A little later, I really expected the Palm Pre to be the nirvana of compact, hyper-connected mobile devices. It wasn’t pretentious. It had a f%$#!%& keyboard. It was ahead of the curve in a number of features. But it wasn’t substantially different. Palm made the concious decision to keep the interface very similar to the old Palm OS, and let’s face it – user interfaces have evolved since then. But I got one. I like it. It’s a nice toy. If you want a compact, full-features smart phone, it’s still your best bet.

Motorola unveiled the Sholes over the summer. Beefy processor. Best-of-breed screen. Ridiculous connectivity solutions. A f%$#!%& keyboard. And CDMA (like the pre) so I don’t have to use the Ancient Telegram & Trash network. 5MP camera w/ LED flash. Ran Android (1.6 at the time). Super cool. At that point, they were still shopping for a vendor. I was cautiously optimistic it wouldn’t be a metro-only network like T-Mobile or Sprint.

Then came the onslaught of Droid Does during the baseball post-season. Speculation ran wild as to which phone it was, beneath the hype. BGR scooped it and pointed it out as a Sholes running Android 2.0. Thursday last I received mine.

Metal. Everywhere.

Ridiculously clear screen with outstanding pixel density.

Incredibly fast processor.

A f%$#!%& keyboard.

Seamless integration with all of the stuff I use (e-mail, calendar, contacts, etc. etc.).

Transparent movement between WIFI and the Verizon 3G network.

Incredibly fast processor.

Deep interface built atop a fully-accessible Linux system.

Scads of customizability.

Surprisingly good camera with shockingly bright flash.

Oh, and an incredibly fast processor.

If the pricetag is $100 too high for you, Verizon is also offering an HTC-based version called the Eris with no keyboard, more plastic, and a mid-level processor, with the same interface and general feature-set.

Oh yeah, and when you send e-mail, it’s not tagged “Sent from my <BlackBerry|iPhone|Other Pretentious Device>”.

But, since most people seem to enjoy those things: This post authored using a WordPress app from my Droid.

I certainly empathize with your password management situation. Passwords are, actually, horrible security mechanisms and it is my opinion that they should be done away with altogether. Problem solved: No passwords means no password management headaches.

So, how to do prove you’re who you are? How do your systems trust who you say you are? A token. A “key”. A physical and logical item possessed by the user. Something they can lose or get stolen or drop in their coffee mug, but doesn’t matter because it’s useless without them leashed to it- and can be reproduced by authorized personnel in a jiffy.

The security industry likes calling it “two-factor authentication”: The two factors being something you have (the token) and something you know (the sentence uttered by your first girlfriend when she dumped you, song lyrics, the title of a book … whatever). Behind the scenes we shift from password management (gross and abhorrent) to key management (fun and exciting!)

Encrypted-key security is the only managed authentication scheme I have rolled out in client environments for the last 7…8 years. It can be “difficult” to wrench into an existing infrastructure, changing the culture, disrupting the status quo- but technologically is a vastly superior solution to identity management.

The defacto standard is PGP [1], although there are a lot of players in this market with varying quality of products, some aiming at various vertical markets. The link below gives a nice picture of how various systemic pieces tie together.

I know I didn’t answer your question- people tell me that a lot- but I can’t in good faith recommend password management. I haven’t been able to since 1999 or so, and certainly can’t as 2009 winds down. Sure, there are things you can do – the DoD uses the Mandylion [2], which you can buy on ThinkGeek [3] for $50 – but it doesn’t solve the actual problem of secure identity management: Please pardon the crudeness, but it’s like putting whipped-cream on dogshit.

[1] http://www.pgp.com/products/index.html
[2] http://www.mandylionlabs.com/
[3] http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/security/91a2/

If you apply for jobs being vetted by morally superior -word removed- who pine for the “old days” of hunting witches in Salem , probably yes.

If not, then no. As someone who has done a lot of consulting for various gambling-related businesses, I can tell you that any software development company should prize former casino/gambling-related coders (that leave on good terms). It takes a lot of pedantic coding, edge-case handling, and vociferous documentation to make that industry run “right”, and those skills are hard to bake into someone.

I can’t speak to other countries, but in the US there are very few jobs that will – in and of themselves – cause you to get passed over for prospective employment. Except maybe working for the Revenue Service. We really don’t like them.

Over the next five years, gross storage needs will double every other year, sparked by industry trends that avoid deleting anything, ever; continued bloat in software programs; increased user demand for larger-file storage; increased user demand for indefinite storage; increased user, corporate, and industry expectation of system-side backups and frequent snapshots; and the enabling factor of meteoric-disk-size -to- paltry-disk-cost ratios.

Since the late 1990s, we have seen rapid acceleration of infinite data life. While storage vendors will use terms such as “information life-cycle management”, “information archiving” or “data warehousing” – they all converge onto the premise that corporate data life is no longer finite. The value of this is dubious, but irrelevant to argue: financial workers expect to be able to look at historical data for modelling purposes; draft and product workers expect to be able to look at long-dead projects that might now be of value with new knowledge; in the throes of bankruptcy, competent managers (and lawyers) will want to mine the archives for something… anything that may provide some value. Everything your organization has ever known is expected to be retained, indefinitely.

The average 10-page MS Word document in 1995 was 13K in size. The average 10-page MS Word document in 2006 is 1.4MB. While that size may still seem small, it’s indicative of a growing trend of software generating vastly wasteful content because they can. Software vendors don’t need to worry about their data fitting onto floppies anymore, so they don’t. Multiply this across dozens of applications, add in media, and you have truly huge data files with only a few pages of actual content.

Similarly, the users want ever-larger files. Gone are the days of compressing graphics, video and audio to the Nth degree: users want full-quality content. They don’t want a 120×120 “thumbnail” video, they want something that takes some real-estate on their oversized monitor. As bandwidth increases, so will the user-desire for better content faster. They then want to save that same content to their network volume. They want it backed up in case of catastrophe (or their own error). What was a 3MB MP3 file is now a 45MB FLAC or WAV file sitting in your database.

The increase in user-end space (desktop harddisks) has led users to demand not only more and more space from their storage providers, but also indefinite storage. Users no longer have to selectively delete their e-mails to stay in a predefined space, so they keep them all, forever. They expect the same from the rest of their digital attics: they expect every bad poem, doodle, patent-idea-on-a-napkin, picture of their grandkids, etc. to be immediately available, forever.

Forever. Even if your disks die. Even if they accidentally delete them. Even if a meteor pummels your datacenter. The old standard of weekly backups have long passed the borders of Being Prudent, travelled through the Fields of Marginally Acceptable, and have entered the Mountains of Irreparable Harm to Your Reputation. Users, customers, regulators, etc. are barely tolerant of losing a day of data, and this will get worse. In the next half-decade a truly monumental shift into multi-media backups, near-real-time data snapshots, and 100% protection of data assets will be fully realized, requiring several multiples more mixed-media backup storage than live data storage.

On the up-side, disk sizes are sky-rocketing, costs are plummeting and the reliability of the new serial ATA (SATA) architected drives have come up to a level that allows anyone to build in or expand networked disk with a trivial investment. A new generation of storage vendors are coming up and challenging the old way of thinking about networked storage, and adopting technologies with more agility than their behemoth competitors. We’re quickly on our way to 1TB disk drives, flash-based storage continues to be refined and is nearing enterprise-grade, holographic storage is being commercially realized for some applications, and all of these technologies are driving the cost per megabyte down.

… writes to wonder if the glory has gone out of IT… Has a more pervasive technical culture forced our IT gurus into obsolescence?

This question is unfortunately very loaded, but I’m going to step into the minefield: The only segment of IT impacted negatively by this evolution are user support staff. The image of the Helpdesk technician riding the Silver Steed of Only I Can Solve Your Problem and being lavished with riches, lovers, and their own parking spaces went the way of the dodo a long time ago… Probably about the time Yahoo! hit their stride.

In truth, the more pervasive an adept “the users” are to technology, the more “IT gurus” are needed. What has changed, is where the bar to be a “guru” is set. It used to be that anyone who could add RAM to their own computer was labelled a guru by neophytes. As IT has evolved, it has joined the ranks of other venerable classes in that your proficiency (or guru-ness) can only be measured by qualified peers. Thus impressing the luddite by showing them how they can just hit Ctrl-B to make things bold, and having them fawn all over you doesn’t count.

But it does. User support has been increasingly marginalized as the user bar has gone up, but it is still exceptionally important, and will remain so for quite some time. Ineffective user support leads to all sorts of problems within an organization, and excellent user support enables the entire organization to evolve and move forward without tripping on the little things.

The advice I give to people who have become sullen about their profession is the same that I give to everyone: Evolve your skills. If you’re surprised that the same skills you had 15…10…5 years ago aren’t getting you the love today, tough. Unless you’re a philosopher, theologian, or geologist, your skills need to evolve. You’ve chosen a profession that isn’t static: you’re not pondering the past in IT, you’re supporting the future.

Over the next five years, datacenter bandwidth will level off for a bit. With the 10GigE standard behind us we can finally pull our backbones up to a level where they’ll be able to breathe easier for a while. Storage speeds are still being gated by the storage devices themselves, and until either solid-state media becomes cost effective or disks rotate twice as fast as they are now, that isn’t going to change much. Aggregating virtual systems is actually causing an interesting bandwidth phenomena that I’ll address later. Regardless, a 10Gig, or Nx1Gig backbone should be able to breathe well for the next half-decade. Planned year-over-year demand increases of 5-7% should be expected.

Desktop network speeds have been about the same for the last five years, and will largely remain unchanged. A 32-bit computer system running a commercial desktop operating systems has too many architectural limitations, still, to be make use of more than 60-85Mb/s of bandwidth. While some vendors are running 64bit processors, they generally are using bus architectures that aren’t that wide, thus gating peripheral speeds back to 32bit. In the next five years that will clean up a bit, and 64bit “extensions” to the 32bit processors will become more common place, but still not impacting the network noticeably due largely to OS and bus architectural issues.

Environments consolidating onto virtualized systems are seeing an interesting gross decrease in datacenter network bandwidth use. Not surprisingly, they’re also seeing peak utilization well above what they had prior to consolidation. The latter is easily explained by virtualized systems generally “netbooting” their OS from the storage network or a bootserver, and now more than ever embracing networked storage completely. The gross decrease has been unexpected because of the higher demands on the network, but is explained by architectural constraints. We’re now seeing 10-15 virtual servers sharing one or two network connections, where previously each had one or two of their own. This has somewhat of a levelling effect on network use, but isn’t dramatically impacting service performance as one would expect. The network is more important in these environments, but as a whole not as taxed.

It was largely believed that mobile “broadband” availability and use would be much higher by now, but we have yet to see a real platform for use. The Palm Treo series is getting an overhaul “soon” and rumored platforms by Google and Apple may change that landscape. In general, even if fully realized, the network demands by these users will largely have no impact on the greater network, or on datacenter network needs. The next-generation, “4G”, will be changing that, but I don’t expect to see that kind of horsepower in a phone until late-2010-to-2012: the processors are still just too slow.

What will change dramatically will be the bandwidth access for remote users. While not directly impacting the datacenter we’re going to see dramatic growth in the cable/DSL/satellite “broadband” space. Internet-facing applications may see a 20-30% rise in client demands as users become less tolerant of waiting for application loads due to their expectations of “faster” service, on the order of 200-250% more bandwidth. It is expected that OSP asymmetrical provisioning will continue.

The hosted systems industry has turned another critical point. Several years ago we eschewed large mainframe systems in exchange for commodity servers that could divide load and work together to provide services without single-vendor lock-in and without a single piece of “iron” waiting to fail. The computing power of a $2,000,000 mainframe was dwarfed by the implementation of $80,000 in commodity hardware. With virtualization coming-of-age- with Intel and AMD putting hooks into their processors and chipsets to allow virtualization to be fully realized and not just a software-only hack- we’ve seen those same commodity systems hosting dozens of virtual systems reliably and at near-metal efficiency. The cost per virtual system is a number rapidly approaching zero.

New offerings from Sun, IBM and HP/Compaq are emphasizing something that “the server guys” haven’t needed to care much about: infrastructure. Historically, your network engineers and analysts worried about interconnection, route redundancy, and ensuring the bits could flow where they needed, reliably and sufficiently; and your system engineers worried about everything up to the point the bits hit “the network”. Moving forward, that is almost a debilitating dichotomy. Traditionally, in the post-mainframe era, a physical system did one or two things and its exclusion from the network or its under-performance on the network was a minor issue. With a physical system possibly hosting dozens of virtual systems- all with unique networking requirements, cross-talking requirements, and of course: networked storage requirements- your system engineers must be well-versed in network engineering. “The Network Is The Computer” is not just a Sun tag-line, or a lame cliche’. We’re now fully realizing the potency of that statement. Every system offering from the Big Three contains significant “infrastructure” features: Network features.

By pushing more and more network features into server systems- IBM servers with Cisco “swrouters” built-in, for example – the server itself has become more important and less relevant at the same time. Keeping it up and running well will require a new kind of system engineer because “the box” is now more complex: But at the same time, collections of “boxes” should be able to self-heal and adapt to the failures of others. Each system has now become disposable.

A large swath of the architectural literati are already deploying quantities of self-healing farms that take over the work – the very virtual machines – of failed or failing physical systems. Virtualization on its own wasn’t a game-changer. Virtualization with processor support and recognition sparked real potential. Virtualization on top of “infrastructure”-aware (e.g. heavily networked) physical systems has dramatically shifted the value of hybrid “networked systems engineers”, raised the bar for the “server guys” to get up to speed on the real internals of networking, and has provided the unprecedented opportunity to deploy redundantly resilient systems that can in-practice achieve five-to-seven “nines” of reliability.

AMEN

I really want to call attention to some of the finer, most important, high-impact parts of his essay. The focus of this is management, but if you’re in a relationship, or friends with a knowledge worker, you’re generally just as likely to be impacted for all the same reasons as someone in the same IT establishment.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Those whom they do not believe are worthy of their respect might instead be treated to professional courtesy, a friendly demeanor or the acceptance of authority.

My closest friend once warned a newcomer, “if Matt was consistently nice to you, you’d be irrelevant.” This is not a concious thing, but it is very real. Arguments, seemingly unprofessional behaviour, witty banter, are all ways of negotiating decisions and divining truth and logic. No knowledge worker wastes energy or logic on people that aren’t worth the investment. We’ll take bullets for those we respect, but wouldn’t lift a finger for those we don’t. That respect is earned by a confluence of aptitude, attitude, and appreciation. I’ll fall over myself trying to help a bright person who bakes me cookies, or someone who admits they’ve got a problem and is willing to do what it takes to solve it. But bright and ungrateful, or troubled and unwilling to learn – forget it. I’ve got better things to do.

IT pros are [not] antisocial. On the whole, they have plenty to say.

The biggest misconception you can make is that a knowledge worker’s lack of engagement has anything to do with being anti-social. Sure, there are some socially awkward people in any group, in any industry, but they’re not the mass. Again, it has to do with the value of communication. Don’t expect a network architect to ramble on about dulcimer trees and virtually redundant paths to your HR director- They can assess, instantly, the subject-matter competency of their audience and will prefer to say nothing and hover by the punch bowl over engaging people who won’t understand anything they have to say. This works the other way as well. Knoweldge workers don’t care about accrual systems nor the intricacies of handling the corporate Christmas Fund.

Self-organization

IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.

Look at your IT group:

• Do they hang-out voluntarily outside of work? Knowledge workers don’t generally leisure with anyone they don’t respect.
• Do they invite managers to do things? A manager who is being included by a team has their respect.
• Do they invite managers outside of their chain-of-command to do things? You may have a synergy there you’re not realizing the potential of.
• Who do they eat with? Meal time is leisure time. Geeks don’t eat with people that give them indigestion.

The more synergies you see within the above dynamics, the more likely you have a successful team on your hands. If you observe these groupings happening across group-lines (server guys and network guys… network guys and programmers… helpdesk and programmers, whatever), that’s a pretty good indication you’ve got good geeks, and they’re gelling well . If you notice team members heading for the door the moment work is “over”, never involved with other members, probably they’re being shunned and you’ve got some decisions to make.

Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert

Doctors are a close parallel. The stakes may be higher in medicine, but the work in both fields requires a technical expertise that can’t be faked and a proficiency that can only be measured by qualified peers.

I’ve never met a knowledge worker that cares about degrees or certifications, theirs or others. Your MIS or MBA earns you no credibility. Your A+ or MCSE won’t even get you a second glance. Experience, demonstrable skill, and respect are the only currencies that matter. The worst thing a manager, co-worker, or anyone else can do is try to fake it. Fraud is always a bad decision, generally generates more work, and smacks of irresponsibility- None of those things a knowledge worker will appreciate.

It’s Lupus

While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures.

Would you prefer a nice doctor that cuts off your left leg to cure your broken right thumb? Or someone who barely acknowledges you exist, but seemingly effortlessly diagnoses your rare condition, and sets you on the correct treatment before walking out of the room, never to see you again? If I had a nickel for every time my mother said “no one likes a know-it-all”, I would have retired at 17. Your uber knowledge workers are always right. They are. They have to be. If they weren’t, you wouldn’t keep them around. Why would you? What’s the point in an asshole who’s wrong frequently/all the time? Showing that you have confidence in their decisions, and will back them up in between the time that they say “we should do X” and X is finally proven to be “right” means the world to them, and gains you major credibility. Throwing out illogical arguments, or pedantic edge-cases that are nothing more than theoretical CYA, loses you major credibility.

It’s not about being right for the sake of being right but being right for the sake of saving a lot of time, effort, money and credibility.

Separating the Wheat from the Chafe

If someone has to constantly be taught Computers 101 every time a new problem presents itself, he can’t contribute in the most fundamental way.

Team members that aren’t competent and are unwilling to learn need to be reassigned away from knowledge workers. They’re poisonous, and over time will drag down morale and cause retention problems.

Strong IT groups view correctness as a virtue, and certitude as a delivery method. Meek IT groups, beaten down by inconsistent policies and a lack of structural support, are simply ineffective at driving change and creating efficiencies

As a manager, if you have a group that actively works to maintain the status quo; not changing or evolving with the times; not improving or increasing services – then you have a problem. The problem could be you, or it could be the group, or it could be a bit of both.

Knowledge workers strive to create efficiency and to evolve their own role. Good knowledge workers will seek out new services to offer, or new ways to do old things. Great knowledge workers will continuously automate their “old job” such that every 6…8…15 months their current job looks nothing (relatively) like their old job. If they’re not doing this (re-read Self-organization, too), it’s time to shake things up.

If the problem is you, shore up your support for them. Make a real, sustained effort to get in their corner- to show them you have their back. It’s amazing how quickly a good group can turn around with a little consistent, positive focus. An obtuse group won’t respond at all to TLC.

Some people will still think I spelled chaff wrong.

You’re Paying Money For That?

IT pros are sensitive to logic — that’s what you pay them for. When things don’t add up, they are prone to express their opinions on the matter, and the level of response will be proportional to the absurdity of the event. The more things that occur that make no sense, the more cynical IT pros will become.

Nothing sets a knowledge worker off faster, more viscerally, or with less ability to restrain, than making an illogical or over-valued acquisition. If your team says “we can do that with open source software” or “we could do that in-house”, you need to listen. What they’re really saying is “only an idiot would go and spend money on shit… Money you’re not putting into our salaries”. Knowledge workers want to provide great services. They’re not going to suggest a product that stinks, or won’t meet the needs- it would reflect poorly on their decision-making skills. The more upset they are, the more you need to listen. That nice shiny new pair of shoes with all the bells and whistles will cost you dearly in morale. Dearly.

Pointless administravia like meaningless “evaluations”, paperwork, etc. are similarly likely to receive push-back.

What executives often fail to recognize is that every decision made that impacts IT is a technical decision. Not just some of the decisions, and not just the details of the decision, but every decision, bar none… It can cost an organization literally millions of dollars.

When HR goes out and buys a new HR system that’s “easy to use” and “won’t burden your IT people” and wizzbangwow without consulting IT on several levels, this is a bad thing. Of course, when you bring in your knowledge workers, and they say “this really shouldn’t be purchased”, you need to listen to them. Again, I’ve never met a knowledge worker that gives a care about their own workload: they care about making sound decisions, and helping the organization succeed. HR may be impressed with the marketing glitz surrounding the nice shiny new pair of shoes with all the bells and whistles, but that doesn’t mean the organization should acquire it.

Management Behaving Absurdly

Good IT pros are not anti-bureaucracy, as many observers think. They are anti-stupidity.

Sun-Tzu said (out of order) “Defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win, while victorious warriors win first and then go to war”.

Mat-Thew said “A manager takes a collection of resources and accomplishes work, while a leader fosters accomplishment by inspiring their resources toward work”.

If you feel your knowledge workers have problems with authority or don’t respect you because you’re bureaucratic, you could be right. However, Occam’s Razor tells us that if you see this problem in more of your workers than you don’t, the problem isn’t them… It’s you.

Even marginal knowledge workers acknowledge the need for, and willing to participate in, logical bureaucracy. They want to get paid, so they account for their hours and report them. They want to have a record of work, so they will use ticketing systems. They want the organization to succeed, so they will provide truthful expert knowledge when called upon (a manager would call this a “meeting”), as long as there is logical purpose for the provision.

Arbitrary or micro-management, illogical decisions, inconsistent policies, the creation of unnecessary work.

If you have personnel who need micro-management, they’re not knowledge workers – but smart (ostensibly) people there to collect a paycheck. You’ll also notice through self-organization, that they’ll be on the “outside”. Micro-managing knowledge workers is detrimental, because it steps on self-organization, shows lack of understanding, and most damningly- it causes a knowledge worker to question your motives, and increases the likelihood you’re a credit whore.

Executives expect expert advice from the top IT person, but they have no way of knowing when they aren’t getting it. Therein lies the problem.

As a manager, nothing will create an image problem for you faster than if those over you don’t feel they can get the answers they need from you. If executives are talking directly to your subordinates, you’re getting side-doored, and are becoming irrelevant. Once this hits a critical mass, expect to be relocated or removed altogether. IT managers must have awareness of what’s going on now, what technologies are being used, and where your knowledge workers are leading into tomorrow. If you don’t know those things, or can’t communicate them up the ladder, you’re obsolete.

And make sure all your managers are practicing and learning. It is very easy to slip behind the curve in those positions, but just as with doctors, the only way to be relevant is to practice and maintain an expertise. In IT, six months to a year is all that stands between respect and irrelevance.

I can’t expand much on this. If you’re managing systems people, learn systems- constantly. Programmers? Network analysts? Doesn’t matter- you need to stay current with their world. You do not need their depth of knowledge, but they need you to understand that C is more than the third letter of the alphabet, that linked-lists should never be used outside of a computer science class, that flow control is good but flow constraint is bad, that X is something more than the 24th letter of the alphabet, and you damned-well better know the non-paged memory limit of a 32-bit system architecture.

Who?

IT pros would prefer to make a good decision than to get credit for it.

I was having coffee with a colleague earlier this week (discussing management pitfalls, ironically), when a woman I took classes with many years ago walked up and said “I didn’t know you worked here!” My colleague smiled at her and said “You really just made his day by saying that”. It’s true. Knowledge workers want to be involved in sound decisions, and furthering goals, mostly eschewing credit as long as internal respect orders are maintained. Knowledge workers will chew on their tongues until they bleed to avoid  saying “I told you so” (although it’s always on the tip of their tongue, and do come out, occasionally); they’ll credit “the team” when a spotlight is on them.

If you have people that say “I” instead of “we” frequently, there are two reasons. Either the person is there for just a paycheck, or there is concern that management will take credit for their work. Don’t do that. If you look at self-organization, you should be able to spot where they stand.

Making Management Matter

The primary task of any IT group is to teach people how to work. That’s may sound authoritarian, but it’s not.

Left to their own devices, non-knowledge workers (inside, and outside of IT) will maintain the status quo. They’ll do the minimum necessary to collect their paycheck, and never work any smarter. As a manager, it’s critical that you realize the value of your knowledge workers beyond their cubicle walls. Your top people can raise the bar across the organization, provide strategic visioning, and fundamentally improve (which means “change”, a scary thing) how the organization functions.

Take an interest. IT pros work their butts off for people they respect, so you need to give them every reason to afford you some.

As said previously, knowledge workers will take bullets for those they respect. Once you’ve earned it stay engaged, take non-managerial interest in what’s going on, keep them excited about working for you even when the work they’re doing isn’t.

Favor technical competence and leadership skills.

When you notice a knowledge worker take the reins in a crisis and pull the whole group – possible even other groups – through it, that should leave an impression with you. That worker should be your right hand. If they aren’t in your team, maybe you need to figure out how to change that. When you notice a knowledge worker disavow responsibility for a failure – personal or team – or come up with lists of excuses, that too should leave an impression with you. Irresponsibility is not a trait of a knowledge worker. Not ever.

If you need someone to keep track of where projects are, file paperwork, produce reports and do customer relations, hire some assistants for a lot less money.

Delegating chores and administravia to knowledge workers is a waste of money, brainpower, and above all: Respect. Insulate your brainshare from these items and let them provide you value.

When it comes to performance checks, yearly reviews are worthless without a 360-degree assessment.

Everyone hates performance checks, whether knowledge worker, clock-fodder, runt or luddite. The key item is that knowledge workers are all for assessments if they’re purposeful and logical. Having a manager rate a subordinate (generally higher than they deserve), write some courteous crap (because their MBA professor told them that positive rewards work better than punishments) and give them goals to work on (because there’s always room for improvement), is an illogical, purposeless system that doesn’t result in the subordinate understanding any more about themselves or their performance. It’s total crap. Total. Crap.

Multi-factor assessments (such as the 360, the author mentions) are actually logical, have defined purpose, and result in a fairly consistent understanding about how their performance is perceived. MFAs involve diagnostics by superiors, subordinates, peers, and others with sufficient contact and experience: Sometimes major clients, organization psychologists, whomever. This takes a lot of work, but I’ve seen it correct some fairly chronic problems in short-order. Seeing that everyone thinks you need to shower more, generally has some impact.

Periodically, bring a few key IT brains to the boardroom to observe the problems of the organization at large, even about things outside of the IT world, if only to make use of their exquisitely refined BS detectors. A good IT pro is trained in how to accomplish work; their skills are not necessarily limited to computing. In fact, the best business decision-makers I know are IT people who aren’t even managers.

I, like a lot of knowledge workers, wear two hats: We’re an employee somewhere, and we’re consultants. As employees, often, we’re undervalued, underpaid, and our opinions don’t matter outside of niche topics. As consultants, often, we’re prized and paraded, CEOs and CIOs hang on our recommendations, technical staff cower knowing our every gesture will generate work for them, and when the sizable invoice arrives the payment clerks make sure it is turned around immediately.

It’s a surprisingly sharp dichotomy to live with, but those of us that do this understand it: As employees, we make hundreds (thousands, sometimes) of decisions a day, fifty weeks a year, the vast majority of them silently making things better from the shadows. As such, the organization doesn’t really value our individual decisions. As consultants, we make a handful of decisions, all of them pedantically documented and justified, and our clients revel in the certainty that their consultant just made some amazing decisions, and will put together working groups to implement them post-haste.

I had a consulting gig a few years ago where I quickly identified a knowledge worker who was pretty much a subject matter expert in what I was there to do. I separated him from the greater group and we had a discussion over lunch, where he eventually confided his frustration that I was there at all. I told him, essentially, what was in the previous paragraph, and said he should start making all of his decisions out loud while I was there. It would be obnoxious, abrupt, and I would end up getting sick of it – but it served the intended purpose: He knew what he was talking about, and was making congruent decisions to my own. They didn’t need to pay me $5k/day to do what their in-house SME could do for far less. That was the last time they called me in for that topic, and last I checked, the SME was a division head.

As a manager, you need to pull your knowledge workers out of their zones. You need to get their opinions on greater organizational issues. Not only will they respect you for it, but the successes they breed will be attributed to your foresight in engaging them.

A Nice Little Bow

Taking an honest interest in helping your IT group help you is probably the smartest business move an organization can make.

I sound like a broken record, but it all really comes down to this: Engage, listen, learn, support, encourage, repeat.

Unlike in many industries, the fight in most IT groups is in how to get things done, not how to avoid work. IT pros will self-organize, disrupt and subvert in the name of accomplishing work.

If you have subordinates unwilling to do new things, learn new things, or avoid work- they’re not knowledge workers, they’re there to collect a paycheck. Where you should see heated battles is over the details: Which technologies should be used to solve a problem? Which systems should be involved? How will it be pathed? Where will it have dependencies? How will it survive global thermonuclear war? Can it be prototyped? Can it be virtualized? Should it be virtualized? Synchronous or asynchronous? Threaded or processed? Static or dynamic? Database or flatfile? Which database? I feel a lot better just writing out all those things. That’s what matters.

Our most dynamic group has taken a “build it, and they will come” mentality for numerous services that eventually became focal-points for the organization. They go out of their way to do “unofficial” development work, subversively at times, knowing that in the end they were making good decisions, and providing valuable solutions. That’s what a real knowledge worker does, and that’s really all they care about.

This Friday, Nortel’s enterprise products division will be auctioned. Avaya is the stalking-horse, with numerous other companies additionally submitting bids. If history holds, Nortel Enterprise will not be Avaya’s, but belong to someone else (despite all the buzz Avaya and its partners are making). Regardless, that someone will acquire the best enterprising data switching platforms made.

Hands-down, the ERS 5000 -series has continued to be the best integrated UTP switch, since coming onto the scene many years ago. Beefy backplane, generous uplinks, flexible stacking, decent price-point. I’ve baked switches from every vendor willing to send me gear, and no one can handle the battery like an ERS 5000.

The ERS 8600 chassis-based platforms also make a mockery of the competition. Robust, redundant backplanes; extremely flexible slotting options; ridiculous feature set; decent price-point. Better marketing could have really pumped this line, as a number of the slot options were best-of-breed. Again, I’ve baked a number of chassis, and the 8600-series delights on most all of the benchmarks that matter.

There are lots of other diamonds in the enterprise space. Quite a lot. I’m not a “loyal” customer of anyone: I believe in market Darwinism. Unfortunately in this case, the best products were latched onto a fiscally irresponsible company, led by brain-dead opportunists who from the outset have undermined the legacy that is … was … Nortel.

I look forward to Friday – to see who’s getting the chance to own the best-of-breed enterprise networking products, and hope when they sit down and take a good look, they realize what an amazing set of assets they have, and Do The Right Thing with them.

Regardless, Nortel is a less-than-skeletal image of its former self, and a venerable multi-century legacy is all but a footnote.

Cloud computing fosters intense competition.

This is not just wrong (people are wrong all the time, and I don’t blog about it), it’s dangerously wrong. Nowhere in technology have we had less competition potential, and more monopoly potential than in the realm of cloud computing. Why? Cloud computing is all about size and marketing. I remember back in the day when I was happily using WebCrawler to scour the Intertubes for what I wanted to find, when some jerks from Stanford started some crappy search engine called Google. Pffft. “There’s tons of competition in the search engine market”, the analysts said. I was concerned then, I’m concerned now.

Any centralized Internet service is about size and marketing. Read up on my last post if you want to know how I feel about centralized services in general. Right now there are three major players in the “cloud computing” market. That will grow, as did search engines, to probably 20 major players and everyone will think I’m nuts, and then they will be slammed against the wall by One.

One that claims not to be evil.

One that believes (truly) they’re doing good.

One that rules them all.

This is not some psychic prediction, this is the recognition of a pattern that has played out too many times in the young life of the commercial Internet.