Voice of the DBA

Tag: business

  • The Five Year Plan

    This editorial was originally published on June 13, 2013. It is being re-run today as Steve is traveling.

    IT departments won’t exist in five years. A bold prediction from the CITE conference last week. It’s not so much a prediction of an increase in cloud services, but more the idea that the centralized IT department is struggling with the consumerization of technology, the increasing demands of the business for faster turnaround on projects and prototypes, and the flexibility being demanded by an increasingly technology savvy workforce.

    Like most predictions, I take this one with a grain of salt. I don’t think five years is enough time to change the face of the enterprise IT groups. Five years ago the first iPhone had been out for a year and was being demanded by users to replace their Blackberries. These days many corporations support iPhones, along with other smartphones, and Blackberries have disappeared from many organizations. However IT has adapted, released some of their control, and even integrated some of their policies into new technologies. When I enabled corporate mail on my smartphone recently, I had to allow some remote management features to get mail, which was fine with me.

    I do agree that we will start to see some of our IT functions, especially small projects and POC (proof of concepts) increasingly being driven in departments. There are too many projects, too many different technologies, and too little time to work on them for central IT departments to tackle all these projects. Departmental management won’t wait for IT that is stretched too thin, especially if they have existing staff that have some technology skills. That latter factor is something becoming more and more common all the time.

    However I can’t see central IT disappearing. There are often quite a few systems that are complex, that are too large, too important to let someone manage part time. There are projects that cross departments, or even the entire company, and coordinating tasks and resources between departments is complex. Add to all of this the problems and hassles of hiring good technology people, and I can see projects rising in departments, but being turned over at times to IT to manage.

    I do think that central IT groups need to be more flexible, and reduce some of their rules, or adapt them to new technologies and platforms. I expect people working in central staff to be “lent” to departments for projects, perhaps even multiple departments at the same time to help get projects completed, while also gaining some training on the various systems in order to provide support when other staff isn’t available. Such as weekends.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Server Hardware or Coffee?

    I actually chuckled out loud in my office recently. I was reading a piece about Expensify and how they learned some lessons from their database architecture over time. It’s a good piece, but at one point the author talks about two Dell servers. There’s a dual core 2.8Ghz CPU with 500GB of storage for US$700. This could be upgraded to an 8 core, 3.7GHz CPU with 64GB of RAM and 10TB of storage for around US$3,200. However, the author says don’t be cheap. Why?

    That’s less than the company spends on coffee each month.

    I thought that line was funny, and it proves a point. It can be easy to think about the cost of hardware as being high because it’s a large ticket item for most of us. When you view it in the context of the scale of business, then it’s cheap. If any of us spent $3000 a month on food, we might not think $3000 for a server is expensive. When you look at the cost of your labor that might need to babysit an underpowered system, a few more thousand dollars seem like a bargain for memory or CPU resources.

    The author also notes that while EC2 charges for managing your systems, it’s still a steal, and for many of us, capacity isn’t a big issue. We do find that one single system runs most of our workload. If it doesn’t, then we could buy more, or a second system, for a relatively low cost. At least, compared to the rest of our business.

    There certainly are some of you that have a large workload, or you have spent substantially more on server hardware. I think many of my systems have been tens of thousands of dollars, but there are good points to be made. Today’s computers are very powerful, and even though we have more data, a single server is likely able to handle many workloads.

    If we write good code.

    That’s a big caveat, but training your staff to code better, having them spend time learning to query hierarchies more efficiently or quickly splitting strings, can pay off with much happier servers and customers. While I am a fan of using hardware to avoid spending too much time tuning queries, I also think continuously improving the skills of your development staff is much more important and might be the best IT investment you can make. Assuming, of course, that you treat them well and they enjoy working for your management staff.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Are You a Tech Company?

    Are you a tech company. That’s an interesting question. I’m sure some of you might not think so, working for a commercial organization that has some physical product you sell or some service you provide. You might not consider yourself a tech company. However, your organization might be, at least according to this essay at Medium.

    I certainly think software has changed, and will continue to change the world. I think data becomes is an important part of our system, but in conjunction with software and the ease with which we can gather, process, extract, and analyze the information inside of our data. In order to do that, I do believe that we need ways to better build and deploy software, whether that’s database software or application software.

    To do that, can we be afraid of mistakes? I think not. The opening premise of the piece is looking at rapid delivery from two points of view. Can a system be secure if you change it multiple times a day? Or perhaps it can’t be secure if you don’t have the ability to change things. Either view could be true, and most of us lean one way or the other. My view is towards the latter, not because I want to release multiple times a day, but because if there are issues, bugs, or security holes, I need to be able to change my software that day. I can’t wait for weeks or months.

    That’s one of the problems I’ve seen with quite a few systems in the past. The time to release a new version, to patch an issue, is far, far too long when potentially hundreds, or thousands, of malicious attackers could take advantage of a flaw this week. Or our company could lose customers because a feature is broken for long periods of time. While I don’t think the cost of fixing mistakes is zero, I do think that the cost of not fixing issues is also more than zero. Certainly at times the cost of not fixing something might be much, much higher than our organization would tolerate.

    Mistakes will happen. However, the point the essay makes is valid. We should learn from mistakes, and not try to avoid them, but continually push forward to improve our software. Above all, we need to find ways to engage our employees and get them to believe they can produce better software and are empowered to do so.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio .

  • The New Operating System

    I often see pieces written about startup companies and the methods they use to develop software. Small companies often adapt quickly to new ideas and processes. However, many of us work in larger, more established corporations and don’t get the flexibility to change our processes. In fact, for many of us, the idea of developing software faster doesn’t even seem to make sense. Most of us in large organizations (private or public) have fundamentally different views of our clients and market.

    However I read an interesting piece on adaptive, more flexible, startup-type companies that does seem to indicate that many of our larger organizations might want to rethink how they work. The piece looks at an operating system as a way of building products or services. What’s most fascinating to me is that this piece looks at the way in which large, established companies have failed while smaller, younger companies that operate differently have succeeded.

    In many ways, software is eating the world. As playing fields level in many industries because of both cheap computing power and complex software, I suspect more and more organizations will feel pressure to become more adaptive. I would especially think this will happen as new, younger managers mature, with new ways of thinking. Those managers that haven’t spent decades working in a factory mentality will see the power and advantages of trusting people, setting a vision, and then allowing people to build software that does the work.

    However there are plenty of organizations where you have a wide range of skills, and of employee motivation. There are certainly employees that don’t want to innovate and just want to do the job they’ve been doing. There will always be a need for some grunt style work (though maybe less in technology). We certainly need to adapt any system to ensure those employees that need more supervision to transition to new ways of working get that help.

    I expect that we’ll also see more public groups adapt these techniques as well. There is increasing pressure on reducing costs, as well as the need to accomplish more and more, perhaps with smaller groups of people. In many cases this means that software should do more. I would hope that more public organizations adapt their processes in order to meet the demands they face. Those that have, already stand out.

    It’s going to be an interesting world the next decade to two, and I really do think we will see more companies adapting the way they work to something that leans towards embracing and allowing creativity and innovation more than following rules by rote.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.