Primarily my musings on the practical application of technology and management principles at a financial services company.
|
|
| Modern Middle Manager Primarily my musings on the practical application of technology and management principles at a financial services company. |
|
|
Anger Management
Wednesday, April 30, 2003 Vendor management. Few things can get me worked into a frenzy of loathing and vituperation. Specifically, telecom vendors. I am tied to my corporate parent's primary telecom vendor whose former name rhymed with Swirledbomb (when that ship sinks it should ruin the parent corp's business. *&^@#*$ super-geniuses). That vendor took about 18 months to straighten out one of my bills in which they overcharged me. Naturally, I didn't pay the bill while they were working on it (why naturally? Because the customer service guy I was working with said it would make it worse. Based on prior experience with them, he was right). Now they want the final bill amount paid now. Wait a second, you guys couldn't make fixing the damn thing a priority for about a year and a half and once you do I have to pay immediately? My answer was, more or less, "No, you'll get it paid over the same amount of time it took you to fix it." Yes, my sense of justice satisfied, I brushed them off. The bastards went behind my back to our treasurer to get it paid. Said treasurer then questioned why I took so long to pay it, requiring me to justify my actions before the COO as well. In one fell swoop Swirledbomb has made me look like I'm hiding expenses and has totally screwed my budgetary pooch. My pledge to you, guys: I know you don't make diddley-squat on my voice calls so I'll use you for every one this company makes, local and long distance. However, I can get my data cheaper and better from other vendors. You'll never have it, you squinty-eyed toads. May you ride into corporate America history because of your pathetic loser billing system from Hell -- the figurative place where your company belongs, your assets sold at pennies on the dollar to a telecom that can actually find its ass with both hands. Whew, I feel better! Now to find $30K in my budget before the perennial half-year revenue shortfall comes... posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/30/2003 05:22:00 PM (0) comments Search Rankings Tuesday, April 29, 2003 I'm fixing a problem with Sharepoint Portal Server's search rankings (turned out it was because password-protected Excel documents don't get indexed) and it got me to thinking about search rankings on the web. I am the #1 result for "middle manager" on Google and AllTheWeb, #1 for "change mangement" on Lycos and #17 for "leopard print comforter" on Yahoo. Scary stuff, that. Several people have written about how blogs have skewed search results on the web and how it will either force Google, et al, to change the way they rank pages or wind up making them eventually irrelevant (and dampen their ad revenue). I know this isn't a unique or timely observation. What does annoy me, however, is that some MIT professor always comes up in Google searches on my name. Hell, I see dead people appear before I do. So to help Google change this, here's my name for it to index: Henry Jenkins Henry Jenkins Henry Jenkins Henry Jenkins Henry Jenkins Another blow in favor of vanity! posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/29/2003 05:09:00 PM (0) comments The Ducks Just Dropped a Game Monday, April 28, 2003 I'm afraid the Ducks just lost to the Stars, 2-1. However, they are still up in the series, 2-1. Last year it was the Angels; could this year be the Ducks' turn for a championship? posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/28/2003 09:59:00 PM (0) comments Chapter 3 - Where'd the Money Go? Chapter 3 is about benchmarking IT spending. I've already done this in a previous post (damn, where'd it go?) and found that our IT spending as a percentage of revenue was just about on target for our industry (6.7%). Interestingly enough, our staffing is almost 29% less than the industry average and our spending per employee is about 10% less. I attribute some of this to intense standardization, the lack of rogue software running around and the use of several tools to make remote visits unnecessary. We expect that time spent doing end-user support will continue to decline as we centralize using thin clients on Citrix Metaframe. Ultimately this will impact the bottom line of the company in a positive way. posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/28/2003 09:58:00 PM (0) comments I'm Outta Gas... I'm reading another book, the name of which escapes me, that recommends running as an exercise discipline. Since my will to exercise is low and I'm up for anything that promises results in a short amount of time, I decided to give it a try. I'm supposed to do 10 minutes of jogging a day for the first week. OK, maybe 8 minutes of running and two minutes of walking. Not necessarily consecutively. All I can tell you is that I have several muscles that lodged some pretty impressive protests during that brief span of time. Moral of the story -- don't let yourself turn into a couch potato... posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/28/2003 09:45:00 PM (0) comments Chapters 1 & 2 - Why IT Departments Suck Sunday, April 27, 2003 The first two chapters of the Executive's Guide... lay out the premise of the book -- that the IT department is perhaps the greatest source of added value in an organization and unless those resources are used wisely it is the greatest sinkhole. To which I remark...duh. Pretty conventional wisdom. Some good graphs and charts on benchmarking your organization's IT spending vis-a-vis the industry are available, although more detailed data is available from outfits like the META Group. It gets more interesting when the authors explore why IT departments are ineffective. They list a few categories: business turmoil, vendor management, staffing & communications and financial & risk management. However, they list these as proximate causes -- the ultimate cause, they argue, is IT management. Specifically, IT managers who are promoted into the position before they have the financial, political and communication skills necessary are most common source of dysfunction. Their solutions are to improve IT management, add basic project management discipline, manage vendors properly, improve fiscal management & budgeting and improve the relationship between IT and the business. One of the more fascinating ideas for me was being able to tie a dollar of IT expenditure to the revenues of the company. Easy enough -- the IT budget is 6.7% of total revenues. Therefore it takes about $15 dollars in revenue to fund every dollar IT spends. That's a different perspective than I've used. In researching this idea I found that our net margin is 60 basis points (0.6%). That means it takes $100 in revenue to make 60 cents in profit. Now that's a management problem... posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/27/2003 10:12:00 PM (0) comments Is This Sad or What? So I'm watching the NBA Playoffs with my girlfriend in her living room as she works on her laptop and I on mine over the WiFi network at her home... posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/27/2003 09:40:00 PM (0) comments Wireless Roundup Being part of a small company, I don't have the pleasure of a separate R&D department, or team, or really much of anything. So that means I occasionally turn myself into the R&D department. Last week's toys have been the Linksys 802.11g wireless equipment and the SprintPCS wireless network, both used on a laptop I borrowed from work. The Linksys PC adapter and cable router/access point took about 30 minutes to set up. I set up the Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP) with a 128-bit key as well. The throughput has been great and the signal strength tests I've done have been good, so far. I haven't tried my balcony because my homeowner's association (curse their moustaches!) has had it destroyed. I also tried it on my girlfriend's 802.11b network and it's been working absolutely perfectly once I set up her network for encryption. The entire setup (Broadband router, PC Card and PCI Card I haven't installed yet) cost less than $400. A pretty solid system from what I can tell and very handy at home. The SprintPCS service uses their CDMA data network. The card is a Novatel Merlin that installs in about 15 minutes (1 minute to install, 14 minutes to download the latest version of the software). In areas where Sprint supposedly has a "great" presence I'm getting about 30Kbps. Allegedly it can reach speeds of 100Kbps but I have yet to experience that. The advantage of a service like this is access to the Internet throughout most of the United States. The disadvantages are twofold: the speed is equivalent to dialup and the cost is outrageous. Although I've deployed one of our salespeople with a card, I'm unconvinced that it will see widespread use because of those two factors. Some people think that the future of wireless consists of almost ubiquitous WiFi hotspots vs. a national network. I think that may be right considering the cost of a national CDMA 3G buildout. Right now the cost of being an early adopter is too high for a small to medium-sized business. posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/27/2003 09:38:00 PM (0) comments Book Review by Chapter I just started reading a book called The Executive's Guide to Information Technology. The authors, John Bascab and Jon Piot, work for an IT consultancy that specializes in turning around ineffective IT. I had read some good press about this book and, in my new role as semi-executive of an IT department, wanted to match their experiences with how I've built and continue to build my IT department. I'll be summarizing each chapter over the subsequent weeks. posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/27/2003 09:20:00 PM (0) comments Shooting Myself in the Foot Sunday, April 20, 2003 I've had some really great things happen since the year began: a promotion, a girlfriend, a new niece, a staff that's communicating well with each other, some travel and studying for the ground school exam. However, it seems I've inflicted upon myself a new flaw -- with the above wonderful things happening in my life, as well as my love of great food packing on some 10 pounds, I think I've developed sleep apnea. I didn't believe it at first, but the exhaustion I've been experiencing after a night's sleep coupled with some other unfortunate symptoms has convinced me I need to see a doctor next week. (*@&#$^(*#&^$ it. Maybe he'll tell me that all I need is to lose weight, exercise regularly and take some decongestants to clear up this chronic sinus problem. Here's to optimism! posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/20/2003 12:18:00 AM (0) comments CIO Magazine - Top Six Things CIO's Should Do The April edition of CIO Magazine online lists the top six things a CIO should do to be effective. The overall theme is that CIO's should get people in the company to buy in to what IT can do for them as a whole. It means that CIO's must touch the executives, department managers and influential users. When I look at the mirror I see that I've got a pretty good relationship with the two latter groups; it is the execs I have a problem spending time with. Most of that is a desire to keep from being crushed between the Banking and Wealth Management forces in management. The other part is that I have a hard time respecting them. I also find eight-hour long meetings a tremendous waste of time. With what actually gets accomplished in those meetings I could be practicing my golf game. Heh. posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/20/2003 12:01:00 AM (0) comments Happy Easter Saturday, April 19, 2003 Today everyone celebrates the resurrection of the Easter Bunny who brings kids chocolate as a remembrance. I hope all of you have a good Easter Sunday! posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/19/2003 11:59:00 PM (0) comments Idea Guys. I hate idea guys. No, scratch that...I don't hate them, I severely dislike them. But don't they have vision? Don't they revitalize and re-energize? Don't they make companies competitive? Uh, no. I'm not talking about people with vision. I'm talking "idea guys," usually a high-paid exec whose latest diarrhea of the mouth is buzzword-laced hyperbole capable of only causing grief to those of us unlucky enough to be handed a mandate to implement it. It is unfortunate that I am not in executive meetings when these things are bandied about; I fear my boss' bullshit detector, while pretty finely tuned, may not detect the more subtle aroma of hype because he's not a tech exec. Why am I ranting about this? I had a conversation with one of my senior managers about another exec's vision for the wealth management LOB involving "open platforms and systems." Ahem. Yeah, I'm sure "open system" means Microsoft and "open platform" means Excel in his jargon. Sigh. Half the battle is trying to get a senior manager to actually speak in English and describe what they want without the fluff. Of course, that would also mean they might know more than just words, words, words (to quote a famous Dane). I believe in vision. Assigning goal(s), alloting time for them, realizing that the eddies and tides of daily problems will interefere with their implementation but pursuing them to their conclusion without burning out people in the process. This is probably why I won't get that executive washroom key. Heh. posted by Henry Jenkins | 4/19/2003 11:27:00 PM (0) comments |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||