Below is a snippet from the report where Rob talks about the advantages of limiting project customizations…

“When it comes to large technology projects, many organizations tend to stay pretty close to vanilla in terms of their approach. Certain companies may flat out say “no we are not going to have any,” “you can have one or two different levels” or “if you have some they have to be this type of characterization.” They can have only so much effort and impact, which is excellent. You definitely want to limit it because these are very complex applications, even without customizations. They still roll out patches and fixes regularly whether it is desktop computers and very simple software or more complex. There will always be patching and fixing taking place. Vendors and IT organizations know that so any time you can limit the complexity on your end it is an advantage.

You will reach a certain point on most projects where customizing becomes a necessity, whether it means minimally invasive tasks like designing your own reports or possibly more invasive items. The project team at the House started out with the idea that they were going to stay vanilla and only do a couple of items, some of which were required. They may have been for reporting or regulatory needs but there were certain items they had to produce. The software package that was selected may not have all of the features, fields, and data that are needed. Consequently those fields and reports will need to be created…“

-4.5 million people signed Google’s anti-SOPA/PIPA petition, according to the Los Angeles Times

-25 Senators now oppose PIPA (the Senate version of SOPA), according to OpenCongress

-Twitter saw more than 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets between midnight and 4 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday

-Two SOPA co-sponsors and several others dropped support for the House bill

-More than 162 million people saw Wikipedia’s protest page

-More than 8 million people used Wikipedia’s search tool to look up their elected representatives’ contact information

While many are calling the protests a success only time will truly tell the story. The plan, as of now, is to move forward with this anti-piracy legislation. The Senate will vote again on PIPA next Tuesday, January 24^th.

****Update****

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced he is postponing Tuesday’s PIPA vote.

Here is a brief excerpt from the report that points out the importance of a candidate understanding exactly what a recruiter does…

“It is important to understand what an executive recruiter does and does not do because that will help the candidate out immensely. They DO NOT help people find jobs. There are search people out there who will help their friends or install someone in a job. It does happen. Recruiting is not a regulated industry so a lot of “stuff” happens. On the whole though, someone in the executive search field is out there trying to identify opportunities with their potential clients so they will pay They are there to filter out candidates throughout the process, like a funnel. If an executive search person is not working on something that specifically fits your skills there is a good chance they are not going to be able to help you. If you call them at that point that is ok but keep in mind they probably will not return that call every time. Executive search individuals are very introverted by nature because it is perceived they have the “goods.” In other words, you only want to talk to them because they have the jobs. The equation is not that easy. Again, as a candidate, understand what that recruiter does and seek to understand their role. If you start to build a relationship with a search person and you do not understand something about how they operate then ask a question. They will share that information with you, they to just typically do not offer it up very easily.“

“If your organization has a flat network you should really consider moving away from it. You constantly hear about the need to be agile these days. The reason a lot of companies are not agile is because they have these large flat networks. If you want to put a new piece of technology in you have to perform your risk evaluation process based on the entire network. If you tier your network (fig. 4 page 11) it allows you to look at stuff on the internal enclaves as a different risk model than perhaps something out in the DMZ. The House has tiered a lot of their networks now. They have made the decision to let people do a lot more in the middle or out in the DMZ but they are going to be extremely cautious about anything that enters those internal enclaves. The enclaves contain the payroll system, HR system, and Remedy among other things. They have found that utility architecture saved a lot of money because they are not building point solutions each time. If a new technology is introduced with a web tier, app tier, and data tier it can snap in pretty seamlessly because the infrastructure is already in place. In other words you are just integrating a new application as opposed to buying all of those components.

At this point your conversations will focus on needs and fees, not the cost of building a new point solution. This tiering system has helped the House of Representatives become more agile and benefit its members, staff, and constituents. They receive better information because when a new technology becomes available IT will let it go a lot easier. The House recently installed Skype but without that tiered network environment it probably would have never happened. With that tiered architecture they were able to push a lot of stuff further down into their enclaves, thus making it much easier to bring in Skype…”

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-          22% cite the need to access unauthorized programs and apps just to get their job done

-          18% admitted the policies are not enforced

-          18% don’t have the time to think about policies when they are working

-          16% said it’s not convenient

-          15% forget

-          14% do it when their bosses aren’t watching them

Now clearly young professionals should be responsible and abide by the rules. However, I think the problem here lies more at the other end of the spectrum, with management. Outdated policies, lack of enforcement, and probably inadequate education on the rules seem to be the major contributors. I don’t think we need babysitters by any means but you have to have some kind of watch dog in place for enforcement purposes. Young people will push the boundaries for better or worse. In their eyes they there trying to be more efficient and there is no malicious intent. If you do not set standards they have no problem setting their own standard and riding that until someone says “no.”

Outdated policies are never a good thing but that is easy to understand because of IT’s rapidly changing landscape. Policies need to be reviewed on a regular basis. If you do not want these young professionals breaking the rules, perhaps give them some input in terms of what to include in the policy. Collaborate and make compromises to cut down on these issues. This also helps the 22% that said they need access to unauthorized programs and apps just to get their job done. I’m sure there are some sites they think they need access to but in truth they are not really necessary. On the other hand, how are they supposed to complete their work in a satisfactory manner if they do not have the proper tools at their disposal? Go ahead and give them the tools they need within reason and you will start to see these numbers drop.

Dr. Jonathan Reichental, CIO for the City of Palo Alto, California, recently led a Web Forum presentation on “Social Media in the Corporate Environment.” He touched on a lot of these points and highlighted the opportunities that are out there for businesses aiming to shift towards becoming a more social enterprise. To read a full report on this presentation by Dr. Reichental, CLICK HERE.

“On Wednesday, the FBI announced a massive investigation in conjunction with international law enforcement agencies, private industry, and nongovernment organizations, which led to the charging of seven Estonian and Russian citizens for a widespread click fraud scheme that had infected more than 4 million computers and netted the group more than $14 million.“  Read Full Article

I encourage you to read the article because this is perfect example of the collaboration and teamwork it requires to fight cyber-terrorists. “This is what happens when the good guys make it work,” says Phyllis Schneck, Chief Technology Officer for Public Sector at McAfee.

-          A balanced scorecard approach

-          Consolidating your metrics and KPIs to a select few

-          Dashboard organization and drill-down capabilities

-          Erasing silos around the business and technology

-          Establishing common metrics for different organizations tasked with different objectives

-          Customer survey response rates and asking “the right question”

Here is a brief excerpt where one member company talks about what they see in the consumer banking industry in terms of dealing with large metric indexes:

“We haven’t had a lot of luck with that but I’d love to hear other opinions on this. Rolling things up into this big index turns out to be useless because no one can understand it. I followed index 97.43 and our goal is to get down to 97.22, that sort of thing. Instead you could say we want to have an organizational goal that 95% of our things happen on time. So everybody has their own individual SLA’s but you better make 95% within your SLA or within that scorecard as you break it down. You could also say something like you must attain a customer rating of XYZ and find that common metric. At the end of the day, if you’re looking at what the customer wants, they only care about when we’re late or we make a mistake. To that point you want to find how many errors we make, how many times we’re late. You generally look at it that way and then you roll it down by individual. Now that is the customer satisfaction side and you can do the same thing for sales. However, since a lot of people share IT or operations on the productivity side, you can say we want to have a certain cost per customer or account and find something to normalize it across that. Of course this is all much harder than it sounds but finding that common metric is always hard.

What we are experiencing right now in the consumer bank is that having people get rid of their individualities is very difficult. For instance, trying to compare ATMs next to mortgage next to a branch is not easy. On the other hand, if you can have people agree on those key customer metrics, like how many times are we late, make mistakes, or do something that costs us money, then you can track those things. Just in our mortgage business alone there are five sub-lines of business and a few thousand people. That’s not just across the business, that’s in one LOB. It is tough getting people to sign onto these four particular things that we need to run our business. However, unless you do that, you’re going to end up building it from the bottom-up and having a million metrics that don’t roll up anything. So you end up with two things. You either end up with an index that means nothing or you end up with a 100 page report because all you are doing is up pages and then shoving that up to senior management. The balanced scorecard fails if you do any one of those thing…”

“At the conference (Web 2.0 Summit), he said what will make his search tool better than Google will be its “deep search” ability.” It’s about relationships beyond just the keywords,” he said, according to Mashable, a CNN.com content partner.

The rapper-turned-entrepreneur (after some late-90s difficulties) said a search would render not just direct results, but also information on possibly related topics. Its tagline is: “Search once and see what’s related…”

Time will tell if Hammer’s new search tool can really shake up the market but I think it’s safe you say he’s got quite an uphill battle to fight. What are your thoughts on WireDoo and its potential? Will it flourish or flop?

“We have done a lot of outsourcing and I’ll define outsourcing as utilizing a low cost alternative to in-house staff. That could mean taking on off-shore, near-shore, and U.S. third party partners. This also includes converting employees into a temp status while working remotely. The one thing we learned, sort of the hard way, is that it was easy to set up and define how to manage a third party resource. We tried to manage or maintain a relationship with the remote work-from-home type of employees as if they were simply working in another office of ours. However, this approach did not become effective for us or reduce any of the frustrations associated with that type of relationship until we actually looked at them as if they were a remote third party resource. That may sound a little confusing but what I mean is when we went to third party partners, instead of managing the people, we managed the process. We figured out what the process was and what was important for us in that process. Focus on what part made it an effective resource, what part ensured quality, and what particular metric(s) defined success. These tended to vary on each process. You had to spend a lot of time working with the business to identify what metrics they could look at that would actually say this was running well and define future improvement…”

Members can download the full report HERE. In that report you will read about how different companies determine potential benefits to their customers and define the success of their remote workforce. Learn about working with the business side to determine proper metrics and the benefits of using third party resources to handle your work-from-home employees. Some of the other issues approached in the report include training your leadership and using a “manage the process, not the people” method for your remote workers.