It’s time to move your e-mail to hosted servers, to the “cloud” as it were.

Note:  “Cloud” makes as much sense to IT folks as it does to laymen. So let’s make our second resolution to stop using the word “cloud” to describe things on the internet.

Why make the move?

Quality & Resiliency

Many IT departments aren’t very good at supporting e-mail. Moving it external often gives an immediate quality of service boost. The staff who were giving minimal effort to support a service they thought of as boring can be freed up to do other, more interesting things that they’ll be better at.

The level of redundancy and resiliency provided by a hosted provider is also far greater than what you’re likely able to provide in-house. I’ve yet to see a client have more outages as a result of moving e-mail to a hosted provider.

Security

Unless you’re spending a ridiculous amount of money on securing your messaging systems with appliances and dedicated staff, hosted e-mail is going to be much more secure. You can leverage their scale for your benefit and take care of security and compliance concerns that would be much costlier and more difficult to implement if you tried to do so in-house.

Cost

The true cost of supporting mail servers, filters, archival, and the whole messaging ecosystem is a big piece of the IT budget, even though most departments don’t account for it properly. The price-per-user of hosted e-mail often feels high the first time someone sees it on paper, but when compared to an honest accounting of the cost of in-house e-mail, it usually wins.

More simply, it’s just time. E-mail is a commodity service and it no longer makes sense for most companies to maintain their own mail servers. Just like you’re probably not building your own servers and workstations or growing your own corn, it’s time to move e-mail out of the local server-room.

There are several options available, including AppRiver’s Hosted Exchange, Microsoft’s Office365, and Google Apps. If someone tells you that they can provide better e-mail in-house, remind them that there’s no such thing as artisanal e-mail. Let someone else do the work, and you’ll be much better off.

For many businesses information technology is just a row in a spreadsheet. It’s where executives direct as little money as possible to keep the business running. Housekeeping gets the same handling, only the janitor didn’t do anything to deserve how he’s been treated. IT probably did.

A history of failed, costly projects and a continued lack of return on investment has put technology departments in the dog house and reframed IT purchasing from “How will this help grow the business?” to “How can we do this as cheaply as possible with results we can all live with?” Instead of treating IT as a business enabler, it’s handled with risk management gloves. Much of that treatment is fair, but it’s also steered IT down a path of increasingly diminished returns and has limited the ability of IT groups to turn things around, learn from past mistakes, and start helping grow the business.

Value, value, value

If you’re a tech person dealing with management and you hear the “How cheap…?” question, it’s hard not to feel dejected. You’re likely going to have to piece something together that barely works and becomes another line on the “Complaints to IT” form.

From the executive side of the table, you’ve got a problem you’re trying to solve and know the solution needs to involve technology. Based on past IT performance you’re not optimistic, so you lower your expectations down to “What can we do for $10 that won’t break in a week?” all while thinking “Why do we even have an IT department?”

The first step towards making things better is to stop talking about low cost and start thinking and talking about value. Get it out of your head that low cost and value are the same thing. They aren’t. Low cost is a just a feature of a solution.  Value is the benefit the solution provides to the business.

It’s really common for IT folks to get trapped in a features conversation, usually because we start there. But it’s only going to lead to lots of hurt for everyone. Imagine this conversation:

“We only buy red trucks.”

“Ok, but those red trucks aren’t powerful enough to haul the amount of dirt we need. I realize that these trucks I’ve picked out are blue, but they are the one’s we need. They will save the company money in the long run by letting us make fewer trips and we’ll spend less time maintaining them because they won’t be overworked.”

“We only buy red trucks.”

I’m being reductive, but I hope you get the point.  Feature conversations( like “low cost”) are a dead end. They lead to bad feelings and bad decisions.

It’s a bad place to be for everybody, but there is hope and a path to change.

• Low cost is a feature –  Again, It’s not a benefit or a value add. If you’re in IT and you’re championing a project, you need to really think through and communicate what the value of that IT project is going to be to the business. Ideally (and realistically), how will it help the company grow and make more money? Continuing to dress up your ideas as low cost will only net you more crummy projects that you hate.
• Accountability is key – If you’re an executive and you aren’t hearing your IT team talk to you about about value and growth, it’s time to give them a nudge.  They might not know that’s what’s expected of them, especially if they’ve been living under the “How cheap can we do this?” cloud for a long time.

Reframing how IT projects are approached and sidelining the “How cheap…?” question doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to start spending more on IT. In fact, it may steer the business in the opposite direction by shaping better decisions and lessening the chance of IT spinning their wheels on dead-end projects.

Rebuilding trust

Unless you are working for a tech business, you probably won’t be able to turn IT into a profit center, but maybe you can start driving growth and profits indirectly. Maybe the new messaging system you put in means the sales team can talk to five more leads each day. Maybe the new e-commerce infrastructure can handle more traffic and makes the buying experience quicker, leading to more sales. These are the type of wins you need to gain trust and reduce the fighting needed to get the boring technical stuff approved.

I’m not just talking about spinning your projects towards the value angle, but legitimately rethinking about the purpose of IT solutions and IT’s role in the business. It shouldn’t just be about keeping things running but making things better. The best tech projects give businesses new capabilities and an edge over their competition. Not every purchase or solution can do that, but it certainly won’t hurt to start trying to figure out what solutions would and focusing on those.

None of this is new. Enabling-growth and providing value is what business IT has always been about. It’s just that so many businesses and IT departments lost their way and pigeon-holed IT into low-cost mode, where it will never be anything more than a row in a spreadsheet.

Image Credit: tanfelisa

The IT department has taken over in a stealth attack. They extort you for protection money and tell you “No” every-time you want to try to do something new.

It’s time to take back control of your business.

How did I get here?

How did you get to a place where technology is boxing you in and the IT department is making business decisions?

Well, to be honest, it’s probably your fault. Just a little. It’s IT’s fault too. And it’s Bob’s fault (Geez, I hate that guy.). It’s everyone’s fault but that doesn’t matter, we just need to air out the room so we can start turning things around.

When I start work with a business that’s struggling with technology balance and start digging into the past a little, what I usually see is this:

1. People stopped talking to each other, or never did talk. The business folks got stuck in a vacuum, feeling like IT never listens to them so they stop trying. The technology team – in their own vacuum, and suffering from a lack of direction – dug in, built a palisade, and declared themselves kings of the playground.

2. Level 1 Support Technician, who’s never worked anywhere else in his life, got promoted to Chief Information Officer because he’s been here the longest. He’s technically competent and a good guy in general, but doesn’t really understand business.

Again, it doesn’t help to dwell on the “whys” other than to say “Yes, mistakes were made. Let’s move forward.”

Organizing the Resistance

The first step to taking back control of your business starts with a question:

“Why do we even have technology in our office?”

If you don’t know why, that’s a big problem. You’re going to need more help than I can give you in a blog post. Call me.

If you can come up with your reasons, go ask IT what they think. If their answers are different from yours, that’s another problem. You all need to be on the same page. Someone needs to be meeting regularly with IT to make sure they know what the business needs and for the tech team to give feedback and options. (Keep in mind that sometimes “No, we can’t do that.” is a real answer, but make sure they can back it up with reasons that make sense.)

All this might sound a little obvious, but I’m constantly running across companies where the tech team and the business team haven’t talked in months. Everyone’s off doing their own thing and IT has just become a landfill where someone occasionally dumps some money.

If you’ve promoted Tammy the Technician to CIO and there are problems, consider that it might be because she understands as little about the business stuff as you do about the tech stuff. It’s a crummy situation. You can’t really demote her without ruining her as an employee, so you’ve got a choice to make – Help her find a new job somewhere else or stick it out. If you plan on keeping her in the role, you’re going to have to hold her hand a little (or a lot).

Once people start talking to each other, you might find you feel better about technology’s place in your business. I can guarantee you that your IT team will feel better about their jobs when they understand the business problems they are helping solve.

Just talking isn’t an all-in-one fix, but it’s a great place to start.

You need to make sure that the employee was exposed to and learned the rule through a well conducted onboarding process. Handing the employee the handbook and other documents and expecting to just read them is not sufficient. Make sure they understand work place policies and rules from the beginning. It helps to ask them questions about what they read. It helps to follow up with them after a few weeks to make sure the understanding is there. It helps to have their supervisor reinforcing the important thing.

There are so many business and technology problems I run across that could have been prevented by someone taking the time to set expectations.

Maybe it’s because of the time factor, maybe it’s because it requires actually talking to people – I don’t know. But it seems to be a step that gets skipped far too often and the problems that result are attacked later on with technology, shouting, and bad feelings.

Through the program, Yahoo employees will have a choice of phones: iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, or Nokia Lumia 920. Yahoo is also going to pay its employees data and phone bills. Yahoo is also going to discontinue IT support for Blackberry phones.

At this point, I can’t imagine an IT director or CIO asking for money to renew Blackberry licenses. RIM (Blackberry’s manufacturer) hasn’t innovated in years – the Blackberry branded handsets seem to be 1-2 generations behind and many of their once “killer” features have been baked into new mail server software like Exchange 2012.

If you’re about to refresh your e-mail infrastructure, this is something to consider.

Photo: langleyo

Before I delve into that, let me give some background. I’m not an Apple or Linux zealot; I believe in using the appropriate tool for a particular job. Sometimes that’s OS X, sometimes it’s Windows or a Linux distro. The majority of my technical experience is actually on Windows. I’ve got both the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) credentials. Microsoft has indirectly paid my bills for most of my career and I’m grateful for that.

Microsoft has repeatedly stated that Windows 8 was designed for touch and after reading other’s experiences, it seems they’ve been somewhat successful in creating a solid OS for touch-devices.  But I’ve been using Windows 8 on the type of device that a large portion of business users will be – a workstation that doesn’t have touch controls.

Trying to be all things to all people is rarely a recipe for success and Microsoft seems to have stumbled when it comes to the desktop experience of Windows 8. I can normally adapt quickly to a new OS, even if it’s in a different family (Windows XP vs. Ubuntu), but in trying to use Windows 8, I never could develop a smooth workflow. For the entire time I used the OS, I  felt like I was fighting with it.

I found myself having to constantly flip back and forth between the new Metro interface and the older Explorer interface that most Windows users are familiar with. It doesn’t help that each interface uses different control concepts. The Metro side is designed around touch controls  (gestures to open and close apps or access menus) that mostly have mouse & keyboard based analogs, but aren’t very intuitive when using a mouse and keyboard. The Explorer interface uses many of the old control concepts that feel familiar to long-time Windows users but some are randomly swapped out with touch-style controls and it’s never clear what mode you need to put your brain in when you’re looking for something like the setting to shutdown the computer (which is hidden beneath three layers of menus and screens).

Navigating the system is different depending on which screen you’re on. Sometimes the new system menu will appear when you put your cursor on the right side of the screen, sometimes it won’t. Selecting many options in the Metro interface pulls you back into the Explorer interface. Even in a preview build, I think it’s fair to expect a general understanding of how the interface is supposed to work. I don’t think I got that.

What is a new user supposed to do with this?

The result of trying to mash together these two different control styles is a confusing interface that just feels clunky on a desktop or laptop. I don’t have a tablet that will run Windows 8 but a recent Ars Technica article noted several issues with controls that are keyboard & mouse focused not translating well into the touch-environment. So the problems seem to go both ways, at least to some extent.

I’ve used every version of Windows since 3.1 and have gone through each cycle of changes without much worry. There were always people who griped about how Microsoft had ruined their OS, but once I used the new version, I found that most of the complaining was overblown and came from people who were opposed to change. I like change, I want things to be new and different and better. But this is the first version of Windows that really makes me worry about the effects of Microsoft’s changes on how I do my work.

The menu looks nice, but I have no idea how to get out of it and back to the desktop.

Microsoft needs innovation and change to compete, but I believe that trying to ship a single OS that works on both tablets and PCs was a mistake.The dual interfaces are confusing and in many cases unintuitive; retraining users is going to be difficult. The company focused on making a lot of design improvements and it shows, Windows looks a lot better and once you can find the menus they are generally well thought-out. But in process of making Windows pretty, they seem to have forgotten to make it usable. The design is very simple and clean, but lacks the visual cues and hints that teach people how to interact with it.

Again, I’ve been using a preview build and a lot can change between now and the fall when Windows 8 is supposed to be released. I hope that all the feedback they are getting from the preview will drive positive changes in the final build. But, as is, Microsoft has a ton of work ahead of them in making Windows 8 a pleasant experience on the desktop.

Update: When I wrote this I didn’t realize how close Microsoft was to releasing their final build. Per Engadget, as of today (8/1) Microsoft has shipped the final Windows 8 code to manufacturing partners. Unless they made some major changes in the last month, this release is going to be a mess.

Until the last few years, I would have probably recommended a technology-based fix. “Let’s install a web filter. That’s how we’ll solve this.” And I’ve installed and configured a bunch of them with all sorts of different configurations, everything from “no websites at all” to “just monitoring”.

That’s the usual response from an IT vendor – an IT solution, which makes some sense – when you’ve got a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

After the install and some tweaking, you run the reports, and sure enough – web usage is down & not-safe-for-work site visits are being logged. You show the report to management, justifying the purchase, and everyone involved considers the project a success. If it was my project, I’d give myself a pat on the back and move along to whatever was next on the list.

But my outlook changed when I stopped looking at the tech and the reports and started looking at the effect that web filters (as they are normally implemented) and other behavior-shaping technologies have on the culture of a company. In many cases, web filters seemed to cause more harm than good.

One problem with how web filters are often used is that they feed the delusion of productivity management:

• Most non-manufacturing businesses don’t really have a concrete, quantifiable way of measuring worker productivity, so when someone tells me  ”We installed a web filter and it’s increased productivity by 10%” what I hear is “purple monkey dishwasher” and then my brain breaks.

• Employees figured out how to waste time before the internet existed. It’s just the newest distraction. Take away the internet, or even a portion of popular sites and people will find some other non-work activity to do. Aside from that, expecting 100% productivity for 8+ hours seems insane to me. A little distraction can actually help people clear their heads and do better work.

• In my experience (as a manager and an employee), most employees don’t find distractions because they’re lazy. Rather, it’s because they’re bored or lack direction due to a failure of leadership. That’s a tough pill for a lot of team leaders and managers to swallow – that maybe the reason their employees are spending so much time on the internet is because they’ve been a crummy manager and haven’t given them any direction on what to do.

The third point leads into what I think of as the bigger problem, and the issue that really bothers me personally – the infantilization of employees. If a business owner or manager feels like (or even knows) that an employee is spending too much time on the internet, putting in a web filter to try to change that behavior seems like a lazy solution, and to be honest, kind of cowardly.

To employees, the unspoken message is “Instead of talking to you and treating you like a grown-up, we’re going to put you in this playpen so we don’t have to deal with you.”   – How’s that for boosting productivity and morale? Companies that use this type of approach are often the same ones that are struggling to keep talented employees and complain about employee loyalty. I’m not one who’s quick to pin down causality, but this might be something to think about.

So what’s the alternative? If you’re a business owner or an IT person pushing this type of solution, what I propose is this:

1. Acknowledge that employees need some reasonable level of distraction/non-work activity to stay sane.

2. When there is a real issue of work not getting done or IT is coming to you with complaints of a user hogging bandwidth & spreading web-borne virus, go talk to that employee. Maybe they need some direction. Maybe they are bored. Treat the problem like you would someone coming to work late – listen and counsel - and if it keeps on being an issue, work it through your normal HR process.

This might sound fancy, and maybe it is, but I have to believe there is a better solution than trying to band-aid this type of issue with technology. There are some really great uses for web filters in regards to security (they add another layer of malware and phishing protection), but trying to shape workers’ behavior – as a goal, seems to me a poor use of the technology.

Photo: Omar Gurnah

Here’s the hard truth: The employees you support — whose data centers you keep humming and whose email accounts you provision — they don’t need you any more. If you can’t provide a service they want right now, they’ll call up Salesforce or Amazon Web Services and order it from the cloud. And they’ll do it without even telling you.

For better or worse, this is where IT is headed.

Maybe our absolute biggest failure in IT support and management is to understand that our perceptions and those of our constituents don’t always line up. A few years ago it may not have mattered. IT could go its own way alone and get away with it, but the days of being an IT dictator are over.

The focus of the post is on IT in education, but I fully agree with the overall message and think it applies to IT’s role regardless of industry. Good IT departments have always listened and reacted to the business. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) some are just now being forced to adapt and are struggling to justify their existence and meet expectations.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the higher resolution Retina displays of the new iPad and forthcoming Macbook Pro computers would increase consumption of network bandwidth, thus slowing performance of corporate networks. Higher resolution screens do not in and of themselves consume more network bandwidth. Some analysts have suggested that owners of devices with high-resolution screens will likely consume more video and HD video, which would result in higher bandwidth consumption. This article has been substantially recast to reflect this change.

The correction to the article is just as incorrect as the original article.

Retina devices do not use more bandwidth, nor are Retina device users more likely to use more bandwidth because of the device. The new Retina technology doesn’t enable or drive users towards consuming more video content. Pre-existing user interests and habits will have far more effect.

There is no story here. Move along.