All Posts in Cloud

|In: Cloud|Last Updated:

I have a new set of hearing aids. In the instruction manual, well before the explanation of how to change amplification and programming, is this:

You are not allowed to operate the equipment within 20 km of the centre of Ny Ålesund, Norway.

There’s no explanation for the rule, just the fact, which is why my wife and I were briefly tempted to burn some frequent flier miles, just to break it.

But cooler heads prevailed. Actually, colder heads — we live in Minnesota, which we figured is bad enough (Google Maps reveals Ny Ålesund is on an island roughly 1,000 km due north of Lapland).

Which gets us to another disadvantage of relying on policies, standards, and enforcement to make sure how you want everyone to do things around here becomes how everyone actually does do things around here, beyond those mentioned last week: You have to explain your reasons, which makes your policies and standards burdensomely long. If you don’t, you’ll tempt employees to violate the ones that make no apparent sense, just to see what happens.

Changing the culture simply works better. When enough people internalize how we do things around here, peer pressure becomes your primary means of enforcement.

How to change it? You’ll find a detailed account in Leading IT: <Still> The Toughest Job in the World. Glad you asked.

The short version is to change your own behavior, because culture is the learned behavior people exhibit in response to their environment, and leader behavior is the dominant aspect of their environment.

Before you do, you have to describe the culture you want, and there’s a gotcha. The temptation in describing “how we do things around here” is to be procedural: “When someone contacts the service desk, we first identify the caller, next assign a ticket number, then get a description of their issue,” and so on.

But culture isn’t a matter of procedure. It’s a reflection of shared attitudes. Your behavioral description of culture should reflect this — something like, “When someone contacts the service desk we assume they’re experiencing a real problem, and we take ownership of it.”

<SnideComment>Given my experience with service desks, and in particular with my current mailing service after many subscribers received five copies of last week’s column, I’d say this would represent a radical cultural shift in far too many.</SnideComment>

To change your culture you have to describe both the culture you have and the culture you want. You have to figure out what about how you currently behave results in the culture you currently have, and how you’ll need to behave to get the culture you want.

If there are other managers between you and the employees whose behavior you want to change, you have to pay close attention to how those managers are behaving, how you want them to behave, and what you have to do so they’ll behave that way.

A few subscribers asked if there’s a way to change the culture quickly.

The answer is yes. Actually, there are two.

The first is to lay off a significant number of the employees you have and hire to the new culture. It’s unpleasant to say the least — unpleasant for you, more unpleasant for the surviving employees, and … and I hope this is obvious … even more unpleasant for the dear departed.

Although to be fair, on the pleasantness scale the employees you hire as replacements might very well find the change quite positive, all in all.

Anyway, massive layoffs are quick-culture-change tactic #1. The second one is slightly less draconian — fire all of the managers whose behavior seems to be driving the old culture and replace them with managers who seem to have the attitude you’re looking for.

Yes, it’s ugly. No, I don’t generally recommend it. But if you need to turn around a seriously dysfunctional culture quickly, this is your most efficient alternative.

Start with the ringleader, and perhaps his/her chief acolyte. Reason #1: Fire all the managers at once and the disruption will be too great. Reason #2: Persuading HR to go along will be a challenge. Reason #3: Do you really want to be that kind of person? And most important, Reason #4: Once you’ve fired one or two, the rest will usually figure out you’re serious and change their behavior to match what you’re looking for.

And, in case this isn’t clear, you still have to change your behavior (and attitudes) too. Otherwise, the culture will gradually revert back to the one you say you don’t like.

And you’ll have to go through the unpleasantness all over again.

* * *

Four years ago in Keep the Joint Running, Gartner predicted that in just two short years, 20% of all companies would have no IT assets of their own — it will all have moved to third parties and the cloud. KJR’s rebuttal was suitably pungent.

And eight years ago you read about a popular technique for manipulating people.

Comments

|In: Cloud|Last Updated:

I don’t get it.

Amazon will now sell businesses virtual PCs for $35 per month. I’m trying to figure out how this makes sense.

Let’s run the numbers. You can buy a pretty decent desktop computer … from Amazon, to take one variable out of the comparison … for $400. Plus a monitor, keyboard and mouse, but they’re the same either way — a wash.

For the Amazon offering, unless you’re planning to run it directly in your frontal lobes you’ll need a cloud client to run it on. Typical cloud clients run around $350.

Imagine you expect the desktop PC to last 3 years … a typical rotation … but because you’re using a cloud-based PC you expect your cloud client device to last twice as long. That’s probably too generous, but I’m a generous guy.

The raw numbers say that over six years you’ll spend $800 for a traditional PC. For the Amazon alternative you’ll spend $350 + 12*6*$35 = $2,870.

Presumably, what you get for the additional $2,000 and change … $333 per year … is …

I don’t get it. Because you’ll still have to handle software installations, user support, and so on. The big benefit is that if a cloud client dies, there’s no disruption when you replace it. (And, by the way: Dear Microsoft … this is 2013 and it’s still an awesome pain to migrate from one PC to another. Why haven’t you fixed this yet? Love, Bob)

Probably, this is the wrong comparison. What we should be comparing Amazon Workspaces to is running your own VDI infrastructure. It’s a much more plausible comparison, because without Amazon you need to server capacity to run the virtual desktops, and storage capacity for user data.

Enter a nice piece written by Network Computing’s Art Wittmann earlier this year (“Calculating the True Cost of VDI,” 4/15/2013). Wittmann’s bottom line comes to $900 to $1,000 to provision a cloud-client system. The picture is complex enough that I’m not going to try to put a side-by-side comparison together.

Building a side-by-side comparison is complicated by quite a few little details, like how many times you’d replace the data center hardware over the six-year span we’ve allowed for VDI desktops (if it’s every three years add $320 per desktop for this, spent in year 4 of the cycle), and whether you or Amazon will upgrade the desktop OS, and if it’s Amazon whether the upgrade license is at no additional charge.

If you’re running low on space or AC, factor that in too.

Oh, one more quibbling little detail: If it’s your server, your local users get to operate at wire speeds. If you use Amazon’s service they’ll share Internet bandwidth. Yes, VDI is pretty efficient in its bandwidth use. You still need to determine whether you’d need to beef up your network.

Or add to it, because now that everyone is completely dependent on the Internet connection, you’ll need two, from two different ISPs, connecting to two different points-of-presence at opposite sides of your building. You should have this already, of course, and if you don’t, stop reading right now and make the proper arrangements.

I’m far too lazy to perform the detailed analysis, although if you’d like to put one together and send it my way I’d be happy to share it with the rest of the KJR community.

My guess is that managing your own VDI will win, but not by a lot.

But what this really points out is that after all these years of VDI being touted as the just-makes-sense alternative to putting real PCs in front of employees, the raw economics still favor the real PC.

VDI’s “value proposition” (if you aren’t an initiate: “Why you might want to buy it”) has always been the same. It isn’t hard cash. It’s headache reduction.

But reducing IT’s headaches doesn’t improve revenue, costs, or risks.

It’s long past time for a hard-edged look at the trade-offs between using VDI-provisioned desktops and real PCs. Not just how the costs compare … I trust regular KJR readers don’t need me to explain why total cost of ownership is such a useless metric yet again … but how they compare with respect to the business benefits they enable as well.

But this will probably prove impossible, because much of the benefit of real PCs comes from “shadow IT.”

It’s something most IT departments still try to stamp out, because IT only sees the headaches it causes. Its benefits are, by definition, hidden in the shadows where they’re devilishly hard to dig out.

Comments