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.

Windows 8 is out!

Windows 8 was finally released yesterday. It seems to have been around for ever with the developer previews, betas and release candidates but now it is finally here officially.

I am downloading it now and will post back here once I have had chance to install and find my way around it. I will be doing an upgrade install on my just over a year old Lenovo L520, currently running Win7 Pro. So I'm a little nervous to say the least. I am doing backups while downloading Eight. Better safe than sorry.

Watch this space .....

Why CRM is a necessity for your organisation

I wrote recently about why you should have a CRM system in your organisation - Information is King. The post talked about using a CRM solution to better manage your sales leads and opportunities. There is a lot more to CRM that new prospects - what about managing your existing customers? Kamal Sharma, CIO of Mindlance goes into more detail on different purposes of CRM in his blog, Why CRM is a necessity for every growing enterprise.

In the piece, he is talking about knowing more about your existing customer - not just who they are and what they do but drilling down further into understanding the trends in their business or industry, and better understanding what they actually need. Overall, this will ultimately lead to a closer relationship with your customer, which we all know always leads to a longer relationship, involving more sales. What's not to like?

If you don't have a CRM solution in your business, you should be asking yourself 'why not?'

Shameless Plug - Waynessa Bags

I wouldn't normally do this but it is for a good cause - my wife!

My wife has started up an online store selling quality fashion handbags, purses, wallets and accessories, and we would love to be getting a bit more attention on the net. Please have a browse and let me know what you think of the site (I created it). And of course if some pretty item takes your fancy, please feel free to throw it in your cart and buy it!

Waynessa Bags - All your accessory needs.

Thank you for your attention during this short commercial break. Your scheduled programming will return directly.

Who Owns Your Digital Life? Follow Up

Recently I wrote a piece about Who owns your digital life? I talked about how if you read the small print on your digital purchases (books, music, movies, etc) then you would see that you never actually owned it, you only purchased a licence to use it.

Wel it seems Amazon decided to prove me right recently when they deleted somebody's account and wiped their Kindle because they were apparently linked to an account that had been abusing the system - see
Amazon account ban reminds us DRM content is only rented | Digital Trends

I find this frankly staggering. Amazon just decided "we don't like you so we are going to delete everything you have purchased from us - thanks for your business". This should be a wake up call for us all. Not least by virtue of the fact that we keep having DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) imposed on us. All DRM does is takes all your rights away and gives them (leaves them?) with the company that 'sold' you the product. I believe that DRM makes content and products Defective by Design. I would urge you to take a look at this web site and learn more about your rights and how they are abused and more importantly, how to do something about it.

Customer Service - What do you see?

Everyone remembers a bad customer service experience. You could deal with the same company for years and maybe they provide fantastic service - they really go above and beyond. But what do you remember? If you said "the one time they screw up", you'd be right.

I came across this article - Your Customer Does Not See - and it really makes sense. It talks about doing all the right things but it doesn't get noticed by your customer. However, when you mess up once, they do notice that. How do you deal with that? Well part of that will be in being consistent. Have a set of policies and procedures that describe how you deal with each possible situation. That takes a bit of effort and certainly no small investment in time. But a happy customer is a customer for life, so in the end it has to be worth it.

Go the extra mile. Don't just flick off a quick email. Pick up the phone and talk to your customer. It is easy to miss the tone of an email and take it the wrong way but when you have someone on the phone, you can much easier deal with whatever the situation may be; put the fire out if you need to.

But probably above all else, make sure you listen to your customer. Ask them what they want, then shut up and let them tell you. If what they ask for isn't possible, it's OK to say so - you should never promise something you can't deliver, after all. In this case, explain what they want isn't possible and why. But really importantly, you then need to provide an alternative solution to the problem. Never just say no. Say not like that but this way will offer you some value.

I had a poor customer service experience recently with a web hosting provider. I had a technical issue that I understood and believed I knew the fix for. I logged a support case with the company and gave them all the relevant information so that they could come to the same conclusion. Instead, they answered some question that I didn't ask. I replied to them and got a response from a different agent. This guy also responded to some other question. I went through this several times, with several different agents over several days before I called and spoke to somebody who quickly escalated it to a more senior agent, Lo and behold, the problem was resolved almost immediately. The moral of this story? As the service provider, make sure you read and listen to what your customer is saying. Don't read the first line and assume you know the rest - or even assume you know more than the customer.

Information is King - where is your CRM?

In the digital age, digital information is king. Pretty obvious really. Or is it? Do business owners and managers realise this?

From some discussions I've had, it seems not. Some people just don't seem to 'get it'. They store email addresses and phone numbers into their contacts in Outlook, Gmail or on their phones but that's it. Opportunities are tracked via notes or tasks with no real structure and no game plan on how to close the deal. That may be all well and good if you have opportunities coming out the wazoo but in a tight market, you need to be smarter than that.

So what will a CRM solution give you that you can't just do in Outlook? Plenty is the answer. I'll elaborate.

1. The most obvious thing is that it will give you the ability to create, store, view and sort your opportunities in a consistent and structured manner. This will make them easy to search or browse and therefore easier to follow up on (and close). You will also keep all documentation relating to the opportunity in this single repository - quotes, build specs, etc. 
2. The ability to put a dollar figure on your potential future business. It's all well and good to think you have plenty of business in the pipeline but how can you measure it? Most CRM solutions will give you some kind of dashboard that will tell you exactly what is in the pipeline, and if you have it set up correctly in the first place, which opportunities have the highest probability of closing. The most likely opportunities will then float to the top and these are the ones you will want to concentrate on.
3. By having your opportunities in the one system - and again making sure that system is set up correctly - you can make sure that all the members of your sales team are following the same procedures when working a deal, by programmatically presenting the next step as the previous one is completed.
4. Following on from this, most CRMs will give you the ability to automate parts of the process. For example, if you have a process that says when you get a new lead, you send them a welcome pack on day one, a link to some relevant info on your web site on day two, then arrange a meeting on day three, you can often automate this whole process. That's a far more efficient way of managing leads, not to mention removing the possibility of a human forgetting a step.

CRM solutions need not be expensive these days, with many hosted in the cloud and available for a nominal monthly fee per user. That being the case, there is no real excuse not to have one. If you aren't using a CRM solution in your business, why not?

Bruce Willis goes after Apple

I wrote the other day about what happens to your digital collections when you die - Who owns your digital life?

Well it seems that Bruce Willis (yes, that Bruce Willis) has got fired up over this issue and is backing legal moves to increase the rights of downloaders. According to The Sun at least.

Regardless of the validity of the source here - there is no direct quote from the actor - it is good to see this important issue get some media coverage.

How Secure Are You Online? The Checklist | Lifehacker Australia

This is a very handy security resource and I recommend you read and understand the ideas in here to keep yourself safe online - How Secure Are You Online? The Checklist | Lifehacker Australia

One great tip in here is to use the web site Should I change my password?. This monitors the sites such as Pastebin, that hackers use to dump username and password lists when a site gets hacked. If your email address shows up, it will alert you so you can go and change your password. Excellent!

Who owns your digital life?

In times gone by, families would collect books, records and other items over the course of a lifetime. These items would sometimes be passed down from generation to generation, becoming a family legacy. But these days, we consume more and more books, magazines, movies and music digitally. What happens to those when you're gone?

Well if you read the terms & conditions for a lot of the kinds of web sites we buy these things from - Kindle books from Amazon.com, music and videos from iTunes, etc, you don't actually own the content you have paid for. In most cases, you are granted licence to consume this media under a single account. OK, it's not overly difficult to circumvent some of these 'protections' but legally, that stuff just doesn't belong to you.

So as the WSJ asked recently Who inherits your iTunes library?. This stuff in theory could just get lost in the sands of time. There are two takeaways that immediately spring to mind from this:

1 - Should you leave your account passwords with your will so that somebody else can enjoy your collection after you are gone? Maybe there is something in the t's & c's to stop you doing this but it wouldn't be enforceable I wouldn't imagine.

2 - In the case of 'the classics' - in terms of books, at least - most people would probably want a physical copy anyway. The same may well not be true of movies and music, though.

There are a few other important discussions arising from this too. Not least 'ownership' of digital content (as opposed to 'licensing' that we seem to have been duped into), Digital Rights Management (DRM), your digital life in social media, and the question of just who reads those t's & c's anyway?

World IPv6 Day

I wrote about the 'new' IPv6 protocol a few months back - Time for IPv6 - saying that with IPv4 addresses rapidly running out, network admins needed to get themselves ready for IPv6. Well it looks like some of the big boys are getting themselves ready, and giving you and me the chance to test our own systems too on World IPv6 Day on June 8th.

Some of the big web players such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo! will be configuring their sites and services to operate over IPv6, so you can test your own readiness. Google also have a simple test available here. This test will tell you if your systems are ready for IPv6 but sadly doesn't give you any information on what to do if they are not. Watch this space ....

Working Together > Competing?

IT may be one of the few industries where competing companies can work together to become more than the sum of their parts. We work with several local and national companies in order to spread our coverage and widen the skill set available to our customers. We participate in several industry groups where we share ideas with our 'competition' rather than hiding behind our own IP and shooing away anyone who dare ask about how we do things. The power of sharing and working together certainly does seem stronger than the need to compete sometimes. We find that we rarely end up competing for a prospect with the guys we site beside in these groups, which means there are customers our there for all of us. We just need to make sure we find the ones that are the best fit for our specific areas of expertise.

I enjoy reading Arlin Sorensen's blog Peer Power. He recently wrote about the Lessons from Peers (part 1 and part 2). Have a read!

The Merits of Jailbreaking

A while ago I wrote about jailbreaking your iDevice. Now one of the biggest proponents of jailbreaking, and the king of Cydia, Saurik gives you reasons why you should jailbreak your iPhone. Well worth a read!

Service Level Agreements

How do you define an acceptable service level agreement (SLA) when negotiating service contracts with customers? There may be many factors that you want to manage and measure (remember: if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it), including things like maximum response and resolution time and a number of fixed metrics, such as priority levels.

There is a school of thought that as a service provider, you shouldn’t give anything away in an SLA unless it is specifically asked for. Though in a competitive market you will certainly want to offer something different to ‘the other guys’. Whether that is guarantees of quicker response times or a lower percentage of missed SLA targets before penalties apply is up to you. A missed SLA target for example may be where you have a target response time of <1hr for a priority one incident and it takes your 70 minutes to respond. Most SLAs will allow for a small percentage of targets to be missed, so long as some defined average measurement remains within targeted limits.

When defining SLAs, one thing that is often overlooked is how your supplier agreements and even internal (inter-departmental) agreements compare with the SLA your offer customers. Think about it. If you guarantee to replace a server hard disk within 24hrs but your supplier has a 2-day lead time for delivery, how can you meet the SLA? Or maybe your supplier is not a problem but your Accounts team has a policy to only pay invoices when they reach their terms? That hard drive you ordered may not be delivered until after the bill is paid, which could be 30 days down the track.

Other factors may come into play. Maybe you have a standard SLA response time for priority 1 that says you will have an engineer on site within 1 hour. If you have the same terms across multiple customers, then you are going to have to make sure that you always have engineers on standby, or at least in the office doing work they can drop if the need arises. How you schedule your engineers is key in this scenario. Keep an eye on the number of short-response SLAs you put out there and make sure that you actually have the staff to cover them, otherwise you might end up paying the penalty. Literally.

I’ve mentioned priorities a couple of times, so we really have to make sure that we have defined how we come to decide on the priority of a job. Otherwise you know what happens: The customer sets the priority of the job and it is always priority 1! How you define your priorities will be different depending on the services you are offering but just make sure that you do define them clearly. You will most likely define priorities based on the number of users or services affected in an incident, the business impact of an incident or some other arbitrary measurement. Like if the CEO’s PA calls, it is priority 1 every time!!

Lastly, make sure you define the scope of your SLA. Maybe you cover servers and routers but don’t cover printers - make sure that is clear.

SLAs tend to be full of legal jargon. Unfortunately they have to be but the key points I’ve mentioned have to be spelled out unambiguously in plain English for all to understand. For me, that is the key to executing an SLA that keeps all parties happy.