Entries Tagged 'The Geek Factor' ↓

I finally, despite hating AT&T and resenting the crap out of Apple, had decided to pick up a 64GB 3g iPad yesterday to get in on the remaining opportunity to the unlimited 3g plan.

I went to the Apple store on 59th St, and upon spotting an employee blue shirt in the tumultuous sea of humanity, asked, “Where do I go when I know what I want?” — in itself an indicator of a failure of sorts for Apple, I’m sure, but not one cool enough to fix. Of course, in true don’t-let-the-customer-help-himself,-manage-his-experience Apple fashion, it depends what you want. Also in true Apple fashion, “We don’t have it, no other stores on this island have it, probably, and the best I can do for you is give you the phone numbers, so you can call them yourself.” No thanks, guys, I have your phone, and the experience using it for the same is far better than the experience you’re giving me in-person.

Here was me, owner of several iPods, an iPhone, an AppleTV, and a Mac Mini trying to buy the highest-priced item in a product line on a whim, and nobody can tell me even semi-definitively IF I CAN BUY IT TODAY?

Steve: If you insist on controlling the experience, you’ve got to get it right. You have to find a way to recognize that the savvy customer doesn’t want the velvet rope. If I’m ready to pay the premium price, and you can save the “concierge” service for those who need it, let me just find out where I can simply buy a SKU and thereby increase your margins.

Random off-the-wall conspiracy prediction: Sprint 4G iPad soon. Sprint could really use the juice, and would be willing to commit a lot to accelerate 4G roll-out, including an iPad-specific unlimited plan which would explicitly allow tethering. Sprint needs some kind of major play to become relevant, the Pre didn’t do it, and the Evo’s ultimately doomed by battery life — we can’t afford to have our phone batteries die because we had to use an access point for a while.

Continuing the Rethinking IT series, let’s take a look at data.

If one of my underlying principles is that today’s IT is yesterday’s data processing (plus communications), then data’s been fairly well acknowledged to be old hat for IT professionals, right?

We’re doing it wrong
Take a look at your document management system (that’s if you have one of those, and then only if it’s actually used) and see how much of your company’s operating data set is stored, unstructured, in Microsoft Office formats.

How well is it maintained? How does it get shared? How do updates get communicated? Are updates propagated to operational systems? Shouldn’t they be, via some workflow?

Does the status of a routine workflow require meetings to update a project manager? If so, you’re probably doing it wrong. Some of the most important data processing the IT department should be doing is processing data about what it’s doing. Activity logging is essential to knowing how your systems are operating. Are you monitoring your systems from an enterprise monitoring solution that hits a URL or runs a synthetic transaction periodically to determine system health? If you’re polling every 5 minutes, is that really good enough? All it tells you is that the system responds sufficiently to monitoring requests that occur periodically. If you’re responsible for operating a system, you shouldn’t simply be checking for the negative (failure to respond to polling requests), but validating the positive.

Data-Driven Dashboards
We need them at all levels.

Someone “on the ground” who’s going to respond to system problems must be able to positively identify how the system is performing in order to determine whether or not a problem has been corrected. I can no longer accept, “It must be working if nobody’s complaining,” and neither should you. Your front-line guys need “operational intelligence”.

Someone who’s responsible for overseeing a routine process (one for which there’s a defined workflow) should be able to see the status of that workflow and work with individuals to resolve problems, without having representatives of all groups in the workflow attending status meetings. If I had a gigabyte for every time I’ve had to “get on the same page” for a routine, predictable, data-driven process, I could… well, I could store a lot.

Of course, as it gets up the chain, the dashboard will get more focused around business KPIs, and less about technology, but it’s the collection, correlation, and analysis of business activity data that bubbles up into those metrics.

Dr. Dobb’s has a great article about greenshifting. Short and sweet of it? Greenshift is how the “color” assigned to the status of a project gets greener as it approaches the CIO. If your organization assigns colors based upon anything other than observable metrics, you’ll never know who to trust.

Which one do you mean?

IT is full of overloaded terms, and business users bring their own vocabularies. An established corporate taxonomy is a must, as well as the basis for defining the schemata of your core business entities. If you can’t agree on the fundamentals, you can’t interoperate. As well, unique instance identifiers must be used globally to associate additional data from disparate sources. Once you’ve established an instance identifier and some relationships, additional data can be joined from key-value stores or services emulating them, with data maintained by different business units responsible for correlated data. Key-value stores can scale extraordinarily well, and lend themselves naturally to data partitioning.

If we need to exchange data, we MUST agree on a way to communicate “which one” of “which thing” unambiguously. Any text field which can be edited by a non-sysadmin DOES NOT work. If your identifier is “what you call it”, you’re doing it wrong, because “what you call it” can change, and your data must maintain its relationships despite a regime change in the naming department.

Envelope backs ARE important
Metrics are useless if they’re not sanity-checked.

If you’re doing what’s essentially key-value storage, if you know the average size of the objects you’ll store and multiply out by the number of expected objects, you’ll find that effective caching can keep most of your working set in memory for data that are mostly read. Even if you’re using an Oracle RDBMS for storage, database ninjas can do wonders with gobs of RAM. A Dell server with 8 cores and 256GB of RAM starts at about $21k before other hardware and software options, but that pales in comparison with the software license and support. Load up on RAM, and use it effectively.

If you’re storing user preferences for a million users, and the preferences objects will be at most 1k in size, then before accounting for overhead, you’re talking about a gigabyte of data. If you use that type of calculation as your starting point, it cuts through quite a layer of irrelevant crud. Sanity check against fundamentals. Allow for a large margin of safety if you’re required to spec anything out early, since you’ll always have been optimistic about overhead, or someone will have found another function that’ll require your resources, since they’re “available”.

Good, fast, and cheap ARE all possible
The economics of IT have fundamentally shifted in significant ways. Software and software support costs can make up the majority of the costs of maintaining a cheap, powerful server.

Open source alternatives are available for many of the commercial products you use. Commercially-supported “respins” of “Community Editions” can offer significant savings — and potentially better support for your use cases. Creative systems architecture folks can help you assess how you can meet the appropriate SLAs for your services.

To do this effectively, however, they’ll need that with which we started this discussion. Data.

Data about availability requirements. Data about access requirements. Data about access patterns. Data about consistency or transaction support requirements.

Recap for the impatient who scroll to the end to get to the point
Data’s got to be explicitly identifiable. IT activity data’s got to be stored and analyzed both in near-real-time as operational intelligence and for long-term trend analysis, “live-data replays” for accurate performance testing, and for resource and requirements planning. Proper data-driven dashboards at all levels indicate how things are working, as opposed to “no news is good news.”

I was just thinking about what back room wrangling may have gone on to have the iPad contract-free 3G service through AT&T happen.

Obviously, as a book reader, Apple could offer the Kindle up for comparison, and Steve could certainly make the case that ubiquitous connectivity would have to be better than that offered by the Kindle to make his device transcendent. He could get people to pay for that transcendence — it was going to be a premium experience, so people would pay for it. But people hate cell phone companies, and contracts in particular… so it had to be easy to enable and disable, with the option to bump up your plan if you’re running over, without the possibility that you’d get a $5000 bill from AT&T because you left a video stream going.

Steve had a few things to offer up. First, he’d go along with the whole mini-SIM thing to appease AT&T. People couldn’t use their iPhone SIM in their iPad, so they’d have to get the additional service. They’re not going to get rid of their iPhones — you can’t carry the iPad everywhere. Average revenue per Apple fanboi would go up, and with the simplified pricing plans and self-service provisioning, the cost of servicing the additional load is just a technical problem, something that can be solved by using money.

So Steve might have said, “OK, we’ll tell Verizon to screw off, make it so people can’t just use the one subscription for iPhone and iPad, and increase your ARPU. You give us a self-serve no-hassle unlimited-use option and another at a lower price for those who aren’t yet sure how much they’ll love our magical boogie board. And this iPhone 4? It’s gonna be awesome, too, and bring even more folks into the iPhone fold. It’s going to do Skype, so invest in the data side, and you can even drop your spending on the voice side. You do this for us, and we’re going to make you THE carrier of mobile data. Buy the towers, buy the routers, run the fiber — just be ready.”

It seems logical to me to have gone that way. Even if the details are off a bit, we can’t know.

One of the most troubling things about exclusivity agreements is that we know so little about them.

When does an exclusivity agreement between market leaders turn into anticompetitive collusion? Isn’t the team of Apple and AT&T almost its own vertically-integrated market monolith?

Additionally, the terms of such agreements are obviously incredibly material to the financial health of both companies, and investors are prevented from accurately gauging corporate prospects without access to that data.

It would seem to me that disclosure of such terms should be required to be disclosed publicly, with well-defined regulation around what can be redacted, and what the allowed reporting delay can be after contract execution.

I’ll admit that I’d be happy to see the side effect of increased competition when the light is shined into dark corners. I’d love to see service providers competing on the price and value of their service, rather than relying on exclusivity agreements and paying kickbacks. They should be competing for my business, not Apple’s.