Thanks, Technorati

A big thanks to Ian Kallen at Technorati for fixing a bug with InfoWorld's link cosmos. Ian and I used to work together at Salon, so when I noticed a problem, I IM'ed Ian, he took a look at it, and corrected the problem.

Technorati is actually at the root of our process that results in the Top Referrals links on our story pages (see this one, for example). It's not a totally automated process, but the raw Technorati feed is reviewed by an editor who selects the stories based on who is linking to us and whether or not the commentary. It beats the heck out of checking for stale backlinks via Google.

In praise of monoculture

From this week's InfoWorld column:

Working in IT involves a certain bit of idealism, which can be either a positive or negative force. When idealism gets out of control, it frequently obscures the practical considerations that make corporate IT work.

Take the concept of monoculture. In agriculture, monoculture refers to the cultivation of a single crop; for example, you bet the farm on cotton alone. In IT, the monoculture discussion often centers on whether it’s wise to bet the farm on an all-Microsoft environment, knowing that your systems could get wiped out by the latest worm or virus.

But what about all the advantages of monoculture in IT? Before my valued readers fire off their “you are a shill for Microsoft!” letters, let me point out that successful non-Microsoft approaches also lean toward monoculture of one sort or another.

Read the rest. I don't really write much about Microsoft in this column, but don't think I'm letting them off the hook. It's just that that horse has been absolutely flogged to death (not undeservedly).

The absolute antithesis to OS monoculture would be an unmanageable tangle of systems in which every system was different than all the others, providing the most resiliency to common attacks. In my experience, this sort of environment is indicative of an overall lack of IT strategy and general inattention to systems management. When all your systems are the same and uniformly managed (whether OS X, Windows XP, Linux, or whatever), it usually reflects a reasoned approach to the environment.

Backing up Mail.app in OS X

Tonight, I was messing around with our Cyrus IMAP server here at InfoWorld and needed to run a test using my mail account. I didn't want to blow away my mail in the process, so I decided to backup my local cached copies of my IMAP mail contained in Mail.app. I thought I had figured out what directories to back up, but I don't play around with mail backups, so I checked around the web for confirmation. This page at the University of Hawaii confirmed what I thought and gave me the courage to backup my mail with confidence.

Getting the Mac shop in order

This week in my InfoWorld column, I write about dealing with IT weaknesses with "intelligent urgency." In this case, after some months of struggling with a somewhat painful-to-manage Mac environment, we're implementing a managed environment that should make things a lot easier moving forward -- but not without significant user unrest in the process.

If you’ve been CTO at the same company for a few years, things ought to be running fairly smoothly. All major systems should be stable, and overall uptime should be solid. Your sys admins’ pagers and cell phones should be mostly silent through the night. You’ve probably dispensed with what I call “wasted urgency” in your IT organization — the frenetic activity so often wrongly conflated with actual forward movement toward problem solving.

Once your IT operation is clicking, a more intelligent urgency should ultimately take hold, leaving your team in a position to get ahead of the curve by continually refining IT infrastructure until it’s bulletproof. A period of hard-earned, relative calm is the best time to fill nagging IT gaps. But how do you identify and prioritize them, establish a vision for improvement, and then execute properly?

Read on for how we finally saw the light and decided to approach our Mac environment like our other OS environments -- by using best-of-breed tools that make management less of a headache. If OS X turned you into an Apple fan like me, be sure to take a look at tools like Apple Remote Desktop and definitely get a copy of OS X Server. Even if you only have a handful of Macs on your network, it's worth it.

Incidentally, as I was doing my obligatory linking to products in this post, I went to the Apple site and noticed that it appears that Remote Desktop 2.0 was released today. We've been using the 1.x version (which seemed quite good). I can't speak for 2.0, but the simple fact that you can run a "software difference report" on two machines with Remote Desktop 1.x is worth the price of admission -- and it does a lot more than that. Stay tuned for more tales of our implementation.

The lowly print statement

Tim Bray: Debuggers are OK, but when the going gets tough, the tough use “print."

Well said.

The vanishing IT department

Karl Nelson commented on my recent column and follow-up blog post about outsourcing basic IT services. Karl pointed to "The Vanishing IT Department," an interesting read from Jerry Gregoire, the former CIO of Dell and Pepsico. (Some of Jerry Gregoire's other writing is here and there's an older piece about him here.) A brief excerpt:

There are three immutable and unpleasant truths about information technology staffing and retention that make outsourcing the dodge of choice for the incompetent and lazy: 1. Turnover is expensive; 2. Retention rate is the most accurate indicator of leadership quality; and 3. Recruiting is the hardest job an IT manager has.

Gregoire closes by saying:

So, what kind of IT organization do you aspire to have? If you yearn for adequate results on vanilla systems in pursuit of dial-tone regularity, forget about talent shortages and go find yourself a good contract lawyer. If, on the other hand, you still believe IT can make a competitive difference and that even the more mundane tasks can be a channel of competitive advantage given a little creative effort, then developing and retaining a professional organization should be your number-one goal. If it is, I thank you and wish you the very best.

I think this is too strongly worded. In my opinion, the job of the CTO or CIO is more generally to recognize top talent and try to leverage it for the benefit of their organizations. Sometimes that talent sits outside of your own organization within an outsourcer (and without a doubt, turnover with outsourcers is expensive just like people turnover). No IT organization of any size can maintain the highest level of expertise in everything. I also think that some "mundane tasks" will never make a competitive difference no matter how much "creative effort" is put behind them. Why would you ever want to do the IT behind payroll, for example, when you can outsource to companies like ADP? In the end, I think it's all about picking your outsourcing vs. insourcing battles. Outsourcing nothing seems as much an ill-informed strategy as outsourcing everything. There's a balance somewhere in between.

Joy of outsourcing

[Update: I forgot to link to my current InfoWorld column in my original post! ] My current InfoWorld column deals with an outsourcing arrangement that is proving to be increasingly compelling as time goes on. (Note that my column is not a general pro-outsourcing argument, as one sentence makes clear: "Although I don’t think outsourcing is inherently beneficial, a good outsourcing relationship can deliver amazing benefits.")

Right now, my key internal systems are being monitored by a 24-hour NOC (network operations center) using integrated monitoring solutions that I would never be able to buy or integrate into my environment. Our employees benefit from around-the-clock support. A seamlessly automated, proactive patching solution keeps our systems up-to-date and every desktop or laptop is backed up every day regardless of location. I don’t manage these nuts-and-bolts, but I am able to track them via a convenient Web-based dashboard that gives me an instant read on the health of my IT environment, and I receive monthly reports on end-user satisfaction that are audited by a third party. The array of services offered to me has broadened in the past year, but I will actually be paying less for them as my provider continues to achieve economies of scale with a growing customer base.

Lest this arrangement sound a little too utopian, the employees at InfoWorld do the usual complaining about IT support (when you're dealing with Microsoft products, nothing is perfect), but through my outsourcer, I actually have third-party audited satisfaction scores to cut through the din and lots of traps and mechanisms to deal with the inevitable instances of dissatisfaction. Having run relatively small in-house desktop support teams, I know that the work itself is demanding and it's often difficult to carve out the management time to put objective mechanisms in place to measure how well your employee population is being served. Typically, you end up relying on anecdotal evidence too much and if one person has a bad experience, it's difficult to point to any reasonably objective trends in the rest of your body of service to make it clear that one bad experience is an anomaly (and maybe it isn't!) In any case, the old adage that you can't manage what you can't measure holds true in desktop support as well, it's just difficult for a small organization to put together systems that deliver consistent and regular performance metrics. A carefully considered outsourcing arrangement with clear built-in performance metrics can get you there (and, of course, a poor outsourcing arrangement with unclear performance metrics can kill you).

A final thought occurred to me while I was writing this column -- while many IT folks still attack outsourcing as a "bad thing," there's another side to the story. The outsourcers I currently deal with are all local IT professionals like me. Outsourcing isn't fundamentally a job-destroying concept. For example, the guys who manage our web hosting infrastructure work just down the street. I wouldn't be surprised to see them out at lunch, and I wouldn't hesitate to buy them a beer if I saw them in the local pub after work.

MIT Technology Review RSS feed

This might be old news, but the MIT Technology Review weblog has an RSS feed. I had noticed that RSS was missing back in October, but it's there now. (Update: earlier I had linked to the MIT Technology Review RSS feed with the https:// prefix -- it's now corrected.)

Nicholas Carr in ACM's Ubiquity

I've occasionally read ACM's Queue magazine, but was surprised to come across their web-only publication, Ubiquity. Despite its suggestive name, I hadn't actually seen it anywhere before. In any case, Ubiquity has an interview with Nicholas Carr in which the interviewer asks Carr to state the thesis of his latest book in an "elevator pitch." Here's the exchange:

UBIQUITY: As you've talked to people about the book, have you figured out the author's equivalent of the entrepreneur's "elevator pitch" — a one- or two-sentence description of the book's thesis?

CARR: Not really, but I can give it a shot: I think that one of the most crucial of all strategic questions any company needs to ask itself is, Which resources can provide us with a competitive advantage and which are simply commodity inputs that we need to buy but that aren't going to distinguish us in any lasting way? My argument in the book is that, over time, information technology has moved from the first category — a resource that could provide a strong competitive advantage for innovative users — into the latter category, a simple "cost of doing business."

By the way, if the folks at ACM are listening, web-only technology-focused publications like Ubiquity are absolute naturals for RSS feeds.