Best Practice

I'm just putting it out there: I hate best practice.

Who's to say that your practice is better than everybody else's? Does your practice work in every scenario? Can you quantify your 'best' claim? Is there some independent body that will verify it for you? Probably not. But it does make for catchy marketing material and might just get your sales guy his new boat.

ITIL (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library - a framework for IT service management) talks about good practice throughout its books. This seems a lot more realistic to me. Good practice means you are doing things the right way based on the variables you understand and the specific situation you are in. You've taken into account the nuances of the customers configuration, the budget, the available resources, all the documentation and what is widely practiced in your industry or sector. With all that in mind, you want to produce the desired outcome and so you follow good practice.

Another idea from ITIL is the 'adopt and adapt' mantra. Adopt and adapt really means don't just blindly follow what someone else does because they say so, but instead use those methods and that knowledge and apply them to your situation in a manner that will give you the required outcome. We see speakers and writers all the time singing about 'this way worked for me and it will work for you if you follow my words to the letter.' But we're all different and each scenario we encounter - even the same scenario on a different day - is different and needs approaching differently. 

So don't just blindly follow 'best practice'. Adopt and adapt to your situation and turn it into good practice. Best might not be very good after all.

BYOD Policy 101

I wrote about BYOD in Bring Your Own Device - Now What?. It's a complex issue for the modern age and one that isn't going away. Anyway, I came across this article on Lifehacker and thought it summed up BYOD rather nicely. What do you think?

Bring Your Own Device - OK, Now What?

The IT world is full of acronyms and abbreviations. One of the most talked about acronyms doing the rounds at the moment is BYOD - Bring Your Own Device. But what does it mean for the end-user, the IT department and the business?

For the end-user, this is an easy one. Let's say Sue bought an iPad for her own purposes - emails, watching YouTube videos, games for the kids - and would like to use it to log on to her company's cloud-based applications. This may be while in the office, while at home watching TV or while on the train in the morning rush. She has a device capable of connecting to the cloud, she's comfortable using it and her company has compatible cloud services. Seems like a no-brainer - let Sue use her iPad to log onto the company's applications and everybody wins. Only the business function probably has some other views on that ....

The CFO is delighted by the concept of BYOD. Many of the company's staff are bringing in their tablets and smartphones and the bottom line is that he now doesn't have to provide these devices in order to keep the workforce mobile and productive – at anywhere up to $1000 per device, that’s a handy saving. If staff are using their own mobile devices, maybe he can get them bringing their own laptops and PCs too! This is win-win right? Until at a conference, one of the directors is deep in conversation with one of his peers. The story being told is a sorry tale of a disgruntled employee who got fired, then proceeded to log in via his iPad and steal the company secrets before deleting lots of important files. Now this director's delight is turning rapidly to fear, so the first thing he does is pay a visit to the IT department and asks how this can be stopped.

The IT department is probably hiding in some dark, damp area of the basement drinking coffee and trying to grow a beard. While the director lays down the law that we can't have people just connecting up their own devices willy-nilly, IT has a better solution - Mobile Device Management, or MDM. IT explains that this allows the company to set policies on who or what can connect to their systems - even if a user has a valid account and can access financial information from their PC, policies can allow or disallow users from connecting from devices that are not known to the company. IT also explains that when a member of staff leaves the company, they tick a box and that person can no longer access data from their device. Further to that, IT has the power to delete all company data from that device remotely with the click of a mouse. By using an MDM solution, the company still controls the flow of and access to its lifeblood - its data. Even if they don't own the devices that would normally access it.

So now the CFO can rest easy that he doesn't have to go out and purchase devices for his staff. MDM means it is now easy - and easy on the purse strings - to let staff bring in their own devices, while still maintaining absolute control over company data.

Modern Computing

So what's the big deal about cloud computing and security issues (perceived or otherwise) around BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)?

Firstly let's get one thing out of the way: Cloud computing is really just computing these days. All of us use some form of cloud, whether for productivity tools such as Google Apps or Office 365, for backups and storage such as Dropbox and SkyDrive, for entertainment such as YouTube and Netflix, or maybe you have a full private cloud solution for your business applications and data management. All of us use 'the cloud'. If there is anybody out there not using the cloud at all, I'd be interested to hear about it in the comments.

So I'm just going to call it Modern Computing. The thing with Modern Computing, is that we want to access our applications, personal data and public information at any time, from any place using any device. In the past if you wanted to access a file from the office, you had to be in the office using a PC or laptop owned and managed by the company. While the IT department loved this because they could manage access end to end, it really doesn't fit with Modern Computing.

So all of your data and all of your applications are somewhere else. There are real and perceived security concerns around this, of course.You need to be sure your data has adequate protection from hacking, leakage and loss, for example. But this isn't really as big an issue as it seems. You choose your cloud provider based on your specific requirements - of which security is a priority - and then you trust them to do their job. After all, they will make every effort to keep your data safe, or suffer a very public embarrassment which would lose them business. It is in their very best interests to keep your data safe.

Which brings us to BYOD - Bring Your Own Device. While not an entirely new phenomenon, the act of end users using their own devices at work - smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc - is gathering pace these days. The reason? Simple. Users are purchasing the likes of the iPad for personal use and just finding it easier to manage their day to day activities on it than on a clunky old desktop PC that ties then to the office between 9 and 5 every day. Initially IT hated this idea because they no longer had control of those end user devices and became scared of security issues - mostly data loss because of deliberate or accidental removal of data. But more and more now, IT is embracing BYOD because data is kept in the cloud and accessed directly from it (meaning less chance of leakage) and because now they can spend their budgets on other things than PCs and laptops, and spend their time more productively than purchasing, configuring and delivering PCs and laptops to each desk.

According to a recent Gartner report, half of employers will require employees to supply their own device by 2017.

Modern Computing means everything we do and by definition includes the devices we use to do it. That means that while BYOD is a big buzz-word at the moment, the term will most likely disappear over the coming months and years. So while people are enjoying being able to use their own devices for work purposes at the moment, get used to that becoming the norm.

How ridiculous is DRM?

I've written about DRM before. I hate it. It is the spawn of the devil. It is the tool that tells you "Hey, you know that product you just spent good money to buy? Well yeah, you will never really own it".

The guys over at Ecal decided to demonstrate DRM by making a chair that can only be sat on 8 times before the joints melt and the thing falls apart. You can view the video on Gizmodo.

Ridiculous? Absolutely. But it does show how DRM can destroy something you believe is yours.

So my advice is to avoid anything with DRM built-in, until the perpetrators of it get the message. Hop over to Defective by Design and read up on the alternatives.

Should you register yourname.com?

Lots of people purchase their own names as a domain name - I have waynedmoore.au.com for example, where I host this blog. There are lots of good reasons for doing this, some of which were discussed on lifehacker.com recently.

A couple of reasons I believe it is a good idea (as well as those in the article) are:

1. You get to control your name. As we move deeper and deeper into a fully digital world, it becomes more and more important to claim your own real estate. If you don't do it, somebody else will. What if somebody else registers your name and posts some unsavoury content on there? People may well think that came from you. Imagine turning up for a job interview and being faced with a potential employer who thinks you are some low-life because of what she found on a web site when researching your background. Not good.

2. Project your own message. Maybe you are a thought-leader in your field - an expert that other people pay attention to. In that case, why not create a web site or blog in your name to get your message out there to as many people who are prepared to listen? Maybe you are important in your community - a leader or an organiser - again, get your message out there where people can find it.

3. Your name reflects your business. Well this one really is a no-brainer. If you have a business in your own name, then you absolutely must have that name registered. Even if your business has it's own domain name, you will probably want to register your own name for the reasons already mentioned and, and / or to use as a personal blog that will direct traffic to your business site.

So there are lots of reasons to register your own domain name. I can't really think of any good reasons not to. Can you?

Windows 8 - My experience

I wrote the other day saying I was going to give Windows 8 a try - Windows 8 is out!

So on Saturday, I decided to upgrade my laptop and give Windows 8 a run. I had played around with the early betas and release candidates by running them in a VM but this time I went all out. As I had only purchased my laptop in June this year, Microsoft gave me a cheap upgrade to Windows 8 - $14.99 to be exact. So I paid my money and started the download.

To install an upgrade, you download a small installer and let it take care of the rest. The process is pretty painless and took a little while to complete, mostly because of the download time. Once complete, the laptop rebooted a couple of times, then gave me my logon page. I logged on (with my existing domain credentials) and was prompted with the now familiar and divisive "Metro" interface (which Microsoft now calls the Windows 8 UI for legal reasons).

So far so good. I started setting up the tiles on my home screen and generally going about my business but just found it ... a little difficult to navigate. And then it started crashing, frequently. The whole computer would just freeze up solid and have to be power cycled. Not a good start. I wonder if a Windows Update installed in the background broke something? I'll never know because at that point I decided I needed a working computer, and therefore had to format it and start again. Lucky for me, I had taken a backup before I started. Never do any kind up upgrade like this without a backup!

So I went back to my download and realised that all I had downloaded was the magical installer. I followed the links to my account from the receipt and quickly realised that this installer was the only file Microsoft was going to give me. Hmm. Lucky for me I have access to other legitimate sources and downloaded a complete DVD ISO, so I could start again.

After formatting the laptop and starting again, everything seemed pretty smooth. I set up my home screen, started downloading my most important applications, configured power management, wifi and all manner of things. I used it like this for several hours, doing some work and play. I must admit, I was really getting into the new interface at this point. My one major gripe of the interface is that it is not really keyboard friendly, despite there being some shortcuts. I would take keyboard over mouse every time and love Windows 7 for the ability to hit the start key (on the keyboard) and just start typing to find an application or file. In 8, this isn't possible (or I just never found the right shortcut key combination).

Sunday morning I fired up the laptop again but now it started crashing again, just like the upgraded version did. After a few power-cycles I was getting pretty frustrated. I tried unplugging everything and trying different things but it kept locking up. Worse, there were no clues left in the event logs. At this point I was due to go out to a friend's place to help with her website (which was all stored on the laptop). So I took it with some trepidation. However, at her place and then later at my wife's work, it worked sweetly again - not a single hiccup. Then I brought it home and .... yep, you guessed it. Maybe it doesn't like my wifi?

I need my laptop for work (day job and sideline business) and play, so this wasn't acceptable. Sadly, I spent  Sunday afternoon formatting it again and reloading Windows 7, which I'll stick with for now thanks.

IT guys normally say wait until the first service pack before jumping into a new operating system - I normally say this myself! So that's what I'm going to do now. Something isn't quite right. It might be in the product, or Updates from the web, it might be in the drivers for my laptop (even though it is a current spec machine and there are official Windows 8 drivers available), or it might be a negative vibe coming from all my swearing. I don't know and I don't care. I will be steering clear of Windows 8 for the foreseeable future and I would probably suggest you do too, unless there is a really good reason not to. Let somebody else work out the kinks, then install it when Microsoft release the first big set of patches, or service pack 1.