Five Levels of Support

Those of us in the computer field are resigned to at least the occasional support role. If you're in the office next to the CIO, you might just want to consider it hazard duty.

But support comes in many flavors, as I'll attempt to explain these five level of support in more detail:

• Support
• support
• Fsupport
• Xsupport
• FYBYOYO

Support refers to having complete ownership of the problem and responsibility to see that the problem is fixed in a timely manner. This is the level of support that most people recognize and are familiar and comfortable providing. The lines of responsibility is clear and they're in charge.

"support", or "little-s support", occurs when someone else, like it or not, has Support, but needs your help and assistance to resolve a problem. An application developer might need some help from a performance management expert or a network trace run to diagnose an issue. Care must be taken to avoid ending up with Support in these instances.

Fsupport, or "F-support", is familiar to those of us that provide computer support for Friends and Family, the "F" becoming clear. Since Friends certainly occur in the workplace, some confusion can arise when you offer "above and beyond" service for maybe no apparent reason. Maybe you're local expert that your colleagues would rather pull into a problem than call the Help Desk. This can become a balancing act and care must be taken to pick your Friends wisely.

Xsupport, or "X-support", is easily recognized by anyone that studies organization charts. At a certain level an eXecutive, the "X" becoming clear, gets support and loving attention regardless of corporate policy, their love of non-standard computing equipment and any resemblance of a cost/benefit analysis. Need to help their spouse with that new iMac at their summer home, no problem. Just be nice and all will pass by without a career threatening cloud over your head.

That leaves us with FYBYOYO, phonetically "fib-YO-YO", that stands for "Forget You Buddy, You're On Your Own", at least in polite company. This is probably the least familiar of the five levels of support, probably because it appears in real life with the same frequency as blue M&Ms. Whether it's our love of being heroes, racking up a few markers to be called in later, not wanting to rock the boat or a truly altruistic nature, FYBYOYO is a hard stance to take. But if you're tempted, make sure to you're clear about the first four levels. They might trump you more often than you think.

Losing Twenty Percent

Information technologists live in interesting times. The Internet continues to bring the platforms and services that mostly eliminate the problems inherent in the PC-based client/server era, such as large upfront capital investments, slow deployment of new or changed services and a daunting set of security issues rooted in its birth as a non-shared technology (i.e. DOS PCs with a dinky floppy drive and molasses-slow modems) attempting to thrive in the interconnected world of email, web-based services and ever-increasing bandwidths. While using the Internet has its own scale issues, it's clear to everyone from the board room to the kid's bedroom that PC knowledge is moving down in value, and knowledge of the Internet is moving up.

Dealing with change is hardly unique to IT people, but perhaps it's the constant, year-in, year-out bombardment of change that is not as prevalent in other fields. The way I've described it to people I've been fortunate enough to work with is to set their expectation, and my own, that twenty percent of the value of their current skill set is lost every year. Just to stay even requires learning a new twenty percent each year. This obviously is an estimate, varies from person to person and is greater in some years and less in others. But overall it's not far off and the point is not precision, it's direction. Stay still for long and your risk of being obsolete gets higher and the effort to retrain to an entire new skill set becomes tougher.

A technology leader must work with each and every person to insure that this does not happen. They must provide the constant push required to change their people, and the education, projects and rewards to pull them forward. It's easier to let people stay in a job and avoid the short-term productivity hit. It's easier to let someone convince you that they're happy where they are and avoid the whining. But it's harder to change attitudes baked in over years of stagnation and retrain, for example, a mainframe COBOL programmer in Java, C++ or Ruby. If they're lucky enough to time their retirement to their obsolescence, they're in the fortunate few. Most take jobs in less demanding parts of IT or leave the field entirely.

One of the most effective methods of gaining people's attention is to purposely, publicly and continually eliminate older technologies. That elimination may take the form of outsourcing the old mainframe systems, replacing dial-up modem banks with an Internet ISP or manual PC software installation with an automated system. This is, by far, not the only benefit you'll gain from this, but emphasizing the constant "out with the old, in with the new" mantra will send strong signals throughout the organization.

Change can be overwhelming to people, particularly ones that are large or arrive as surprises. The previous suggestions deal with the surprises, but what can be done to keep change in manageable chunks? Fortunately, that's where the twenty percent comes in handy. It's not that large if handled on a continual basis. But a totally new twenty percent is much more difficult than one that is somewhat familiar. Asking a programmer that knows several languages to add Ruby to that list is nowhere near as difficult as asking them to configure routers. Asking a network analyst to configure firewalls is probably better than asking them to learn a programming language.

While keeping within one's area and learning new skills is a good tactic, the people that are very valuable have skills in many areas, ready to pitch in on just about any project that comes around. Some people seem naturally born or gifted to play in all areas, or maybe they just get bored more easily. Regardless, your organization needs to move people around departments and the earlier they learn this the better.

Applying Data Center Recovery Principles to PCs

PCs have become an operational lifeblood of most organizations and the amount of viruses, malware and zero-day attacks continues to increase. Very large security practices have been built up to address these problems and yet this trend surges forward unabated. Are we simply stuck with continually paying more to protect our systems or is there a point where PCs are treated in the same manner as the servers in the data center?

Large companies installed mainframes in the 1960s to automate back office processes, gain efficiencies and enable new and larger business models. It soon became apparent that the data center needed to be well protected. Guards, keypass entry cards, UPS power and fire suppression systems became the norm. But investments to keep the data center safe were not enough and the disaster recovery business was created to allow a company, at a fraction of the cost of running a duplicate data center, to recover their critical applications if the primary data center was unusable. You could never spend enough money to reduce the risk of losing the primary data center to zero.

Perhaps applying the same principles to recovering access to these same applications in the advent of a massive virus outbreak, power blackout or communications failure would provide a cost-effective solution. These applications might also be the same ones that employees need while working remotely.

There are many ways to architect and design a solution, but the least common denominator in today's world is the web browser. If you're fortunate enough to have all your applications web-enabled, then you have a huge head start. Perhaps a dual-boot option on your corporate PCs with a Linux/Firefox option is enough to get your users productive again. Another strategy would be to have employees use their home computers, almost ubiquitous now, as their backup device. A final option would be to re-stage each PC, although this may take more time to accomplish than the business might be able to tolerate.

For those not fortunate enough to be fully web-enabled, which includes most of us, a solution to access those applications needs to be available, but not require a huge investment in hardware and software. The advent of pay-as-you-go Cloud Computing and more robust Open Source software comes to the rescue. The idea is to build a ready-to-go desktop image in the Cloud (e.g. Amazon Web Services) using Linux, Firefox, native Linux applications and Windows applications under the Wine environment. This image would have the necessary VPN connectivity to your data center to access the back-end services. Each user would spin up a copy of the image, with proper authentication of course, and be back in business in minutes. Or perhaps leveraging open source virtualization software can allow multiple people to use one Cloud server concurrently.

This image might also be used for home or hotel access, and potentially avoid the extra costs of providing laptops by leveraging personal and hotel business-center PCs. A copy of this image that provides isolated access during your disaster recovery testing can significantly reduce that network effort. These are just a few of the possible uses for a solution architected in this manner.

Who Has A Bigger Problem

Your manager has just assigned you a difficult project or problem and you're at a loss to envision any possible solution. Is it time to hit the pervasive search engine and starting looking? Perhaps a call to a favorite vendor or perhaps an unknown one? An approach might be to stop looking for a solution and find someone that has a bigger problem than you do, preferably a much larger problem. Depending on the problem, you might even find that person inside your own company.

Odds are someone has a bigger problem than you do and looking outside your normal field of vision is often needed. Looking to reduce the cost of your email system? Try an organization such as a university, other large not-for-profit corporation or a particularly financially distressed company for ideas. Want to improve the integrity of your data center? Can you find a company where revenue dead stops when they're down. How about the stock market? If they make the Wall Street Journal headlines when problems occur, that's a good place to start.

Money, or lack thereof, is a good place to start hunting. Following the money trail is also useful. Are you looking for management support for a new security idea and the CIO isn't very receptive? Who else in your organization is rewarded when incidents are reduced or eliminated? With the advent of SOX compliance putting more people on the chopping block for deficiencies, perhaps Audit, Compliance or the CFO has that bigger problem.

Sales people are rarely a good source, simply because they sell a solution to your problem, not to their problem. Their problem is making their quota, and rightfully so. Helping solve your problem may be aligned at times, but in most cases they sell stuff, not solutions, and their reward is not directly tied to your problem being solved, but in getting the contract signed. Sales people can be a good conduit into making connections into the companies you want to investigate. A better way is to join and be active in one or two few large user groups or leverage a company subscription to The Hackett Group, Gartner Group or other advisory and benchmarking firms. Using LinkedIn, Plaxo or other web-based social networks can also lead to making the right contact.

The idea is not just to implement everything another company does, but to generate new insights into your specific problem. Perhaps one or two components of their solution is enough to satisfy your current needs. Stretching your mind in the direction of the problem, not an immediate solution, may be the key to your next "breakthrough".

Integration Architecture

When architecting a solution to integrate two systems, it's useful to realize that only three categories are possible. Applying the correct approach is crucial to avoiding extra coding, operational issues and higher costs. The three categories are:

• Batch - A set of requests will be processed together at regular intervals. This is typically done to process requests more efficiently or during a window when resources are more available. This is a time-based mechanism.


• Asynchronous - A response to a request is needed as soon as possible. The data will be delivered when the other side is ready and will never be lost. This is an event-based trigger mechanism.


• Real-Time - A response to a request is required in real-time. In case the request is not fulfilled within a reasonable amount of time, the data will be discarded.

Batch interfaces have been around since the advent of mainframes and punch cards. A single method to handle batch data exchange should be used throughout the data center to simplify all operational aspects from security to recovery. One folder structure could be developed for all Production data and a second for Test data. These folders should be mountable to all systems, so multiple protocols (e.g. NFS, SMB) may be required. File system renaming is a useful practice to keep in-flight work from causing issues. As an example, perhaps we have a folder named Payroll. Within the Payroll folder, we create an Inbound, Ready, InProcess, Processed and Error folders. Data being created is put in the Inbound folder and when complete is renamed to put it in the Ready folder. A batch job runs looks in the Ready folder, renames it to put it in the InProcess folder and renames it again upon successful completion to the Processed folder or to the Error folder if unsuccessful. This simple example may not be enough for your requirements, so expand the concept with as many folders and subfolders needed.

Asynchronous interfaces are typically built upon a messaging queuing infrastructure using products such as Microsoft's MSMQ or IBM's MQSeries. Like Batch, you should establish only one method for this type of exchange. Asynchronous interfaces are typically used to process data that needs very quick turnaround, but the data can't be lost if the target system is unavailable.

There are a number of reasons that individual transactions can fail, special attention needs to be paid to build a notification system with the needed data available to take quick action to resolve the error. An approach to this is to make a copy of any transaction that fails and put it into a message queue where a program will read that data, send the appropriate notifications and make the data and error code available to the person performing the troubleshooting. A method of "replaying" the transaction by putting the transaction back on its original queue is useful to avoid manually performing each failed transaction.

Real-time interfaces come in lots of shapes and sizes and will vary from one vendor to the next. Standardization is coming slowly with the adoption of web standards, so you're likely stuck with supporting a variety of proprietary and open standards, fortunately in most cases with the aid of the vendor who knows their own choices well. Still, it will cause a great deal of operational support issues and these interfaces will tend to be your most critical. Put together a team to attack these issues before they become a business issue.

Your standards can be drawn using a generic Source System and Target System on either side of a diagram and your Real-Time, Asynchronous and Batch solutions connecting the two Systems. Each of the three paths describe the specific hardware and software that is standard in your environment. The simple diagram can then be expanded with the specific details for a particular set of Systems.

A few number of highly reusable components will speed the delivery of your interfaces at a greatly reduced cost, and most important, with the least amount of operational issues and business impact.

A Four-Tiered Approach to Standards

Answering the simple question of what is your standard for a particular product, naming convention or password strength is often more involved that just a simple answer. The approach I use to set and communicate standards is a four-tier approach using Preferred, Standard, Non-Standard and Exception as categories.

Preferred is simply the product that I would like to use above all others. This could be for strategic reasons, advantageous licensing, skill base or any number of factors that make it rise above the rest. There is typically only one product signed with the Preferred tag.

Standard is the category for any remaining products that we offer internal support. Anything in the Preferred or Standard categories can be expected to be fully supported with multiple, skilled resources available and with defined Service Level Agreements. Anything rated below these two categories are a warning that issues will need to be overcome before using those products.

Non-standard is usually the catch-all category, naming common products that the internal staff does not have the skill base to support. The importance of this category is to inform decision-makers that additional costs need to be budgeted and that their support team will need to contract with others for support. Making this a dollars discussion usually drives the decision towards a Standard.

Exception means that I do not have the authority to allow this inside my company and that the decision-maker will need to have a discussion with someone higher up the organization chart. I’ve found Exception is better than No. No rarely works until that higher-up says No anyway. Exception says let me explain the situation, agree to disagree and let you know how you can press your case and the obstacles you may find. It turns an adversarial conversation into a useful, and professional, conversation.

Let’s make this more real with a totally fictional database example.

• Preferred – Oracle – Company owns a site license, maintains a highly reliable database farm and all the staff is certified.
  

• Standard – Microsoft SQLServer on Windows and IBM DB2 on AIX – Company has purchased a number of applications that did not offer Oracle as an option and at least three DBA’s are skilled in both.

• Non-Standard – All others not specially listed including but not limited to Informix, MySQL and IBM DB2 on Windows. Use as an embedded database requires 100% vendor support.

• Exception – Any mainframe database, since that platform is being decommissioned.

These standards can become quite involved and should explain as much of the “it depends” as possible. But there can be inter-dependencies between standards or special circumstances that make absolute statements impossible to craft. For example, maybe the vendor just started offering Oracle support but has a long track record on SQLServer. Judgments on these types of cases will be necessary.

Also recognize that your standards will change over time and will need to be communicated as they are modified. A good time to do that is a month or so before you get involved in the budget cycle. Maybe you’ll need some additional training dollars for a product you want to make Standard. Perhaps some outside contractor resources will be needed to cover a product demoted to Non-Standard. Or maybe a capital outlay for a new site license for that Preferred standard that is really taking off.

Eliminate, Automate and Delegate

Sometimes just having a simple methodology for approaching your work helps provide focus and achieve better results. One of the approaches I commonly use is Eliminate, Automate, Delegate, and approach them in that order. This is no means rocket science, but I commonly run across efforts that fail to deliver the best results that could have used this approach.

Eliminate is by far the best result that can be obtained. Start by brainstorming ideas to completely eliminate the need for whatever you’re looking to improve. If it can’t completely done away with, can at least some portion of it go away? Twenty years ago I was involved in a project to access email via the telephone. The original approach was proving daunting and threatening to kill the project. A group got together and looked for a way to resolve the problem. The solution involved moving from a full-screen to a line-mode interface which eliminated seventy-five percent of the coding effort and made the service much more reliable. Considering an option that looked like going backwards (line-mode was so 1970’s) prove to be the key. The prototype was available a few days later.

Automate is replacing human effort with a non-human effort. Job scheduling is a common data center example and robots welding cars applies in the manufacturing world. How many web sites do you check out each day for information? Perhaps moving to an RSS reader, a form of automation that pulls in articles of interest, is a more efficient way to gather that information. Alerting is a common output of automation, only interrupting you when necessary. In this case, you’ve both automated the task and eliminated the need to check it out as often.

Delegate is taking the work done by a higher-paid person and shifting it to a lower-paid, but still qualified, person. Too often professionals spend a large amount of their time doing work at a grade level far below what they are paid. In some cases a person’s desire to perform a lower-valued task comes from their pride in building a solution from the start and its “their baby”. What the reason, good or bad, spending too much time performing lower-valued work will limit your time for new projects, ending with no more new “babies” to take pride in. Delegate takes a commitment to training, letting people make those mistakes (after all, you made yours along the way) and encouraging them. Think hard before you accept a “I’ll just do it myself” attitude.

Things you eliminate can no longer go wrong or waste money. Tasks that you automate usually cost a fraction of a human and it never gets tired or bored. Delegation creates valuable time for the highly skilled and develops new skills in others. But the key is to approach them in the proper order and get enough ideas generated to fully explore an opportunity.