Entries Tagged 'The Geek Factor' ↓

I’m finding myself in a personal career crisis, which I tell here only to explain how I came to this point of reflection. I write this post both to record something that I should never forget, and in hopes that it may someday help someone who happens across it.

I am a ninja.

Were I to describe what I have to offer in the line of Information Technology, I’d have to refer to the slogan of German chemical company BASF. Like BASF, I don’t make the products you use, I make the products you use better. Until now, I’ve considered myself an expert in nothing — jack of all trades, master of none. Books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Matthew Syed’s Bounce illustrate how much more useful practice counts than “talent” in likelihood of extraordinary success. They discuss how 10,000 hours of useful practice are required to achieve mastery.

I’ve gotten far more than 10,000 hours of useful practice in being an IT ninja since I entered the professional workforce in ’99.

After a year in hosting operations (in which I was promoted twice), I hopped on a plane at 24 to go live in London, and work with some people who knew that I was good at what I did. Over the course of the next year, I played the role of unix engineer within operations, network architect(?) within engineering, and a stint in presales for a young division in a telecom which was on its way from $2B market cap to bankruptcy. When I look back on the things I did at 24 and 25, I have to marvel at it. I defined requirements for, designed, performed vendor evaluation, did CapEx planning with finance for, ordered and implemented the managed hosting network infrastructure for hosting facilities, including VLAN tagging and trunking, traffic prioritization with QoS, dynamic layer 3 routing, spanning tree, and a fully redundant mesh to the head-of-row racks. I didn’t even have a CCNA, and someone was crazy enough to let me figure that all out. There was oversight, but they trusted me, and it paid off. I had a few other victories there, but in the end left before the debt defaults brought the company completely down the drain.

I’ve worked as the top technical resource in a hosting center, with ultimate responsibility for keeping customer systems up and running well. Whether “managed” hosting on standard platforms, or “Time and materials” work for which my time was billed at $210/hr to fix problems with whatever was wrong, be it servers, switches, routers, load balancers, or storage. It was my job to be good enough at figuring out whatever came my way that I could get it working again, or working correctly if the customer required a change.

My first (and only, I haven’t reordered since changing positions) business card at my current employer had me listed as “Systems Guru”. My official title went from administrator to architect, but I was still working hands-on with everything from network to server to storage, and I was even writing some code to make things work better.

Now I’m a manager of a team of java developers, and I have responsibility for the application architecture. I find that my breadth of experience in other areas, as well as what I’ve learned about building scalable applications and decoupling components, allows me to decompose a problem into parts which will “just work”. I don’t have to force myself to think in service orientation precisely because it works the way my mind does — it encapsulates design and implementation at all of the layers of the stack, just like my mind can encapsulate all of those layers of the stack into a symbolic representation in my mind. My experience allows me to peel back the layers like peeling back the transparencies of an anatomy book to see the underlying organ systems.

Though I am only a jack of all trades, I am a master at decomposing problems without being limited by a subject-area-expertise mindset. A service is simply providing an interface to what Information Technology fundamentally is — data processing. Data goes in, gets processed, and comes out. I can see the big picture by using symbols precisely because I know that I can zoom into any of those symbols, and know what’s important to know about any portion of the stack that is providing those services.

I’ve been a ninja for over a decade, and I’ve always known it.

What I’d forgotten to appreciate is how I’d become an expert at it.

I’d encourage anyone to take this almost journeyman-seeming path. I can appreciate the guys who are the absolute best at a specific thing, but when you get to the point where you really and truly know that you can figure anything out, it leads to what I can only explain as a beautiful experience “seeing” elegantly simple solutions based upon fundamentals.

The only curse is that it’ll make you want to change the world. Anyone need a ninja to help them change the world?

To quote Vanilla Ice, “If there’s a problem, yo, I’ll solve it. Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it.”

I am consistently finding myself challenging assumptions about the role of IT and information systems in business. I’m also finding that I’ve not been able to consolidate my ideas in a way that provides the value of aggregation and integration, and I’ve decided that thinking my way to a comprehensive belief system and approach on this blog is as good a place as any.

Perspective
The most fundamental asset in IT planning, as well as one of the most important deliverables from IT to its customers including itself, is perspective.

Information
The most valuable asset in gaining perspective is information. Information, as distinguished from data, is the product of analysis of data.

Service
Service is about providing information — whether interactive views of real-time data sources, analytics of user behavior, usage reporting, billing data, user authorization information — in a usable format, reliably and predictably. Service orientation isn’t just about SOAP and Web Services. It’s about providing access to retrieve, store, or modify information and data, and providing a service level agreement for that access.

Data
Data is the heart of IT. Before it was called Information Technology, it was called Data Processing. Collection, storage, management, performance, and availability of data are essential to generate the information required to run IT and provide value to the larger business. Core business entity data, metadata (data about data), service and access data (logging), and authorization data are core business assets and are required to provide information and services and perspective. Effective structuring of business data should be considered a core responsibility of the IT department.

Having laid out some of my principles (and I welcome comments and discussion), I’m looking forward to the next post in this series, where I will start to look at the value chain within IT.

In watching the fight unfold between Cablevision and Disney/ABC, it’s plain to see that the largest problem the cable companies have is their adherence to their business model and not picking the right core competency.

Time Warner Cable is asking its customers to support their fight against content providers:

I’ve recently upgraded my home internet connection to Time Warner Cable’s “Wideband” Internet Service — using DOCSIS 3.0, I get 50Mbps down, 5Mbps up. And I actually get it. Since I’ve posted before about the negative experiences I had with Time Warner’s RoadRunner service at a previous apartment, I’ll update it with some information about how one individual turned around my customer experience and gives me some measure of hope.

In either case, I’ve tried streaming various HD video services, and while I’m fairly impressed as to how far full-screen HD video has come, it’s still not where it needs to be – full-screen on my 24″ LCD the video can resolve to fine detail, but has horribly visible problems with lots of motion. Whether Hulu, TNT, or the Olympics, there were issues, though I found the way the Olympics’ Silverlight video streams seemed to “resolve” to detail very well after motion slowed, and it appeared to in some ways mimic the eye varying focus organically. The Olympics player also didn’t full-screen the video, it full-screened the player, which maintained a photo-like frame with advertising.

In any event, in investigating the bitrates used by all three services, I found that it never exceeded 3.5Mbps, probably due to the tactical problems with distributing significantly higher bitrates over the internet.

Why isn’t Time Warner Cable reading the writing on the wall and recognizing itself for what it is?

The “television” cable company is a content distribution network.

They’ve figured out how to give me a 50/5 last-mile connection. Downloads from content distributed by CDNs is reasonably close to rated speed.

Time Warner should be focusing on making it easy for content providers to get higher bandwidth streaming content hosted (if on-demand) or replicated (if live streams) into their network, from which they could easily pass it along to me at 10 or 15Mbps, resulting in significantly higher quality video.

They could either charge content providers (like ABC/Disney) for their content distribution services which enable an unsurpassed customer experience (possibly even charged at variable rates subject to SLA as monitored by end-user equipment), charge customers to access this premium experience (charge one rate for internet access with “wish you the best” experience, and an additional fee for access to this premium CDN), or a mix of the two.

I’ve got an LG BD570 on the way, which is a Blu-Ray player which supports streaming of Netflix, VUDU, CinemaNow, Youtube, Pandora, and media from my home network over DLNA. It hasn’t been delivered yet, but I’m well on my way to being my own CDN. If they’d provide a highly-accessible CDN, and access to it through a set-top box open to whatever applications whether they use the CDN or not, they could offer a hell of an experience. And they could extend the CDN into my house using one of my set top boxes as a CDN node of sorts.

Did Comcast GetIt(tm) with its rebranding as xfinity? Might that be where they’re heading?

Cablevision’s Optimum Online services have always been a cut above the internet offerings from Comcast and Time Warner. Maybe they can “get it”, give in for now, and then change their business model to be someone whose services are actually in demand, wanted by both the content providers and end users. Rather than being a proxy for licensing battles, they can step out of the way of the content providers’ licensing models, offering infrastructure that seamlessly handles a feature set that supports the licensing models of choice of the content providers, and allow users to handle the battle over licensing.

Get out of being in the middle of the problem, and get into the middle of the solution. There’s something wonderfully empowering in the business model being focused specifically on the level of service provided — it ties business success with customer experience, a wonderful feedback loop.

Wouldn’t it be nice to want to do business with the cable company?

Were they also to establish an open licensing authorization platform, they could provide content providers a platform to authorize access to content based upon the licensor’s business model, and provide sublicensing to content aggregators targeting specific verticals. They’d sell services to content providers (licensors), curators (aggregators based upon value-add with a sublicensing business model), as well as to end users (aggregation of licensing into packages or a la carte bundles for retail sale).

If you make the rights management reasonable, CableCompany, you can open your own iTunes-like content licensing store on this platform. You can get revenue from transaction fees on the sublicensing, and be transparent about it. You’d be a “cloud service”, and could bill based upon usage, and drive usage through an exemplary customer experience.

Or you can wait, and die off when someone else does this. Look out for FiOS and Google. Verizon’s got everything to gain about getting high ARPU internet services rolled out, and don’t have the same legacy mindset about content licensing that you do. And Google’s gigabit-to-the-home is probably actually just an attempt to wake you up to get you to do this for their benefit as well.

Be the open and transparent good guys and innovate to the future, or be the hated bad guys and become irrelevant. Your choice.