Dayton IT Consulting

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!!!!
 

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.

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.

 

This is my last week at my Cincinnati client. My previous posts have been about reviewing the present. This post deals with my future. I am been in the development stages of a new application framework called History Slider. Basically, it allows you to move through time on a fixed map, and show information about that time period. For example, you could have a map of Cincinnati and Dayton, and graphically display the urban sprawl of these two cities. Stop anywhere on the slider and select either UI element, and you can find out the population of the city, it’s suburbs, and any other information you would like to use. I call it a framework because the maps and data can change, but the displaying of data through the UI will not. I even have plans for integration with Google Earth. If you are interested (especially if you are an application Development person), go here. This is an open source framework that is being written in JavaFX. A proof of concept test class is out there now.

In part one, I introduced the concept of “quantum superposition” and in part two I talked about qubits.  One of the things an IT strategy consultant should do, is make things that can be really quite complex and turn them into something practical.  Today I’m continuing the topic of Quantum computing.

Quantum computing also offers the means of making our communications and business transactions far more secure than they are today. Quantum cryptography exploits several remarkable effects of “quantum entanglement.” One of these is the ability to generate pairs of utterly unique and unbreakable keys. Basically, two random but identical particle keys can be created using entanglement. Since reading a quantum particle alters it, any effort to eavesdrop on communication is detected and that communication is either disrupted or ended.

Using this technology, we can create completely secure communications networks. Recently, Toshiba’s R&D labs announced the successful testing of quantum cryptography over fiber-optic networks.

IT Solutions based upon Quantum computing will not only change Cincinnati and Dayton, but the entire world.  How is this going to happen?  I wish I knew exactly how it is going to play out.  I’m still waiting on my flying car!

 

This is my third year at trying to boil down 4 days of experiences into an abbreviated post or presentation for application development teams and management of the Cincinnati and Dayton areas.
As mentioned previously, the major topics were Cloud computing and JavaFX, but a new item that I am impressed with is Open Solaris. Version 2009.06 was released at CommunityOne. I am not a Sun representative and I have not been a Solaris user, but there are some great features that I think are cool. Before I get into the new features, let me give you some background. Solaris was Sun's proprietary OS that has a reputation as a fast, enterprise operating system, using ZFS as their file system. Sun open sourced Solaris a couple of years ago. Application development teams who use Solaris will tell you about the worthiness of DTrace, a system debugging tool. It is the one thing that Linux engineers really want to integrate.
There is not a lot of Solaris usage in Cincinnati, and I don’t have a dedicated box for Solaris, so I never used it, but that may change. Like Linux, you can get a "live" version on a disc to try out. I am currently playing with VirtualBox, a open source virtualizer. Unlike VMware, both the player and recorder are free. To tell you how cool it is, I was running an Ubuntu VM on a live Solaris session with Windows as the host OS!
The other reason for my excitement is project Crossbow. Project Crossbow is a networking virtualization project aimed for usage in the cloud. Before my application development friends tune out due to buzzword overkill, let me explain. Project Crossbow can virtualize your entire network including your NICs and switches. The really cool part is that they have a cool GUI that allows you to drag and drop your network pieces. You need a firewall? Drop it into your network. It’s already configured and ready to use. Need another server? Just drop it in and connect it to your network. Since the network is virtualized, you can create your own network from virtualized pieces from any VM. That’s where the cloud comes in. Virtual networks and hardware can be added or removed at any time, if they were not virtualized by you. You could connect to your partner’s network, and if anything changes on their end, the changes would be reflected in their VM. I would strongly urge application development people who dislike/don't understand networking to use project Crossbow, and for free virtualization, use VirtualBox.

Web application development is a must for Cincinnati and Dayton companies.  We at STAR BASE, Inc. have written much lately about open source IT solutions.  Since we have been on a roll with that, why stop now? 

Another open source IT solution we have worked with is Sugar CRM.  Sugar CRM falls in to a relatively new software category that I’m going to call Commercial Open Source or COS for short.  (Remember you saw the TLA (three letter acronym) COS here first!)  COS applications have a free version that you can download and implement and they also have a commercial version that can be licensed and supported like any other software application.

What we have found to be very effective; is to use the open source version and customize and tailor it to meet specific business needs.   No need to re-invent the wheel.  Swweeet!

 

For several years now STAR BASE, Inc. has been delivering open source IT Services in Cincinnati and Dayton.  I don’t know, but maybe we are IT consulting trend setters for Cincinnati.  Seems I have seen quite a bit in the last week about open source.

This is not the first time I have written about open source. In a previous post, I talked about Magento e-commerce.  I just saw this article about Magento.  As my fellow STAR BASE, Inc. IT strategy consultant, Matt Warman says, "come on in, we’re open."

Open source can substantially lower your cost of application development services.  You know what?  “It don’t get better than this”.

I’ve heard a lot of talk recently about finding some balance.  Lets face it, whether you are an application developer in Cincinnati or Dayton or outside of the IT services field, its tough to balance out all of the demands of life. 

I think of someone balancing on a tight rope or a balance beam.  Its hard to do for long periods of time for most of us. 

I think its easier to blend rather than balance. What do I mean by that?  For me, its doing a little bit of a lot of different things.  For example, I’m not getting out on my motorcycle as much as I would like.  I did get a chance to ride into the office over the week end.  Its not my ideal ride, but at least I got on the “horse” this week.

I have written several posts that have talked about various IT strategies.  More often than not, we practice what we preach.  Star Base, Inc has been around for almost 18 years, so we would fall into what I would call a “mature company” category. 

I have always been determined not to be the cobbler’s children with no shoes, so we have invested in systems over the years.  Our CRM system was starting to show its age and even though business is down, I decided to invest in a new system.  Our new system is actually more than a CRM; it’s a fully integrated HRM (Human Resource Management) and accounting system as well. 

We are still learning about all the capabilities, but a couple that I think are really powerful are resume parsing and email capture.   Part of our business is IT staffing and that requires us to track a lot of resumes.  Our new system automatically parses IT skills out and creates a profile for the person.   It also monitors our email; any message received from someone in our system is automatically logged for that contact. 

Cincinnati and Dayton tend to be more conservative than other parts of the country.  Because of this, a lot of companies tend to have older IT solutions.  Could new web application development give you a competitive advantage that would allow you to leapfrog?

Get a grip; it’s not the end of the world!  We have all got to deal with it.  That was my reaction to the latest economic news.  But then again, it could be my low empathy coming out.  A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to take the BarOn Emotional Quotient Inventory.  The good news is that I’m a fully functional, emotionally normal adult.  (Some of you may disagree and that’s ok, I can deal with it!).  One element of the EQ was low and that was empathy. 

So you may be thinking, “What does this have to do with the Cincinnati and Dayton IT job market or IT consulting?”  Nothing directly, but it does tie into mental toughness.
Mental toughness is having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to generally cope better than your peers with the many demands that are placed on you in an IT job. 

People that are in IT jobs typically have to deal with a lot of stress. Not only do they have to deal with people, they also have to deal with hardware and software that may not always behave as expected.   The current economic conditions can add to stress.  Tomorrow we will look at ways of developing mental toughness.  
 

I’m sure many of you have heard the expression: it's not what you know, it's who you know.  In the Cincinnati and Dayton IT job market, that seems like a true statement.  I just read this post on CIO insight and in it, the author is suggesting that now is the time to upgrade your staff, not simply cut your staff.

That seems like a great idea, on the surface, but how do you know, which staff have better technical skills than others?  We at STAR BASE can objectively determined technical skills with our Now You Know assessments.   More importantly, should technical skills be the sole data point for determining who might stay and who might go? 

I would be interested in hearing what you think.  How would you go about upgrading your staff?

Its been un-real the past few weeks.  Most people in the Greater Cincinnati and Dayton areas have been dealing with the big wind storm clean up and the inconvenience of no power.  At the national level, our leaders in Washington have done about everything but lead and now we have a financial crisis.  On a personal level, I’m dealing with an auto accident that my wife had.  Fortunately she was not seriously injured, but we still have to deal with the at fault driver’s insurance and our insurance.  This woman had the state minimum insurance, which is not enough to even pay for our car.  I spent the past weekend dealing with car dealers; you know what a joy that can be. (Not)
 
Given the title and my introduction, you might think I’m writing from the bar; maybe I should be.  Its really about IT Strategy.  I recently met with a prospect that is interested in our IT Wellness Check.  As we were talking about his organization, he said that they tend to be a bottom up organization.  This means that change and initiatives tended to flow from the rank and file up to management rather than from the management down as in a top down approach.  He is looking for us to help him with how do drive an IT strategy in this type of environment.  

What he was really asking, was how do you herd the cats so they all go in the desired direction more or less?   The short answer is influence.  Once he has established his overall IT strategy, one tactic can be to influence the rank in file to go in the general direction he would like to go.  In other words, give them the ideas and let them think it was their original idea.  Then he can use the company culture to his advantage.

Speaking of good ideas, its Miller time, see you at the bar.

I’m not talking about a Journey song today.  This week Cincinnati and Dayton are getting a chance to test out their business continuity plans.  BC is more than an IT strategy or a disaster recovery plan.  Its how you keep in business when mother nature throws a curve at you.  Part of our IT strategy solutions includes an IT wellness check.  One of the items we cover as part of the IT wellness check is BC (Business Continuity).  So how are you doing?

Since I asked, you may be wondering, how we faired STAR BASE?  I would give us an overall grade of a C.   Power is back on, our servers are up and running, we were able to do our normal day to day business.  There is just one problem.   Our T1 is down.  That means we didn’t have inbound phones and no inbound email or web.  

Email and phones are probably the biggest issue.  Cincinnati Bell says there is a box somewhere that needs power and until Duke gets power restored, we are going to be down.   Current customers have cell numbers to reach us with.  Potentially new customers are a problem.

We are going to look at some sort redundant internet connection, maybe wireless.   We are also going to look at more IP addresses at our remote office so we can direct traffic there.   We currently replicate there every hour. 

One of the hardest things to determine in business continuity planning is determining what is business critical vs what is business inconvenient.  The last time there was a wind storm of this magnitude was 108 years ago.  We were definitely not dependent on power then as much as we are now.  So the question is, do you plan for a hundred year event or not?

It all comes down to cost.  How much will it cost to have a disaster proof plan, if there is such a thing vs how much will it cost to do with out.  Each business will have to decide that for themselves.   I know that one company in Cincinnati that has 3 data centers within 20 miles of downtown.  They were thinking about consolidating data centers.  They may want to look at moving a data center to another state far, far away. 

I am a technology consultant that also assists clients in meeting their sourcing needs in the areas of technology.  Anyone who works in the technology field understands that needs change quickly and yesterdays’ skills may not help one find the right position today.

Likewise job-hunting skills that worked a few years ago do not always work today.  I find the typical approach of most technical workers is pretty much the same as it was about ten years ago.  There is the underlying believe that the “spray and pray approach”  is the best way to get ones name and qualifications out in the market place.  Yes, recruiting is a numbers game but that does not mean one should not have focus and send their resume to every available recruiter they are aware of.

Professional recruiters are really trying to find the best person for the best position because to not do so will reflect badly on the recruiter and the recruiters’ organization.  Information technology consulting incorporates everything from application development to business application development, IT infrastructure as well as the outsourcing of talent.

Organizations everywhere are cutting down on the number of outside vendors that they use believing that quality, not quantity is a better business model for long-term business sustainability.

Experience has taught me that the Cincinnati, Dayton IT marketplace is a tightly knit market space.  When jobs become open in the market place most IT recruiters know about these positions and recruit accordingly. Our marketplace is not a major city like New York or Chicago and the chances of several recruiters having the same job opportunity are much greater.  Candidates that work with every recruiter they can touch actually do more harm than good.  Usually when the potential hiring company sees the same resume from multiple recruiters they become confused and have a tendency to eliminate that given candidate.

I would suggest that potential technical candidates do their homework and interview any recruiter they are working with.  Does this firm have a strategic relationship with the hiring firm or are they hopping to catch a lucky break with your resume?   Technical people tend to think and talk in technical features instead of the terms that organizations want to hear.  Organizations want to hear how your application development skills or IT infrastructure skills can contribute to the overall operational effectiveness of the entire company.  Potential technical candidates looking for opportunities in the Cincinnati IT marketplace might keep these suggestions in mind before they search for their next IT position.

The economy seems to be a popular topic these days.  Last week Michael was talking about the Short Term Impact on Cincinnati and Dayton IT Jobs.   Ohio IT services are not immune from what is happening in the rest of the country.   A well written resume can mean the difference between getting that great IT job or not.

We have seen resumes from one extreme to another.  One individual tried to keep a 20 year career to a one page resume that was so diluted that it didn’t look like he had much experience at all.   Another individual with just a couple of years experience wrote enough to fill in ten pages.   In both cases, resume surgery was needed; one needed a little augmentation, the other some nip and tuck.

Performing a little plastic surgery on your resume means making yourself the most attractive candidate you can be. Here’s what to do:

• Highlight a handful of top "core" competencies. A long laundry list of skills gives the impression that you're the master of none.
• Use bullets to emphasize key accomplishments.
• Describe major projects, duties and tasks. It may be best to leave out minor items. List too many and you appear unclear in your career goals.

Think about removing lines in your resume that may no longer be relevant. Sure you still know DOS commands and trained thousands on their use, but here’s the question: Is that relevant to your career and to technology today?  Try and keep your reader in mind and present yourself in a way that is relevant.  Want some feedback on your resume?  Send it here.  If you want more tips, check this out.  Your next IT Job might come down to how well you present yourself, not your IT job knowledge.

Cincinnati and Dayton IT staffing can certainly be challenging.  It seems like each customer has their own set of rules and it's up to the IT staffing company to figure out what they are.  Most IT staffing companies do not carry any kind of staff or bench.  IT consulting firms typically do have some staff or bench.  In either case, when filling a staff augmentation role, most customers want to see a resume submitted.  A lot of customers have the rule where whoever submits the IT consultant first gets the position. 

I would argue that this just contributes to bad behavior.  I had a person that I thought was the perfect fit, but I was having trouble connecting with them to see if I could submit him.  I had worked with this person before, but I didn’t just want to submit his resume.  I wanted to “get there first”, so I submitted a blind resume.  That way I could make sure that I was on the same page as the customer.  Just because I thought he was perfect, didn’t mean they would.  Well, that didn’t go over well with this customer, but what’s a poor IT staffing company to do?  

We interview and test our candidates for claimed skills which takes extra time and expense.  I can’t tell you how many times we have lost IT jobs because someone else submitted the person first.  Most of the time, the consultants don’t care who signs their check, they just want one.  No wonder some IT staffing companies get accused of resume slamming.   Looks like all parties contribute to this issue.  

After yesterday’s rather heavy post, it seems like I should lighten up a bit.  A Cincinnati and Dayton information technology consulting company should have a sense of humor too.   So instead of talking about business application development or some IT Strategy, lets figure out if a computer is masculine or feminine.

A SPANISH Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.

'House' for instance, is feminine: 'la casa.'   'Pencil,' however, is masculine: 'el lapiz.'

A student asked, 'What gender is 'computer'?'

Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer' should be a masculine or a  feminine noun.  Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.

The men's group decided that 'computer' should definitely be of the feminine gender ('la computadora'), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else;
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval;
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

(THIS GETS BETTER!)

The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine ('el computador'), because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;
2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves, you have to give them precise instructions;
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem;
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

The women won.

Thanks Jean for sending me that. 

Over the weekend I took my family to see a movie.  After the movie, my son suggested we cross Route 4 and go to Sonic for some ice cream. He also suggested that we cross the highway on foot and play frogger.  You might ask what this has to do with information technology consulting?  It got me thinking about a business concept called leapfrogging.   This is where you are behind your competition in some manner, but are able to institute something to allow you to leap in front of your competition.

A lot of times, information technology comes into play to enable a company to leapfrog.  One example of this is a company that had old analog phone system.  It worked perfectly fine for its intended purpose and the owner saw no need to replace it.  One day, the phone system crashed and they were forced to find a replacement.  All of their competitors have changed phone systems years ago and were able to transfer calls to where ever a person might be located. The salespeople were always able to handle customer requests.   However at this particular company, they could only transfer calls into the venerable voice mail and messages could only be retrieved while in the office. 

With the new phone system, they had come out of the 70’s.  Voice and data were integrated with their current network. Not only could they do what their competition was doing as I described above, but they could also send quotes and have all correspondence logged with their CRM system.  This allowed them to respond faster than their competitors and increased their customer satisfaction. This capability allowed them to leapfrog their competitors. 

Cincinnati and Dayton tend to be more conservative than other parts of the country.  Because of this, a lot of companies tend to have older IT solutions.  Could new web application development give you a competitive advantage that would allow you to leapfrog?

Wow, I’m not the only one who has noticed that some IT workers have a bad attitude .  A couple of weeks ago, I was musing about American programmers and yesterday Michael Vizard posted a blog about older IT workers.   In my post, I was lumping all American programmers together and Michael narrowed it down to older IT workers.   Regardless of your origins or age, it comes down to your attitude.

I really like the last few sentences of the blog: “The deck is most certainly stacked against older IT professionals, but it's hardly insurmountable. The last time anybody checked, experience usually has a way of winning over raw talent when the big game is really on the line. As they saying goes, you're as young as you feel. So maybe it's time to get back in the game with a new attitude and start kicking some butt.”

I know that certain aspects of the economy are in the dumper, but Cincinnati, and Dayton IT jobs are holding their own.   I have always said that there is no substitute for experience when it comes to IT Consulting.  So get back in the game and let’s go kick some butt.