When people are overworked and stressed out, it’s always good to bring up pointers on how to avoid fights – just in case. Ed Muzio of Group Harmonics recently made some fine points on the topic of email.
As anyone who uses email frequently can attest, it can be fast, flexible and highly combustible. Muzio explains that the reasons predate email, going back to communications studies in the 1960s showing:
- 55 percent of communication is visual,
- 38 percent is conveyed through tone, and
- 7 percent of communication is in words.
For example, Muzio says, take this sentence in an email: “I didn’t say you have an attitude problem.”
Being an email, you don’t have visual or tone. Did the sender mean “I” didn’t say it, or that “you” don’t have the problem, or was the emphasis on “attitude,” (meaning you have a problem, it’s just not an attitude one). Depending on how the reader interprets that simple sentence, you could get anger, hurt feelings, or relief.
Instead of emailing, if you call the person on the phone, then communication becomes 7 percent words and 38 percent tone, for a vastly improved 45 percent. If you visit the person’s cubicle face-to-face, communication gains the final 55 percent in visual cues.
Because emails can be fraught with danger, Muzio advizes refraining sending them when you need to communicate emotional content or something sensitive. Stick with facts and data whenever possible.
I ran across this recent InfoWorld article that discusses how IT jobs — especially those of data center managers — might permanently change because of today’s tight budgets. “There’s an incredible focus this year on driving efficiency,” says Rick Villars, vice president of storage systems at IDC. “What this means is reducing capital expenditures and trying to cut operational expenses wherever possible.”
The article points out that many small and midsize companies are beginning to think of the data center as a utility. “Such thinking would ultimately lead upper management to realize that hosted data centers could serve customers tremendous scale with such little effort and cost that CIOs simply have to start buying professionally managed services rather than spending resources to do it themselves. The writing is on the wall. Small and midsize data centers won’t exist very long as companies take a look at why they’re managing data centers themselves.”
We’re seeing this trend from the other side, which is why EasyStreet continues to focus on providing reliable data center and managed services for the increasing number of northwest companies that decide to move their data center responsibilities “outside.” (OK. End of commercial.)
Of course, the article concludes, “Internal IT operations will still be responsible for the last 10 feet of cable, so they’ll have to be even more aware of their users’ needs… This might be a rebirth of the jack-of-all-trades who can interface with users, make the software do what they want, talk to the back-end guys. Those jobs will be around for a long time.”
You can read the entire InfoWorld article here.
IT professionals are well aware that so-called “simple” solutions usually have their own formidable complexities. Rick Freedman, author of “The IT Consultant,” recently provided a classic example. It seems IT consulting company EDS last year was eager to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency “Energy Star” program for reducing computer energy use, and in the process save $480,000 a year.
“Its plan didn’t involve wholesale replacement of servers or storage devices or virtualizing and consolidating the data center,” Freedman writes. “It also didn’t require the company to pipe chilled water into its facility or install solar panels on the roof. EDS simply used the existing power-management capabilities of its 90,000 desktop PCs to turn off the power when idle.”
But what seemed like a perfect example of “low-hanging fruit” had some serious hitches. Some applications had problems coming back online. Backup operations had to be rescheduled. Entire systems disappeared from consoles and set off alarms. EDS had to put the brakes on the plan and re-implement it as a multi-phase project to eliminate the problems.
“EDS’s experience seeking energy efficiency tells us a couple of things,” Freedman concludes. “First, applying the most basic Green IT tactics, such as turning off the lights, can reap significant green rewards and cost savings. And, second, even the simplest tactics have complications.”
Bob Heye, a reporter for local ABC channel KATU called earlier this week to ask if EasyStreet could help their viewers learn about the importance of securing their Wi-Fi networks. So after a bit of encouragement from his manager, EasyStreet Tech Extraordinaire, Kenny Payne, came to the rescue. (Along with our other technical staff, Kenny is well versed about all things Internet.)
Below is a picture from one of our many security cameras showing Kenny being taped by the news crew. (Don’t even try to access our secure data center without being caught!)
You can view the entire resulting news story, “Is your wireless network a public porn gateway?,” including Kenny’s words of wisdom, here.
Since 1995, EasyStreet has been coming up with good reasons why companies should outsource their IT infrastructures. Now, technology giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo are echoing a lot of what we’ve been saying for 14 years. They too want to convince companies to move from costly and inefficient corporate data centers to the benefits of a cost-effective, shared environment.
The big difference, of course, is that the technology giants are talking about giant data centers shared by millions of users. Their lures are cloud computing and utility computing, which provides on-demand server capacity. But whether the message is coming from a giant company or from a considerably smaller EasyStreet, it’s clear that more and more companies are suffering from their own vastly overbuilt data centers, recurring upgrade costs and the dramatically escalating price of power.
TechRepublic.com’s editor-in-chief Jason Hines, writing on this topic, recently observed: “For governments, large financial institutions, and other high-security environments, outsourcing the data center will probably never make sense. For virtually everyone else, it’s going to become a very attractive option in the next 3-5 years. I suspect that a decade from now running your own data center will be the exception and not the rule, and IT departments will need a strong business case to justify the existence of a private data center.”
He notes that the Googles, Microsofts, et al, are arguing they can save companies from overprovisioning and overspending on server capacity while adding 24/7/365 monitoring, scalable load management and IT service management — same as you-know-who in Beaverton.
“Of course, the trade-off is that IT departments give up some control, and usually some staff positions as well,” Hines writes. “Many companies will be fine with that since IT is probably not one of their core competencies. They will welcome the expertise from a third party and will be happy to find a new way to control IT costs.”
Amen.
