Heading into the holiday season, information technology journalists and bloggers are producing their lists for what to expect in 2012. Unsurprisingly, the focus of these lists seem to be heavily weighted on the side of technology; embracing cloud computing, availability of broadband, the consumerisation of IT or predictions about release dates for the latest Microsoft, Apple or Samsung mobile products.

At Pragmetric, we believe that technology alone, will become something of a back seat driver in 2012.

Sure, there will be plenty of exciting growth in the technology sector as well as in IT departments. Although for most businesses, this continued growth may only add to their feeling of being left behind. Regardless of the business you’re in, there is one constant; the information you create and manage.

As a back seat driver in 2012, we believe that business information will be in the drivers seat. During our current uncertain economic times, businesses are looking to drive efficiency and productivity improvements that positively impact their bottom line. Technology will certainly support this effort, but only once the movement of information through the business is truly understood.

Throughout 2012, IT departments will become equally responsible for understanding business process in detail, as they will the technology that moves information through the business. They will be champions of business improvement, and a cross functional department that provides a value-added service to every business unit. Importantly, customers will be a key focus, and blindly receive added value from the improvements rolled out.

Perhaps 2012 will be the year information gains some ground in the race for recognition in ‘Information Technology’.

From everyone at Pragmetric, we wish you a safe happy holiday season and a productive and profitable 2012.

There have been some widely publicised security breaches recently and it seems hacking groups are moving into the realm of online rockstars, which will only increase the frequency of this type of breach.

One we want to focus on today is the July 4 attack on a Twitter account at Fox News in the US.

If you’re not familiar with the incident, hackers gained access to the Fox News Politics Twitter account and posted messages announcing the assassination of President Obama (which are completely untrue, but particularly emotive). Fox News have since removed the tweets from their timeline.

The incident highlights some of the risks involved with the growth of cloud based software as a service (SaaS). Businesses are no longer responsible for the end to end security of software (that is outsourced to Twitter in this case) and the best you can do to control access is use a particularly strong password that is changed regularly. In a large business like Fox News, there may be multiple people that require access to the one Twitter account. If a strong password is maintained and changed regularly, this password then needs to be shared between multiple people, meaning there will be a process to inform the relevant people of any new password.

While on the surface it appears that the Twitter account password was guessed (maybe using some sort of brute force attack), perhaps the process to inform different groups of an updated password was where the attack actually originated. One example of this may be someone masquerading as a Fox News staffer requesting the Twitter password over the phone. If the person on the end of the phone fails to follow due process to verify who they’re speaking to (perhaps due to a perceived urgency to post something), the password could be handed over to a non approved user.

Why would a car thief break into a car when someone will happily hand them the keys…?

If you’re thinking about how cloud based applications or infrastructure can benefit your business, arrange a time to discuss your particular requirements with one of our consultants.

A great feature of Google Apps is the capacity to collaborate on documents in real time instead of draft after draft being emailed around an office (which slows production and increases data storage). One major hesitation organisations have had with regard to the uptake of Google Apps for collaboration is that you could only use the web interface to build documents, spreadsheets and presentations. These would then have to be transposed into traditional Microsoft Office documents for final release.

Not any more;

Reading about some recent updates to Google Apps, Google have developed a plugin for Microsoft Office (2003, 2007 and 2010) called Google Cloud Connect which enables you to collaborate on documents using Word, Excel or Powerpoint. Other users can be given access to contribute or simply view the same document in real time. Google Cloud Connect then leverages Google Apps to manage revision history etc which means you can get back to any version of the document during its construction.

How much time could that save you when building your next sales presentation or board paper?

Read more about how Google Cloud Connect works, and view the video at http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/officeconnect.html

Occasionally the consulting services that Pragmetric provide are misunderstood by potential clients. I hope the following thoughts help clarify where Pragmetric fits with regard to delivering your overall information and technology management strategy.

Working with a General Practitioner (GP) that owns a network of medical practices around Melbourne, I learnt a very important lesson. This gentleman, let’s call him Charles for the purpose of this article, was very intelligent and we often had very interesting discussions, a number of them about why companies engage independent consultants.

Charles fully admits he should never perform open heart surgery on his patients, nor deliver their children in his practices. He does however strongly advocate that your GP should provide a trusted 1st and 3rd opinion on serious health matters. He will always direct you towards the most appropriate “specialist” if he feels that his initial diagnosis and treatment plan may not deliver the desired results for you. Once his patients have seen the specialist, he always recommends they come back to him and discuss the diagnosis and next steps prescribed by the specialist.

This methodology ensures that an expert in the field of general medical diagnosis and treatment guides you through more serious issues. Just as importantly, Charles provides a critical 3rd opinion to re-enforce the specialists prescribed treatment plan is the most appropriate course of action for you, as well as confirming that the treatment plan is not over prescribed.

Pragmetric performs a similar function with relation to executing your information management and technology strategy. We have a strong knowledge of all things IT, a strong network of solution provides across a vast range of technologies and sound IT management experience. In collaboration with our clients, we provide a 1st opinion devising an appropriate technology strategy. Once a plan is in place, we brief and engage appropriate specialists to deliver solutions in line with the strategy, all the while ensuring these solution providers are not over prescribing solutions for you.

We are dedicated to delivering results for our clients, and ensuring the best partners are selected to achieve this.

Almost every IT meeting I’ve been involved with all too quickly seems to head down the nuts and bolts technology path. Questions are thrown around like “how much storage space does that give us?”, “what redundancy will that provide?”, “how fast is it?”.

Let’s look at a couple of definitions of “Information Technology”:

from Answers.com – Information Technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is “the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware.” IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information.

from dictionary.com – noun – the development, implementation, and maintenance of computer hardware and software systems to organise and communicate information electronically.

By definition, the technology (hardware and software) only exists to support the information managed within a business.

If you make the information the focus in our earlier questions, they become “how much information do we currently have, and how quickly are we adding to that base?”, “how available do we need our information to be?”, “how quickly do we need to access our information?”. These are all business questions that can easily be discussed with the MD or CEO.

Effective information management should be the goal of the IT professional; technology provides only the tools and processes by which we get there.

Let us know what you think, or perhaps whether IT meetings with your senior management get easier.

You’ve probably heard about the problems the NAB has been having over the last few days (some details here). Details are somewhat thin on the ground, and probably will remain so (at least as far as those of us who aren’t inside the NAB are concerned).

What’s come out is some fairly light information that mentions a ‘corrupted file’ being at the root of the situation.

One of the key fundamentals of systems design is ‘be liberal in what you expect, and strict in what you export’. This means that you should expect there to be things wrong with your inputs, and make sure that they meet your requirements before you start acting on them. It’s fairly obvious that this wasn’t the case here – otherwise a corrupted file would not have had impact on the system’s data. If you detect an error in the file, you simply stop processing, and report the problem.

Of course, determining that there is an error is just part of the equation. How should you move on from there?

Well, hopefully you have a means of recovering a copy of the file from a known good source. Then, you just start the process again – in this case, transactions would have gone through, possibly a few hours delayed. This is the sort of thing where it’s best to involve a human, at least the first couple of times it happens.

Think about when you last filled in a form on a website: You enter your information, and if there’s something missing, you get an error message. You don’t get a situation where there’s invalid information entered into the system, because the system has been built in such a way that it expects some people to get the occasional thing wrong, and figures out how to let them know so they can correct the information before it’s stored.

While the ‘corrupted file’ is being blamed, that’s really a cop out. It’s the first order cause. Blame should, more accurately, rest upon the system designers and programmers, who didn’t validate their system inputs before starting to process the file into the live system. It’s possible that this mandate came down from management, or that deadlines were pushed, but ultimately, a flaw in system design has to rest with the designers of the system.

How can you stop this from happening to you?

If you’re designing systems, make sure that you have good system designers involved – and that you listen to them. Don’t skimp on doing things right for the sake of expediency. If you’re buying systems, make sure they’re thoroughly tested at the evaluation stage, before you embed them into your organisation.

Things that ‘should never happen’ DO happen. Good systems deal with them cleanly, and make it easy to recover from them. Poor systems fail, and cause huge amounts of work to clean up.

I’m not in the habit of linking from this weblog, nor do I habitually include cartoons. However, this Dilbert strip rings very, very true.

Here at Pragmetric, we find it, frankly, ridiculous how hard it is to compare offerings from vendors – even when they’re quoting to provide exactly the same thing. It shouldn’t take a complex spreadsheet to determine how much you’re going to end up paying for a given product or suite of services.

But, even for us, with years of experience in the industry, it does.

How can someone without our experience have a hope of making sense of things?

This is one of the ways in which we add value to our clients – we strive to make pricing transparent, our own included. That way, you can make your decision (with our support), based on the best possible information.

The goal of a business is profit. Fairly simple, right?

In order to make a profit, you have to actively seek out and maximise opportunities while you analyse and minimise risks that have a potential to negatively impact on the profit potential of those opportunities.

Business Technology is present on both sides of the equation.

There are some quite major risks associated with getting it wrong.

The biggest risk, and probably the one that comes first to people’s minds, is the financial risk associated with a failed implementation, or with making a bad purchasing decision. There’s also the cost of a lost opportunity if you follow the wrong path, or if you don’t look forward far enough to see a change coming. Consider the myriad of risks of entering into a 3 year support contract with someone who turns out to be an unscrupulous cowboy.

While the risks are important and, as such, need to be managed, we try to focus on growing opportunities, ways in which we can have a positive impact on your business.

Of course, the ultimate decision rests with our clients – we need to convince them that the rewards from taking up an opportunity will more than repay the associated cost. Our expertise, in support of your decision.

There’s a new generation of pending CIOs who are working their way up the industry ranks. They’re different to the old school in a number of ways. They need to be, the technology world is changing faster than ever. Some of them have reached CIO level positions, while others are still in the early stages of their IT careers, and won’t be there for a few years. The CIOs of the future are a very different breed to the CIOs of now.

Big Iron vs Overgrown Desktops

Traditional CIOs come from the days when mainframes were for business, and everything else was a toy. Back then, if you wanted to do serious work (is there any other kind?), you needed big iron that cost (at least) 6 figures, required re-inforced floors and a pallet-jack or forklift to move.

Next-Generation CIOs cut their teeth on Linux and Windows, they’re used to “small iron” servers, they’re on board with clustering, redundant failover. They understand how the cloud works, and the love the idea of not having to actually have hardware to look after.

Bare Metal Coders vs High Level Hand-wavers

Assembler, Cobol and Fortran – real languages for when you need the job done right. Back in the day, the computers were slow and stupid – you needed your code to be fast and precise. Traditional CIOs are horrified to realise that modern coders can’t code for bare metal, have no idea how to address memory directly, and really don’t care about what CPU they’re writing for.

Modern coders write in high level languages, letting the computer figure out the optimal way to do things, and knowing that most of the time, it’ll get things right. They know that it’s more cost-efficient to add another CPU to each server than for them to spend 2 months optimising the code for a few microseconds here and there. RAM is cheap, we’ll just add more of it, no need to be overly careful about memory.

Many CIOs who’ve had skin in the game for a while come from a development background. But the type of background it was, that makes a difference.

In-house vs outsourcers

Back in the day, if you had IT needs, you had an IT department. These days, if you’re not in the IT business, why would you? Leave it to the experts! Of course, it’s never that simple, that cut and dried – but your Next Generation CIO is onboard with outsourcing, pulling in expertise as and when it’s needed rather than keeping it all in-house.

Technology vs Business

Your CIO has to have something of a technical bent – but these days, as IT reaches its tentacles further and further into every aspect of the business, your CIO has to know more and more about anything and everything. CIOs these days are generalists, who know lots about almost everything, and even more about technology. More importantly, they know how these things inter-relate, and look for ways to leverage technology to make everyone else’s job easier.

What does it all mean?

A good CIO is flexible, adaptive, and able to not only move with the times, but able to foresee where things are heading, and align their business to take advantage of change at the most opportune times.

A good CIO drives organisation change that benefits the organisation in tangible ways.

And remember… a good CIO doesn’t have to be onboard full time.

In this recent post, I talked about older, slightly stale websites being “not-so-good”.

One thing I didn’t cover, was the subject of what makes a website “good”. And I got called on it.

Your business website should be a business asset – yet it probably appears on the company books as an expense.

In accounting terms (which are, admittedly, somewhat simplistic for the purposes of this discussion) an asset is something (tangible or not) which your company owns. Your website probably doesn’t appear as an asset on the company accounts – there are just expenses associated with it. It’s just something you pay for, something you need, because “everyone needs a website”.

But is your website a positive asset to your business? Does it positively contribute to the business bottom line in some way?

If not, why do you bother? If your website represents a net loss to your business, I say get rid of it.

Either that, or fix it. Change it so it helps your business, rather than just hurting your bottom line.

If you could spend a little bit more on it (let’s say, another $1000 a year), but that extra effort drove another $30,000 worth of business through your doors, and on that business you realise an extra $5,000 in gross profit – would that be a good use of money?

That would be a good website.

Most business websites these days cost relatively little to maintain, but provide little positive value to the business. They’re there to dispense basic information – address, opening hours, maybe some nice pictures and friendly words about what the business does. If it costs less than about $50 a month, it’s probably worthwhile, in that it saves maybe an hour or so of staff time when people don’t have to ring up to find a few little things out.

But it could be so much better. It could do so much more. It could make your existing customers want to come back to you, or come back to you more often. It could introduce new customers to your business, start making their experience of dealing with your positive before they start walking through your door.

Ultimately, a good website is one that helps your business return positive value to shareholders.

How could your site do that better?