Cloud computing, shifts in IT roles

BostonB

Well its like SQL. Its very easy to do simple queries (searches). But as complexity increases its very easy to make a mistake in a query, or a join and get the wrong data back.

Bad data in = bad data out. Its very easy for someone to put in bad data, email you from a different account, or change the subject matter, or not have a key phrase in a email. You could also label or it, or not label it incorrectly and your filters could fail.

You can also makes mistakes with traditional sorting. Personally I think its more transparent. YMMV.

BostonB

I think a lot of SME have the experience of the IT gurus's getting sidetracked in solving a IT problem not the the underlying business requirement. I don't think its a one way street.

Boskonay

I also think it depends on the nature of type of cloud service. If a small business replaces their PBX, for example, with one hosting in the cloud, then as long as their handsets are online, it's working.... A much 'simpler' solution than a domain controller, etc, etc

Evil Phil

Google spreadsheets do have scripts, which are javascript instead of VBA, but afaik you can't record a macro. I don't think Google have gone for the exact same market as Microsoft Office. Google's offering is probably as close to Sharepoint as it is Office. Spreadsheets do support web based forms and imbedding in Google Sites. I suspect that Google have looked at web-based productivity and gone for a feature set that is powerful, just in a different way.

Excel macros and VBA are going to be hard to beat however, a lot of people who will have no problem dropping word are going to be reluctant to move away from Excel. Lots of BAs are good with VBA but I doubt they'll find Javascript as forgiving or be eager to retrain.

@bobbytables - regarding data protection. There is a lot of legislative red tape in Ireland, did you mention data protection requirements to the people you talked too? I'm wondering if they saw it as just more red tape.

DublinWriter

fergalr wrote: »

I don't understand this point at all.
Why wouldn't you use Gmail for business?

Lack of an SLA for one, but then again, you get what you pay for.

There would also be a legal minefield over who 'owns' the account, employer or employee, and who would be responsible for misuse of same.

amen

But as complexity increases its very easy to make a mistake in a query, or a join and get the wrong data back.

a bit off topoic and while some what true what normally happens is the data is correct but it takes 40 minutes to get the data and a little bit of rewriting can return the data in <1 second (a true story in my case!)

BostonB

amen wrote: »

a bit off topoic and while some what true what normally happens is the data is correct but it takes 40 minutes to get the data and a little bit of rewriting can return the data in <1 second (a true story in my case!)

The data can appear to be correct but can be wrong. IE missing records, or contain too many records.

In the Gmail context, I recently had to construct a paper trail from email sent over a 12 months or so, and was surprised how awkward it was to list the emails in order to print them correctly, or take a record of them.

BostonB

How do you get VBA in Access or Excel into the could. Assuming you can, will the power user be able to work on them, or will it require a higher skill set, which will be more expensive?

Evil Phil

BostonB wrote: »

How do you get VBA in Access or Excel into the could. Assuming you can, will the power user be able to work on them, or will it require a higher skill set, which will be more expensive?

That is an issue, VBA is an excellent tool that makes Excel all the more powerful (I've never worked with Access). It really is the jewel in MS Office's crown. It is something the likes of Google Docs is going to find very hard to compete with.

fergalr

DublinWriter wrote: »

Lack of an SLA for one, but then again, you get what you pay for.

Well, for 50$/user/year they give a 99.9 SLA.

Tbh though, I've always thought SLAs are overrated.

1) Vanilla Gmail is up enough of the time that I'd build a business on it.
2) SLAs are usually just a 'promise' that you have to pay for - there is frequently no recourse, in the unlikely event that the SLA is breached. You might get your month or years fees back, but you won't get compensated for the business you lost that day.

I understand that the client is going to want a guarantee, and I'm not saying they aren't important from a business point of view; just that sometimes people overrate their importance... ...and there aren't many SMEs that have sufficient IT infrastructure to give the sort of uptime you get with normal GMail anyway.

DublinWriter wrote: »

There would also be a legal minefield over who 'owns' the account, employer or employee, and who would be responsible for misuse of same.

That's an interesting point.
I would have presumed that if the company was paying for a google apps account, it would then be fairly clearly a corporate account.
I guess you could have someone sign a contract or legal agreement to this effect when they got setup for it?

bobbytables

I think a lot of SME have the experience of the IT gurus's getting sidetracked in solving a IT problem not the the underlying business requirement. I don't think its a one way street.

I don't disagree with that at all, as Engineers are stereotypically immersed in technical (non-business related) problem solving. Whether the technical solution in turn solves a business problem is a separate matter and why advance knowledge of which technical solution to deliver is key. This process requires input from both the business and technical sides, not just one. It all starts with a business problem, and it is at that level business people should keep their focus when contracting IT people to give them options. E.g. we're paying too much on mobile phone communications between field agents, etc is a business problem, not a technical problem. However, in my experience I found people paying above and beyond for telecommunications via the likes of Eircom up until recent times without ever hearing about VOIP and the range of options open to them. It wasn't a business person who first figured out that phone calls could be routed over IP, it was an Engineer.

So my point is that a lot of the time it was business people who identified opportunities and the Engineers just implemented what was needed. I have met plenty of business people who didn't look for a better way because they were certain they couldn't do any better than what they had. In recent years I've met business people that finally realised the value in keeping technical people close by.

@bobbytables - regarding data protection. There is a lot of legislative red tape in Ireland, did you mention data protection requirements to the people you talked too? I'm wondering if they saw it as just more red tape.

Yes and they did. However many of them just wanted to know was there any way I could get them around it. Sometimes I am glad that some of the business people I've met can't do the technical things I can, for the sake of their customers and probably themselves. The concept of "Just because it's technically possible, doesn't mean you should", doesn't seem to carry any weight in some boardrooms. Unfortunately I've wasted more time & energy on such people than I'd care to mention. Also the stage whereby some businesses decide to bail on an idea because of red tape varies.

The thing is I'm an Engineer first and a business person second. I understand that business people care very little about problems and even less about solutions, unless those solutions can make them money, enough money to make the process of engagement worthwhile. Engineers can often get so consumed by the process of problem solving, why they are solving a particular problem becomes secondary to the actual process itself. I hold my hand up and admit that I have added to my own workloads over the years by trying to find technically elegant solutions as opposed to doing what makes business sense.

What I think is important though is not to undermine the role IT professionals tend to now play in identifying genuine business opportunities. The reason why I say it is because I watch time and time again, even on these boards business people looking for IT assistance and using language such as "just" & "quick/simple/small job". Technology was once a just an optional business tool, now it's an integral part of business. It can be the very reason a business exists and what allows a business to scale beyond any other means available.

Business people could never admit to such weakness though.

Jumpy

I have not seen any company above SME have standard enough systems to even think about using a cloud.

BostonB

I think theres a place for cloud computing, but its not for everyone.

BostonB

Jumpy wrote: »

I have not seen any company above SME have standard enough systems to even think about using a cloud.

Thats good a point.You often get systems that have been built over many years. Perhaps a mess from an IT point of view, but replacing them would be a huge rewrite. Its often vastly cheaper to leave them in place. As the resources to unravel them just aren't there.

Boskonay

IAAS cloud lets you leave those systems in place, just move them out of the office in to a more manageable, secure and resilient environment...

BostonB

Considering some of these system are in place 20yrs, with no real issues, I think its going to be hard to sell that angle.

Boskonay

lol, depends on the system allright

We've seen people move CCTV DVRs, SQL application servers, fileservers, into the cloud...

Evil Phil

BostonB wrote: »

Thats good a point.You often get systems that have been built over many years. Perhaps a mess from an IT point of view, but replacing them would be a huge rewrite. Its often vastly cheaper to leave them in place. As the resources to unravel them just aren't there.

A similar thing applies to large companies, it's called the Barrier to Exit. Where by it's cheaper to support the existing investment in infrastructure rather than change entirely. Cheaper being really important in this economy.

I'm guessing that most companies will end up with a hybrid approach.

BostonB

Evil Phil wrote: »

...Barrier to Exit. ....

Great phrase.

Boskonay

Lovely phrase allright

I guess if the company can move to the cloud for less than they current costs, it will be the decider for many FCs / CFO's.

If they are, for example, paying for power/cooling and maintenance on kit, which can be cloudified, for less than the ESB bill, it's a no brainer.,,

BostonB

We've done a lot of virtualisation of stuff where it can be moved. But there some stuff that it just doesn't make any sense to do that.

Boskonay

Absolutely, POS, Billing engines, etc. Better off onsite.

Art_Wolf

Going to be very interesting for business now with MS jumping on board: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11571613

StickyMcGinty

Art_Wolf wrote: »

Going to be very interesting for business now with MS jumping on board: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11571613

we were looking at their cloud exchange/sharepoint solution a while back:

http://www.microsoft.com/online/

To be honest I think a lot of SME's suffer from poor infrastructure to begin with, so moving business services into the cloud is only partially fixing the problem. What about AV/OS updates?, patching? network maintenance? etc.

If businesses rely on using technology to manage their processes then they should invest in staff to maintain it. I know it's not always financially viable to hire dedicated IT staff, but outsourcing your infrastructure management ( an "IT department in a box" type service) is a more robust solution IMO.

fergalr

StickyMcGinty wrote: »

If businesses rely on using technology to manage their processes then they should invest in staff to maintain it. I know it's not always financially viable to hire dedicated IT staff, but outsourcing your infrastructure management ( an "IT department in a box" type service) is a more robust solution IMO.

In theory, that sounds like a good idea, but I've seen several businesses where the external IT outsourcing has been considerably worse than useless - telling people they have a working backup, when they don't, for example.

Small business owners have very little way of telling whether the IT support they are getting is worth anything, or doing anything, and no way to evaluate differences between cowboys and solid IT support.

Its robust in theory, but the practice is frequently dire.

oooomy

The company im working for has there payroll systems, email, software testing solutions/bug tracking, collaboration tools, file/image hosting, on demand servers all done from cloud solutions.
why pay for system admin guys to manage email for example when a hr person and set up and manage it all themselves for a fraction of the cost.

StickyMcGinty

oooomy wrote: »

The company im working for has there payroll systems, email, software testing solutions/bug tracking, collaboration tools, file/image hosting, on demand servers all done from cloud solutions.
why pay for system admin guys to manage email for example when a hr person and set up and manage it all themselves for a fraction of the cost.

I agree. Managing an infrastructure like this in-house by hiring dedicated staff is madness for an SME (bar a few exceptions). The problem is that patching, Anti virus and other basic PC maintenance tasks isn't included at a local level in any of the cloud service offerings (the ones I've seen anyway). This is probably the biggest indirect expense associated with using technology in the workplace. Fine if you've got the "go to guy" in the office who's handy with computers and can fix everyones machines when needs be, but there's a cost associated with his/her time also.

The cost of cloud services versus the cost of outsourcing your whole IT department isn't as large as you'd think. I was looking at options for our company recently and the quotes were surprisingly competitive with cloud services - but offered a whole lot more in terms of infrastructure & cost of scalability.

fergalr wrote: »

In theory, that sounds like a good idea, but I've seen several businesses where the external IT outsourcing has been considerably worse than useless - telling people they have a working backup, when they don't, for example.

Small business owners have very little way of telling whether the IT support they are getting is worth anything, or doing anything, and no way to evaluate differences between cowboys and solid IT support.

Its robust in theory, but the practice is frequently dire.

I've heard similar stories before but with any service there's good and bad guys. Also, why would a company invest in a service without putting down solid metrics for a return on that investment?

I hope I'm not jinxing the fact that we're prob going to go with an outsourced IT department ourselves over cloud services, but since we're a software development company the business case was simple - keep engineers working on our core business products and reduce the time spend on network housekeeping, maintenance etc in-house.

Sposs

oooomy wrote: »

The company im working for has there payroll systems, email, software testing solutions/bug tracking, collaboration tools, file/image hosting, on demand servers all done from cloud solutions.
why pay for system admin guys to manage email for example when a hr person and set up and manage it all themselves for a fraction of the cost.

Have to disagree with that, all do those functions might be outsourced to a cloud platform, the day to day management is still the same as a normal physical server infrastructure so ideally you would still need your technical staff managing it unless of course all those functions/solutions are being offered as a SaaS.

fergalr

StickyMcGinty wrote: »

I've heard similar stories before but with any service there's good and bad guys. Also, why would a company invest in a service without putting down solid metrics for a return on that investment?

The thing is there's such an asymmetry of knowledge, its almost impossible for the company to measure what they are getting.

If you don't know anything about computers, and someone bills you for a backup system, how do you evaluate whether its working or not?
How do you begin to evaluate how good of a job they did?
Its basically impossible for a 5 person company with no technical clue to evaluate the IT service people they get, and this seems to lead to some very bad people.


I could tell you such horror stories...
...like absolutely critical, can-not-lose (from more than just a business point of view), data, being backed up to an external harddrive (as one of the backup systems), as a NTbackup file.

No problem there, but the file was about 6GB in size, and the external hard drive had been formatted as FAT32. NTBackup failed silently.

I had a long conversation with the technical head of the company responsible for installing this about how this would not work, and how while this business was going down a different route in future, they should really go and check the backup procedures on their other clients computers.


Another story with a tape backup system, where it would rotate through 10 tapes, one a week. NTBackup was not configured to overwrite the tape if it had existing data on it.
That backup worked just fine for the first 2 and a half months.



But this is the thing - you can run a business like that for several years before you have a failure that needs the backup to work - so the cowboys don't get caught out for several years, and even then they can probably BS their way past it - and the SME has no way of evaluating their work in the meanwhile.
Same holds true with viruses etc.

At least with google, if you are paying them to host you data and back it up, at least you have some idea that they are technically competent, and that if they were losing customers data on a regular basis, you'd at least hear of it.


I don't do this stuff professionally - I'm more into programming, and at the moment, doing a PHD in all sorts of theoretical stuff - but these are just the horror stories Ive come across when being asked to look at the setups of people I know personally. I've no idea how bad the stuff people that specialise in this see.
Its a scary world out there.

testicle

Boskonay wrote: »

<Disclosure: my brother runs this company>

And you're the CEO.

Come along. Full disclosure please!