Blog

You Are Valuable - Being An Asset Not A Cog

2012-05-01T05:53:37Z

In many of my mentoring discussions, I always ask my students "Do they trust their leader?" While a straightforward question it is amazing to see how much qualification my students want to go through in order to answer the question. The question can be applied to any professional that one interacts with and with a simple yes or no. On a personal level, no one has a problem answering this question when applied outside of a professional setting... "Do you trust your butcher?" or "Do you trust your sibling?" What I find is different is the relationship or more specifically the expectations of the relationship.

Often times most professionals see the relationship with others the same way an organization does: through the org chart. If someone is of higher rank, certain assumptions are done, if they are of equal rank, other assumptions are made, and if they are lower in rank then yet even another set of assumptions are raised. This differs from personal relationships where there is an absence of an org chart, everyone is equal. Most professionals do not even recognize that they behave in accordance to what they believe the org chart represents which is that there are professionals that are superior (high rank), some that are equal, or some that are inferior (lower rank). As commonplace as this thinking is, it is not advantageous to adopt it. In doing so, a professional creates barriers or improper filters to people and how they behave within the workplace. More often this leads to false senses of security, arrogance, or other dangerous attitudes that can have devastating career impacts.

A great follow-up to the trust question of a manager or similarly "higher ranked" leader is based on a simple scenario: "Does your leader praise you for your successes? Does your leader defend you when you make a mistake?" Most professionals are surprised by the defense remark in that most firmly believe that managers are not there to "defend" anyone. In truth leaders defend their team more so than admonishing them because the team is a reflection of their professional conduct. A lazy leader creates a lazy team. A creative leader creates a creative team. A political leader creates a political team. And so on. Any leader which most professionals see as their manager or higher-ranked co-worker should defend their team.

Yet there is a strong distinction between a leader vs. one who is put in a position of leadership. A leader exhibits qualities and characteristics that inspire, empower and support the people they are responsible for. A person placed in a leadership position sees people as resources to be used, cogs so to speak, rather than assets. This fundamental relationship understanding is absolutely critical in understanding the true nature of the value proposition differences between professionals.

Typically someone managing cogs does not admire a cog for being a cog. In their view, a cog does not even warrant the slightest amount of attention. It is obtained to perform a purpose. If the cog fails at it's purpose or breaks down, it is replaced. Simple as that. However an asset is something to be protected, cultivated, taken care of, so that it can be of greater value over time not less. As a result professionals who see themselves as managing cogs take a very different view than those managing assets. Organizations that have true leadership never willingly want to lose assets. They will work with them to find the best fit, good roles, and greater challenges so that they stay.

This of course leads to the next and final question: "Does your leader see you as a cog or an asset?" This is where almost all professionals that I have mentored have the same answer ... they simply do not know. At this point I mention it is their responsibility to manage their career and test their leader. Why spend all the effort on a leader who at the end of your usefulness is more than likely simply going to "get rid of you" as opposed to "working with you to regain your value". So how can a professional determine what kind of manager they have? Simple: give them a test.

For example in my own professional experience I have purposely "failed" on tasks to test how my higher-ranked co-workers would react. It is easy to get praise when you are successful, yet it is rare to find someone to defend and mentor you when you fail. In my case I test organizational leaders as often as they test me. Working within an organization is a mutually beneficial arrangement or should be. I look at each person and each organization as my equal never my superior. Also I look at each relationship as mutual whereby we work "with" one another, not where I "work for" the organization.

Another way to look at the relationship is as one between equals. As much as you as an individual professional have to "prove yourself" to your organization, the reverse is equally true: the organization needs to prove itself to the professional. Many management levels within organizations see themselves in this manner. They bring value to an organization that can be desirable. So they spend their time convincing the organization of their value and hopefully by demonstrating it.

If one wants to be considered valuable, then one has to see themselves as a valuable asset not just another cog. While this seems very simple, which it is, it is not always easy. However by taking this powerful perspective it allows individuals to act differently: seeing opportunities that they might have missed, conducting themselves with empowerment not desperation, understanding and marketing their own unique brand, and ultimately taking charge of their own career.

Innovation - Perspective Matters

2012-02-29T19:10:35Z

Recently I had the pleasure of assisting several colleagues with how to address coming up with innovative solutions to their business challenges. It was interesting work and I found that in spite of the different problems they had to tackle, the desire to look "innovative" in their proposed solutions was absolutely critical. From their perspective being innovative meant that they were in fact quite able to contribute to their organization's value proposition and retain their positions.

The first thing that I had to explore with them was what the term "innovative" meant to them. Most had elaborate descriptions using examples ranging from Apple's products, to cloud technologies, electric hybrids, and the like. At this point I mentioned to them that the typical description of being "innovative" resembles a personality that always brings forth new ideas to existing problems that demonstrates original and creative elements. Something that is missing in this personality is the idea of being able to deliver. Innovation sometimes fails, such as Apple's Newton or Mobile.me service. Just because something or someone is innovative does not mean that they are always right nor will be able to produce significant returns on investments all the time.

So why is innovation so important to many professionals? From a practical viewpoint of an individual it comes down to being valuable or perhaps more valuable to an organization. In today's business world not being up on the latest trends and how they can be valuable to an organization can put professionals at a disadvantage to other professionals who do understand the latest capabilities especially when competing for scarce business resources. A good example that I encountered happened to be the use of Salesforce.com outside of traditional IT boundaries. Several technical leaders had been criticized by their business counterparts for not delivering good value for the amount of resources expended on internal efforts. The results were... a) the technical leaders were seen as "less" valuable to the business, b) business resources were re-allocated to other areas, c) the technical groups were "excluded" from key business initiatives. While the examples differed the results were always the same for the most part. Professionals that do not seem to have a firm understanding of what the latest offerings can bring to the table and how they can realistically be of assistance to the business is seen as a weakness.

Let me be clear in that this is not simply limited to lower level leaders or what I call "boots-on-the-ground" professionals but C-leaders are similarly guilty of not understanding nor appreciating the value propositions of the new models. For example I had recent discussion about the crowdfunding company Kickstarter with a seasoned C-level. They were mystified by the model and wanted an explanation of how it worked. So after a brief discussion of how the company worked at a conceptual level I pointed out several successfully funded programs such as DoubleFine and more recently Pebble. Using such a crowdfunding model start-ups had a new avenue that could not only supplement existing investment avenues, it could potentially replace them. I also pointed out that crowdfunding was not limited to just start-ups. For example, it is quite possible for a department within a larger organization to go to Kickstarter and get budget for an effort that while not appealing to C-level leadership, might be really appealing to the company's customers. Admittedly Kickstarter might not be the best way of enabling this capability but some future crowdfunding site might be able to do this which would enable a different and perhaps better cost/profit structure for initiatives that company leaders might be unwilling to take on their own.

Ultimately being a professional regardless of the field means being on top of the latest approaches and advances in the chosen profession. Being seen as continually valuable is the result of mixing experience, the latest approaches, and using one's own talent and know-how to blend them to solve problems. In the technical arena, it is even more critical considering the rapid rate and amount of change being introduced. And like so many companies and products, the ones that can innovate have shown to take commanding leads much to the chagrin and misfortune of incumbent market players. The same is holds very much true for the individual professional unwilling and unable to adjust.

2012 - Let the Talent Wars Begin!

2012-02-01T06:24:44Z

Among many of my professional colleagues they have noticed a significant upswing in hiring in our local area of the Silicon Valley and their local areas across the country. However in many cases while they see the hiring we have not been able to take the time to compare notes on what we see as trends.

While a totally informal poll with absolutely no scientific method, among the executives and technology specialists that I interact with on a regular basis there are a number of areas of growth:

Cloud. This is both a mix of cloud providers such as SalesForce, Amazon, etc. Also there is growth in cloud enablement or provisioning where organizations are looking to create their own internal clouds.
Mobile. Everyone I have spoken to has seen significant demand for mobile expertise. While there is a large amount of focus on Apple iOS and Google Android, there is also increased demand in Windows Phone 7 as well.
Big Data and it's corresponding analytics. I put both of these together because in my mind there are several facets to big data such as infrastructure/operation, and the very valuable analytics. While it is true that the ideal is to have data scientists, many organizations want the value of the analytics are looking to convert internal personnel to the task and/or looking for tools/services.
Enterprise Applications. Surprised? As more experienced individuals retire or move away from core enterprise applications, younger talent finds such applications very boring and unattractive leaving large gaps in terms of having personnel capable of meeting the demand. This demand is unlikely to change as enterprise applications are not really capturing the imagination of graduating college students.
Social Networking. A very fast growing area thanks to the competition between Facebook and Google, many professionals are finding significant demand in this area in terms of services, analytics, competitive products, and consulting.
Gaming. Casual and social gaming have certainly increased but the increased interest in gamification techniques and how they can be applied to companies have created a noticeable increase in companies looking for those with some degree of background in gaming. How much this grows remains to be seen but it is interesting.
Enterprise Consumerization. Many organizations are looking to create large financial impacts by engaging and retaining orders of magnitude of customers. In order to do this, companies are looking at ways to introduce degrees of consumerization into their organizations and ultimately personnel who understand various aspects of this concept and what it entails.
User Experience. Many companies now realize that user experience is tremendously important to attracting and retaining customers. As a consequence there is a very large increase in looking for designers, user experience experts, and other disciplines. This includes not only creating whole new experiences from scratch but transitional as well moving from existing ones to new ones.

In addition to these areas, there are corresponding increases for a variety of experience levels ranging from college graduates to experienced professionals.

Another observation about these positions is a commensurate increase in their expectations along a variety of dimensions: flexibility, entrepreneurial, adaptability, and many others. Many of my colleagues have also noticed that most of the organizations had in fact held conservative stances during the recession which while natural created skills gaps between what the market now demanded and their own skills. As a result, many find seizing these new opportunities more daunting than they had originally planned.

2012 signals a period of unparalleled demand for professionals that we all hope will be shared by others on the road to recovery.

Your Business and the Cloud - What Does the Cloud Mean to Your Business?

2012-02-01T05:52:26Z

A lot of my more recent conversations have involved the use of cloud technologies within companies. It starts at the implementation level but in many cases it moves back into the overall vision of what the cloud will enable within a company. While many leaders understand that the cloud can enable an organization to realize strategic opportunities, there is still a lot of confusion on what the cloud will specifically enable.

For example a simple conversation between business leaders revealed a disconnect in what the cloud would do for the business. Most technology leaders see gains in the data centers and infrastructure where such resources would be more readily accessible in a more self-service manner to business units. However the view most business sponsors have is typically one where they see application services that they use on a regular basis being more accessible and adaptable to their changing needs. Essentially, IT sees their deliverable as Amazon Web Services, whereas the business tends to see what they will receive as more SalesForce-like.

This form of disconnect is reasonable as there are a series of steps that needs to be accomplished for an organization to embrace cloud most of which are not technology-related. Many businesses are not cognizant of the amount of changes to the organization that take place when implementing their own clouds: security of typically what is thought of, yet other concerns such as impacts to other areas such as change management processes, quality assurance, budgets, business process, etc. are not.

For example, a small improvement such as self-service can create significant changes to budgets, and while many organizations find their approval processes adequate on less agile services, when whole divisions can "order" or "provision" cloud services can cause huge wait times and backlogs in approval queues. For example, if an organization is used to approving say 100 items a day, cloud services can potentially increase this level a thousand-fold.

Another example would be the customer service aspect of cloud services which most organizations see as their internal ticketing system. Many organizations make the mistake of over-simplying the amount of effort and underestimating the actual impact to their internal workloads. While it can be argued that turning a single ticket around can be faster, like going from 1hr to 5minutes, the number of tickets typically jumps significantly which catches many groups unprepared. Longer turnarounds can lead to SLA breaches which can potentially impact financial charge backs in the form of IT discounts being given or similar actions.

Typically I advise colleagues and leaders to use scenarios around the most basic of cloud services as excellent ways to walk through the process of identifying areas that may be impacted, and changes that need to be made. This process can be painful and slow at first, but after several iterations those involved will be very comfortable with the changing situation.

The most important step is for leadership to make certain that they absolutely on the same page for their cloud strategy and have agreement on it's deliverables.

Language Wars - Whatever Works!

2011-12-16T23:13:17Z

Over the years one of the most common and perhaps most often misunderstood practice is that of technical professionals to have debates on technologies. The technologies in question are typically ones that each person has had extensive or perhaps not so extensive experience with. Most of the time these discussions are taken in the proper spirit of exchanging insights and improving one's education. However once in a while, the discussion turns into verbal arguments about how technology A is "better" than technology B. To most technical individuals this is part of the territory. However business users and similar non-techies tend to see these debates as highly disconcerting. What are they to make of experts that they respect not reach a consensus about which technology would be proper to use for their business problem.

In my experience it is much less an issue of what technology to be used as opposed to what is the problem that needs to be solved. The age old wisdom of "use the right tool for the right job" comes to mind. In many cases arguments about which database to use still persist in spite of the diminishing return in terms of identifying actual hurdles to solve a problem. A nice recent example came to mind about MySQL vs. Oracle RDBMS. The fact that both products are now supported by the same vendor (Oracle) and both have excellent track records for many large deployments would to most people seem to end the debate on which to use. Yet within many organizations the war still wages. Generally what I see is typically around length of experience or perhaps even age. Most older/experienced professionals tend to gravitate towards Oracle having a veritable treasure trove of industry best practices within past organizations on it's use. On the opposite side, younger/equally experienced professionals who have exposure to different technologies such as Ruby-on-Rails, PHP, etc. have mostly used MySQL. They like the usability, the ease-of-administration, and the elegance of how the technology has worked it's way in many times seamlessly with their toolkits such that others solutions seem cumbersome in comparison. In the end either database is more than likely able to address pretty much any size scale of problem for an organization, however the arguments wage.

These arguments for the most part are not really based on any technical merit. Instead they are based almost exclusively on pre-existing viewpoints and internal politics. For instance building on the MySQL and Oracle example, in many large (and not so large) organizations IT decision makers tend to classify anything for "production, customer facing" to be Oracle with MySQL tagged as "experimental, prototyping". When I inquired about this curious categorization it came down to a perception that the Oracle RDBMS was more "robust/scalable" or had a "better track record" for mission critical applications. Even in spite of pointing out examples such as Facebook or Sabre Holdings the IT leadership continued to stress the use of Oracle. I even had a nice "sit down" session with an executive VP of technology who advised me that even "mentioning" MySQL would cause issues from the CTO and other members of the executive staff. Unfortunately these sorts of encounters far more often than not.

From a technical standpoint pretty much any technology can work to resolve a problem: Java, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Erlang, C, C++, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, Hadoop, MongoDB, whatever. However no matter the technology whether Open Source or vendor-provided, it requires a commitment from the business to adopt it, own it, learn it... basically invest and believe in it. This is tremendously foreign to many companies who tend to see their legacy applications as necessary evils in doing business not as strategic tools for competitive advantage. While many companies see the use of technology as the domain of high-tech companies, the truth is that many organizations in many different industries use technology to solve problems from auto manufacturers, to supermarkets, to dentists, heck even your local pub probably has a computer system of some kind squirreled away allowing their servers to place orders to the kitchen.

Generally speaking from my experience organizations that tend to not trust technology are really not trusting their internal partnership with technical departments. Now I will admit that a falling out in a relationship is hardly caused by one party but usually all parties, however generally I find that internal technology groups are having a hard time coping and adapting to the changing world around them and trying to meet the business demands. Again while there are many symptoms such as lack of education, out-dated implementation cycles, etc. the core issue is typically a lack of commitment and that starts from the top. Almost all proper working relationships have C-level leaders who are in agreement both publicly and privately with the business needs and strive to do the utmost to give them what they need. However C-levels that "have doubts" whether directly or indirectly carry themselves accordingly; project plans are padded, micro-management is taken up to "insure things run smoothly", requirements are not provided, etc. These views then travel down throughout an organization resulting in a very large cultural barrier in accepting let alone implementing anything necessary to meet business needs.

Language wars tend to be used as a scapegoat in almost all organizations as to why they are not getting what they want from their internal technology groups. Instead organizations need to understand what type of technology team they want/need (great HBR article on this concept) and then have the commitment to get there.

Ow! Too Much Tech - What does all of this mean?

2011-12-16T19:58:22Z

Throughout my career I am often asked in meetings by my fellow technology leaders, business leaders and colleagues about the various technology trends. Most of the questions are about why some of the technologies are being used, for what reasons, how are they doing generally speaking, and what could it mean to businesses and individuals. It is not only my technical perspective that they value, but additionally the non-technical one.

From my perspective, technology has created some radical changes across a variety of industries affecting numerous businesses and individuals. The challenge is pretty simple: how to recognize what is needed out of a sea of change. Firstly many professionals amazingly still see that many of the changes are simply not that many nor necessarily that much of a change agent. This typically means that these individuals will have a lot of learning to catch up on and a lot to digest resulting in a natural selection/de-selection of what is important or not. Often times I point to the mobile industry disruption that Apple caused resulting in the rise of Apple iPhone, Google Android and Microsoft WP7 and the decline of Nokia and RIM. Simply ignoring what is up-and-coming and not really taking careful consideration of why things rise and more importantly who would be the target customer has been demonstrated to be tremendously dangerous for existing market leaders and professionals no matter how long they have been there, how experienced they may be, or how much subject matter expertise they have.

From a high level viewpoint there are several technology trends that have significant impacts both to businesses and individual professionals:

Technology	Meaning to Business	Meaning to Professional
Mobile	Appeals to customers in a different manner; fast, mobile, effective, efficient.	Looking at customers differently and learning techniques to address them effectively.
Social	Word-of-mouth counts more so than ever now. Need to be able to tap into it.	Highly dynamic and fluid. Requires engagement and voluntary participation.
Big Data	Lots of key learning and competitive advantage in data.	How to understand the difference between big data and traditional data.
Cloud	A different way to react quickly to changing business needs.	How to make a complex process, simple, effective and fast.

For businesses the changes mean looking at customers differently, understanding that speed to market which has always been a great challenge is even more important, but also that quality and price matter. If one looks at Apple for example, they have sold a lot of iPhones and continue to sell a lot of really good products at a higher price than competitors. However their customers love the company and are willing to spend their hard earned dollars on what they see as a great value. Many companies definitely want a similar level of passion with their customers though often times are not able to achieve it.

However for every business that wants to tackle the challenge there are the individuals that need to carry it out. This is where many times professionals find themselves at a disadvantage in that they themselves are not necessarily familar with the changes which makes it difficult to execute. For example many technical professionals I speak with are not very familiar with how mobile platforms differ from their back-end counterparts in terms of developing solutions, managing them, and the like. Similarly even in well defined and well known approaches such as Amazon Web Services are not understood to a point where most IT shops could deploy similar services within their own organization even with outside vendor or Open Source products.

Often times being able to take even simple steps towards incorporating these trends into existing solutions is a prime example of the how contentious the viewpoints are within organizations. A blend of ill will from prior IT/Business conflicts, lack of knowledge, and plain old stubbornness often times bogs down initiatives unnecessarily resulting in negative impacts to a business in the forms of missed opportunities and even talent loss to competitors.

While it is true that there are indeed many different changes that continue to emerge at a rapid pace that both businesses and individuals have to deal with, the reality is that if observed with a calm, cool and determined mindset, these can be sorted out into workable and beneficial solutions.

Adapt or Die - Keeping Skills Up to Date

2011-12-16T19:12:00Z

Most business professionals realize that it is absolutely necessary to keep abreast of their industry and keep their skills up to date to remain relevant. For technical professionals this is also very true and very challenging. Many of my colleagues are amazed at how up-to-date I am on my technical and business skill set and often ask how I manage to keep them so topical. The answer is simple: adapt or die.

At first glance this statement seems a bit dire but it does tend to simply capture the essence of what anyone who loves what they do. If you are passionate about what you are doing, then no matter what you find a way to keep yourself motivated to do better. That means doing more, learning more, and making what you do more valuable and enjoyable.

So that may be a great say mental motivator but what about the nuts and bolts? Basically that is nothing more than plain old hard work. For many technical professionals that I coach, I often ask what they would like to know more about and then go about working out a plan of action for them so that they can improve.

In one case someone wanted to know a little bit more about cloud services and the difference between relational and non-relational data stores. They had been trying their own form of learning and research yet wanted a bit more to help them cement what they had gained. Since the individual was still fairly hands-on, we worked out a plan for them to create a simple "To Do List". Yet rather than building it on relational technology, I thought it would be better for them to sign up for the free Amazon Web Service tier and work with the S3 service instead. S3 was a great way to get them to see how a non-relational data store could be used and at the same time give them some practical exposure to using cloud services to solve a faily simple problem. Within a couple of weeks they had not only solved their smaller problem but they also began to work on larger problems with different services. In a matter of a few months the individual had not only improved in their overall understanding, but had gained the attention of their manager at work which resulted in being involved in a more strategic and valuable project at work.

Simply being aware of a concept is not always enough for people to cement an idea into a key learning. Often times practical application helps reinforce the concept so that the individual can carry it forward in their career.

Many times keeping skills up to date is very difficult yet I find with enough effort, dedication, perseverance and planning keeping skills up to date is fun and engaging!

Cloud - What It Means to Business

2011-12-16T18:27:42Z

A very active topic among the technology professionals and business leaders has been the concept of cloud technologies and what it means overall to the industry. This discussion has been going round-and-round for a number of years now. However there is a much higher level of interest in the concept which I think is great!

Cloud means different things to different people. To the average consumer the first thing they tend to think of is storage, or more specifically the availability of content when it is needed and having a backup in case they need it. This is the general perception of what most consumers see especially with offerings such as Apple iCloud and DropBox. The significant progress made in this area, as small as it may seem, is the growing confidence in consumers that a technology is understandable to them in an non-techie manner and is useful in the same sense. What Apple has done is make people more comfortable with using cloud-based solutions with regards to something that they hold near and dear which is content that they value, i.e. paid content. This is a bit different than say DropBox which is a very cool service in my opinion, hardly gets a lot of notice from the average consumer. Interestingly a similar view is shared among most business users as well: they have heard/know of/understand iCloud but have different perceptions of other cloud offerings such as DropBox. Apple has created a manner that allows users to see some relevant benefit from cloud technologies that makes sense to them. Amazon's Kindle Fire is also leveraging their robust cloud offerings in their device once again in a manner that makes sense to their customers. As more and more vendors deliver solutions to customers using cloud that make sense to them there will be a greater general understanding of what cloud can do for the average person.

For businesses and professionals cloud technologies offer quite a lot of options in addressing common challenges. For entrepreneurs or similarly highly motivated individuals cloud offerings like those from Amazon are tremendously useful for advancing their own understanding of cloud technology. In many cases cloud offerings allow entrepreneurial companies to be formed with minimal investment in infrastructure while gaining significant advantages with regards to availability and growth. For developers coming to understand and work with cloud, programs such as Amazon Web Services - Free Tier allows professionals to explore what these offerings mean and how to work with them again with minimal investments other than time.

Amazon is arguably the standard of cloud providers though by no means are they the only ones. Cloud providers come in a variety of flavors such as Heroku, SalesForce, Rackspace, etc. All of these vendors offer external services that can help businesses address challenges and develop new offerings in a much faster and scalable manner than would be typically found in most companies.

Most technology groups within an organization see cloud technologies as a way to "save money". In truth cloud technologies are not necessarily going to result in immediate cost savings. The benefit of cloud technologies is mostly in how the model especially around self-service can help propel a business forward with solutions in a cost-efficient, rapid manner. A classic case in most companies is probably Salesforce. Many sales and marketing departments need and want solutions to address many of their critical needs. However when they speak with their own internal technical departments more often than not their needs are not addressed adequately by their own IT staff. Hence using their own budgets they often sign-up for Salesforce, create what they need, use it, and end up never having to "bother with the ineffective IT department" ever again.

While it has been argued, repeatedly in fact, that such initiatives are "against company policy", etc. the brutal reality is that business units are finding that their own IT groups are a) not delivering things fast enough, b) not listening to them as a customer, and c) have incompatible expectations in terms of timelines and costs. As more and more cloud-based solutions appear, especially in the area of Software-as-a-Service or SaaS, more and more business units will forego locking horns with internal resources and instead move to adopt these other offerings.

For internal groups the message is pretty clear: adapt or die. If internal groups want to remain relevant they are going to have to learn, understand, embrace, and deploy a service model very similar to cloud companies for their own internal groups. The key challenge will be in delivering a business service as opposed to an operational service to customers. For example, most customers do not want to see services in terms of gigabytes of storage, number of CPUs, etc. They want to see things in terms that they understand such as "it will cost my department $2000 a month to get 5 analytics widgets and 20 reports". They also want to see timelines that they understand. To business users ordering something should take only minutes to hours, not weeks, not months, not years. After all how would you feel if you had to wait 30-days to get online access to your account from your bank?

The ability to move quickly in a cost-effective manner to businesses is absolutely essential. It allows a business to react to changing market conditions, capitalize on new opportunities, make better decisions, etc. The more that IT departments are seen as impediments to these imperatives, the more unnecessary and cost-inefficient they become and in effect IT becomes a cost center to most businesses as opposed to a profit center. When a unit is a cost center, it gets cut and criticized which is not the most attractive place to be.

In addition to business perceptions the reality is that most internal groups who are expected to be the experts of these rapidly changing technologies are often times quite ignorant in relevant subject matter. Most IT professionals that I have had contact with are far more familiar with legacy approaches than cloud. They do not necessarily understand the approach or concepts, let alone how to implement it within their organization. While vendors begin to offer internal cloud-building solutions, the fundamental gap in understanding is going to take a while longer for most professionals to come to grips with which will slow the pace of IT adoption of cloud, though not necessarily business adoption of cloud.

Developments at Yahoo! - A Personal Perspective

2011-09-07T15:13:31Z

With the recent developments at Yahoo! involving the departure of their CEO and the rumor of their intent to sell themselves, there are lots of discussions among the general technical professionals. These are not "insiders" nor "brainiacs" but rather what I call the general technology population that would typically include managers, directors, senior engineers, architects, and the occasional CEO/CIO/CTO in the mix.

Our conversations touch the history of the company, it's hey-day, it's decline and current status. From my perspective Yahoo! is yet another example of a company that continues to face a rapidly changing competitive landscape and has been challenged in exactly how to adapt.

Yahoo! had been on top of the world in terms of the key landing site for most people. It had content, it had people's interest, and consequently it had a huge presence. Then Google came along, and suddenly Yahoo! found itself slowly but inexorably losing ground to this competitor. A slick, simple, easy-to-use interface, with snappy response times and pretty darned good results offered appealed to many folks. In the technical world, Google swamped the internet with whitepapers, blogs and other infobits on their cool technology, their approaches and ideas. They engaged in a communication campaign that reached out to the imagination of techies while their product engaged the consumer.

In my opinion, Google fundamentally challenged the idea of curated content versus automated search. It seemed to be a fight and mindshift that Google had won given their growing market dominance over Yahoo!. Yet I kept with the belief that people fundamentally wanted contact with other humans in many ways even in internet content. This in spite of the growing influence and success of the Google approach.

However, another recent company came back to challenge Google's position with a different form of curation, one based on social interactions, that company was called Facebook. Within a few short years, this young talented upstart had not only grown a dedicated following, but a following that had displaced Google as the top interent landing spot for most people. Also with Facebook being less "open", they now could use their insights in a manner similar to Google's main line of business - advertising.

So what about Yahoo!? It seemed to me that with the emergence and growth of Facebook among other social networks such as Twitter, that Yahoo! has a really good chance of coming back to being a significant competitor. After all they had made such wonderful calls with products such as Flickr which really appealed to everyone, and seemed to be a heavy influence to companies such as Instagr.am. Yet Yahoo! still struggled to find a formula that would worked for them.

The recent appoint of Carol Bartz seemed hopeful to many technical professionals. That is until we all started to see layoffs, product cuts, etc. While generally acceptable in terms of cost cutting, it seemed to me that such moves were affecting the fundamentals of what Yahoo! was about... an innovative technology company bringing cool curated content to the people. With the rise of Facebook and Twitter among others, it seemed that a strategy to incorporate some form of social interaction on their content, perhaps similar to Flickr, could become a new core to Yahoo!'s content and hence increase their growth and ad revenue.

Yet to me some lessons from the Yahoo! life cycle can be applied to any technical professional or leader:

Adapt or die. This is a standard business practice. A company or individual is challenged all the time with changes that affect their livelihood especially in the high-tech field. Coming up with an approach that recognizes change and processes to adapt to it are absolutely crucial.
Cost-cutting can be dangerous. At some point, everyone worries about their budget. And invariably that means cuts. However be tremendously aware of what are "good" vs. "bad" cuts. Most leaders that I have seen have tremendously underestimated how cuts can affect the personality, demeanor, and tempo of a company. Not just internally but externally. These cuts can be seen in a positive or negative light. More thought needs to be given about the real impacts of cuts, and not just the financial ones.
Keep in tune with your customers. This also seems pretty basic but most professionals and organizations only do this in what I call a "arms-length" approach. Very rarely are customer concerns and feedback actually used in anything more than just short-term analysis. Toyota for example has a very long-reaching and deeply infused sense of customers from the president all the way down to the individual team member. They have managed to keep this going even as they have become a huge global company. Customers are what keeps a company going. All too often I see companies and individuals using customers as convenient tools and setting them aside most of the time. This can be fatal especially as competitors rise in your business space and your customers start to go to them instead of you.

So as the latest chapter in Yahoo! unfolds it remains to be seen what this silicon valley icon will do. If anything, it is entirely possible that the company can indeed turn itself around in a fashion similar to Apple. And equally possible, it can fade into the sunset like so many companies have done. Regardless of what happens to Yahoo! it will be remembered and the lessons from it's life will be absorbed into the collective consciousness of the those who will live on.

Hue - Visual Desktop for Hadoop

2011-09-02T22:46:47Z

In Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop, questions about what the optional components can do is not always clear. This is in spite of the abundant documentation on their site. One of the components I appreciate the most is Hue and Beeswax. This is due to the fact that while I am quite comfortable with the command line, many of my fellow professionals are not.

The basic hive command line is not unlike the MySQL or Oracle command lines...

Hive Command LineHowever there are times that the command line is not desirable. Especially for many business analysts and the like.

For this Hue is an excellent component. Please note that the exact URL is typically changed per environment.

Hue LogonAs with most applications that business professionals are familiar with, it prompts the user for their credentials in the form of a username and password. Once those have been provided and the user authorization granted, the Hue desktop is then presented...

Hue DesktopAt the bottom of the toolbar the icons for the various utilities such as the FileBrowser, Help, etc. are all presented.

The Hue-based interface is far more friendlier to most business users as can be seen in the next few screenshots of the File Browser functionality...

Hue FileBrowserHue FileBrowser Content PreviewThe Hive interface is similarly more appealing to those that find the command line a bit challenging. While the output is the same as the command line, the results and actions are more friendlier to most non-technical professionals. Here for example is the Show Tables directive...

Hue Hive InterfaceOnce a user sees the table they are allowed to see they can browse the contents of the selected table as seen below...

Hue Hive Browse Table

In addition to seeing the contents, a user will also be able to see the "structure" of a Hive construct...

Hue Hive ColumnsWhile Hive looks similar to many relational databases, it is in fact NOT a relational database. Unstructured data is in fact just as happy in Hive as structured data as the example below illustrates...

Hue Hive Unstructured DataIn this particular sample of data, it is an older log file of a PeopleSoft application server. While it conforms to the log structure for Oracle PeopleSoft it is by no means "structured" below a simple line for a log entry. This need not be the case, but it serves for purposes of illustration.

Once the data is identified in Hive, SQL-like commands can be issued in the Hue environment...

Hive command in HueThe command will then be executed on the cluster with the results to be shown to the user starting with the results of the actual query...

Hive Results in Hue

Additionally logs about the execution can be accessed via the appropriate tab from the result pane...

Logs in HueThere are a lot of other capabilities in Hue not just for Hive but for other Hadoop functions as well such as designing Hadoop jobs. This will of course vary based on the environment and privileges allowed to each user.

The Hue interface has come a long way. Being bundled in the Cloudera distribution makes it easier for environments using Hadoop and Hive for big data analytics to become more comfortable with the technology.