Jeff's Blog

Hi There!  My name is Jeff Welsh In 1991, I founded STAR BASE Consulting, Inc. to better meet the application development, IT outsourcing, and IT strategy needs of the Greater Southwest Ohio community.  I have been involved with IT and several other businesses since 1981.  

I will be blogging about Information Technology Consulting, IT strategy,  and IT staffing.  We cover the Greater Cincinnati and Greater Dayton Ohio areas, so I’m sure I will be talking about what is happing around Ohio IT Services along with Southeast Indiana and Northern Kentucky.   I hope you will find reading worth while and maybe even informative.

Away from the office, I am a husband and father of two sons.  I serve in a leadership capacity at Legacy Christian Church.  I enjoy classic cars and riding my motorcycle.  Don’t be surprised if some of those topics creep into my blog from time to time.

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!
 

You have probably heard your parents or grand-parents talk about when they were younger and how they had to walk to school, up hill both ways.  When they shared this story with you it was to prepare you for times when things weren’t so easy and to provide you with their knowledge and advice from their hard earned experience. 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.

1. Bill for time not worked.  This will be the quickest way to end up out of a consulting gig. Make sure you bill the client only for the time you actually work. This can be tricky if your clients are friends. When you go to a job like this, you know there will be a period of time spent socializing, especially when you first arrive. Don't bill for this time. Start the billing period when you start working.  Sometimes clients will have celebrations during the day.  If you don’t want to appear anti-social, by not going, just don’t bill.  If there are any questions, ask the account manager to find out. If you are the account manager, ask your client manager at one of your one to one meetings if it’s ok to bill.  Some client’s have a culture where that is part of the expectation.

2. Negotiate rates and make deals with the client.  If you work for a consulting firm, you know there are channels for clients to go though to make requests..  Most firms have some sort of account manager to handle those issues.  Direct the client to the account manager.  I had one consultant that actually went so far as to look in the client’s AP system to see how much we were getting paid and then wanted to negotiate a higher rate with the client.  This particular action did not end well for the consultant and he has not been able to be considered for other assignments in this client even when his skill set was ideal.  Never, ever work out a side deal or moonlight with a client this can comprise your integrity and jeopardize the trust between  you, the consulting company and inevitably the client.

3. Act like a prima donna.  Yes, you’re good, that’s why you have been hired. I actually heard a consultant tell the client that their employees were stupid.  Hello? You are there to serve those employees.  You don’t know what kind of constraints they have had to work with.  Hind sight is always 20-20.  Its always far better to politely make suggestions. You may find out your brilliant idea was considered previously and there was a very valid reason for it not being implemented.  It’s much better to NOT have egg on your face or your foot in your mouth.

4. Miscommunicate or undercommunicate when engaged at a client I believe that the client should know what is going on with their project.  Many times I have had to be the bearer of bad news.  I also like weekly status reports to let the client know what I have worked on and what I’m planning on doing.  If at all possible I like to let them know a percent complete.  Years ago, I heard another consultant tell the client he was “unit testing”.  The client assumed that meant he had all the functionality done and was testing.  The reality was he had about 10% of the functionality done and was testing just that one small piece.  When the truth came out, it was not pretty.

Tomorrow I will finish off the last 3 sins.
To be continued……

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……….

 

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.

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?

 

I am part of the LinkedIn community and a member of several groups in LinkedIn.  One of the groups I am a member of is the IBM i Professionals group.  I get a weekly summary of activity and sometimes there are comments on the posts that people have made.  Usually there are no more than 3-5 comments.  What caught my attention is a LinkedIn post that had 23 comments.   The original post referenced this blog post:  http://blog.angustheitchap.com/?p=159  In this post, the author talks about the iSeries application development community needing to pull together to DO something about the lack of support for the platform.  He asks the question: What have YOU done for the IBM i platform this week?

As a former iSeries application developer, I thought it was a good question, perhaps about 10 years too late, but a good question none the less.  Let me state for the record that the iSeries is a great platform and it is without a doubt the best box for business that IBM has. 

The problem is that it is a victim of its own success.  There is no other platform where an application written in the 1980’s could still run un-touched even though the underlying hardware has changed numerous times.  To me the core issue is this: IBM is no longer in the hardware business; meaning they don’t derive that much revenue from hardware anymore.  The majority of IBM’s revenue comes from services.  The iSeries does not need or generate the services revenue that other platforms do.  So in my opinion, it’s an economic issue and no amount of doing or community is going to change that.

In part one; I talked about some of the IT Strategies and business strategies that were discussed at the Techserve Alliance conference we recently attended.  I’ll admit I’m a sucker for quaint sayings and one of the speakers had a good one:  It’s time to take the Basset hound to the farm.  So what does that have to do with IT Strategy or business?

Plenty, takin’ the basset hound to the farm means it’s time to re-think what you are doing, why you are doing it, and who is doing it.  It’s time to eliminate products, services, processes or people that are not delivering value to the business.  This is not just an IT strategy, but an important business strategy as well.  It is critically important to make sure both business and IT are aligned. 

The trick is to figure out what your basset hound(s) are.  Every business that has been around for any length of time has one or more of these.  It may be a line of products that are kept in stock because it “rounds out the product line”, when the reality is the items are not that important.   It could be a service that our “customers really want”, but in reality  the service does not deliver value or it could be that “special process” that you do “because we have always done it that way”.  Then there is Bob.  Everybody likes Bob. Bob has been around forever and knows everything.  The problem is Bob doesn’t really do anything.

It’s always better to take the basset hound to the farm on your own terms rather than be forced into it by circumstances.  Take for example the company in New England that manufactured parts for submarines.  When the ship yard closed a few years ago, they were forced to change.  They redeployed their manufacturing expertise and now make parts for the medical industry.  What could they have accomplished if they had manufactured both parts for submarines and medical devices?  Could the business have been double the size?

That’s where an outside consultant can help.  They can be objective and bring an outside perspective to your current business and IT strategy.  STAR BASE is in a good position to teach old dogs new tricks”.  (Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?!)

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.

 

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.  

 

A couple of weeks ago, I made the trek to Columbus and attended the Ohio chapter meeting of TechServe Alliance of which STAR BASE, Inc. is a member.  In talking with other owners and corporate executives, everyone is pretty much saying the same thing: “We are seeing more sales activity, just no commitments.”   Seems like everyone involved with Ohio Information Technology firms is in the same boat.  In Cincinnati, things might not be quite as bad as Columbus because there is less state government work.

So why is there a lack of commitment?  There could be many reasons, but it all boils down to what I call the FUD Factor.   Never heard of the FUD Factor?  We would not be a real IT Consulting firm if we couldn’t use a TLA (three letter acronym) and it’s not what you’re thinking!  FUD is short for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. 

When the FUD factor is high, people tend not to make commitments, changes or decisions.  Doing nothing seems like the safest choice.  A high FUD factor equals RISK and as a society, we have become very risk adverse.   When the FUD factor is low, decisions are much easier to make, less risky. 

With the economy down and so much uncertainty, the FUD factor is definitely high.  So is doing nothing really a good choice?  Things tend to move in cycles or patterns, it is the way of the world... Losers become winners. Winners become losers. Day yields to night; nights divide the days; summer gives way to winter. Life goes on...always as it always was...but never the same.

Will you be ready?
 

Having been in business for over 18 years now in Cincinnati, we have seen a few changes in the IT Solutions space.  It’s interesting to see what were once considered cutting edge technologies slowly fade in to oblivion.  It’s also very gratifying to be able to change and adapt to the newest IT Solutions. 

The past couple of weeks we have gotten calls from both ends of the spectrum.  From the older side, we had inquires from two different companies running older IBM System/36 software.  I had thought most of that RPG 2 and OCL had pretty much been converted over to something else during the Y2K scare at the turn of the century.  I guess not.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have gotten calls from a couple of companies looking for some help with Magento ecommerce.  Magento happens to be one of the open source ecommerce packages we have experience with. 

This is not the first post that I have written about open source, check this one out.  If you are thinking about a sweet CRM package, check out this post.

One other thing, you might be wondering about is why the picture of the 1974 Dodge Charger?   I was looking for a picture that could represent something old that is also new and cool.  I may be biased, but I think that picture does it.   That is “The Beauty” at the Quaker State and Lube cruise in on Sunday night.  I typically go to the Colerain location.  Next time I go, I will bring “The Beast”.

 

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!

 

In part 1 of this post, I talked about the 80’s television show Quantum Leap, that wasn’t the point of the post. It is fun to imagine traveling around in time; but then again, I digress.   In part one, I introduced the concept of “quantum superposition”; big words, even for an IT strategy consultant.

Have you heard of the particle wave theory? In practical terms, it means that bizarre and counterintuitive effects occur on very small scales, and they can be harnessed.

This “quantum superposition” effect will, for example, will transform how we do “computer math.”  Currently, everything done by computers is in binary. The smallest piece of information a computer handles, the bit, is either a one or zero. A quantum computer, though, would be able to store and work with number systems other than binary.

This means computers would become exponentially more powerful because each “quantum bit” (qubit) could store a much greater range of numbers than the two that binary math restricts us to. Imagine a laptop with the computing power of the world’s 10 most powerful supercomputers. Then you begin to grasp the potential of quantum computing.

Designing chips and IT infrastructure to take advantage of “higher level” math than binary is years away.  The more immediate impact will be in storage.  Most application developers know that 8 bits make up a byte or 1 character.  What if a qubit could hold many bytes or characters?  

Next time, I will share another quantum idea.

 

By the title of this post you might think that it is about an 80’s television show by the same name.   I really enjoyed Quantum Leap when it first aired and you can still catch re-runs if you have cable or satellite TV, but I digress.

In the past, I have talked about rate of change and its impact on IT infrastructure and application development. Today, I’m continuing along that line.

IT infrastructure is going to go through a massive transformation in the years ahead. Quantum technologies that were only theories in scientific journals just a few years ago are being prototyped in labs now. These new components will change the way we live forever.

Currently, data is processed by moving bunches of electrons about in huge batches. Think of the components in your PC as electrical plumbing. Data is usually stored as batches of electrons or in computer terms, bits. Imagine your computer’s hard drive as a bunch of very small buckets, some full of water, some not. This would represent the on and off that current computers understand or binary language.  This will change:

Improved technologies from emerging nanosciences are allowing us to replace batches of electrons with the smallest individual unit: the electron. As a result, computers will work at far higher speeds. Additionally, far less electricity will be required to do the same amount of work.  So what’s the big deal you may be thinking, that’s been happening for years.

The big difference now is “quantum superposition”.  In a nutshell, this means that a quantum particle can exist in multiple states and everything in between at the same time. This is because a quantum particle, such as an electron, behaves as both a particle and a wave.  Quantum physics is going to have a huge role in how we store and represent data in the future.

Next time, I will take a quantum dive deeper into this. 

 

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”.

Just when I thought the browser wars were pretty much a thing of the past, they are heating up again.  Web application development is difficult enough without having to worry about what version of what browser a client may be using.  

We just upgraded a couple of machines to IE 8 and guess what?  IE 8 is not compatable with our web based CRM!  IE 7 and FireFox 3 work fine, but in IE 8 the search fields are not input capable.  IE 8 provides for a “compatablity mode”, but hey that doesn’t work either.  I was wondering if Google Chrome would work, but in Chrome, the search fields don’t show up at all; the field labels are repeated. 

I was thinking about trying Opera, but stopped because how many web browsers do I really need on my machine any way?

In order for web applications to continue to flourish and expand, there has got to be adherence to standards by both application developers and software companies.  There are so many other applications that could be developed and expanded.  But what do we do with IT solutions?  Both vendors and developers shoot themselves in the foot by delivering applications and software that “stops working”. 

What's the business impact?
- Increased support costs.
- Increased applications development and testing time
- Less confidence by the user community of “IT not  being able to do anything right”.
- Less time and money to develop new applications.

As a reformed, application developer, maybe I should retitle this post “The Return of the Angry White Guy.”  I think instead, I’m going outside and shouting, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”.