Voice of the DBA

Tag: business

  • How is this free?

    I received this ad in an email:

    free

    Now I’m a member of the SSWUG mailing list, I get their daily lists and they know that I’m a registered member, but not a paid member. I don’t feel that their service is worth paying for since the majority of the content is available free on the web, I have a ton indexed on SQLServerCentral, and don’t see the value. I don’t dispute the service is worth something, and if it’s worth $79/yr to you, feel free to subscribe.

    However I clicked this link and went to another page where I was informed that this webcast was actually $29. It’s free for paid members of SSWUG, but not for registered members.

    I went back to the email and saw the fine print below this ad:

    free2

    I suppose this is adequate disclosure, but it feels deceitful to me. I was thinking that I’d hear Ryan speak, who I met at SQL Saturday #63, and see if there was something about CMS that I’d missed, or could learn.

    Instead I feel a little cheated, and a rather annoyed that I wasted my time with this. I don’t blame Ryan, and think this is a poor business practice on the part of SSWUG.

    If you want to give something away for free, do it. If you advertise something for free, but then have fine print that it’s only for certain people, I think you’re fundamentally being a little dishonest with the people with whom you’ve communicated.

  • Data Matters

    A very interesting book about technology and business – from inside Google.

    I recently finished reading In the Plex, which is a great look inside Google and how they operate. For a company that has had so much secrecy around it’s internal workings, this was an amazing look at how the company operates. If you’re interested in Google, or even in how a technology company might grow and operate, or even just curious about the decisions that might affect our lives with regard to digital information, this is an interesting book to read.

    There are lots of things to talk about in there, but one thing in particular seemed to stand out to me. I n many cases, the justification for getting some project approved, or moving forward, is different than in many companies. It’s not the personal relationship with the person in charge, or because it seems like a good idea, but because the data matters. That’s a quote used quite often in the book.

    Those of us that work as data professionals know that data is important. We spend lots of time and effort to cleanse, standardize, and organize data in a way that allows it to be used as information for better decisions. That’s the fundamental idea behind business intelligence and data warehousing: extracting information from data and using it to run your business better.

    However I suspect that many companies don’t have management that really understands or truly appreciates the value of the data stored. They don’t often devote the resources, especially time, to allows data professionals to build better systems that people can use. We struggle to purchase enough storage and struggle to make writing better T-SQL or tuning the systems a priority. Most importantly, we often don’t have the time to spend just working with data in different ways to try and build patterns.

    Data is important, but without having the ability to turn it into information, most of that value remains locked away.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • For your CIO: Building Technical Leaders

    I might send this to a VP or CIO: Global CIO: A Framework For Developing Technical Leaders. It’s an article that talks about building senior technical leaders in your company, which I think is important if you view your Information Technology department as strategic.

    That also means thinking about retention, and building an atmosphere where people want to work. That doesn’t mean you can’t have layoffs or need to keep every person, but management does have to show competent and hard working technical people that they are valuable. It should also involve some way to balance the disparate needs of ambitious people that you want to retain and those average employees that want a secure job and are willing to do the average jobs.

    It also involves keeping a career path for technical people that doesn’t lead to management. Plenty of smart technical people want to keep growing, so give them a way to do so.

  • The Test of Time

    I'd like to build a "smarter business" that will last for 100 years.

    IBM turns 100, and in this article, they brag about bench pressing more other companies half its age. That’s a great headline, and I still remember when IBM was not only the premier hardware vendor of the computer world, but also the largest software maker as well. The “Smarter Planet” ads that IBM puts out there are great, and they are a diverse company, covering so many different industries and locations that it’s hard to comprehend everything they are working on.

    The culture and mission of IBM has changed in 100 years, but it’s still amazing that the company has survived. I think back to the tech companies of my youth, and many of them are gone. Who remembers 3COM? Anyone set up a Wellfleet router? DEC becoming Compaq, and now HP. Apple is still around, but Sun Microsystems is disappearing into Oracle. Microsoft is only 30 years old.

    I once worked for a hundred year old company, one that embraced and remembered it’s history, even as it evolved in the modern world. The President of the company had worked there for his whole career, taking over for his father that had worked there almost his whole life and still came into the office a few days a week at age 80. There was a sense of history, tradition, and pride that kept people working there, with the vast majority of the company having worked there over a decade when I was hired.

    The modern world is fast paced, rapidly changing, and evolving quickly, but there is something to be said for adapting to fit in, while maintaining your mission and ideals. I hope that more companies would look beyond their next quarter or year and make the attempt to build a business that they are proud of, and can survive a hundred years into the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts