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Book Review: Untangling IT
by Don Rima
Everyone has at one time or another read about another's experiences in their personal or professional life, where someone reviews their successes and failures in an attempt to help smooth the road for others. Sometimes these are magazine articles, and other times they're lengthy books.
When I think of the library of books I've read that have helped make me a better person, both personally and professionally, I immediately think of Hal Geneen's book Managing or Peggy Noonan's book on speech writing, Simply Speaking. Books like these present the thoughts and experiences of people who have been in the trenches. I recently finished another book that I'll be adding to my list: Bob Tipton's Untangling IT: 25 years of lessons in effective IT leadership.
In this easy-to-read recanting of the author's successes, failures, and findings as a leader in the IT realm, readers can learn some effective ways of making things run smoother. You'll notice I said "leadership," not "management." Tipton aptly points out that "people are lead, things are managed."
The chapter on Tipton's findings on interpersonal behavioral introduces the reader to the author's brand of leadership and business analysis and has some interesting ideas on team building and hiring practices. There's also a good smattering of advice on handling office politics. Tipton also has some good-sense ideas on building a progressing and workable team, provided you have the luxury of actually doing so. Most of us inherit an IT shop, then have to deal with being the new kid on the block as well as having a new boss.
One thing I found in Tipton's book that I have not seen in a lot of IT management books is the concept that IT folks need to stop thinking in terms of compilers, databases, computer languages, abend codes, and the internal systems technobabble that has basically been our core vocabulary ever since most of us got into IT. Rather, we need to think of IT as a business unit. IT folks who are going to succeed in the future are going to know their business and how it runs, and they'll be integrators of information that flows into that business. For many this is a paradigm shift of major proportions.
If you get the chance, go to Tipton's Web page and pick up a copy of his book. It's good reading and may help you through some of those rough spots in life or at work.
Don Rima has two decades of experience with IBM midrange systems and runs his own IT consulting group in the Washington metro area. E-mail: dr2@cssas400.com
HP to Merge Server, Services Units
While the top brass at Hewlett-Packard held their security analyst meeting in New York as 2003 came to a close, chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina would not confirm whether the company will merge Enterprise Systems Group and HP Services into a single entity called Technology Solutions Group.
A report in the Wall Street Journal suggested that Ann Livermore, who heads up the services unit and hails from pre-merger HP, would become the executive vice president of the newly merged unit, and that Peter Blackmore, executive vice president in charge of the Enterprise Systems Group, which controls the development and marketing of servers, storage, and systems management software, would be put in charge of the sales force for the new Technology Solutions Group.
After the meeting, the reports forced Fiorina's hand and she sent a memo explaining the reorganization. The merger of the services and server/storage units, which will occur over the coming quarters, would seem to have less to do with personalities and the pressures of running the two most difficult and widely scrutinized business at HP than with trying to gain synergy and market leverage by combining computing platforms and services into a single offering for customers who have grown tired of system integration headaches. HP would be wise to continue to report separate profit-and-loss statements for enterprise systems (which includes servers and storage) and services units, even if it does merge them.
Fiorina said that HP will start breaking out software sales and their profit-and-loss figures in coming quarters, which suggests that HP wants to demonstrate leadership in all categories it plays in. If HP does retain the profit-and-loss figures for these units, it will be able to prove that the reorganization is not about masking the lack of revenue growth and dismal profits in the systems and storage area, but about changing the go-to-market strategy for HP as it attacks the enterprise and small and midsized business markets.
It would not be surprising to see IBM do a similar reorganization, or one that shows how Big Blue sells into various industries and sectors, as opposed to by product line.
IBM Acquires Green Pasture for Its Content Management Arsenal
As the business year was coming to a close in 2003, IBM snapped up Green Pasture Software, a privately held provider of content management software based in Corevalis, Oregon. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The Green Pasture buy marks the third content management software acquisition that IBM's Software Group has made in two years. IBM acquired record management provider Tarian in November 2002 and Web content management software provider in July 2003. Green Pasture provides document management software called G5, which organizes multimedia, spreadsheet, and CAD files and stores them in Lotus Domino or DB2 formats and allows access to them from Microsoft Office and other popular desktop environments. The G5 portfolio also includes document lifecycle management features that control how documents can be shared and distributed.
PeopleSoft Readies Price Changes for JDE OneWorld Suite
Application software provider PeopleSoft is expected to unify the pricing schemes of OneWorld ERP suite, which the company acquired when it bought J.D. Edwards last year, and which it now calls EnterpriseOne, with the value-based pricing it uses for its eponymous ERP suite.
For years PeopleSoft has used value-based pricing, which is not based on server capacity, number of processors, or number of users, but on using a complex equation that assesses the value of the software to the business based on industry, annual revenue, and other factors. PeopleSoft contends that such a pricing model is necessary because, with Web-enabled applications, it is very difficult to know how many users might come into a system from the Internet or from extranets or intranets. Moreover, traditional server-based or module-based pricing often discriminates one platform (such as mainframe, OS/400, or Unix servers) from another (such as Windows-based X86 servers).
The JDE OneWorld suite used a combination of tiered server and per-seat pricing until now. The exact pricing scheme for the EnterpriseOne suite is being determined now. PeopleSoft reportedly will not be changing pricing for its RPG-based WorldSoftware suite for AS/400 and iSeries servers.
VMware Forgoes IPO to Become EMC Subsidiary
Server virtualization vendor VMware had been profitable for less than a year and had aspirations of cashing in on the revitalized tech IPO market when storage vendor EMC made an offer it just couldn't refuse. The 370-person company agreed to become an EMC subsidiary for $635 million, a figure that illustrates how important VMware's software--which carves Intel-based servers into multiple Windows, Linux, and NetWare virtual machines--is to the Wintel and Lintel server strategies of VMware's business partners, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, NEC, and Unisys. That's about three times VMware's expected revenues in 2004.
IBM is a very close partner of VMware, as its GSX Server, ESX Server, VMotion, and VirtualCenter offerings finally gave Big Blue similar types of server virtualization capabilities in xSeries that it had already developed for its high-end based iSeries, pSeries, and zSeries servers.
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