System iNetwork

July 2007

July 31, 2007 3:11 PM

Don't Let Those Vacationing Hurricanes Fool You

With all the dire warnings about global warming, and the sad stories of shattered lives that continue to come out of the U.S. Gulf Coast, maybe it's slipped your mind that this summer, as Eliza Doolittle once practiced in My Fair Lady, "hurricanes hardly happen." I'm sure no one in Florida is missing them, but with hurricanes seemingly on vacation so far this summer, without them something else seems to be missing: Object lessons about the value of business continuity services.

There are too many enterprises that continue to insist on learning the hard way that you need a backup, and a plan for what to do when that backup fails. AT&T's Business Continuity Study this year, a telephone survey of 1,000 IT executives in 10 U.S. cities, showed that 30 percent of U.S. businesses still don't consider business continuity planning a priority! Not only that, only 41 percent of companies that have already experienced a disaster take any action in response to warning from governments at any level (it's only 33 percent among those that haven't experienced one).

I personally know of a company in the Denver area (not mine, thank goodness), which I won't name for obvious reasons, that doesn't even back up its systems at night. If their server should crash, they'd have to reconstruct all their business records from scratch and be reduced to asking all their business partners who owes who what just to reconstruct their general ledger. We all know this company isn't a fluke; you probably know someone yourself that works at at least a small company where the same is true, don't you? Or maybe even something worse?

This example of neglect is a particularly stark one, certainly, but even if your company does backups, if you don't have a business continuity plan, you may be personally participating in a pattern of negligence that's nearly as bad. Or at least, could be judged so in court if one of the many catastrophes that happen around the world every day happens to take place where you work.

Not that having a business continuity plan is a panacea. The AT&T survey reports that of those companies that do have a plan, only 57 percent have updated the plan, and only 41 percent have tested them, in the past 12 months. And while I'm using the idea of natural disasters as an example, we all know that catastrophic data corruption can come from many other sources: hackers, viruses and worms, and other human activity -- intentional and unintentional, internal and international.

Some of the reasons for the business continuity blind spot are obvious. Sublime confidence that "it won't happen here" and too many hotter fires burning in the IT department than to undertake a continuity project are just two excuses that too many IT people use to mentally write off the danger. The trouble is, if something does happen, not only is the tree going to fall pretty close to your personal head, but think about all the other work you've proudly done that might be compromised, ruined, or at least overshadowed. It's the 21st century, and some people still think their computers are indestructible?! At least we can say the wellsprings of human optimism run deep.

If your company doesn't have a plan, at least take the first step. Do some research. Someone's got to be the hero, why not you? There are plenty of information sources, and companies that offer continuity planning services that can offer plans and no-obligation information about where to start. AT&T, of course, has such services, that's why it did the study, but they're not System i-specific. The Business Continuity Institute's web site offers some vendor-neutral information.

Other places to go for help include IBM Global Services and the major System i high-availability vendors, Vision Solutions and DataMirror. There are also a number of companies that specialize in business continuity consulting, such as Advanced Continuity, CAPS Business Recovery Services, Clear Technologies, CompuTek Consulting , Cosgrove Consulting Group, El Camino Disaster Recovery, MSI Systems Integrators , ProActive Solutions, Strategic Computer Solutions, Synergistic Solutions, and Tamp Computer Services.

There are others. If your company offers System i business continuity services, please post a response and add yourselves to this list.

Posted by on July 31, 2007 at 3:11 PM | Comments (3)

July 24, 2007 1:54 PM

Let's Get Our Heads Together on "Collaboration"

The September issue of System iNEWS will include a product roundup on workflow applications for the System i. I won't steal the thunder of that article by revealing here what products are included, but compiling it made me think about the closely associated concept of collaboration and what it means. It's my belief that "collaboration" has become an overused term when applied to software. Maybe it's time we try to rescue ourselves from some confusion.

Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org ) defines collaboration as consisting of three primary venues: conversational (e.g., telephone, IM, e-mail), largely for purposes of discovery; transactional (e.g., commerce), exchanges that alter the participants' relationship; and collaborational interactions (e.g., document management), which alter a "collaboration entity," which could be development of an idea or creation of a design. (While I realize it's become fashionable to bash Wikipedia lately, most notoriously because of perceptions of bias in some politically related definitions on the part of some political purists, and I myself find a bit of fault with defining collaboration with that very term tacked on to other words, let's pass over those objections for now.) These three definitions cover a lot of ground but I think represent a majority consensus about general meanings of the word.

Similarly, there are many solutions that claim to be "collaborative" software in the System i market, and they range from Notes/Domino and Sametime, through eCommerce apps, to ERP and medical apps (for example) that provide collaborative features, to application development tools that cater to teams of programmers, and finally to imaging and content-management applications that let multiple users put their fingers in any collective pie, so to speak.

The problem is, as I explained to a colleague, if I write one paragraph in an MS Word document, send it to you, and you alter it, then we've "collaborated." But that doesn't make Word a collaboration application, does it? Not really. And although applications like e-mail, IM, and Sametime are important tools, they've become such generic forms of communication for all kinds of functions. So I wonder if it's completely fair anymore to call them collaborative, particularly when the communication may not be to any specific end at all.

I'm inclined to think collaborative really should only be used to refer to the third case in the Wikipedia definition, that of facilitating joint development of an idea or project. Or I suppose what you could call "projectware," and let the rest remain in a more general groupware category. That way, "collaborative applications" could be generally divided into two much more intelligible groups, namely collaborative development tools that let a programming team collectively build an application, and collaborative content tools that let end users build documents, presentations, and other concept-based entities. (Of course, finding a way to enforce this definition on an industry that loves to apply the latest buzz words to the widest possible assortment of features and products would be another story.) Both product types would need to include such necessary features as versioning, tracking who changed what, and failsafes against two people modifying the same part at the same time but only one of those changes being recorded, for example.

Or am I way out on a limb here? Do you think the concept of collaboration could use a bit of redefinition? Do we need to separate applications that enable mere communication with each other from software that helps us build something specific?

Posted by on July 24, 2007 at 1:54 PM | Comments (2)

July 16, 2007 3:33 PM

Online Social Networking for IT: Here to Stay

Last weekend I got together with some buddies. After one of the guys got a check-in call from his teenaged daughter, there was the usual "gee, they grow up fast" conversation that wandered into the MySpace debate because the dad mentioned that both of his daughters have pages there. None of the other guys in the group have daughters, and pretty soon several people were trundling out the conventional wisdom about MySpace being nothing but flypaper for child molesters. "How do you deal with your girls not giving out too much information about themselves?" one of us asked. The dad said, "Oh, I tell them over and over not to reveal enough for anyone to find them." Then he smiled broadly and said, "Of course, I have my own MySpace account just to keep an eye on that."

He's far from the first adult to do something like that, but what's getting to be news is how many people are doing it for professional rather than family reasons. While there certainly are plenty of horror stories about social networking's potential downsides, it's starting to look like this phenomenon is catching fire in the business world. As it should be.

As happens in human culture from time to time, youth is leading its elders, in this instance into yet another aspect of Internet culture that was unforeseen not so long ago. Naturally, IT people, System i users among them, are some of the first to see there are benefits.

IBM is trying to take a leadership role by offering several opportunities for System i professionals to take advantage of social networking. It's been encouraging the System i community to join iSociety ( http://www.isociety.org ), its "online home for everyone who believes in the System i philosophy of business computing," as former COMMON President Beverly Russell put it in her introductory letter last September. At the Town Meeting at COMMON Anaheim in May, Trevor Perry and others commented on iSociety's substantial growth since its launch.

IBM also launched last spring IBM developerWorks community spaces ( http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/spaces ), designed to help developers "build communities around a broad range of technology topics and business trends." In addition, it announced IBM Lotus Connections for Partners ( http://paxos.lotus.com ), a resource that lets IBM business partners "create and share profile information that describes their business, find subject matter experts, share online information through social bookmarking and blogging, engage in collaborative business activities as appropriate and joint communities of interest."

IBM's Lotus Connections ( http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product3.nsf/wdocs/connectionshome ) product facilitates community building, blog writing, and other networking with other employees, business partners, and customers. For example, includes a feature called dogear that lets people "save, organize, and share" Internet bookmarks with their established community, and advocates search-and-pivot browsing, "where you start by navigating by tags or links or people, and, when you find someone who looks interesting, pivot to go to their Profile or their bookmarks."

Of course, Microsoft's not far behind, supposedly working on social networking tools based on MS Office. Just a few other examples of social networks for business are Advogado ( http://www.advogado.net ) a community for open-source software developers, as well as LinkedIn ( http://www.linkedIn.com ) and Zoodango ( http://www.zoodango.com ), where users can swap resumes and do some professional networking.

It would be easy to argue that professional social networking, particularly among IT types, is just an outgrowth of forums, which have probably been around since the Beatles broke up. But trading personal information and making professional and quasipersonal connections via the Internet is a whole order of magnitude above swapping tips and techniques and answering each other's technical questions. I think this is happening because of the psychological aspects.

In a world that has encouraged us for millennia to retreat into social isolation aside from a small trusted circle of family and friends, and to treat anyone we don't know personally as a potential threat, online social networking is relatively safe, despite what the Chris Hansens of the world would lead us to believe is the norm. You can sit in your own office or home, a safe environment, and only put out in public what you're willing to share, and you can make connections with people who can't pull a gun on you or bash you over the head just because you've accidentally started talking to someone bad. Certainly there's potential danger for the naive, but that shouldn't be the gating factor. And as more people start participating, the fear factor will diminish. Don't forget, people were once afraid of riding in automobiles, and even though that can be downright deadly on occasion, there are few of us now who would willingly give ours up. They're just too darned convenient.

And so it will go with online social networking for professional purposes. The networking, problem-solving, and information-exchange convenience this phenomenon represents are bigger than anyone realizes until they get involved. In a few years, people won't believe how they were once able to get along without a community in which they can find colleagues at other companies who follow the same occupations, face the same problems, and maybe even have worked for the same idiot bosses who've migrated to greener pastures. At the least, I think we'll be able to discover a huge commonality of interest with as many people as we reasonably have time to interact with.

And lucky us, the tech-savvy folks working in IT, we get to be among the first to discover the benefits personally. This genie's fled the bottle and won't ever go back.

Posted by on July 16, 2007 at 3:33 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2007 2:14 PM

What's IT's Worst Problem? Studies Can't Agree

Press releases about interesting IT-related studies cross my desk constantly. For years I simply ignored them because there wasn't much I could do with them. But the advantage of a blog is that I can at least point to them and some of the issues they raise. The issues become sharper when several studies point to dramatically different problems.

Four recent ones form a case in point. All frame their announcements as if they're pinpointing the most significant problem for IT in today's world, but strangely enough, they completely disagree about what that is. None of the four is System i-specific, but it seems illogical to suppose similar studies at System i shops wouldn't provide at least somewhat similar results.

Let's start with the SupportSoft IT Headache Index, a study sponsored last spring by SupportSoft ( http://www.supportsoft.com ), a seller of help desk automation software and services primarily for Windows. That study analyzed two million call logs from 20 large corporations averaging 75,000 employees each and found that 75 percent of all help desk calls are caused by just five major problem groups. Twenty percent, the largest group, were caused by password problems. System problems such as system performance or hardware failures, and problems with or requests for modifications to applications were the next two most common cause of calls at 16 percent each. Connectivity issues, especially VPN complaints and remote-access setups, were fourth at 12 percent, and e-mail problems were fifth at 11 percent. I don't think too many people could disagree that dealing with user complaints is a major time sink for many IT people and that, as SupportSoft unsurprisingly concludes, more self-service password and other help-desk automation solutions would help.

In our market, ARCAD Software's ( http://www.arcadsoftware.com ) ARCAD-Customer, SoftLanding Systems' ( http://www.softlanding.com ) ExpressDesk and HelpDesk, GroupSoft Systems' ( http://www.groupsoft.com ) GS/HelpDesk, Q-SYS' ( http://www.q-sys-co.uk ) Q-CHASE, Datawatch's ( http://www.datawatch.com ) Visual|Help Desk, SafeStone Technologies' ( http://www.safestone.com ) AxcessIT Password Reset Manager, Geneous Software's ( http://www.geneous.com ) Password Geneous, and Proginet Corporation's ( http://www.proginet.co.uk ) SecurPass are the main help-desk automation solutions for i5/OS. If you're running Notes/Domino you can add GWI Software's ( http://www.gwi.com ) c.Support for IBM/Domino, DominoKeys' ( http://www.dominokeys.com ) Help Center, Basic Business Systems' ( http://www.basic.co.uk ) Service Desk for Lotus Notes, and PistolStar's ( http://www.pistolstar.com ) Web Set Password to the list. (For product descriptions of all the above, see SystemiNetwork.com, article ID 20777.)

But that's not the biggest IT problem, advocates of Managed Objects' ( http://www.managedobjects.com ) June survey of 200 U.S. IT managers and senior leaders would argue. They'd say it's application software. In this survey, 61 percent of respondents reported that applications caused more infrastructure downtime at their companies than all hardware problems combined. In environments where organizations rely more on homegrown software than off-the-shelf apps, that number rose to 80 percent. The survey went on to find that 82 percent of the surveyed organizations reported application crashes significant enough to affect their businesses, with an average duration of 3-4 hours and at an average cost of more than $10,000 per hour. ManagedObjects, a producer of application dependency-mapping tools, naturally claims application dependency-mapping tools are the answer. Maybe it's right, but its tools don't work for System i.

Products offering that kind of help for the System i include ARCAD Software's ARCAD-Observer, Business Computer Design International's ( http://www.bcdsoftware.com ) Docu-Mint, Midrange Dynamics GmbH's ( http://www.midrangedynamics.com ) MDXREF, KST Software's ( http://www.kstsoftware.com ) PGMREF Master, Hawkeye Information Systems' ( http://www.hawkinfo.com ) Pathfinder, Applied Logic Corporation's ( http://www.alcsoftware.com ) PDE/400, Software Management's ( http://www.smisupervisor.com ) SMI SuperVisor, ADEonics' ( http://www.adeonics.com ) TOTAL/400-DU, and Databorough's ( http://www.databorough.com ) X-Analysis. (For brief product descriptions of most of the above, see SystemiNetwork.com, article ID 20571, or a refresh of that roundup of this product area in the upcoming August issue of System iNEWS.)

Our last two studies disagree with SupportSoft and Managed Objects' conclusions. According to Pillar Data Systems ( http://www.pillardata.com ), a purveyor of enterprise network storage systems, surveys conducted of IT shops in the U.K. last month by The Kern Organization and the National Computing Centre found that IT staffs there see their biggest problem as one of infrastructure, specifically paying for heating, cooling, and floor space in data centers. Of the Kern survey respondents, 83 percent said space, cooling, and power had a great impact on storage purchase decisions and 56 percent said environmental issues affected their storage purchase decisions. The NCC study shows respondents expecting demand for data center floor space to grow by 20 percent in just the next two years and 35 percent reporting that power consumption generates the biggest financial pressure on budgets for computer operations. (It must be all that e-mail everyone leaves archived on the server . . .) Pillar, of course, will sell you a storage system that meets all these challenges. I won't even try to list all the System i hardware vendors with storage solutions here.

So who's right about the nature of IT's worst problem? Is it the headache of not being able to get enough done on strategic projects because so many end users have so many daily problems? Is it that the interactions of all the application software you're required to maintain is starting to make maps tracking their relationships look like spaghetti code from freshman computer science majors? Is it that the need to track and store the mushrooming volume of business data is about to require you to sublet part of the nearest mall as space for a server farm? Which study result hits home for you? Or maybe it's something altogether different. What do you think your enterprise's biggest IT problem is?

Posted by on July 10, 2007 at 2:14 PM | Comments (8)

July 2, 2007 10:27 AM

On Staying "Alive for 25" in the Computer Industry

It's July and System iNEWS's long-awaited anniversary month has arrived. Just 25 years and one week ago, nobody'd ever heard of us! While we're proud of lasting for a quarter-century in an industry that's famous for celebrating technological obsolesence every 18 months or so, we're hardly alone in reaching silver-anniversary status. IBM's classic midrange platform and many other business enterprises associated with it have defied the odds of Moore's Law over the years right along with us. Today I want to celebrate some of those companies who've been our companions over those years and speculate a little on what it is that has kept so many of them thriving.

Actually, we have to start with IBM. If we think back over the decades, there have been several times when the market thought IBM was going to fail, or at least be broken up into pieces. But particularly during the tenure of Lou Gerstner, and typified not least by the System i itself, IBM successfully managed to reinvent itself and remain a major force in computing. Despite its size, its tendency to become overly bureaucratic, and its long corporate lifecycle, IBM is still formidable. By reformulating its hardware, software, and service offerings in significant ways over the decades, IBM has remained the elephant in the room even as it was criticized, often rightly, for lack of vision, nimbleness, and marketing savvy.While undoubtedly some of those changes could have come earlier, IBM has showed a knack for "just in time" overhauls that have kept it in the game, although of course its sheer momentum and market capitalization have undoubtedly also helped.

Business Computer Design International (BCD), gets the prize for longest keeper of the faith for our publication. Our first advertiser, it's been with our publication every step of the way and was also among the first vendors to have its products covered editorially in our pages. At least some of its success is due to its unrelenting focus on the developer community for the System i and its predecessors and its ability to provide solid tools for helping with application development. Its Docu-Mint has been a mainstay in program documentation for more than 25 years and the company remains on the cutting edge today with such products as its most recent offering, WebSmart PHP, an IDE for web application building.

BCD isn't the only development tool provider to thrive for our entire history, of course. Michaels, ross & cole ltd. (now mrc), Amalgamated Software of North America (now ASNA), California Software (now Infinite Software), and Kisco Information Systems have all been around for as long, or nearly as long, as our oldest subscribers have read our pages.

Help/Systems is sort of a fraternal twin for System iNEWS. Both our endeavors were launched in the same month, so Help/Systems is also celebrating its 25th birthday in July. This company's success has been in another area of vital interest for our readers, that of systems management and automation. Its ROBOT38 was a pioneer in systems automation by letting system managers and operators run programs or CL commands at prescheduled times on the S/38 and its ROBOT product line is a major player in System i automated operations today. Help/Systems' recent absorption of Advanced Systems Concepts, another longterm player in our market, should enhance its longevity even further.

Another venerable player is Hawkeye Information Systems, whose Pathfinder is still around as a system documentation tool. Pathfinder was originally launched as a System/3 product. While Help/Systems shares our birthday, Hawkeye practically shares our magazine's birthplace, its headquarters being located just a few miles up the road from our offices in northern Colorado.

Application software products are the most numerous kind of solutions available for the System i and there are many companies that have been successful at offering those options, too. Global Software, HarrisData, Lawson Software, and New Generation Software, are "historical" providers of accounting, business-intelligence, and reporting solutions for all of the System i's incarnations.

I mustn't forget to mention J.D. Edwards (JDE), of course. Founded a mere 45 miles from our offices, and despite its purchase by Peoplesoft and then Oracle, JDE remains an identifiable entity within vast Oracle because of the comprehensiveness of its enterprise resource planning software and the loyalty it engendered, and still maintains, with thousands of System i users.

"Last but not least," I should mention several other market players of long standing that I haven't gotten to yet. These include Fax*Star, I-O Corporation, Midrange Performance Group, Para Research, Tango 04/Computing Group, Vision Solutions, and WorksRight Software. If I've forgotten any, please post a longevity reminder for all of us.

What has kept so many companies thriving for so many years in a computing market that, at least in the mind of the general public, has apparently been overshadowed by the mainframes, PC clones, Apples, and Blackberries of the world? I suppose it's almost too obvious, but I'll state it anyway. It's paying attention to your audience.

None of these companies, ours included, would still exist if IBM hadn't provided and maintained a computing platform that is still the best system for SMBs in the world and if the rest of us hadn't correctly observed what users of that system needed and provided it consistently well. The System i market may not be the largest in computing, but it's been one of the most loyal, and that loyalty is rooted firmly in the excellence of the system and the software tools that have been made available for use on it. If the System i were to drop off the face of the earth tomorrow, this collective achievement by our market would still stand, I think for quite a long time. It's an example of what can happen when people of intelligence and industry focus their attention on their customers' needs, and then meet those needs with a genuine desire to help and to provide products of quality.

Posted by on July 2, 2007 at 10:27 AM | Comments (4)