Bradley Howard's Blog

Away on Thursday and Friday

May 19, 2011 at 9:00am

This Thursday and Friday I’m in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, with all the Account Managers and sales people from Endava for a Customer Facing Unit conference. We’ll discuss the latest trends and industry observations, best practices (internally & externally), all with the aim of collaboration between clients, and how to help them in their businesses.

It’s interesting that these conferences are almost always held in Eastern Europe. There are several reasons why – the cost including flights is the same as using a London hotel; getting out of the office usually helps creative thinking; and connecting our global offices where we do most of our ‘delivery’ can only be a good thing.

The key points for this conference from my point of view are as follows:

The future of System Integrators (aka “IT services” in 21^st century language) are to add value. The future is to provide domain expertise and help propel our clients forward. Not just answering our clients' current needs but helping them with their future roadmap.
Our clients need to collaborate with one another. They have something in common – Endava, and most can work in conjunction with each other rather than compete. This might be working practices. It might be efficiencies learned through one client and able to be transferred to another.
Working with product vendors more, mainly because product vendors [unsuccessfully] try to fit their products into an organisation (and often through the wrong route) rather than understanding a client’s requirements and then seeing if their product will help.

tags:

Endava, IT, Romania, business, future, insight, trends,

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Are accountants being replaced by IT professionals?

May 12, 2011 at 5:13pm

Facebook20is20made20for20accountants20and20not20online20marketing1

Fifteen years ago the professionals who worked across an entire organisation were the accountants. My best man trained as an accountant, and I thought his university course was excellent - it taught all aspects of business, so that he would understand each function of an organisation from manufacturing to HR to marketing to IT to sales.

In the last five years, it's now the IT professionals who work across the organisation. IT are invited into all aspects of the organisation. A new manufacturing plant needs to be kitted out with technology. The HR department want a new HR system. Sales need a new CRM system. A new marketing campaign will probably involve a website, and even if IT doesn't produce the website, IT will still have a decision role in the choice of Content Management System or agency. IT will probably have a role in recommending specific social media.

IT have become very good at understanding the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of doing something within an organisation.

Producing a Facebook Page doesn't cost anything. Someone in IT is going to ask who will look after it, who will answer the comments, who will keep the content fresh, what will the complaints process be. Suddenly the Facebook Page isn't free, it requires a couple of people to spend a couple of hours a day on Facebook.

This is because IT has become more mature in project management and understanding that Total Cost of Ownership. Ten years ago, IT got burnt buying software and then realising training cost more. And more powerful servers were required. And maintenance cost a lot more. So IT departments realised that to do something required calculating the Total Cost of Ownership.

Universities need to catch up quickly - they need to train IT professionals about the rest of the organisation and to learn to speak their language. Accountants have historically been good at this communication, and IT have been awful. IT love buzzwords and jargon. The rest of the organisation dislikes it. IT love to deep dive into detail. The rest of the organisation is bored by it.

I'd like to thank Ilan for inspiring this post a few weeks ago, and for a gentleman at Internet World yesterday for reviving the thoughts.

tags:

CRM, Facebook, IT, business, marketing, project management, sales, trends, web traffic,

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Avoiding the data cowboys

Feb 24, 2011 at 5:37pm

In December 2010, I started looking for a software utility to back up my data on my home PC to my FTP server that I use for some personal websites.

The inevitable happened – I turned on my PC one day and the computer wouldn’t boot. I tried a number of different utilities and rescue remedies over the following days, but after a while the BIOS in the PC didn’t even recognise the drive. I bought an external hard disk caddy, plugged it into my laptop and only half the time my laptop could see the drive but no data. When it did recognise the drive, it would lose it after a few minutes.

I quickly asked some friends on Facebook for data utility recommendations.

Someone recommended a utility from SysTweak. I downloaded the trial – it showed me the contents of my disk! I recovered a few files, which worked. I quickly paid for the full version.

To recover the whole drive I had to do a hard disk scan. But everytime I started a scan it wouldn’t complete because the drive ‘disappeared’. It was really frustrating and time consuming.

I came into work one day and asked the super-techie-support chappies what to do. They recommended a data recovery company. However data recovery companies are the modern version of builders - most people wouldn’t recommend a company they’d used before! Apparently these companies all offer really low prices, but once you send your drive to them, they open it and then you receive the infamous “Oooooo, it’s worse than you described”, and then you’re led into further gotchas and costs.

You want recovery media – how else are you supposed to get hundreds of Gb back? You'd get charged full RRP for an external drive from these cowboys.

I was pretty despondent by this time, however the manager found me and recommended one company he’d used for a similar personal situation to mine – Datatrack Labs. I contacted the company and took a really cautious approach.

In the end, I managed to get the data recovered for around £350. It was considerably more than their website’s “starting from” cost, but they were open to negotiation because I was an individual rather than a business and I wasn't in a hurry. I got all my data back on an external drive in a few weeks.

I’d highly recommend using Datatrack, in an industry which doesn’t get a lot of recommendations because of the cowboys out there. Actually, I’d recommend you back up your data more often.

Photo courtesy of Remi on Flickr (- it's not a picture of my hard drive!)

tags:

IT, application review, site review,

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Technology dependency

Sep 13, 2010 at 10:26pm

On Sunday we had a couple of friends round to the house in the afternoon and as usual we got on to the subject of work. One of the friends is an IT Director at a huge global law firm, and the other is the Logistics Manager for a company that sells paper and other printer consumables.

We got on to the subject of technology and the friend from the law firm said that he has an IT department of 500 people. Those 500 people support 2,000 'fee earners'. I remarked that 1 IT person for 4 fee earners seemed a high ratio for a law firm.

He said that his company relies so much on technology, that the firm can quote that for every second of downtime, it costs the company £x. Fee earners need to be able to access their live systems 24x7. Any outage or delay costs the company money.

In the last two years, the firm has not experienced any downtime, and that is in part to the right IT people, and the right number. He repeatedly said that his company relies to the point that it is dependent on it, and the people to keep the systems optimised.

Our other friend with the paper business said that if the law firm sounds reliant on technology, his one is totally dependent on it.

Almost 100% of his orders come from their Internet website. The 'almost' is because some orders come in via phone, because some customers want to speak to a sales person about their order - however they would only be able to find the phone number from the website!

After some thought, he found it fascinating when he stepped back to think about the basic details: the website is hosted on a set of servers that no one from the paper company has ever seen, or has any desire to look at - in a country that, well... they don't actually know (or care) which countries the servers are in!

On the theme of friends, our best man lives in Holland and works for Elsevier, the publishing company. Elsevier is 430 years old. Try to think of any other company more than 200 years old without looking at Google or Wikipedia...

Image courtesy of Dave Rutt.

tags:

IT, business, ecommerce, technology,

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Shouting at the clouds

Aug 31, 2010 at 2:28pm

As a Digital Media agency, we are regularly being asked our view on whether we use cloud services from Google Analytics to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure full hosting.

My answer at this point in time is really simple we don't use them because if these services go wrong, we (and our customers) have no one to pick up the phone and shout at.

For example, we generally use Omniture (Adobe) for site analytics rather than Google Analytics. I know the name and mobile phone number of our Omniture account manager. I guess that just knowing who to contact gives a level of reassurance.

One of our partners uses one of the large cloud services for it’s main business operations. It makes sense to them – they need to simulate hundreds of computers during tests, for short periods of time. Trying to do that from a standard Internet connection in the office is fraught with problems, and it’s easier and cheaper to rely on the cloud’s infrastructure. Except recently they have been experiencing problem after problem in that cloud’s environment, and their entire business is dependent on that specific cloud provider.

When you experience an outage on Azure or Amazon, who can you call? How can you offer an SLA to end clients when you can’t contact your infrastructure provider?

There are companies who have invested in setting up their own ‘cloud’ environments (we are one of them), with proven support systems in place, and the real USP… a manned 24x7 helpdesk complete with an Account Manager.

tags:

Amazon, Endava, IT, Microsoft, analytics, business, cloud, digital media,

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Change: the enemy of stability, sometimes

Aug 10, 2010 at 11:39am

I'm a great fan of change at work.

Sometimes I like change for the necessity of just changing something. As a small example, at work I recommend people keep moving desks a couple of times a year, to sit next to different people (for many reasons - spread knowledge, establish a good, deeper relationship with different people, get a different perspective, and so on).

The one element of change at work that I don't like is system changes. When I speak to friends outside of work, they are amazed at why organisations need such large IT organisations, or even why a website needs so many technical resources.

Changing a system always brings a level of risk. Always. No matter how much everyone thinks "nothing can go wrong" - and yes, I hear this from experienced people as much as junior people - it can always come back and bite.

Unfortunately, the only way that you can assess risks of change appropriately is to be burnt (aka "get it wrong"). And after being burnt, its important to act almost scared of it happening again.

Several years ago we made a small modification to a website on a Friday afternoon. You can tell what happened next - there was a problem, and we all ended up working late into the weekend. Since then, we have a blanket rule of no live rollouts after Friday lunchtime.

I spoke to a senior manager at Endava about this recently, and he said that whenever his Managed Services division engage with a new client having stability issues, the first thing they improve or implement if it doesn't already exist is a full Change Request procedure. This immediately requires people to stop fire fighting and think about any changes. And it always reaps rapid improvements.

Another example is that retail banks have a code freeze during the last quarter of the year, to prevent anything impacting Xmas sales. On some of our sports websites at work, Xmas can be the busiest period (e.g. football). However we insist on a system wide freeze well before the Xmas period, and this creates the highest level of stability of the year. Let me repeat - the busiest time of the year in the most stable!

People adapt to change well. Even if it requires some help during the initial change 'shock'. However systems rarely respond to change well.

tags:

Endava, IT, banking, change, management training, software development, sport, website production,

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Tags

Away on Thursday and Friday

Are accountants being replaced by IT professionals?

Avoiding the data cowboys

Technology dependency

Shouting at the clouds

Change: the enemy of stability, sometimes

Bradley Howard

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