverage, and Find Bugs reports. Things seem great, them why do they need a performance engineer?

The reason is common; who defines the duties of ITsets the rules. IT and the business need to be aligned to work on the common goals and increase productivity. If IT is too dominant, there is too much focus on technology and the business doesn’t get the tools they need to be productive. If the business unit is dominant, only projects that have a tangible return get done. In this case the business is more dominant, so projects like refactoring code, or cleaning up errors found by software like Find Bugs has a much lower priority. They do happen only if performance is an issue to the business. The performance team is set up like a clean up crew that comes in after the fact, to make things work better. There are coding style forms and best practices, but is up to the each developer to follow them. Since the focus is getting the project done on time, the developers are concerned on getting code that works,not what works best. The performance team is used to fix the worst performance offenders.To be fair, I have been at clients where IT treats the business units as a nuisance. The best tools are there, but little support for the business.
What’s the solution? IT needs select a technology that best suits the solving of business problems. The business should prioritize their issues, but work with IT to plan for fix releases. IT must utilize the tools that they have and encourage the usage of them. If you have the tools, use them!

This post may shock you... the Java Rocker is going to talk about legacy iSeries and AS/400! Before you panic, and call it the end of the world, let me continue. This post is about running all of the cool new Web 2.0 things on your IBM hardware. Really! Even in Cincinnati! Many people, (myself included) thought the old IBM hardware was only for RPG and COBOL (shudders). It turns out that IBM has been adding functionality to run Linux on the box. That means Wikis, Ecommerce, blogs, and web applications are now there for iSeries-AS/400 people. The catch is that your iSeries needs to be up to date, which sadly for most organizations is not. My IT consulting colleagues at STAR BASE are good with taking your tired old hardware and doing the maintenance necessary for the modernization piece. They get your hardware and software cleaned up and ready, so I can help you with all of the cool new application development projects that I have been talking about.

In Part one, I introduced the idea of Test Data Management or TDM.  TDM is not something unique to IT Applications in Cincinnati, Dayton or to Ohio. It’s something that will need to be addressed nationwide.  With more and more government regulations and data privacy concerns, it will be more and more important to not only manage production data, but also test data used for quality assurance as well. 

One of the aspects of good TDM is for the obfuscation (sometimes referred to as de-identification or masking) of data values from a production database in order to make the test instances “safe”.   One of the challenges is preserving data distributions and referential integrity–even across distributed database systems.  This is particularly important in the healthcare and financial industries where PHI (Personal Health Information), social security numbers or banking information could get exposed.

Another aspect is the challenge of maintaining security around the test databases themselves.   Many companies have tight security around production data, but next to none around test and developer data.   Often this data is just a copy of production data that is not masked in any way.   According to a Ponemon Institute study, data breach incidents cost U.S. companies $202 per compromised customer record in 2008, that is compared to $197 in 2007.  With the cases studied a range of 4,200 to 113,000 records that were affected. 

Do any of you reading this have a little twinge in your stomach?  Can’t anything be easy anymore?  Maybe some RX is in order.  That was EASY!!!!
 

I had lunch today with one of our Cincinnati customers and he made the comment that his company had eliminated a lot of costs via their IT applications.  He also said there was no more low hanging fruit in their IT applications.  Everything is integrated and there are no easy changes. I laughed and said there is nothing easy any more; even my easy button quit talking!

In today’s world some IT applications have grown quite complex.  It was not that long ago an application developer that knew business could do the business analysis, the technical design, program the application, test and implement it.
Enterprise IT applications today require a team of dedicated professional working together and a good process methodology.  Many members of the team are specialized in a particular skill or a part in the development process.

One of the things that is sometimes overlooked or gets glossed over is testing and quality assurance.  I have even heard developers say “why should I test, that’s what we have users for”.   Because systems have become so integrated and complex, quality assurance is not something to be taken lightly.  As a matter of fact, it is quickly becoming a specialty in and of its self.  There are many aspects to quality assurance, but one that I think we will be seeing a lot more of in the coming months and years is the notion of Test Data Management.   To be continued……….

 

First, sorry for the tardiness of my posts. Between the holidays, coming back from the holidays, a cold, and a secret project (for now), I haven't had time to blog.. until now. My current focus has been a Facebook game application. Well it's still in the alpha phase, but I wanted to get the architecture up and running. There's nothing worse for an application development person than to finish your application, then find out you need to rewrite it (or worse) because of the architecture doesn't support it. Even without Zembly, setting up a Facebook application is pretty easy. Since I had most of the defaults already in, the only thing I need to do is to tell Facebook where my application resides. Since I don't have Zembly anymore, I have to put on my application development and network administrator hats on set up an application server.
My first test was to deploy the application into my local Tomcat. NetBeans does a great job of having the files available to you, but the thing you learn quickly is that there isn't a simple deployment piece. Tomcat needs a WAR file, so I tried to use the JAR command to WAR up the files in the dist folder. No dice. The war file needs a proper web.xml file to work properly. Rather than use workarounds on workarounds, I created a web application project in NetBeans, linked the jar file from my JavaFX project, and copied the JNLP and HTML files to my new project. I now have a WAR to deploy. Tomcat loves this file. I run and... “FILE NOT FOUND?” was heard all throughout Cincinnati. Your JNLP file that was created points to a servlet called internally by NetBeans. Make sure change the following lines:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<jnlp spec="1.0+" codebase="http://your server.com/app path/" href="SBWarsTest_browser.jnlp">
<information>
<title>SBWarsTest</title>
<vendor>STAR BASE </vendor>
<homepage href="http://your server.com/app path/"/>

Once I made the change to localhost, everything was fine. Now I wanted a real application server, so I downloaded and installed Glassfish V.2.1 on one of our servers, changed the JNLP file and we are in business. I tried to hit it from my machine, and no dice. After some extensive research, I found out the the Java 7 EA JRE does not play well with JavaFX. I uninstalled it (which reverted to JRE 1.6.18), and it works. In Facebook, you need to set the canvas callback URL to your host application path. The result is the pretty picture you see at the top of my post.

Happy New Year!!!  Welcome to a new year, new decade and a new beginning. 

As the recession recedes and recovery takes hold, IT executives are looking at their project lists and trying to decide what their priorities are.  Should we do application development in house or bring in an IT consulting company?  Should we consider an open source application?   What is the ROI?  What’s a company to do?   It doesn’t matter if your company is in Cincinnati, Dayton or Katmandu, the questions are the same.

Last month we did a pulse survey to see how IT leaders are managing ROI measurement.  The results were surprising and sparked a lot of conversation here at STAR BASE, Inc.  The thing that surprised us the most was the number of companies that did NOT look at ROI before doing a project.   Most of our respondents (58%) do not.

Some of conversations we have had revolved around the idea of doing a project or installing an application just to stay in the game.   Could you imagine a company of any size today functioning without email?  I could argue that there is negative ROI with amount of time managing my email in box takes! 

For those that measure ROI, only about half see the actual ROI align with the projected ROI most of the time.  The other half report that they see the actual ROI align with the projected ROI less than half the time and most said seldom or never.  I have often said that if management knew how much it was really going to cost to install that new ERP system before they started, they probably wouldn’t.

Since most of our respondents don’t look at ROI and of those that did, half said the ROI did not align, my question is this:  How do you decide what projects to do?  Are most companies spending money on IT because they need to “keep up with the Jones’ “?  Is it because installing that new ERP will look good on everyone’s resume?

Get your copy of our ROI Survey results by going here.

When I went to JavaOne this year, I had some friends who went to the Google I/O conference a few days before. Besides getting a new G2 phone (lucky), they were raving about Google Wave. Google recently released Wave into beta, and I have had a chance to play with it.
For those who do not know, Google Wave is a new type of communication software that allows real time collaboration. I know, it sounds all buzzwordy, but it is real cool. Think of Wave as email, SMS, and a working SharePoint all in one. To start a Wave you select new and a text area displays. Select from your contacts to add people, write some text and press send. Sounds like email right? Well, what if after some correspondence, you need to bring other people into the loop? And those late comers are now asking new questions? I don't know about you, but I get confused trying to read emails with lot's of history, and getting new emails based off of some of that history. Google Wave fixes this because everyone is updating a single thread in real time. If you are added late, there is a play button to show the order of the messages. Since it is in real time, all response are shown when entered. You could follow a meeting while listening to a conference call, and ask questions during the meeting, instead of having a second meeting to discuss the first meeting.
Collaboration is the key aspect of Wave. I am using Wave to let some people in Brazil help me test my JavaFX application. As a Cincinnati based application development person, this already saves me time and money. I added a zip file, and instructions on how to use it. I can get their feedback, and update the zip file. I think all application development people can see how useful this is. I can update my code to my users, and have a history of feedback. This will work well for those “confused” management types who “forgot” their feedback.

Google Wave is also a development platform. You can create your own widgets to run on Google Wave. The widgets provided by Google are a poll widget, collaborative Sudoku, and emoticons. I have used the poll widget, and works nicely. If you have a yes/no/maybe question to ask, it really is useful. I have an idea of using TTS to create “talking” Waves.

The one thing I would like to point out is that you will be able to run the Google Wave engine on your boxes. That means you can have a “private” Wave and a “public” Wave. You can set access restrictions on Wave, so you can have control of who uses Wave. Now that it is in beta, look for an invite and get riding!

I was reading this article and as a Cincinnati based IT consulting firm owner, found it interesting.  Social networks are influencing our everyday lives more and more each day.  This research was conducted by Don Bulmer from SAP and Vanessa DiMauro  According to them, there were six key findings:

1. Professional decision-making is becoming more social - enter the era of Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG).
Professionals want to be collaborative in the decision-cycle but not be marketed or sold to online; however online marketing is a preferred activity by companies.
2. The big three have emerged as leading professional networks: LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter.
The convergence of Internet, mobile, and social media has taken significant shape as professionals rely on anywhere access to information, relationships and networks.
3. Professional networks are emerging as decision-support tools.
Decision-makers are broadening reach to gather information especially among active users.
4. Professionals trust online information almost as much as information gotten from in-person.
Information obtained from offline networks still have highest levels of trust with slight advantage over online (offline: 92% - combined strongly/somewhat trust; online: 83% combined strongly/somewhat trust).
5. Reliance on web-based professional networks and online communities has increased significantly over the past 3 years.
Three quarters of respondents rely on professional networks to support business decisions
6. Social Media use patterns are not pre-determined by age or organizational affiliation.
Younger (20-35) and older professionals (55+) are more active users of social tools than middle aged professionals.
There are more people collaborating outside their company wall than within their organizational intranet.

After reading this, a Bad Company tune came to mind, “Run with the Pack”.  There is certainly safety in numbers.  My question is this:  If everyone is doing the same thing, are they giving up any competitive advantages?

 

“IT executives increasingly implement marketing initiatives to improve the communications with their business customers. But these efforts often focus solely on the brand aspects of the services under the IT’s control without understanding the business’ perception of IT. To maximize the success, IT must add business satisfaction assessments to its tool kit. Understanding business satisfaction requires qualitative and quantitative data that capture customer expectations and perceptions through different types of interactions such as interviews, panels, focus groups, complaint systems, and surveys. This report provides best-practice recommendations, survey templates, and questions to guide IT executives through the deployment of a business satisfaction assessment. It applies Forrester’s deep expertise in external customer satisfaction to the interface between business customers and their internal IT suppliers.” says a new Forrester report.

I have served on countless business application development teams within several organizations in the Southwest Ohio and Cincinnati Information Technology community, one thing I can say is that most IT organizations do not gauge business satisfaction with IT business solutions.  I have served in only a couple of organizations where the business serves on the IT governance committee.  An organization does not have to be “big” to have an IT governance committee.  No matter what the size of the organization decisions are made as to priorities in IT work.  IT governance does not have to be a long drawn out process or take great time commitment from the business or IT executives, but business involvement in IT governance goes a long way in gaining business buy-in as you roll out the IT business solutions to the business.

Involvement in IT governance is just one way that many organizations in the Greater Cincinnati area can improve the IT-business relationship.  The Forrester report goes into ways to solicit and gauge business satisfaction with IT business solutions.  Doing so should affect decisions concerning not only IT business solution delivery but also IT Infrastructure and IT outsourcing initiatives.

 

I recently read an article about the state of the IBM “i” and the amount of complaining by IBM application development and business partner folk. I know several RPG application development folk, and it sounds familiar. That made me think about my Java Application development and career. Are there things to complain about, and uncertainty about the future? Yes, but there are 2 reasons why the Java community is in a better place; the business model and the community. Before the IBMers call for a holy war, I said COMMUNITY! I am not talking about the strengths or weaknesses of the hardware or software. The business model for IBM is that they make the hardware and software, and partner for the sales and service. I think that is a viable model until IBM competes in the sales and services with their partners. If a lead is brought in by a small partner, they are awarded by giving the business to someone bigger. This sets up a confrontational relationship between IBM, the big partners, and the little partners. IBM can also decide whether or not you are worthy to be a partner. Why does this affect the software application development team? Because most consulting firm are selling SERVICES not HARDWARE. If they are not seeing business because of political fighting, they don't have to sell it. There are viable options on other platforms, where interference does not happen. IBM never fostered a community, they created a hierarchy with themselves as the head.

Certainly Sun has done some things that made myself and others unhappy. Besides, complaining, we actively pushed to remove barriers in our path. We do have an open source Java. Is there a IBM community that can work with RPG to make it work for them? I also think its about scale and timing. It's not like IBM software developers have their own AS/400 at their home. It's easy for me to create and use nearly any kind of application at my home in Cincinnati, and pretty cheaply. It makes it fun to tell non-technical people about my application development. Nobody but accountants want to hear about accounting programs. Java, and newer languages have grown up with the Internet. I have friends from all over the globe that have similar interests. If I have a problem, I can go online to a forum, friend, or web page to find what I need. I can read and write blogs to voice my opinion (like now). These things are not ingrained in the Legacy community, and in fact, have been actively campaigned against. It is my belief that any software, hardware, or service will die when there is no vocal community to support it.

People outside of Cincinnati may be shocked to know that I work with languages OUTSIDE of Java! I don't know any application development person, especially one who does web application development who doesn't use several languages. I have recently been working on Magento. What is that you say? Magento is an Open Source PHP ECommerce application based on the Zend Framework. You don't need to download Zend, just the Magento PHP files. We actually have Magento internally setup with a LAMP package, but I already have MySQL and Apache on my local machine, so I thought I'd tackle and individual install. The verdict? Well after a couple of small hiccups (don't use the Windows install for PHP, just unzip, and localhost needs to be a virtual host), setup was a breeze!  Fortunately, STAR BASE, Inc. has enough experience to over come these issues.  Magento is easy to customize products and catalogs, and would be a good choice for organizations to create their own ECommerce site. Magento is easy enough to implement without an IT Consultant, but an experienced consultant can save you time and frustration.

Seems like it has been a while since I have had a chance to do a post.  For the last 3 weeks things have been absolutely crazy in our IT consulting world, but in a good way.  We had a chance to go to the Techserve Alliance national conference in Las Vegas.  I have heard all the jokes, including the one about it staying in Vegas.   We did learn that just because you are pre-checked with the airline, does not mean that your bags are.   We got our bags checked with literally a minute to spare and fortunately all made it back to Cincinnati.

Upon return, we signed a support contract for a new customer.  They trust us enough to outsource their entire IT applications support to us.  We have a real life example of an IT Strategy that was discussed at the conference (See #3).  Not only was IT strategy discussed but business strategy as well.  Here are some highlights:

1. Market Differentiation - customers have lots of choices, how will you stand out?

2. Improve Systems and methodology for delivering service- excellence, efficiency, depth of service.

3. Outsource what you can-eliminate the busy work that does not add strategic value.

4. Deal with the economy being slow to recover till 2012, spend your money wisely, hire wisely, fire quickly, and refine what is working, stop what is not.           

5. Build Alliances with like minded providers in different industries and sell collaboratively to serve the customers' need.

My favorite of these five is number four.  Said another way, its takin’ the basset hound to the farm.  I’ll expand more on that in my next post.

Its good to see Cincinnati and Dayton area companies starting to embrace open source as an alternative to custom application development.  As an IT Strategy consultant, I can say there is a place for both.

STAR BASE, Inc. just landed another Magento project.  I have written about Magento before and this post has links to several others.   These are not your father’s shareware packages. The packages we are working with are what I’m calling Commercial Open Source. 

I’m curious, why have you or your company not implemented an open source option?  Is it because the light at the end of the tunnel looks more like a train?  Maybe we’re just ahead of the curve again and I need a little bit of Patience.