IT Services Cincinnati

• the job titles on your work history do not reflect your experience in business analysis (they include other titles such as programmer, software developer, financial analyst, etc.) and/or;
• you spent many years doing business analysis work for one company (perhaps even with the title of BA), but never obtained post secondary education, and is finding it difficult to get your resume noticed by other companies.

As I move from client to client, IT shop to IT shop, the one think I notice is that most organizations do not have an internal BA Body of Knowledge.  There are several reasons that I can think of as to why organizations have not taken on the task of developing an internal BABOK:

    1. Companies are slow to embrace the idea and value of a BA Center of Excellence.
    2. Companies do not understand what an internal BABOK is and what should be in it.
    3. Companies have not realized the value of an internal BABOK.
    4. Not enough time, not enough resources.

So let’s take a look at these reasons.  First, creating a BA Center of Excellence would allow the organization to use their BA talent in a more strategic role within the organization.  It would allow them to move their BAs among the business units within the organization with a much less learning curve.  BAs leaving the organization don’t take valuable business knowledge out the door with them and just as important, new BAs have a much shorter ramp up time to become effective to the organization.  I believe once organizations realize the value that developing a BA Center of Excellence can have on the organization, they would all want one.

Secondly, there is reference material available that conceptually describes an internal BA Body of Knowledge, but you would have to dive deep into reading material to find it.  So, let me spell out for all to see what we are talking about when we say an organization should develop an internal BA Body of Knowledge.  This is a centralized, electronic copy of documents that define anything within the business.  This is a wealth of knowledge that all your BAs can draw from to better perform their duties.  This would allow a BA to learn a new area of the business quickly that they have not worked in before as they are assigned new tasks.  This BABOK would define the business organization, the business units with it and the interrelationships between those business units.  What did that sound like to you?  If you said an Enterprise Architecture, you are absolutely correct.  The first thing to include in your internal BABOK is the organization Enterprise Architecture, including all five parts of the architecture.  Also include the BA Career Ladder, BA Competence Model, BA Job Descriptions, new BA training material, BA departure review and BA reference material pertinent to the organization.

Thirdly, now that you understand what wealth of knowledge is included in an internal BABOK, I think you can realize the value of it without me saying a word.  Most organizations do not have an Enterprise Architecture, let alone an internal BABOK.  Those organizations that somewhat have one; usually have it dispersed all over the company network, which makes finding material very difficult.  Centralized, easy to access, electronic, included in the company’s backup and restore process adds tremendous value to the organization.

Lastly, this is always the reason that many good ideas do not take form.  Realize, that if you had an internal BABOK that your BAs used on a daily basis that research tasks take a lot less time.  This can decrease project schedules, freeing up more than just BA resource time.

That all sounds nice, but what does it mean to the organization?  Well, there are many benefits to having an Enterprise Architecture and internal electronic BABOK to the organization:

1. Project portfolio in greater alignment with business strategic goals and initiatives
2. Realization of BA talent in a more strategic role
3. New BAs become more effective to the organization faster
4. Ensure enterprise knowledge stays within the organization when BAs leave the organization
5. Starting point for Enterprise Capability Gap Analysis
6. Reference material for new product feasibility studies
7. Reference material for competitive edge analysis
8. Required material for new enterprise software impact analysis

There are many benefits to the BA practice within the organization:

1. Reference material easily available without exhaustive searching
2. Understand BA Competencies important to the organization
3. Understand BA Competencies needed to achieve the next level on the BA Career Ladder
4. Move within the business units of the organization with greater ease and knowledge
5. Needed reference material for Enterprise Analysis activities

Now can your organization survive in these economic times without an internal BABOK?

 

“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.

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.

 

I attended the first meeting of the season for the Cincinnati IIBA^® Chapter. They are doing a series entitled CIO Speaker Series, where they have the CIO from prominent companies in the Cincinnati area who have demonstrated a solid commitment to promoting the effective practice of Business Analysis in their organizations come and speak on how that commitment is put into practice within their organization.

Now I really thought this was going to be boring but the speaker; Jeff Wolverton, Senior VP and CIO of Great American Financial Resources, Inc. (GAFRI), captured my attention when he spoke about how he used the area of Business Analysis to turn his IT organization around and assist them in providing better IT business solutions.

Jeff has been with GAFRI for 11 years and has held the position of CIO for the past 8 years, but they have really put an emphasis on the area of Business Analysis and have begun to reap the benefits thereof here in the last year and a half.

He demonstrated how putting Business Analysis first changed the reputation of his IT staff within the organization from an IT production support group that is slow in delivering business applications that are often bug ridden, to an IT staff that develops great business application solutions that work for the business. GAFRI IT staff went from delivering solutions and telling the business to report any bugs found and they will fix them to delivering business solutions where they had found 85% of all bugs prior to user acceptance testing.

Jeff also spoke about how in last year’s economy where IT budgets in most organizations were being slashed, he received a double-digit increase; the largest increase in his 8 years as CIO. So how do you get that kind of budget increase and turn around the reputation of your IT staff and the business application solutions that they deliver? GAFRI did it by getting to the business requirements behind the business requests and implementing a systematic, repeatable project delivery process.

Jeff and his team put into place a new IT business solutions delivery process from the requirements gathering phase to project delivery (implementation). This new process was going to take much longer than the old process. What use to take a week will now take two to four weeks.  How do you get business buy-in to wait for their business applications? When you deliver a business application solution in which the business usually reports several bugs during testing to delivering a solution in which the business reports almost no bugs, they see value in the new process.

GAFRI’s new IT business solution delivery process put emphasis on two areas: requirements gathering and application testing. They created new roles within their IT staff and put people in place with very specific duties to gain measurable increased value in these areas. They not only put IT staff through training, but they put the business through training on the new delivery process and the business role on working with the IT staff to drive better IT business solutions.

The first new IT role is the Requirements Analyst. This person works with the business in the beginning of the project to elicit and form clear and concise business requirements for the IT business solution. So many times when IT delivers a project they get the punch line to that Dr. Seuss rhyme about the Super Programmer, where the requester says ‘You gave me just what I asked for but not what I need!’. The Requirements Analyst works throughout the project, in a diminishing role, to ensure that the IT solution will meet the needs of the business.

The second new IT role created is the Test Analyst. Typically, testing is thought of after development is complete or nearing completion. In GAFRI’s model test plans are created before or as development starts and are based on the business requirements of the project. The Test Analyst either performs or supports IT Quality Assurance testing and supports User Acceptance Testing.

GAFRI is a shining example of how commitment to the area of Business Analysis can reap many benefits for the organization, both for IT and the business. The end result is better IT business solutions.

Come on, come on, come on, come on now Touch me, babe!  Can't you see that I am not afraid? ....... Yea, I have been listening to The Doors again.  See the complete lyrics here.  Actually we are trying to decide how, when and what to do marketing wise or as we say internally, how many times to “touch” the client.  Even a Cincinnati based Information Technology Firm is not immune to the FUD Factor.  What’s an IT Consulting Service firm to do?

One of the things that has stuck with me from my marketing class at MIT  is when the professor said that the quickest way to burn through a million dollars and have nothing to show for it, was to start marketing and advertising. We certainly need to be marketing, but if companies’ are not in a position to buy, are the marketing dollars wasted? 

Having been around for 19 years, this is the 3rd economic downturn we have experienced.  We have come out of each one a little wiser and a little stronger.  We have been positioning to leap frog our competitors during this one.  We have seen an up tick in activity, just like everyone else.  This is the 64 dollar question:  Is now the time to spend the marketing dollars?

Since today I have more questions than answers, I invite you to leave comments on How?, When?, How often?  What means?  You would like to be marketed to.  Comments will be posted following this blog, so contribute and check back to see what others think.  

 

• Network security specialist: A person familiar with intrusion detection systems.
• Penetration testers: Someone who can assess a system's potential vulnerabilities.
• Incident handlers: People who understand attack methodology and can apply critical thinking skills to respond to incidents.
• Forensics Analyst: The person who looks for evidence after an attack.
• Research Analyst: The person to keep abreast technological advances in incident response activities.
• Team Leader: Leads the team through crises and communicates to the business incident activities and cost to the business.

• Preparation and Training: for both prevention and incident response.
• Identification: fast identification of an occurring attack and its impact on the IT infrastructure can help in minimizing the duration and cost of clean-up.
• Containment: Once an attack has been identified, steps must be taken to minimize the effects of the attack.
• Recovery and Analysis: The recovery period allows analysis and lessons learned of What happened? Why did it happened? Was the response effective?

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 was recently out of the office for eight days on a cruise to the Eastern Caribbean.  While out of the office, I did not have access to e-mail and quite frankly, really did not want to have access.   As the owner of an IT consulting company in Cincinnati, I get plenty of e-mail.  I estimate that I get about 70 real e-mails a day.  A lot of these are IT strategy and IT consulting related, our spam service does a pretty good job of eliminating spam.  On Monday morning, my inbox had over 700 unread messages in it.

So today I thought I would talk about strategic ways of dealing with e-mail.  Yes, one way is the delete button.  I know one person that told me they simply delete everything in the inbox and figured that if there was something important there, the sender would eventually let them know.  But rather than delete everything, I like the strategic use of the delete button. 

The first thing is to know about the type of mail that you received.  My e-mail, typically falls into these categories: e-mail from customers or fellow Starbase, Inc. associates, time sensitive newsletters, list-serve messages, and other miscellaneous.  

My e-mail client has the ability to color code messages, so messages from Starbase, Inc. associates and customers are color coded, so I better see them and not accidently delete them.  I typically look at these first.  

The biggest key to effectively dealing with a lot of email is to group the messages into blocks.  To help group these messages together, I sort my inbox various ways.  Sorting by sender helps me delete mail very quickly from senders that I don’t care to read.   Sorting by subject, helps me deal with the list serve messages.  If there is a subject that I don’t care to read, I can deal with those messages in a block as well.

Once I have eliminated the messages I don’t care to open, I can more effectively deal with the remaining messages. 

“You can program yourself to be positive. Being Positive is a discipline … and the more adversity you face, the more positive you have to be. Being positive helps build confidence and self-esteem”  --Rick Pitino, University of Louisville Head Basketball Coach

In part one; I introduced the concept of being mentally tough in today’s economic climate.  This applies not only to IT jobs, but to any job.

Developing Mental Toughness

1. Starts with the right attitude and state of mind.  You need to know what your core confidence is all about.  Confidence comes in knowing you are prepared and courage to make hard decisions.  As long as no one dies, thing will probably be OK. 
2. Program your mind for success ahead of time with positive affirmations and expectations.   Expect the best from yourself; affirm what it is you are going to do to be successful.  Use goal oriented statements starting with “I will, I can, I am going to…
Focus on those things you want to occur, rather than things you’re afraid might go wrong. (I have been reminded recently it’s OK to have a plan B or a back up plan).
3. Make your behaviors routine.   Develop a systematic routine that clicks on desired mental-emotional state of mind. 
4. Poise and Composure:  Learn how to let go of mistakes quickly if things do not go the way you want.  The key part of mental training is about compensating, adjusting, and trusting.  If plan A does not work, go to plan B or C (See above.).  Be persistent and mentally tough; don’t allow frustration to undermine your confidence/focus. 
5. Take control of Negative Self-Talk: Reframe “stinking thinking” into positive task oriented suggestions.  Being aware of situations that cause you to get frustrated, rushed, intimidated, lose focus is a good first step. Then reframe the negativity into positive, mentally tough self-suggestions.  For example, in basketball instead of “I can’t hit that shot if my life depended on it”, let go, reframe it back into something more positive and task oriented “get a good look at the basket, see it, feel it, trust it”.  When I was doing a lot of application development, I can tell you how many times I was able to solve a problem just by talking to some one else. 
6. Look at failure as a stepping stone for future achievement.  Michael Jordan missed 9000 shots, missed 26 game winning shots, lost 300 games, yet he was a6 time NBA World Champion. He said that, “I failed over and over, that is why I succeed”.
7. Be a difference maker, step up when it matters the most.  Life is all about risks and it requires you to jump. Don't be a person who has to look back and wonder what they would have or could have done.  Nothing is forever.

As an enterprise application development team member, I have had a long history with both companies. I started in this business with IBM’s CICS and COBOL. Publishing one update every 10 years or so, COBOL could not compete with the newer languages of the time (Java). IBM only started looking at viable additions or enhancements after losing lots of business. Having seen what IBM did with their languages, the outlook is not so rosy with Java. I also came from a vendor (Silverstream), which took Java and created proprietary extensions. When Silverstream got bought out by Novell and disappeared, my focus was to convince employers that I did in fact know Java. Since then, I have had a personal dislike for non-standard "enhancements" to technology. IBM’s WebSphere falls directly into that category. Taking a perfectly usable Apache web container and adding "enhancements" so it doesn’t follow apache documentation, but needs IBM support makes me angry. Their JDK implementation leaves many things to be desired. IBM has a history of taking open source technologies and contorting them so only IBM trained personnel can use them. To most application development team guys, IBM is a huge thorn in their sides. It is management not IT that purchases big blue.
It’s not just Java, but many of my other favorite technologies that IBM may toss. Glassfish is a free, easy to use application server that uses the latest EE5 code base. WebSphere 7.0 has been recently released to use IBM’s EE5 edition. 2 years after Glassfish! I am a long time MySQL user, I don’t ever want to use DB2. I can’t imagine using DB2 for my passion projects. NetBeans has made great strides in the IDE space, and is becoming the choice of many application development team members. Whether you use all IBM or all Sun is moot; we have choice and competition, but not for long.

IBM’s lack of focus on marketing and developer mind share (anyone remember OS/2?) are important reasons why I hope this doesn’t happen. In a perfect world, Google would swoop in and buy them. Their cultures are very similar (many former Sun people work at Google), and the competition would still be there.
Yes, many of these technologies are open source. They will not just disapear; but without corporate backing, they will not see light of day in the corporate space. The reason Red Hat and SUSE are major Linux distributions is that Enterprises can have Service contracts. If IBM chooses to abandon them, I don't see widespread use, unless the technology is overwhelmingly compelling.