Tech Moronique: Identity theft, the HP way.

by with No Comment ManagementPoliticsTechnology

I was thinking to myself about how many setbacks the industry has had in the last few years, and how all those setbacks have a face… so I want to take a quick break, and celebrate the poster children of retrograde progress. 

This month, Patricia Dunn.  

I truly wish I could have been a fly on the wall, watching her brush her hair, put on the makeup, dressing for success… as thoughts of securing her success at HP danced in her head.  She’s about to become the hero of HP, the one who called out the whistleblower, the one who weeded out the unfaithful, the disloyal.

Confident beyond smug, she laid out the framework of her heroics to the Board of Directors, proudly pointing out that the villain who had plagued HP for so long had been ratted out, by his own phone company.

What a coup!  She had proven that she could get the job done where Carly failed… that she would go the extra mile and make sure HP was safe from espionage… errr… except her own.  She did what she truly believed was right, using only the logic in her head.  Only, like dozens of Aggressive Self-Starters (A.S.S.)s before her, she failed to pick up on the obvious reason why it’s more difficult for other leaders to get tough jobs done.  People who have character… morals… and even semblance of adherence to the law… simply won’t consider certain options.

Many organizations value loyalty above character.  A liability the organization ultimately pays for, in true Galactic Empire style.  While it is true that those of good character also possess loyalty, it is not the more valued trait.  One need only look to the government to find a superb example of an organization composed of those with superior loyalty, matched with the character of a… hmmm… let’s just say that it would be something spineless, slimy, without eyes or particularly useful brain.  Dunn, Bush, Palpatine… all examples of how Loyalty is the cornerstone of every successful empire.

“Dunn, Bush, Palpatine… all examples of how Loyalty is the cornerstone of every successful empire.”

Which brings us back to HP’s predicament.  Dunn made a bold move, (bold and stupid and with any luck, illegal) but this type of behavior is seldom disconnected from the organization’s culture.  She made it to a high level with her particular (particularly low) level of character, which says something about HP in general.  Allowing someone with little candor and even less respect for personal privacy into high office doesn’t happen in a vacuum, those kinds of traits are hard to conceal.  The new HP way has congress interested, (ex-)employees angry, and the rest of the population disgusted. 

Was HP in a worse state when their long-range visions were being relayed to the media, which made HP look like a company confident in its in-your-face business strategy… or now, that its leadership has admitted to the use of identity theft and impersonation as a mechanism to sew shut the loose lips?  The HP way sure doesn’t sound too appealing these days.  That’s a shame, I have always preferred HP machines myself… I have visited the HP campus a couple times… and frankly, I have a whole new perspective on the company as a whole.

Of course, I hold out little hope that she actually comprehends how in the wrong she was, but I have little doubt that she’ll be back.  Hard to keep a major A.S.S. down, ya know.  HP is under new leadership, but not different leadership.  Hurd has been up at the top with the others for a very long time… he had a big hand in putting Dunn in charge, so how different can he be?

ENIAC-1 failed - no MP3 support!

j.ello on IT Part 2: IT’s About Automation, Stupid.

by with No Comment CIOITj.ello on ITManagementTechnology

What’s IT?  For a complete, clear and detailed explanation, we turn to Wikipedia.  Well, ok, so I jest… it’s woefully vague, probably inaccurate, though not entirely indefensible.  The current entry just doesn’t annoy anyone enough to bother changing it – it’s a “democratic truth”.  Fact is, IT used to mean something, but misuse, time and evolution have diluted the definition such that it means everything and nothing – like a common 4-letter expletive beginning with “F”… which ironically, is the word that most commonly precedes a call to an IT professional.  I’ll give you my definition.  “IT is the space that exists between you and digital information.”  Nuff said.  When people ask what I do, I generally just say “computer sh*#”.  It’s universally communicative.

In most organizations, “IT” simply means “The Help Desk” or the “Techies”… or paraphrasing a colleague of mine, “they who tend the garden”.  “IS”, on the other hand, refers to those who program applications that manage data.  Also inaccurate, but there is usually such a big difference between the goals of these two groups, that they naturally divide along that line.  The hardest part about speaking intelligently on IT issues is the lack of a concrete definition…. and anyone in the biz can tell ya, that tidbit alone causes a great deal of consternation.

The point is, if we can’t define the word which defines the job, how do we know that we’re doing the job?  THAT, above all, is why so few organizations have a handle on IT.

“Automation is the most important aspect of computing, and always has been.”

So what is IT *supposed* to do?  To answer that, you need to know what a computer does.  If you turn on the lights and poke a Computer Science grad with a stick, they’ll tell you, “a computer does math”.  But it’s not the fact that a computer does math that has ever made it useful.  It’s the fact that a computer AUTOMATES math that’s important.  It’s not particularly interesting to add 1 and 1… unless you can do it a hundred billion times a second and then manipulate that activity to play the latest home video of someone doing the dance from Napoleon Dynamite.  Automation is the most important aspect of computing, and always has been.  Computing IS automation.

Everything, and I mean everything, one does with a computer is an exercise in automation… no matter how hidden the automation may seem.  Even the act of typing is, at its simplest, push-button automated writing.  One finger stroke is converted to what would otherwise take a hand-gesture to accomplish with a pen.  Copy and Paste functions can automate with two strokes what might take a thousand to retype.  Print a thousand copies… you get the idea.  Every function of every program ever written is simply an automated version of something that is already accomplishable, but not as efficiently.  To expand that further, every popular technology is an automated  ENIAC-1 failed - no MP3 support!mechanism for something that could be done a less efficient way… it’s the reason for moving to the latest version of your office suite.  From BBS’s to MySpace.  From e-mail notifications to RSS feeds to feed aggregation tools like Digg.com.  Even moving from cash to checks to debit cards to PayPal to the natural eventuality of sub-dermal chips that can withdraw from your account for making a deposit in a city bathroom.  Digital technologies do not truly progress until the available capabilities are automated in a desirable fashion. 

The value of all digital technology comes from the automation of processes.  We can therefore make the leap and say that an IT organization is at its most valuable when it enables the automation of processes.

And then a lone voice from the peanut gallery shouts, “Ya, programmers are more important than techies!”  Well… no…  In fact, it’s the natural split between the technical and programming sides of the typical IT organization – or even the absence of one or the other – that that underscores how poorly the purpose of computing is understood… and by the same token, why we struggle to understand the value of IT as a whole.   

Read the next article, where I blame the boss.

j.ello on IT Part 1: The New Old Thing

by with No Comment computersITj.ello on ITTechnologyUsers

I have been in the so-called “IT” profession for more than half my life.  I am shocked to find how little has changed in that time… and how much everyone thinks it has.

I was pleased to find a lovingly-written article on the perennially reborn, long-beloved operating system called GEOS.  If you haven’t heard of it, it provided a Mac/Windows-like interface on a Commodore 64/128… in 1986.  Think about that for a moment.  There was a mouse and a friendly, visual operating system for a computer that couldn’t even hold a candle to an average cell phone.  In fact, the “Start Menu”, so synonymous with Windows, was a concept introduced years earlier in GEOS. A WYSIWYG word processor, a spreadsheet application, a database, and a whole lot more.  All the fundamentals of a full fledged office suite, and while no, GEOS wasn’t the first to do these things, GEOS did them all in 64k, 20 years ago.  That says something about us, about technology, and about the Information Technology industry.

Back to 2006, it seems we’ve come so far.  But after 20 some-odd years of windowed-interface development, what are the primary activities of a typical person at work in front of a computer?  Office applications. CPU speed, RAM, storage, all multiplied thousands of times over 20 years, and we do office applications.

“…why, oh why, do people still work at the same speed no matter how fast their computers are?”

And you’ll say, “but we do so much in addition to that”.  Do we?  I could send email in 1986.  We had the equivalent of your typical websites, and while they weren’t all interconnected or particularly pretty, they did have daily content, forums, some even had multi-user chat rooms.  We had downloads such as midi-like renditions of music (illegally created and distributed, just like today), software (freeware, shareware and pirated, just like today), and such teen favorites as porn and the “Anarchist Cookbook“.

Truth is that the desires of casual computing haven’t changed, neither has the amount of knowledge necessary to do the things we want to do.  Entertainment *STILL* almost single-handedly drives the economics of computing, with no end in sight.  All we’ve been doing for 20 years is applying new capabilities to make the old ideas more attractive, more intelligent, more “2.0”. 2.0… oh yes… I’ll come back to this “2.0” crap… just you wait.

So, if all we’re doing is the same old thing, why isn’t it any easier?  Why are our IT staffs inundated with seemingly basic questions… better yet, why do we still have IT?  Many technology analysts have been predicting for at least as long as I’ve been alive that all of this will simply become black-box and push-button, akin to electricity.  And yet here we are, with an ever diverging technology base, and an ever more complicated set of scenarios for the IT staff… and an ever developing understanding of how inadequate our infrastructure is to handle the “same old things” that we’ve always done.  Why do we insource, then outsource, then insource again?  And why, oh why, do people still work at the same speed no matter how fast their computers are?

These answers and more will be revealed over the next few days, including why all the experts preaching “computing is commodity” are wrong… and why I say “Computing is art.”