People, Not Resources

Do these statements sound familiar?

"We need to see if we can find a resource for this project."

"Our storage resource is busy, but our network resource is available."

"We need to find another resource."

I hear things like this all the time. And while I recognize that most even moderately sized companies have human resources departments, I really don't like it when the word "resource" is applied to people.

I am not a resource. I'm a person who happens to have some unique technical skills that might be utilized to help other people get something done. But I'm not a resource. I'm not a machine. I have a name.

I like this Wikipedia entry, especially the last sentence:

"The term human resources can be defined as the skills, energies, talents, abilities and knowledge that are used for the production of goods or the rendering of services. In a project management context, human resources are those employees responsible for executing the activities defined in the project plan. Human resources are considered to be the most important resource in any project."

That's my point: The people providing "human resources" are not disposable. They're not expendable. They're critical to the organization, and they should be treated that way.

This article outlines 10 ways employers can keep employees happy, including offering flexible work options, communicating openly, recognizing success, explaining the big picture, building trust and, above all, giving employees respect. It made me happy just to read it.

In this world of downsizing and budget cutting, it's worth remembering that it's better and less expensive to retain a current employee than it is to recruit a new employee. Over time your people become more skilled, they know how to get things done internally and they know the customers. In IT specifically, they know the systems and have experienced the server issues.

When I was writing this post, I searched on "I am not a resource," and found, among other things, this and this.

So I'm not the only person who feels this way. Far from it.

You may think I'm being overly sensitive about employers describing employees as resources. And if you think I am, let me know in Comments. My response, again, comes from Wikipedia:  "A resource is any physical or virtual entity of limited availability that needs to be consumed to obtain a benefit from it."

Hopefully we don't need to be consumed to be beneficial.

A Look at Today's POWER7, AIX Announcements

Today IBM is making more announcements around AIX and POWER7. I'll go through a few highlights here, and, I'm sure, cover these topics in greater depth as time goes on. (Note: Some of the information that follows is copied from materials that I received from IBM.)

POWER Blades
There will be three new POWER blades with three new model numbers (the PS700, PS701 and PS702). I'll get to their capabilities in a moment, but I want to first note that these new model numbers, across the servers and the blades, make it much easier for me to keep things straight in my head. For instance, talking to people about JS blades could be confusing. Is it a JS20? A JS21, JS22 or JS43? Which is POWER5 and which is POWER6? However, with the naming of these new PS blades, it's easy to recognize them as POWER7 -- P stands for POWER, and the 70X numbering indicates POWER7. (By the same token, a 570 server was a nebulous term, since a POWER5 570 and a POWER6 570 aren't the same thing. Now though, when a 770 is mentioned, we're obviously talking about POWER7.)

Anyway, some specs: The PS700 blade is a POWER7 4-core (one socket with four cores per blade) with 4GB to 64GB DDR3 memory, 0-2 SAS disks and a single wide blade form factor.

The PS701 is a POWER7 8-core (one socket with eight cores per blade) with 4GB to 128GB DDR3 memory, 0-1 SAS drives and a single wide blade form factor.

The PS702 is a POWER7 16-core (one socket x eight cores per blade) with 4GB to 256GB DDR3 memory, 0-2 SAS disks and a double wide blade form factor. Think of this as two PS701s connected together to provide more cores, more available memory and additional disk drives.

AIX Info
AIX 7 -- The next AIX version will be binary compatible with AIX 6 and AIX 5. That's good news for customers running the older versions of the operating system. (These customers will also be interested in the pending withdrawal of AIX 5.3 support, which I'll detail in a bit.) AIX 7 will provide vertical scalability of up to 1,024 threads and 256 cores in a single partition. That'll be a fun day when I have the opportunity to build and run those 256-core LPARs.

AIX Profile Manager -- Included with AIX 7, AIX Profile Manager is designed to make it easier to create, update and verify AIX configuration properties across multiple systems. Think of this as a follow-on to the AIX Runtime Expert; it will be an IBM Systems Director plug-in.

AIX Profile Manager is designed to ease the task of managing pools of AIX systems. For instance, imagine you have a pool of 40 WebSphere servers. You tune one and you want to propagate those settings to all of the other servers. AIX Profile Manager will allow you to connect to the "source" via IBM Systems Director. Then you can collect the information into an XML file and apply the profile to the other 39 servers.

Withdrawal of AIX 5.3 support -- IBM plans to withdraw marketing for AIX 5.3 in April 2011. For those of you who are still on AIX 5.3, now is the time to start thinking about migrating to a more current version of AIX. This advance notice should give everyone ample time to plan upgrades and migrations.

License metric tool -- Also soon to come is an IBM license metric tool that can help AIX users simplify license tracking and audit reporting. The metric tool will allow you to periodically collect information about the software you're running and make it easier to determine how many licenses you're using. It runs internally, so the collected information won't be reported back to IBM. Think of it as a solution for self-auditing your environment. This tool is already available for products like DB2 and WebSphere; now it will support AIX as software to be managed.

Cluster-aware AIX is designed to help you easily create clusters of AIX instances for scale-out computing or high availability. It will include built-in event management and monitoring capabilities, and will also have features such as common device naming to help simplify administration. IBM considers this a foundation for future AIX capabilities and the next generation of PowerHA SystemMirror.

AIX 5.2 WPAR is intended to help minimize the effort needed to consolidate old environments on new, more efficient hardware. For shops that still run legacy hardware and AIX 5.2, this WPAR capability will allow you to stay on AIX V5.2 while moving up to POWER7 and retiring the old hardware. All you'll need to do is back up an existing AIX 5.2 environment using mksysb and restore it inside of an AIX 7 WPAR.

Personally, I can't wait to test this. I know of several client environments that stay on older hardware due to application dependencies around 5.2. These folks can really benefit from consolidating old
workloads onto new hardware.

AIX Express Edition -- A new Express Edition of AIX will be priced for smaller workloads. AIX 6 and 7 will have all three editions -- Express, Standard and Enterprise edition -- while AIX 5.3 will only have Standard edition. Express Edition is intended for two deployment situations:

* When you're running AIX on entry level servers and blades.
* When you're consolidating smaller workloads on enterprise servers.

This offering is limited to a 4-core maximum partition size with an 8GB memory per core maximum. There will be flexibility to optimize for multiple workloads as any combination of AIX Editions can run on a single server.

Stayed Tuned
As IBM did with AIX6, we can look forward to an open beta for AIX 7 in the next few months. This will give us all a chance to test out the new features and get our environments ready to migrate to the new operating system.

Two Tales of Customer Service

Providing excellent customer service is one way to stand out from your competition. The old line about it being far easier to maintain a relationship with an existing customer than it is start one with a new customer is certainly true.

Recently though, I had an experience that takes this idea in another direction. I ordered a new computer system for my home. My previous interaction with this company was positive. A few years ago this outfit delivered my new system on time, and it's worked flawlessly. They stayed in contact, through mailings and e-mails, over the years. So when it was time for a new machine, I naturally thought of them first.

I placed my order, and waited for my delivery. And waited. And waited some more. Eventually I got an e-mail saying that the ship date had slipped by several weeks. No kidding. Unfortunately, in this case I was counting on the system to arrive by a certain date because I'd already promised my older system to someone else. They didn't want to wait either.

So I decided that the new ship date wouldn't work, and I canceled the order. Or I tried to. When I called the toll-free line, I was put on hold five times. And when I got a new agent, that person needed to reestablish my name, address, order number and other information. One agent erroneously told me that it would be impossible to cancel the order this far into the process.

At no time did anyone attempt to solve the problem by locating a similar replacement system that might work instead. No one I talked to even sounded the least bit sorry that the delivery wouldn't go as promised. Each agent just seemed to be in a hurry to get me off the phone and move onto the next call. Guess which company isn't getting my business any more?

I'm tempted to say that this is fairly typical customer service these days. However, I've also had a very positive experience lately.

In early February, when the east coast was being deluged with snow, I had to fly out of Baltimore. I had an early-evening flight, but, in anticipation of the storm, the airport had already decided a day ahead of time that it was going to shut down early that morning. My only chance was to leave the customer site a day earlier than planned so I could figure out how to get out of town.

Over lunch I returned to my hotel to check out. Even though I was a bit past the official checkout time, I wasn't charged for an extra night. Moreover, the desk clerk got me a room at a hotel closer to the airport for that evening, taking the time to relay all of my information to the new property. In addition, the airline switched my departure time without charging me extra. And of course, I'm grateful to my customer for understanding my dilemma and letting me leave early in the first place. I made a flight early the next morning, and got out ahead of the storm.

So, do you think I'll use this hotel chain again, and/or recommend them to others? Do you think I'll speak highly of the airline? And it's all due to service people who took the initiative and spent a few minutes to help me.

We should all treat our customers -- be they actual customers, co-workers, end users, what have you -- as well as I was treated that day. We should all take an extra moment to exceed their expectations and make their day.

If not, you might drive someone into the arms of your competition.

In IT, Right is Might

Having previously written about management in "A Tale of Two Managers," I really liked this Computerworld article. Some quotes:

"Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these intractable behavioral deficits you must do X, Y and Z."

"... my personal experiences working within IT groups have always been quite good, working with IT pros for whom the negative stereotypes just don't seem to apply.”

"Few people notice this, but for IT groups respect is the currency of the realm. IT pros do not squander this currency. Those whom they do not believe are worthy of their respect might instead be treated to professional courtesy, a friendly demeanor or the acceptance of authority. Gaining respect is not a matter of being the boss and has nothing to do with being likeable or sociable; whether you talk, eat or smell right; or any measure that isn't directly related to the work."

There's much more, and I encourage that you read it all, but this idea struck me: I've worked with arrogant people, but I put up with them and their arrogant attitudes because they were really, really smart. I knew that when I asked a question, I'd get the right answer every time, end of story. Sure, I may have wished these people were wrong occasionally, but it never happened. They were always right, and being right demands respect.

The article expresses it this way:

"While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period."

Fortunately, I have had the privilege of working with a few nice people who also knew their stuff. These people not only knew what they were talking about, they also patiently took the time to help others understand what they already knew. Yes, they were busy -- in part because they were constantly bombarded with questions from people who were unable or unwilling to find answers on their own. However, rather than berate their questioners, they took the time to help.

Are you a jerk who's always right? Are you nice but often wrong? Are you really nice and really good? Be honest.

Twitter: A Toy and a Tool

You may not be able to say much in only 140 characters, but you can still do plenty via Twitter.

I'm a late adopter when it comes to social networking. I dabble with LinkedIn but continue to resist MySpace and Facebook. When Twitter first launched, I went to the Web site and wondered, "What am I going to do with this?" But since I started "tweeting" and, specifically, running TweetDeck, I've found ways to make Twitter useful for me.

For those similarly wary of social networking, here's the rundown on Twitter, courtesy of Wikipedia:

"Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users -- known as followers -- who have subscribed to them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter Web site, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications."

Through Twitter, I've watched people from all walks of life as they broadcast their thoughts and ideas. Many link to stories they find on Slashdot or Digg, though I don't follow these folks for long, as they aren't providing anything new or valuable to me.

I've followed companies. At least some of them seem to recognize Twitter's potential as a customer service tool. I watched employees from an airline help stranded travelers and inform customers about new cities or services that they're adding. I also watched Tony Hawk hide skateboards and tell people where to find them. And of course, in the aftermath of the recent Iran elections, Twitter became the primary means for Iranians to tell the world about the protests and violence.

I agree with those who say there are more followers than tweeters. In my case, I don't spend much time tweeting. I figure people don't care about what I'm eating or that I'm stuck in traffic. What I find powerful about Twitter is the ability to search.

Numerous Twitter-related clients are available for the PC or your smartphone. With TweetDeck, I can continuously run searches for things that interest me (AIX, POWER6, IBM, etc.). Whenever a tweeter comments on these topics, I'll see it. Often I'll check the person’s profile and recent tweets. If they interest me, I'll follow the tweeter. Over time you'll find information that you might not have otherwise uncovered.

Google helped me find ways to automate sending Twitter posts from the command line using "curl" and "split" on a Linux machine. To test the functionality, I downloaded information from different Web sites and used the split command to divide these into several files. Then I published them on Twitter. I was doing things like downloading weather forecasts or RSS feeds, splitting them into 140 character chunks, and tweeting them. People more creative than I am could find other uses for splitting data using cron and simple text parsing.

I'd read that someone posted the text to "Moby Dick" onto Twitter. I wanted to do something similar, but  on a much smaller scale, so I found the text from the Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat" and tweeted that file.

First I split it into 140-character chunks:

split –b 140 catinhat.txt cathat

This created files in my directory with names like cathataa, cathatab, cathatac, etc. To send them out via Twitter, I just ran:

for i in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y; do curl -u
username:password -d "status=`cat cathata$i`"
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml; done

Where the username and password were obviously real ones.

While for me this was simply an exercise in automatically splitting and posting large files, were anyone following me on Twitter, they would have be notified of my action. And anyone searching for the text of "The Cat in the Hat" would have been directed to my Twitter page. Granted, using this service to tweet "Moby Dick" and "The Cat in the Hat" is silly, but as I said, more and more people will find interesting things to do with Twitter.

Some argue that Twitter is a fad, and that it will soon be replaced by something else. That may be true. Nothing lasts forever. For now I'll use it until the next big thing comes along. Then I'll migrate to that next big thing--in due time, of course. I am a late adopter, after all.

Living in the Future

I've owned a BlackBerry smartphone for a while. I'm happy with it, to the point that the iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. Windows Mobile wars don't interest me. The BlackBerry works just fine.

I was, however, unhappy to find that my cellular provider disabled the phone's built-in GPS. While this issue was remedied with the purchase of a small GPS "puck" that can be connected via Bluetooth, I now must be sure to have both the phone and the puck if I plan on using GPS.

I'm directionally challenged. One thing I liked about living in Denver is that if I knew where the mountains were, I knew which way was west. Once I left the Rockies, I found that printing directions from MapQuest or Google Maps helped me get where I was going. Of course, this isn't a perfect solution. I've been undone by getting the wrong address, making a wrong turn or having the meeting location change while I was en route.

Between these experiences and the fact that I'm constantly traveling to different locations and customer sites, I decided that I needed a GPS. Plus, using them in rental cars sold me on the functionality.

Initially I wasn't sure which device I wanted, but then I discovered that my phone could run GPS mapping software. It talks to my puck and uses the cellular data network to access the back-end servers that do the heavy lifting of calculating directions and routing. The phone gives both audio and on-screen directions to the addresses that I enter. Although I can only use this combination in cellular coverage areas, and I cannot be talking on the phone when it needs to use the data link to access the back-end servers, I find that this accounts for 95 percent of my usage patterns, so it works fine.

My first software package was a monthly subscription plan. The directions were accurate and I was happy with it. Eventually though, I realized that there was only one audio option--the phone’s built-in speaker. It was audible, but because cars can be noisy, I wanted to route the audio through the car stereo. (If you have an older vehicle that has a cassette tape player, you can get a cassette adapter and run the audio from your phone’s built-in jack through the car stereo. Otherwise, you can use small radio transmitters that will broadcast over FM to your car radio.)

Unfortunately, my software didn't support audio from the phone's built-in jack, only the built-in speaker. And after multiple interactions with support, I learned that the solution provider didn't plan on changing this any time soon. I was hardly the only one seeking this function. The provider's support forums were overflowing with posts from frustrated users/soon-to-be former customers who wanted this functionality added. I too wound up turning to a new GPS software solution. Now I can route the audio through the car stereo or an earpiece.

As I think about all the things I can do from my phone--make calls, check e-mail, play MP3s, update my calendar, use GPS mapping software, browse the Internet, ssh to servers--I realize that we are  living in the future. Wil Wheaton (you might know him from his books, his blog, the movie "Stand by Me" or the television series "Star Trek: The Next Generation") explains it well when he talks about attending a MacWorld conference many years ago:

"... Tim (Jenison, who's considered the father of desktop video) had this little slab of RAM that was about the size of a credit card. 'One day,' he said, 'you'll be able to put a whole album on something this size.'

"… the way Tim presented this thing to us — not like it was something awesome that could happen but that it was something awesome that would happen — made quite an impression on me. It was at that moment that I became truly aware of how rapidly the world was changing, and how lucky I was to be living in it.

"I wasn't mature enough to consider it then, but I wonder if people have felt the way I did throughout history, just for different reasons: mechanical flight, telegraphs, telephones, atomic energy and
weapons, home computers, stuff like that. ...”

Even in our jobs, where on a daily basis we work with technologies that were not long ago the stuff of fiction (virtualization, Capacity on Demand, hot swap of server components and live partition mobility, to name a few), it's still exciting to think of what tomorrow will bring. A decade from now, who knows what amazing things we'll be able to do with our servers and our phones?

No, I Will Not Fix Your Computer

You've probably seen this. It's perfect weekend attire for the IT professional. Maybe you don't go as far as wearing a T-shirt that says, "No, I will not fix your computer." But do you tell people to leave you alone when they ask for help?

If you work in IT, the world assumes that you can fix home computers. It doesn't matter if you're the network guy, the mainframe guy or a Web designer--people only understand that you work on computers, so you must naturally know how to fix their broken machines.

In an ideal world, home PC owners would fix their computers--or at least they'd know how to boot from media and run chkdsk. But in reality, people bring their computer issues to IT pros, either those they know or those they don't.

With that in mind, here's a story I've been following. Maybe you heard that the mayor of Racine, Wis., was recently arrested in Dateline-esque style sting.

Disturbing as it is that child pornography was found on his computer, what's interesting is the way he got caught. The (now former) mayor apparently "brought a personal computer to city hall and asked city workers to fix a problem with it. Whatever the workers found was turned over to Racine police,
who in turn passed it on to the state task force."

I also read that the technician who worked on this machine in August 2007 copied and saved the files, and then went to the mayor and suggested he delete them. It was more than a year before the computer tech turned the files over to the police.

If you ever do need to take your computer in for service, take caution. While you don't have illegal files or images on your PC, you may have personal data and files that you don't want others to see. And it's not uncommon for computer technicians to find--and make copies of--materials they find on customer machines. Keep that in mind when you're seeking help with your computer.

People really would be best off fixing their own computers, but in reality, their choices are generally limited to trusting strangers in a repair shop or trying their luck with the IT guy that they know. When you're that IT guy, and people come to you, what do you say? Do you try to help out, or do you just point to the T-shirt?