“Herding Cats” – The Power of the Portal

October 5th, 2009 by Vince

It’s been said that managing IT projects is akin to “herding cats”… conjuring up the image of programmers, managers, and business stakeholders scurrying about in all directions, as the well intended project manager attempts to keep everyone on task, and carries out the daunting task of consistent and effective project team communication. As the work environment continues to become increasingly “virtual”, with project team members spread out across separate locations, typing with their thumbs on Blackberry’s, iPhones, and related mobile devices, keeping the project team “on the same page” is an ever increasing challenge.

Well, there seems to be light, or should I say, a portal, at the end of the tunnel. We here at Diamond have found that implementing an easy to use, secure, web-based project portal, accessible from anywhere a project team member might find themselves, is a very effective “cat herder”.

It used to be that with a well written project status report and email, projects teams were able to stay relatively in-synch. But today, with team members increasingly in scattered locations, keeping track of the latest version of key documents, important project developments, and risk reporting, relying on attachments in emails is less and less effective.

Enter the “project portal”… another example of a shift taking place as the world of social networks, blogs, wiki’s, and other forms of instant communication takes hold of all of us. The  shift is the concept of a central “place” where invited participants can “meet” and collaborate. Google has recently deployed their “Wave” platform (http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html) to over 100,000 developers for Beta testing. Google Wave is a whole new approach to email, chat, and collaboration… possibly changing the communication experience as drastically as email itself did almost 20 years ago.

The power of Diamond’s project portal is in its centrality… as project team members go to a central place to find the latest news, status, reports, and risks.  Document version control ensures that team members are always reading the latest, up-to-date copy of any document loaded into the portal.  Automation in the form of team member notification can be implemented to ensure notice is given when significant events occur on the project.

So, even as project teams become more and more scattered across offices, cities, and states… the project portal becomes the consistent meeting place and central voice of reason for everyone involved in the project.

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Overcoming Peripheral Challenges in Your Virtual Infrastructure

October 1st, 2009 by Tim

One challenge that many organizations face when working on leveraging server virtualization in their environment is the inclusion of server builds that utilize specific physical peripherals such as serial based devices. The challenge presents itself in the form of being able to leverage the High Availability features of Virtualization Technology. In a highly available Virtual Infrastructure the Virtual Machine builds have access to its required resources regardless of which Virtualization Host it is currently running on. One way to overcome this challenge is to install identical physical peripherals on each of the Virtualization Hosts in your environment. In this scenario your virtual machine builds will have access to the peripheral regardless of which Host that they are running on. The problem is that in addition to this not being a recommended approach from the Virtualization Solution vendors, it becomes cost prohibitive in larger Virtual Infrastructures and decreases the total available COM ports (or whatever port you are utilizing). The more effective solution is to virtualize these devices within your Virtual Machines and send the requests to a network based peripheral instead. Because these devices reside on the Ethernet network, there is no need to install direct attached peripheral devices on the individual Virtual Host Systems.

There are many vendors who provide solutions in this space but they all work in the same manner. There is a physical device that bridges your Ethernet network directly with the external peripheral such as a serial based or USB based device. This device enables the communication controls to be transmitted over your existing network infrastructure. Because these devices are connected directly to the network, where the communication controls originate is irrelevant to the end device. The other piece of the solution is specialized software typically provided by the vendor who manufactured the peripheral bridge that allows the Operating System within your Virtual Machine to create a virtual port that transmits its commands over the network. To the Operating System these virtual ports look exactly like their physical counterparts. Once these virtual ports are available from within your virtual machine you can use any application to send communication controls to the end device, completing the function.

Because this solution separates the physical device from the Virtual Host or Virtual Machine, with many vendors a by-product is the ability to share these network based devices amongst several unique Virtual Machines.

Also of note, this solution can be utilized on physical server systems that have not been virtualized yet using the same virtual port application and physical network device.

X86 Server Virtualization Technology is still relatively young but the limitations for creating a comprehensive Virtual Infrastructure are dissipating quickly.

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What’s so critical about “Critical Success Factors”?

September 3rd, 2009 by Vince

As defined by Wikipedia:

“Critical Success Factor (CSF) is the term for an element which is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission.”

We here at Diamond do not take the concept of ‘critical success factors’ lightly.  As a matter of fact, we make sure to review these with our clients at the start of every project so we’re all on the same page.

Now there are some easy, no-brainer “success factors” that come along with any project.  They are the ones listed in bright clear text, usually in a section of a contract called “Deliverables”.  Although these are obviously important, there are often other factors that can make or break a project that aren’t always spelled out so clearly.

Diamond likes to look at success factors from “within the trench”, as a team, in partnership with our clients.  As we all know, once a contract is signed by the management types, it’s up the collaborative efforts of the project team to actually deliver the goods.  And the critical success factors should speak directly to delivering these goods.

The critical success factor discussion usually starts like, “Ok, we have all signed up to build this new, really cool software widget.  How will we as a team know when we have reached success, and what or who will tell us?”

It is amazing at times what comes up.  As an example, in a recent project, the project team members on the client side brought up that this new software needs to be the easiest, most intuitive, program to use as possible, with little to no training required.  These folks knew the user community intimately; and they also knew that whole hearted acceptance and buy-in by the general user community was going to be the lynchpin of success.  So, over and above the black and white “deliverables” outlined in the contract, we as a team knew that the user interface and general usability of the system was going to influence short and long term success.  So specific ‘critical success factors’ were written as a team, and documented in the project status report which is distributed weekly.

So, to sum up…attacking ‘critical success factors’ from the trench, as a cohesive, collaborative team, will uncover aspects of the project that have not been discussed during the sales and proposal generation process.  This tactic also provides opportunity to have all project team members provide input, and in the end, results in a unified project team with mutual success at the forefront.

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So you bought Microsoft SharePoint….Now What?

August 24th, 2009 by Tim

At Diamond Technologies, our clients ask us all the time “what can SharePoint do”?  When we hear that, we’re reminded of the old spaghetti sauce commercial, the one that no matter what ingredient was asked about, the answer was “it’s in there”.   And that’s the challenge with SharePoint, there’s a lot in there.  But with SharePoint or any powerful technology, the question we really should be asking is not “what can SharePoint do”, but rather “what problem am I trying to solve?”

So now you know what problem you’re trying to solve, is SharePoint your best choice?  Well naturally…that depends (you knew that was coming didn’t you)?  According to Nucleus Research, Children’s Hospital Boston saw an ROI of 409% in 3 months by using SharePoint to move content creation from the IT department to the departments and content creators.

If your solution demands one or more of the following core features, we seriously recommend you take a look at SharePoint:

Portal – SharePoint does a great job providing a single platform for Internet, Intranet and Extranet Portals.  Half of the Ten Best Intranets of 2009 are built on SharePoint (source: Jakob Nielsen).

Collaboration and WorkFlow – Fancy words for getting your people working together more efficiently.  SharePoint provides the familiarity, productivity and seamless integration with the Microsoft Office suite of tools, including Word, Excel, Outlook and more.

Web Content Management – With SharePoint, managing your web content can be done by your team.  No more calling IT to get the website updated (careful – proper governance and approval guidelines are essential).

Document and Records Management – SharePoint lets you manage your documents and records effectively; including extremely powerful search capabilities and built-in functions for team collaboration on document creation, approval and workflow.

Forms – SharePoint comes loaded with tons of out-of-the-box templates for numerous standard line of business actions.

Business Intelligence – Another fancy word for business analytics and reporting, SharePoint provides out-of-the-box capabilities to manage and present server based Excel spreadsheets, KPIs and data dashboards.

Why do we recommend SharePoint for these key functions?  Because in each of these areas, the built-in capabilities of SharePoint make it a much better solution than custom development.  You’ll see results faster and cheaper, both in the short term and over the long run.  “Well architected SharePoint solutions are likely to be one of the smartest investments companies can make to survive and thrive in this challenging economy.” (source: Susan Hanley in Network World).

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Uh, which phone should I use?

August 24th, 2009 by Tony

That’s probably the first question a manager asks themselves when thinking about enterprise mobility.  Of course, like all other things mobile, it raises a lot more questions.  You should ask yourself these:

  • What is the nature of the application I want to deploy?  Is it email, IM, and PIM (calendar, contacts, etc.)?  Is it only voice (call, PTT, etc.).  Do I want to push out backend corporate data?  Do I want to extend a current application?  Any combination or all of the above?
  • Who is going to use the mobile application?  Do they already have a corporate mobile device?  Do they have their own personal device?  Are they comfortable with technology?
  • Where is the mobile application going to be used?  Is it possible the device may be dropped?  Do I need a ruggedized device?  Do I get non-ruggedized phones real cheap and can easily replace them if they get damaged?
  • What features does the device require?  Does it need GPS?  Camera? Barcode scanner?  Does it need to be connected to a network at all times?  Just some of the time?
  • What is my budget to accomplish all of this?

Who wants to stick their neck out, throw a dart, and hopefully create a successful mobile application that pays for itself in a year or two?  Relax; it’s not as daunting as you think.  Like all IT decisions there are trade-offs with every solution; but by answering the questions above, you have already completed much of the requirements gathering.

Once you get a handle those issues, the major consideration is whether to use your employee’s personal phones versus purchasing a corporate phone for everyone to use.  There are easy to see benefits in both choices.  With a standard corporate phone, you can choose a single mobile OS that best fits your applications, data requirements, and policy requirements.  You can probably work out a good deal with one of the mobile carriers to get corporate pricing.  By incorporating individual phones, you give your employee’s a device they’re already comfortable with and with little or no budget outlay from you.

The drawbacks are basically the inverse of the benefits.  Corporate phones will require a budget outlay and you may have to buy a bunch of them.  Using personal phones means multiple operating systems which means you either have to develop or purchase applications that run on multiple platforms and absorb the cost of that.  Device management of personal phones becomes a much bigger issue since you will only want to encrypt and/or wipeout corporate data.

If you determine you need ruggedized or specialized devices, your choice is easy.  You will need to buy them.  If you are only deploying email, IM, and PIM, let your employees use their own phones.  They probably already are, but you should think about management of corporate sensitive emails.  They gray area is when you start deploying line of business applications.  We will address that in the future.

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Five Reasons to Virtualize and “Green Your IT”

August 24th, 2009 by Tim

Virtualization Technologies are the best way for your company to “Go Green” with its information technology.  Virtualization allows you to run many “virtual computers” on a single physical machine.  The benefits are numerous, including simplified management and improved business continuity, but the Big Green reason is energy savings, which can be dramatic.  According to CIO Magazine, “Industry experts say by 2010 the cost to power and cool data center equipment is likely to exceed the cost of the hardware itself, and energy costs may soon represent more than half of the total cost of running a data center.”

Here’s five reasons why we think Virtualization is a must for your information technology strategy.

Server Consolidation – This one is almost too simple.  Virtualization allows you to consolidate your servers, often in a ratio of 10:1 or better.  What this means is that if today you have ten physical computers running your business, with Virtualization you can reduce that to one or two machines.  The benefits are almost obvious.  Reduced computer hardware costs, reduced power consumption, reduced cooling requirements, reduced floor space requirements, and on and on.

Infrastructure Optimization – It is estimated that most servers are utilized only 15% – 20%.  Think about it, those expensive servers (the ones that IT tells you need replacement every three years anyway) are being grossly underutilized.  By consolidating your servers in a virtual computing platform, it is estimated that server utilization goes up to about 80%.  Now that’s a better use of those resources !

Business Continuity – In a 24 X 7 world your business cannot afford disruption of its IT services.  And while disasters and unplanned downtime get the big headlines, planned downtime for hardware maintenance and system updates is the cause of the majority of service downtime.  Virtualization technologies provide amazingly fast failover and recovery capabilities for both planned and unplanned outages, allowing your business to continue operations, virtually uninterrupted.

Desktop Virtualization – When thinking about Virtualization, most people think of the server side of things.  Virtualizing the desktop encapsulates the desktop operating system, applications and user data as a set of files called a virtual machine that can be stored centrally.  This approach provides a number of the key advantages including centralized configuration and management, the ability to enable stronger policy enforcement and tighter data security and expedited deployment.

Multiple Operating Systems, One Platform – If you’re like most larger organizations today, you’ve probably got a mix of Windows, Unix and Linux varieties running in your shop.  Virtualization technologies from VMware allow you to run all of those operating systems on the same physical hardware, at the same time!  That’s right, you can have Windows and Linux virtual machines running on the same physical computer.  The benefits?  No more dedicated hardware for different operating systems, reduced costs, simplified operations and more. 

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Project Management – A Blend of Science & Art

August 24th, 2009 by Vince

After spending more than 10 years of my career managing enterprise level IT projects, I have learned, and come to appreciate that effective Project Management is truly a blend of both science and art.  I stumbled over this quote from Atlantic Global’s website, after doing a bit of “creativity reconnaissance” on the web:

“Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.”

There is obviously science to successful project management.  Gathering the requirements, defining the scope of work, estimating the work, building a project plan, identifying risks, measuring and tracking effort and progress, etc…and there are many tools available to us today to help us (even automate) these scientific tasks.

But what gets lost al too often, even by the best project managers, is the art of project management.  What I mean by the word art is all of the subtle and sometimes intangible aspects of managing a project to a successful completion.  As the quote above says, things will ALWAYS change… business needs and circumstances change, priorities change, scope will change, people change…The project manager, and ultimately the project team, need to expect change, and it’s up to the project manager to prepare the team (the customer included here) to expect and be able to handle changes along the way.

The art of project management includes activity like; educating, preparing, counseling, and communicating.  I have found that educating the customer, especially in the world of Information Technology projects, is huge.  If the customer is afforded the chance to learn about what happens “behind the scenes” and how it happens… as change happens, the customer will be armed with enough broad view knowledge of the process to better understand the implications of the change.

To sum up my thoughts here… it truly does take a blend of science based tools and processes, with an equal part of artist-like communication to have the best opportunity for project success… because as we all know… CHANGE HAPPENS.

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3 Things You Might Not Know About SharePoint

August 24th, 2009 by Tim

Unless you’ve been hiding under the proverbial rock for the past couple years, by now you’ve probably heard plenty about Microsoft SharePoint.  Here are a couple things about SharePoint that you might not already know.

1. SharePoint Is The Fastest Growing Product In Microsoft’s History (And Why You Should Care)

Back in 2008 sales of SharePoint passed 100 million licenses sold, had attracted 17,000 user companies, and eclipsed $1 billion in sales for Microsoft.  Critics may dispute these exact figures or point to SharePoint’s flaws but they don’t deny that the SharePoint juggernaut is real.  For our customers, the reason this matters is simple – Technology executives have to be careful where they invest valuable resources, especially today.  Given these numbers it’s safe to say that SharePoint is here to stay.  We believe that SharePoint will be the de-facto building platform for Microsoft solutions in the future and we are counseling our client development shops that they need to understand and get on board with this technology or get left behind.

2. SharePoint Can Actually SAVE You Money

What you say?!  With licensing, implementation, training, and all that, how do I save money?  Diamond Technologies has always been a company focused on the business value of technology solutions so this one’s near to our hearts.  One of the strongest virtues of this technology is that SharePoint empowers your business users with the tools to create real business value without the IT department.  OK, before you IT types come to my office and kill me let me clear that up just a bit.  Once your IT folks establish the proper SharePoint governance and infrastructure, then your business folks can create that value.  Let’s face it, even in the best of times IT resources can be scarce and overworked.  With SharePoint, your departmental users can keep intranet and web content up-to-date; create and manage powerful business and workflow processes and much more, without engaging those IT resources.

3. A Sneak Preview At SharePoint 2010

There’s still a ways to go, but as the saying goes “time flies” and before you know it…So here’s a few tidbits of what we see as significant with SharePoint 2010.   Ready for the Internet – The current release (MOSS 2007) is currently regarded as a great platform for intranet solutions but is sometimes criticized for its applicability outside the firewall.  With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft seems determined to change that, with improved capabilities all around for developing collaborative solutions that will run on any device across all technical and geographical boundaries.  “64 is the new 32.” – Plan on including upgrades to your hardware platforms, operating systems, and your SQL Server (for storage). SharePoint 2010 will only be available in a 64-bit version. Also, your development staff should start looking at Silverlight and LINQ to get a jumpstart on the technologies which will be integral to the SharePoint 2010 release. Other Stuff – The new version includes a significantly improved web page editor, out-of-the-box support for Silverlight web parts, end-to-end integration with Visio’s back-end data links, more powerful search, and on and on.  Obviously, there’s much, much more to SharePoint 2010 than we can ever cover here, but we thought you’d be interested in a few things we think are important for your business.

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Enterprise Mobility Introduction

August 24th, 2009 by Tony

This is my first post in what I hope to be an entertaining and informative series of thoughts and observations.  Let me use this post to explain what the blog will be about.  I will typically focus on how mobility affects businesses.  This usually falls under the umbrella of enterprise mobility.

Whether you know it or not, your employees (and probably you) are using mobility.  You are communicating with you co-workers on their mobile devices and they are probably finding some way to read their corporate email on their devices.  The primary questions are, how can you make this profitable for your business and how can you control it?  Don’t let the term “enterprise” make you think this is only about Fortune 500 companies.  A small HVAC firm with five workers in the field can realize a high ROI by implementing a mobile solution!

I will cover a multitude of issues about the benefits, pitfalls, and latest news surrounding enterprise mobility.  This can range from how mobility affects GRC (Governance, Risks, Compliance) policies, to how the latest iPhone game is making your employees less productive, and, as a mobile technology manager and developer myself, how the heck do develop and manage all the current mobile platforms!

Let’s end this post by identifying three core types of corporate mobility initiatives:

Transform The Business — There’s an opportunity for enterprises to use mobility to completely redefine their businesses. However, this entails risk, as customers may be unwilling to accept major business changes, and, in today’s economy, may have to wait.

Grow The Business — These are role-specific mobile applications such as field-force automation, sales force automation, and logistics, which offer good ROI even in a recession.  Enterprises should look for solutions that involve low or zero capital expenditure funding, such as Software as a Service (Salesforce.com?).  Field Force Automation and other mobile business solutions achieve ROI by redefining the business process, by changing the way people work; they will typically deliver ROI in a year or less.

Run The Business — These are options such as wireless connectivity in laptops and mobile email.  The deployment of solutions such as 3G data cards and wireless email can be done at fairly low cost, albeit with modest ROI.  On the plus side, these can open up links to other corporate initiatives such as remote working/telecommuting and disaster recovery.

I know you are probably think of all the reasons why you wouldn’t want to jump into this pool, but I hope you will continue to check back and see why it is a good idea.

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Diamond certified as VMware VIP Professional Partner

August 24th, 2009 by Tim

Diamond Technologies announces its partnership with VMware, an industry leader in virtualization technologies.

Business continuity, “Green IT”, server consolidation and desktop virtualization are some of the reasons companies are choosing virtualization technologies and VMware for their IT computing infrastructure. Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments.

Diamond Technologies has been successfully helping organizations leverage this exciting technology for many years and we are excited to announce our partnership with VMware. Our experience includes helping the State of Delaware, New Castle County and the City of Wilmington to improve their IT efficiency and reducing their total cost of IT ownership using VMware products and technologies.

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