Voice of the DBA

Tag: business

  • Getting IT Out of the Data Center

    The subtitle to this article says it all: IT isn’t a monolithic cost sink. I support this idea, though I don’t think it’s always accurate. Some companies just want an IT cost sink, where the data processing infrastructure is a utility. It provides a service that’s requested, technology automates specific processes, and that’s it. Certainly many companies think they do more than this, but in reality, IT is just a utility like power or water in many organizations.

    However the article points out that an Information Technology department can be so much more. IT can work with the business, improve processes, even provide strategic advantages over your competitors if you structure your environment to do so and allow it to work.

    Building a culture that encourages and promotes collaboration between technical and business people takes work. You need to find and nurture technical people that want to work with other people as much as they want to work with computers. It’s great to have highly skilled technical staffers, but you need to ensure they are willing to use their skills to collaborate with business end users.

    You also need business people that are willing to work with the technical developers. They need to be excited, and open minded about technology. They have to be willing to think outside the box, understand the limitations of current platforms, and be excited about building something in an iterative fashion with people whose primary focus is on technical work.

    I do believe, and have seen, IT groups dramatically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization, but it takes time, and it requires both sides to commit to work together, in a way that ensures each learns from and compromises with, the other.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Managerial Moneyball

    I really enjoyed reading Moneyball. Its a book about baseball and data and how information should be used to choose baseball players for the Oakland As. It’s an interesting approach, one that has rarely been used in the sport in the past, though it is gaining traction. It does seem that this approach has helped the As to high level of success given the constraint of their limited payroll. There’s even a great movie if you don’t want to read the book, but the book is really much better and goes into more detail on data points and how they are used.

    The idea of using data to make decisions has been applied to other areas, with “The Moneyball Effect” being talked about in other industries. Recently I also ran across an opinion piece on bad managers that also referenced Moneyball. The piece notes that most people make poor managers. They lack the skills, and more importantly, they really lack those innate qualities that motivate, inspire, and engage employees. Whether you agree with that last part, I think most of you agree that most managers are poorly chosen, trained, and certainly not qualified.

    The idea of using data to identify people that would make good managers, and perhaps even move people out of managerial roles. The premise of the piece is really the bad managers make their teams perform worse, so if you’ve got one of the seven-out-of-ten people ill suited to the work, you should move them out of that position. Then identify, promote, train, and support the others to manage your employees and help them to perform at their best.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

  • Minimal Meetings

    This editorial was originally published on April 24, 2010. It is being re-run as Steve is out of town at the PASS Summit.

    I read something the other day that struck me. It’s obvious, but I hadn’t really thought about it in that way before. If you invite nine people to a one hour meeting, then is isn’t a one hour meeting. It’s a ten hour  meeting to the company with all the lost productivity.

    That’s a lot of time lost.

    Especially if you are meeting with developers or DBAs. They often have code to write, or problems to think about, and embedding them in a meeting for an hour, especially multiple people, can do more damage to your project than a lot of bad code. No wonder there isn’t enough time to do testing?

    There’s no good solution, especially since meetings can be productive ways to ensure information is shared in a group. They can help reset everyone to the same view of a project or situation. But you should also look to minimize their impact.

    Don’t invite people to meetings if they can read about a decision later, or if they are just getting a status update. A meeting ought to be for people whose job is affected. They need to give input on a decision, or make the decision. Everyone else is just task switching away from their job and losing time that could be put to better use.

    It’s tempting to invite all stakeholders, and anyone who might be needed “just in case.” Resist that temptation and let people spend more time actually building software.

    Steve Jones

  • Data Decisions or Instinct?

    Most of us that are data professionals think the best way to make decisions is to use data to justify some course of action. We look for patterns in data, some guidance that the information we have will lead us to make the best choice for our organization. Google has talked about making data driven decisions as a part of their success and they think more organizations should do this. Any number of other companies also use data to power their BI systems and dashboards that help their employees make better choices.

    That seems in contrast to this piece from the Harvard Business Review that says that great decisions don’t start with data. It talks about using stories and emotions, with a few key facts sprinkled in, to help sell ideas and get decisions made. On one hand I agree that stories help to sell decisions, but I often have found that successful salespeople use this technique to deceive and convince by plucking emotional heartstrings, and using relatively little data.

    In my mind, the best way to make decisions is to go with your instincts, but while examining and understanding the data. You can’t discard data, especially when it presents strong patterns. However data can be deceiving when we don’t carefully examine the ways in which it’s put together. An average doesn’t always reflect the actual value of a set of numbers, especially when we don’t also understand the range, standard deviation, and count of values.

    We also have to realize where we do and don’t have experience and expertise in some subject. We should certainly look to data to guide us and perhaps even justify our decisions, but we can’t forget that the human brain is still an important part of any computational exercise. We need employees that you use their judgement, in collaboration with data, to make the best decision for our organizations.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.