SPAM Exists, Get Over It

In the “old days”, circa 10 years ago, to avoid E-Mail SPAM you bought anti-spam software and your IT staff would spend hours tweaking the rules that the software used to decide what to block (and what not to block).

These filtering rules got pretty complex, as spammers quickly learned not to use a pure word. You probably have seen SPAM emails with misspellings this in the title; Viagra, V1@gr@, vi@6ra .. you get the idea.

The trick was to build filters that would catch as much of that crap as possible, but without stopping the legitimate e-mail.

Today?

Anti-spam tools now are mature and can be contracted out to service providers for about 2 bucks per person per month. These tools are now mathematically driven and rarely (but still occasionally!) block legitimate e-mail.

The point is; there is no excuse any more for your staff to wade through through hundreds of SPAM emails looking for the few that are not SPAM.

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Where Is Your Planning Horizon? (Part 2)

In part 1 of this post, I outlined how ‘C’ level executives and managers in the small to medium enterprise need to ensure that their senior IT leaders (internal or outsourced) are considering long and medium term planning horizons, not just short term planning, which is the specific, immediate actions required for particular results.

Often longer term planning can be difficult, because it will always be a moving target. (I have changed my own long term planning goals twice in the last 18 months or so) Despite being a moving target, get away from the what if.. or you will never get any planning goals off the ground.

Your IT planning has to balance the long term of where you want to be vs. the day by day steps that get you to that goal.

One Without The Other?

Does not work!

With no long term planning, short and medium term planning has no goal. No end game. No target that you are trying to aim for. And with only long term planning, you get stuck vague ideals about a perfect future – but with no immediate deliverables to begin setting you on that road. (like the old saying; if you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there)

And yes! your long term plans will probably change, be aware of it, and adjust as necessary.

In part 1 I promised to give a real world example, so here it is!

After joining my organization n the fall of 2007, I realized that our IT cost structure was way out of whack.

So easily enough my long term plan was to reduce our IT cost by at least 50%

The short term and medium term plans to get to that goal included multiple tasks, some of these were relatively easy to implement, and others that were more difficult. Examples include;

* Improving purchase approvals,processes and supplier agreements

* Improving IT costing

* Consolidating four database servers down to one

* Consolidating five application servers down to three

* Improving budget and trend analysis

You get the idea!

Some of these tasks took a lot of planning and time (eg, you can’t just pick up and move a database from one server to another – trust me on that – applications will break, software code needs to modified, etc etc)

In the interest of full disclosure, I cannot take credit for all cost reductions we achieved as our B2B customer base started feeling the pain of our current economic meltdown long before the press started talking about the recession word. When they closed their wallets, many growth and spending plans had to be shelved.

The Long Term Planning Change

OK, so my first long term plan was cutting IT costs. By middle to late 2008, the market that we call SaaS, (Software as a service)and  PaaS (platform as a service) had begun to mature.

For me? maintaining database servers and application servers are not our core competency.So my long term planning has evolved into identifying if we can successfully leverage those technologies.

The SMB Takeaway

Yes, the future is unknown, and unknowable. But that is not excuse to avoid planning for where you believe you need to be. You may modify, you may tweak, you may adjust.

In fact you may rip out and replace the whole plan.

Do it anyway!

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Photo credit coincoyote via flickr

Automatic Update Hell

A lot of software that gets installed on your PC does that automatic update thing. (Yes Windows Included) And of course many newer software installations quietly upgrade other things in the background.

I hate that.

Here are two reasons!

1) Spent two hours trying to fix a laptop because a Microsoft freebie tool upgrade updated a part of Windows that now causes a multi-function print device to blow up.

So, we have to hope a newer version of the print driver and software comes out some day

2) My own machine updated to the Java Run time Edition 6 for an installation of another piece of software

Of course – it has blown up a device that only works with the version 5 of the Java Run time Environment.

You ever tried searching a vendor web site for older versions of software???

Ha!

Sorry – Rant is now Off!

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Sharepoint Danger!

A quirky titled column by Fred Yeomans titled; Danger! Do not implement SharePoint in your Organization!

The title may be quirky, but the context is truly valid for those of us in the small to medium business space.

The problem here is the way you think about your projects. If you are consistently talking about “implementing SharePoint” you are going in the wrong direction. If you are talking about implementing any platform, you are setting up for failure. Many of the problems we run into with SharePoint and other platforms arise from focusing on the technologies.

It bears repeating – business technologies, in and of themselves, won’t do a thing for you.

What technologies can do for you is help speed up an existing business process flow, or provide a solution to resolve a particular business pain point.

In other words, there has to be business value there first.

The SMB Takeaway

If there is a business value through reducing some type of cycle time, improving communication or reducing re-work and missing information costs, sure – look at some technology platform.

But beware of technology, just for technologies sake!

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Real SMB IT: For Heavens Sake, Use Templates!

Too often in the small business space we tend to re-invent the wheel. Again, again, and again, then again for good measure.

Case in point, my spouse also works for an SME, she was working on a document that three or four people had contributed to.

The document had to be cleaned and formatted to a consistent look and feel as each contributor had done their part in the way they saw fit. One used text and bullets , one used embedded tables etc.

It was a nightmare.

We worked on that G-D thing until after 1 AM

The SMB Takeaway

Whatever software you are using, take the time to develop styles and templates. It makes filling in the blanks so much easier. Time and time again.

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Hands On ITIL Helpdesk

I have written many high level overviews of ITIL on this blog, and to this day it is the most searched for information.

Unfortunately for me, very few of those visitors have left questions on other info they would like to see.

However, if you are someone who stumbled on the ITIL stuff here, Mary Weilage has an excellent post at Techreplublic titled; Implementing help desk software: IT exec offers a firsthand account about Jay Rollins’ search for and implementation of ITIL aligned help desk processes.

It provides an excellent summary of the questions, requirements and trade offs made along the way.

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The More Things Change

….the more they stay the same.

The headline for the June 15 2009 print edition of eWeek; Browsers battle for enterprise dominance

The exact same headlines as a decade ago – except it was Netscape vs. MS Internet Explorer

Sigh…..

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Adobe Software, Please Get a Frigging Life

As a software development shop, we use a fuck-load of Adobe  Nasdaq: ADBE (and formerly Macromedia) software.

We have had such horrible experiences with their software licencing mechanism that we are starting to look at alternatives.

The most recent – eight hours (multiply that by my salary and the software developer sitting on her thumbs to get the idea) and all is still not fixed.

We purchased another Adobe product (Audition) and the installation blew up. The software would not run at all. Not only was that software dead, it killed many of the other Adobe products (eg. Captivate, Photoshop, Flash, InDesign etc) on the workstation.

The problem with Adobe’s software is that you shell out all that money, but the software still won’t work until you let it ‘phone home’ to Adobe’s servers to activate the licence on that particular workstation.

In order to remove the licence, and reinstall it, you need to start the software and ‘de-activate’ it. The software then phones home to Adobe’s servers and lets the licence be transferred to a new machine.

You can guess, since I could not start the software, I could not deactivate those licences.

The eight hours was with their tech support, the first part trying to get the software working (including their nuclear bomb clean.exe utility which supposedly blows away everything it touches)

Then, one application at a time calling back to use tech support to do what ever it is they have to do to let me re-install the software when the licence cannot be deactivated. (Dear tech support, yes, I know it should be deactivated, yes I know it should be done first, but the damned machine is dead, yes the software is legally purchased,here is the licence, the list goes on)

The SMB Takeaway

Yes, Adobe packs more features in its software than a Swiss Army Knife. Maybe if you are a Global 2000 sized organization, you have methods and licences to bypass this pain.

But since most people use less than 20% of the features in any particular software package, save yourself the cost and look for alternatives.

Footnote: The software that started it all (Audition) is still not working, at this writing, we have tried it on two other machines (A Sony running Windows Vista and a Dell running Windows XP)

The SMB Takeaway Part 2 – For the financial officers

Lets look again;

Direct labour cost, my time for eight hours

Indirect labour cost a software developer who cannot do her job for eight hours

Indirect soft cost, (like many in this recession) we are working on several initiatives to reduce costs, one major one that I am running. The domino effect on that project could be 30 days of excess costs.

Indirect soft cost, The project that developer was working on is now over a week late for its delivery. What cost can you put on that?

And that is a true, rather than rhetorical question.

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This Hurts, Even To Read

Read this article By Gene Kim at Information Security Resources.

28 hours ago, when we started testing, my team started finding failures left and right.  Which is what we expected, given all the corners that were cut by the developers because of deadlines

That quote is one snippet, one gem in a long line.

There are enough lessons for an entire book. And don’t think that because you are an SME that you are immune.

In fact because you are an SME, you probably don’t even have the segregation of development, quality control and downstream production servers that Mr. Kim describes.

In Short?

If you cut corners, some where, some when, you will pay for it, and next – make sure Plan ‘B’ is ready to go. And yes Plan ‘B’ can be a rollback to the state that existed before you started.

But here is the problem, if you were doing all this first on your production servers and environment – can you even go back to the the way it was?

(hint: My odds would be better than casino odds betting against you!)

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Are You Being Nickled And Dimed?

Unfortunately this is all to common, you have that new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software or some other software tool.

You make the capital investment, go through a long and painful installation, configuration and training process and then;

Finished right?

Maybe not!

Once the software is installed the change requests start coming in.

Some of these changes will be great – they will add value, or improve decisions. But some of them won’t.

Every change has a cost. Both in time, and possibly work flows and training. Not to mention Quality Control and testing.

Do you manage these changes?

Do you understand the value equation in these change requests?

If it takes ‘x’ hours for one particular change, is there value there to be received?

One small change may not seem like much – but add them all up and the costs start to rise.

And when it seems that money is already spent – it can be difficult to see these operational cost leaks.

The SMB Takeaway

Nickles And Dimes

You have spent money, and time on that software implementation.

But you can’t consider it ‘complete’.

Put all changes through the same value ringer that the initial project went through.

As the old saying goes; Watch the nickles and dimes, then the dollars take care of themselves.

Photo Credit stargonautone via flickr

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