Last week I was asked for Qhuba’s opinion on Green IT.

We hadn’t approached the subject for a while, the first time we did we simply thought carbon compensation was the best way to go, planted a few hundred trees (well, 1800 to be more exact) and just moved on.

Now we’re being asked more and more what we advise companies to do if they want to do green IT.

Here are three less conventional things you MUST do.

1 - Put in your policies that you will virtualise EVERYTHING you can, but only when opportunity truly arises

Why? The math is a little complex. If you have 3 small machines that you virtualise into 1 bigger machine - you save power right? Yes, true, but if you factor in the environmental cost of creating a new machine (and throwing away the 3 older ones before they are truly done with), it doesn’t make sense to pro-actively virtualise.

2 - Move to nuclear power. (Oops, we said the ‘N’ word).

Why? At the moment, whilst we are waiting for greenhouse gas problems to be resolved, the fastest thing you can do to reduce your carbon production is make sure that you are not taking power from coal or gas-fueled plants. Go Hydro or Nuclear if you can.

3 - Move to SaaS.

Why? Putting your software in the hands of a (very) large data centre makes sense from all kinds of angles. Particularly where they are building hydro plants right next to the datacentres.

You’ll note there are lots of other things we didn’t mention. As a company we believe people should live close to their work or work from home as much as possible. This doesn’t only cut down on the travel costs (both environmental and cash versions), but increases their own personal productivity and enjoyment. Fewer traffic jams = fewer frustrated people, and of course less bad emmisions.

When we planted our trees we made sure they were on places where we are sure they will live at least 60 years long, and not be cut for timber after 20 or so years. You know of course that the first years of a trees life they actually produce more greenhouse gases than they absorbe…

So do Green IT in a variety of ways - but please don’t go and buy new equipment to do it with - that doesn’t make sense.

For a long time CIO’s and other IT folk have been forced to start pushing the business benefits of changes. This is a good thing. We need to focus more on the benefits of doing IT than on the costs.

BUT… There is always a BUT.

Yesterday a colleague asked advice for an organisation that’s moving into open-source and is looking to the next step. (We at Qhuba believe in a very slow - but sure - move to open source).

They are looking to justify the next step. Of course there are the obvious items such as reduced license costs, but to truly sell it to the business they are looking for the ‘business case’. So the question arises: What is in IT for the business?

Well, painfully, not very much. At best you hope - like with any migration - that the business will just keep on running after you’re done. After all, new IT tools are just that - tools. They do not trigger the step-changes that can be made if someone truly improves a business process.
These tools are no doubt essential to many of those changes, but they are not the catalyst.

The best you can hope for is landing up with much of the same. Any benefits such as end-user productivity and reduced TCO have been achieved many years ago. All we can focus on when doing projects around the bread-and-butter IT services is reduction in cost or effort from the IT department.

An that kind of brings back the world of “what’s in it for me, the CIO”.

We’ve been longing to stay away from that world, and now the only way we can justify the benefits are by again turning the focus on our own (IT) cost and reducing them.

This in itself though should be the wake-up call for CIO’s. If there is no further gain to be had on the business side - we should call it a day with IT improvements in those areas, and just stop doing IT there altogether.

Yes - stop doing IT in those areas. Just like most large companies have stopped producing the majority of their energy themselves, so we need to stop producing our own ‘bread-and-butter’ IT services ourselves.

If you’ve landed up asking youreself: “What’s in IT for me?”, by all means go ahead and take the next step - just make sure it’s the last one you force yourself to take - give it up to some SAAS provider, or find another solution altogether.

Hardy Heron is almost out. It’s the latest of the Ubuntu lineage, a really usable Linux.

Arguably, Linux has been the playground of the geek until the ascent of Ubuntu - billed as “Linux for Human beings”. And so it is. With much focus on usability, it has taken leaps and bounds forwards bringing a windows alternative to the masses.

But having a cheap (free) alternative to an operating system is different to having an alternative to Windows.

Certainly in the corporate sphere there are just too many reasons why you wouldn’t want to move from whatever platform you are on.

Directory issues are a key one. No one ever wants to go through the pain of setting up a large corporate Active Directory again. So as long as you’re using that, you’re stuck with Windows or a whole lot of pain - right?

Not any more.

Unusually, in the top 19 billed “improvements since the last version” - Cannonical are listing Active Directory integration at number 13.

Policy Kit is listed at number 4. For those of you that can remember the improvements in security policy settings when Windows came out with Active Directory 2003 and Windows XP SP2, the reason this is such a big issue will be obvious.

I guess that now the Ubuntu folk (clearly with the whole Linux community advances behind them) have almost cracked the usability issues around wireless cards, external monitors and the like, it’s time to step up to the corporate plate and be heard as a viable ‘drop-in’ alternative to upgrading to the next version of Windows.

Yesterday on the flight back from Birmingham (UK) to Amsterdam (NL) I read the worst discription of Web 2.0 that I have ever seen.

I normally try to avoid articles in newspapers about Web 2.0, as I haven’t seen a good one yet. However this time it was in the Financiele Dagblad (kind of Financial Times of the Netherlands), so I thought it might be worthwhile, as influential Dutch corporate executives might read the same.

Bad move. Bad article, not just because I don’t agree with the people being quoted (happens a lot), but primarily because we don’t help anything move forward when we talk in technologies of things we understand today.

Let me give an example: I would bet more people know more accurately what “Warp 9″ means that what “Web 2.0″ means. Face it, we all know that when Captain Kirk fires it up to Warp 9 that he’s going to outrun the bad-guys, unless of coure he warps into a black hole or asteroid field.

But what is Web 2.0? Well, it’s 1.0+this+that+…

That’s not what the way we should be describing it. There’s nothing less exciting that the old version+1. I want (we all want) the TOTALLY NEW VERSION (without of course the instability of v.1.0).

So how should we be describing it then? Well, shoot for the stars and through in a phaser gun, replicator or two. How about this for a start:

“Web X.0 will find us, not have us go looking for it. Information will find people, people will not go looking for information, with the same ease that a Jedi knight ‘knows’ things.

Imagine the i-Phone finding you before the Hype. It just sidles up to you, knock $400 out of your pocket (knowing you would buy it in any case, and becomes yours. The day after - Steve Jobs launches it to very much poo-hah.

I’m not talking about intelligent agents parsing your wishes and going out to look for a match somewhere on the internet - that’s just Web 1.0+1, more automation, systems, mashups etc.

We’re talking intelligent information. Information that finds you without you having to go look for it or register any previous interest.

When we look for people to do new things with frequently we think “oh, she’s the kind of person who would like to do that”, without even realising we’re doing it without putting labels on people or people in boxes. We just ‘know’ that person would like it. Without knowing how or why we make that decision.

So let’s bottle a bit of that, and make information more like us. In doing so, web Whatever-dot-oh will sort itself out without our intervention.”

Pauwl Lunow

Over the last weeks I’ve been in and out of disaster recovery plans, vendor presentations and summing up my advice to a CIO of a mid-size company (around 250M Euro turnover).

I’ve been spending some time on the phone with her and vendors have presentation after presentation on the need for full redundancy, 5×9 uptime, exceptionally expensive systems being proposed and basically the fear of God, hell, or Sarbanes-Oxley being blown in your face.

I can’t believe it all. For the first few presentations I was nodding in agreement, yes… sounds sensible…. until…

Until you realise that there is frequently, very frequently, almost always no requirement for anything past 2 9’s uptime. Maybe 3, but almost never 5. Let me clarify this a little though.

If I’m in front of an ATM and I can’t get money out of it (an example I’ve heard a lot the last few days - no idea why, the client has nothing to do with the financial industry), I am NOT about to move banks. In fact, as in Europe there are almost never cross-bank charges for withdrawal of money, I really don’t care which ATM I go to.

Knowing my money is secure in the bank is a feature, not knowing the bank’s ATM’s are ALL 100% up.

Banking, access to your money is a critical feature - so with banking I can image for some systems a 5×9 uptime is essential. ATM’s do not belong in that category. Vendors: Stop using silly examples.

Many of the examples given are off-topic ones because the real on-topic example are few, far between, and not likely to hold water with a little close examination.

My challenge here is this: If you are led by suppliers to believe you need 5×9’s uptime, I believe there is a 5×9’s probability you don’t. Get a second opinion, and not from a company specialised in HOW to do 5×9’s uptime, but one looking after your business interests.

Advice to vendors?: On-topic examples without the ‘fear-of-god’ factor, and with a huge dose of reality & practical alternatives to hugely expensive to maintain systems.

In the last weeks we’ve been thinking about energy consumption.

 As a company (www.qhuba.com) we’re nearly CO2 neutral, but we’ve a long way to go to eek out the last parts of CO2 and even further if you consider all waste issues.

Talking to someone from the Dutch government focussed on the environment, it has become more clear that the political solution will wait for itself, and is not likely to help us with innovative ideas on how to become more environmentally sound.

My understanding has changed my views from ’cut down on this and that’ to ’replace what you take’. This is a fundamental difference. It’s helped me understand why we as a company have many hectares of forest which compensates for our CO2 use. We’re not actually cutting down on CO2, we’re replacing what we use.

So now on to the waste mangement part: We initially thought we’d start cutting down on what we use once we understood what that meant. I’ve heard an estimate of 140 litres of water begin required to make 1 cup of coffee. Would good stewardship then mean I have to give up my coffee? If so, what do I replace it with? Water?

 The solution lies elsewhere. Replace what you use, don’t try to cut down on stuff unless there are clear other benefits (e.g. cost).

So how do we translate this to IT?

Is there some way that we can say “replace old CPU power with new CPU power, but only to the extent you actually use it?” Hang on, that sounds a lot like consolidation through virtualisation.

Maybe there is something in this idea at all.

What about “only open ports that you actually use”. Wow, we’ve just described one of the key security policies.

And I suppose now, in the face of all the new wealth in features coming with new products, we should take a really good look at what we’re using, and determine if there is actually a need to move.

IT devices are not necessarily old washing machines. Just because they’re older, the documents you edit and the transactions you do using your IT are not of lesser quality.

You decide.

I’m on the move again. This time it’s not a lifhgt to Rome or the US, but I’m relocating my weekday home to another city in holland.

Why? Traffic.

Incredible really to have this as a reason in todays’ world where we have incredible possibilities for telecommunication. This got me to thinking. We work increasingly globally, and are more electronic-interrupt driven than process driven. So much so in fact that when we find there are interrupt not included in a process, we formalise the process so far that we can be sure the next time it’s required, the correct interrupt will be generated causing us to do some work.

Let’s up the abstraction level for a moment to create a little understanding around the point.

Think about your yearly planning cycle. In large companies nowadays it’s an incredibly scripted process, with the dates of starting, drafting & delivering known well in advance, frequently even the year before. It’s become such a massive process we’ve automated as much of it as possible. In many cases an e-mail reminder goes out automatically to remind people that it’s that time of year again, and they’d better get going with the plans.

Works right? Well…. yes, BUT, is it the best way, or just the way we’ve gotten used to doing it?

Go back to the reasons WHY you want to review your plans. It’s all to do with maximising business benefits whilst minimising costs and associated effort. Off course I’m glossing over a number of other reasons to do it here. But basically it’s just good business (sensible) practice to do so.

So why wait until the year is over until you do it? There is no good reason.

If we can identify things now that would benefit us, then why not weigh up the pro’s & con’s now and cut to the chase? Why wait until just before review time to review how it is you’re doing and what it is you’re doing?

Just as any auditor knows, waiting until the end of a major project to do an audit will only lead to a pat on the back or a flaming of the project, but NEVER to an improvement of the outcome itself. Doing an audit at the start and during however, reduces the risk of the flame, and increases the value of the outcome.

For those who disagree, I challenge that you don’t have enough understanding of your audit departments’ capabilities, and are not getting value for your money in doing so.

So here’s the advice: Let’s move away from scripted business, and move to a much more fluid way of working in which continuous improvement is the driver, not our pre-programmed interrupts. I don’t mean we don’t set goals anymore; goals are essential, but I DO mean we check more frequently (but don’t script this part either) how we are achieving them, if we are achieving them, and if we should still strive to achieve them.

Maybe it’s a process politicians can take when half-way through a war as well. If your objectives have changed, or the outcomes needs to be something different, just stop doing what you’re doing and go and do the other.

Easily said. Easily done?

Well, I’m in Portland.

For those o you who’ve never been there, the old town is great, trolley-cars (trams in other parts of the world) are great, and in central downtown they’re free.

We’ve had a number of keynotes, from the likes of Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Marten Mickos (MySQL), Doug Fisher (Intel), and many others.

Of these, something Marten Mickos just said has stuck in my mind. It’s about innovation and the costs of innovation:

“I’ve don’t believe money can create innovation. I do believe that innovation can create money.” Marten was referring to keeping “frugality” on top of the list when considering innovation: just throwing money at R&D is not successful. True innovation is borne of a need to survive. He used SUN as a good example: while they were on top of the pile, they didn’t innovate. When the money almost ran out, they did some of their best work.

The same is of course true of early Microsoft work, done in the times of frugality, it was innovative. Now they buy the results of innovation elsewhere: Are they struggling internally to innovate dispite the huge amounts of money they spend?

I’m not sure. There is much that parties like Microsoft Research do that can easily be put into the innovative box. The issue I believe is more around vested interests.

Vested interests are the reason why Sony Entertainment and Sony Electronics; although owning both parts of the pie that Apple eventually ate; the content & the hardware; they just couldn’t get their differing vested interests aligned.

Similar issues surround the whole entertainment arena with their getting to grips (or not) with digital media.

So what’s the issue then with Linux? What are the vested interests currently undermining the future of it?

In the short term we’ll see. Ubuntu is and has been the most popular Linux distribution for the last few years. It’s so popular that some magazines are having difficulties keeping the coverage of ubuntu DOWN in order to keep their readers on-board.

The next few months will be key. As popularity and newsworthy events increase in the Ubuntu arena, we’ll see what vested interests other parts of the Linux community have. If they are smart, they’ll figure out how to combine the vested interests, nont use them to fight one another.

 from Portland, Oregon, USA,

Pauwl

I’m off to the US soon, to Portland to  the Ubuntu Live event.

Now I have family living in the US, so I thought I’d book a flight from Paris to LA, then do the Portland leg as an internal US flight, stopping in LA a few days on one side of my intercontinental trip.

Easier said then done. It took me quite a while to get the right-priced tickets going at the right dates/times to make changing flights OK. Conceptually, it’s simple. This is what I wanted:

1. Fly from Paris to LA
2. Connect and fly through to Portland
3. Present at Ubuntu Live 
4. Fly back from Portland to LA
5. Stop over a few days, surf a bit, do the Californian thing for a while, then get a flight back to Paris

Now I can’t be the only one wanting to do something like this, but do you think it’s possible in any of the systems like Expedia, Lastminute.com etc? Not a chance. Not only does it want to offer me a full set of nights’stay in hotels in LA (I might want the night before the flight back, but not the rest), but I also have to manually sync up my departure & arrival times.

Of course the fact that I booked the flight for 1 person only, but made 2 seperate bookings means I need to select which itenerary I want, although, to me, it’s just one single trip.

 So I started thinking about all the other things that we have as services that are not quite there yet.

One of the other on-line services I use a lot are the bookstores. I most frequently use Amazon and Barnes&Noble, although I’ll shop anywhere if they can get me the latest Harry potter a day earlier.

Now what really impresses me about those sites is that in most cases (as long as you’re buying from them and not a 2nd hand seller via them), you can chop and change your order, add books or CD’s to it up until the day it ships. I’m pushed to think what more I’d want from them. (I know, out-of-print books - but that’s the hobby thing)

Now how can I have such a good experience with cheap articles (books), and a much worse experience with more expensive ones (the flights/hotels)? Surely there’s something going wrong here. I can’t believe that flight planning is more complex than shipping books, particularly as it’s the airlines themselves doing the difficult part of airplane maintenance. All Expedia needs to do is check prices, availability, and go. It’s not like they need to schedule the flights in themselves (although, wouldn’t that be nice?).

I suppose this is a plea to anyone thinking about providing any online service to, once you’ve built it, actually go and look properly how people are using it. And by that I don’t mean checking out the usage statistics, and seeing how browsing habbits change if you move the banner from the top to the left. I mean actually physically going out there and looking at what people do with what you give them.

We all have different ways of doing things. That makes us more interesting as a human race. Don’t force us into an unnatural pattern because the IT systems work better with it. Fix the problem.

Make machines work more human for us.

Pauwl

I’m just back from Rome, where I did some work for Getronics, and spoke with the great CIO’s of Chevron (Lynn Chou), Booz-Allen-Hamilton (Frank Smith), and DSM (Jo van den Hanenberg).

I spoke about the 3 laws of IT (see http://www.qhuba.com for more info), and sat in on a days’ workshop.

As it was in Rome, I took the opportunity of spending an extra day there with my wife, and we took in the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of Rome. Really enjoyable stay.

It’s a little worrying from other aspects though. It made me think. Again.

In the light falling through the circular hole in the top of the pantheon, I came to a realisation. We’re fixing the wrong problem. The fact that it’s a problem is part of the reason we’re trying to fix it.

Here, let me try the thought-train on you:

We always go to look for the biggest or most expensive problem we can find, and then try to solve it, to see what problems we as IT vendors (or CIO’s) can do for our customers.

Shouldn’t we be spending more time on areas where there are no problems?

Think about it. we go through our lives for 90% of the time with little or no problems.

And still, we’re trying to optimise the last 10%? That just doesn’t make sense. Isn’t it time to stop and take a really good look at the 90% that isn’t obviously causing a problem, and see what we can do there?

Like fashion, food, good music; there’s plenty out there, but time and again we’re made happy by the fact that there’s more where it came from. We buy better mobile phones even though we can’t articulate what’s wrong with our old ones.

So here’s the challenge: Now go out and fix what’s not broken. We might just land up surprising ourselves and our customers.

Pauwl Lunow