Transparency, big data and decision making

Anyone who knows me professionally will tell you that I'm a huge proponent of being transparent in communications.  I have firm expectations of transparency up, down and sideways through the org chart.  I tell my staff that I expect transparency in their communications with myself and their peers.  When asked by my management what I need to be successful, one of the top items I respond with is transparency from them with information.  I firmly believe that knowledge is power and that effective decisions can be made more accurately when people are better informed.

Transparency of information is a key element to data driven decision making.  Gut instincts will get some people a long ways however for the majority of people, the best decisions are made when people have as much information available to them.  Of course the rub is that you never have perfect information and you never can have complete information.  Or can you?

The world of big data is changing all of the paradigms around the decision making process.  When I started in graduate school working on a statistics degree nearly 20 years ago, the thought of having a complete data set for analysis was the ideal but not realistic.  We used the power of mathematics to develop confidence levels around decisions made based on sampling methods that reduced the error potential in reduced sample sizes.  A sample versus a census was the only feasible way to move from a theoretical exercise into an actionable decision.

The power of computation and the size of data warehouses today has become so enormous, the process of doing analysis and consequently making decisions around a census of the population is no longer part of theory.  It is practice.  This leads back to my fixation on transparency.  Just why is transparency so important?

As a business leader, I can either recognize that data is everywhere and virtually everyone has access to these data stores in one form or another.  If I'm not transparent, it is too easy for people I'm working with to find the information anyway.  Sometimes though when people discover the raw information on their own, they may not get complete data or they may resolve the data in ways that provide incorrect results.  The possibility of arriving at false conclusions is heightened.  When it comes to things that relate to the health of a business that can directly impact people's livelihoods, this can be a real problem.  People always tend to arrive at the worst possible conclusions and accept those as reality.  It is human nature to assume the sky is falling and left unchecked, these false decision outcomes can become a cancer within the business.

Treating information the same way that source code in the Open Source software world is the only way to mitigate these cancers.  Creating a culture of transparency in the workplace helps to alleviate these problems.  People don't always like to hear the honest truth and sometimes the whole story is not always welcome information.  I have found that the respect earned by consistently being transparent helps bridge over tough conversations and builds a level of trust that can be called upon when needed.  Not all FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) can be removed by this effort but it certainly is minimized.

When people have been empowered with information through transparency, the probability of decisions made being successful increases dramatically.  Morale is also increased as people at all levels share in the ownership of the decision making process.

Holiday Spirit????

This lovely Black Friday morning I awoke to a quiet house, the boys slept in a little or at least were pretty quiet when they got up.  However, my peace was disturbed when I read the front page of the paper, The Billings Gazette and looked at the two main articles adjacent to each other on the front page.  The first one titled Shoppers, Stores Just Can't Wait For Black Friday was about the excitement of the official start of the holiday shopping season.  The second one titled This Means Everything To Me was about the Thanksgiving meal prepared by the Food Bank for people in need.

The reason that I was disturbed was the sharp contrast of these two images.  On the one hand, we had a story about greedy shoppers camping out in front of a Best Buy store at 6PM waiting for a midnight opening so they could all rush in and buy 42" TV's for $200 along with a photo of a lady with her shopping cart overflowing with toys from the Toys R Us sale that started at 9PM.  On the other hand, we have a story about the Food Bank providing Thanksgiving meals for needy folks and there is a person named Frank Tall Bull quoted as saying "I'm homeless and starving.  This means everything to me.  I'm just happy and grateful I'm still alive."

What is wrong with this country when in the same day and in the same newspaper on the same page these two stories could exist?  I'm by no means exempt from materialism and "want" but at the same time as I watch my boys grow their collection of toys, I'm becoming more appreciative of a more minimalist lifestyle.  I feel compelled to do something but I am at a loss as to what action I can specifically take.

Recently I've been to several of my son's friends' houses and seen the sheer volume of toys those boys have.  While I feel that my sons have a lot of stuff, their levels of stuff appear to pale in comparison to those other kids.  And those kids aren't living in what would typically be considered "rich" households.  I'm not sure what causes those kids to have so much stuff but nonetheless, they do.  With Christmas approaching as well as my older son's birthday, I'm again faced with the issue of limiting how much stuff the boys get from both us and others as gifts.  They just don't need that many more gifts and with my job situation, it is a great opportunity to restrict the amount of things coming into the house.

We are going to be moving before too much longer and I will be taking that opportunity to reduce the amount of "stuff" I have as well.  My shop if full of tools, toys, parts and a multitude of items that seemed useful, important or needed at one point in time.  I'm going to be selling, giving away or just plain eliminating as much as I can.  The same goes for the contents of the house.  Having stuff just for the sake of having it isn't necessary.  I'll be doing my best to unload items cheaply or freely in the coming month.

Going forward, I need to help those around me and in my community reach balance without being annoying or somehow pushing values onto others.  The two articles that I referenced above make it so clear that as a society, out way of thinking is so far out of whack that it shouldn't be hard to nudge folks into a more balanced approach to needs and wants.

Underemployment

This week marked the first week in many, many years that I've been in an underemployed or unemployed state.  Fortunately it wasn't a surprise, it had been brewing for sometime and I was working diligently ahead of time to mitigate the impact this would have.  However, losing your job when you are the sole income source for a family is still a challenge.

I have a simple strategy, reduce spending as much as possible and network, network, network to locate a new position.  I see this as a great opportunity for me both professionally and personally. We are going to have an opportunity to move to a new city and meet new people, I'm going to be able to work in a new career with a new company.  That of course, is glossing over many of the difficulties associated with this but on the whole, I expect it to be a positive experience.


So far, one of the most eye opening and surprising things I've discovered is how non-responsive recruiters are to potential candidates.  I know they are generally snowed under with applicants, candidates and other stress of the recruitment process but communications are the key to the process working.  On the other side, it is a hard lesson for a candidate to learn but recruiters don't work for candidates, they work for companies and if a candidate can't fill a current need, the recruiter can't afford to spend much (if any) time with the candidate.  In many ways, the process is broken.


I remember years ago when the job search process was a task intensive operation of reading local newspapers, calling job services, and contacting employment agencies.  It was difficult to learn about openings and was difficult for employers to get a broad selection of candidates for roles.  Contrast that with today's environment where virtually every job is published world wide and essentially unlimited numbers of qualified (and unqualified) candidates are able to apply to positions.  It is as truly a daunting task for companies and recruiters to sift through all of the noise to find the star candidates as it is for candidates to get into the hands of the selection managers.


Further complicating things is with all of the noise in the process, there has been an evolution in hiring to screen candidates with long lists of perfect selection criteria.  Seemingly gone are the days in which a candidate was judged by his or her potential to be the next superstar the company needs and has been replaced by an arduous process of ensuring that every potential wish list of qualification has been already covered by the candidate's job history.  Hiring for aptitude and attitude seem to have gone by the wayside as old fashioned and out of favor.


Its time for a new approach to recruitment and job searches.  Differentiation in resume appears to be one of the few tools available to candidates to attempt to stand out in the candidate pile.  I've worked with a pioneer in the area of contrarian thinking to the job search process.  Doug Whatley has developed the PIP (Personal Intellectual Property) process of developing a resume.  While the process might have some people that don't like the format, looking at a PIP CV is an eye opener for sure.  I've had a number of recruiters tell me that they didn't know where I belonged, they just knew that I belonged at their company.  All of those comments are from the enlightened nature of the CV itself.


So, I'll continue my networking and searching, working my way through the system of recruitment and hiring.  Wish me luck (and don't forget to help me network).

The Cloud Revolution

As I continue to look for new and exciting technologies to apply in my role as Director of IT, two items continue to surface. Both Cloud Computing and Virtualization are the place to be these days. Interestingly enough, they are both extensions of the concept of clustered computing from the 90's. When I was at Red Hat, we were developing some of the first clustering tools for Linux aimed at load sharing and high availability. Those same concepts and tools have evolved into what has become the infrastructure for clouds and virtulatization.

Virtualization is taking those concepts internal and creating virtual machines within a single computer to allow better resource utilization as well as to gain more robust performance from technology investments. Of course there are many other purposes for virtualization. Cloud computing builds on that concept in that it groups N machines together for a common purpose. Those machines might also contain any number of virtualized machines as well. Cloud differs from virtualization in that a "cloud" is created to provide a service without regard for the logistics of the hardware. This includes both public clouds and private clouds, the main difference being in how the environment is hosted.

So anyway, back to my investigation of practicality. The price points for these technologies range from next to zero for some open source based solutions all the way to the moon for complete managed and hosted environments. Some applications and environments lend themselves very nicely to public clouds given that the bandwidth requirements of the data passed between the cloud and the clients is relatively low. As the interaction between the cloud and the clients increases, the bandwidth requirements go up also. Services such as cloud based storage and virtual desktop environments substantially increase the need for bandwidth making self-hosted private clouds more appealing.

As with all technologies, there is always a trade off between features, costs and staff resources necessary to implement and manage the solution. What I think is truly amazing is that the breadth of options and choices available makes it so that there is an optimized solution for almost every environment and budget. Where the rub comes in is with marketing and with competition between all of these choices, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort through the noise to get to the solution that actually would work for a particular need and budget. For the smaller IT shops, this is a particularly challenging dilemma given they don't have the staff resources to become expert in enough of the options to determine the best fit for their operation nor are they likely big enough to hire an independent consulting firm to guide them. Partnering with a vendor is the likely path, however that path eliminates virtually all choice beyond what that vendor sells and offers.

The good thing is that like almost every other cutting edge technology, a few more years into its life cycle and these challenges will have been worked out and there will be well documented paths to follow, no matter what your budget or scope. This is the evolutionary part of technology that I love so much, first it is technology for the sake of doing what hasn't been done but then it becomes the business side of deploying it to increase the profitability of the firm. Participating right there in the middle is the sweet spot.

Baseball

Well, I think today may be the last straw for me and Major League Baseball. I've stuck through a lot of things (strikes, favorite players leaving the Dodgers for crazy salaries, etc.) but in watching Manny Ramirez's at bat in the 6th inning today at Coors Field, I have finally had enough (I think). Ask any Little League baseball player what is the fundamental rule of umpire interactions and they will (should) all say you don't argue strikes with the umpire. It is a traditional rule of baseball enforced with an iron fist by the home plate umpire. Manny comes in as a pinch hitter, first pitch is a called strike, which he argues with the umpire about, gets ejected and leaves the game. Who does this guy think he is?

So, to back up a bit, Manny has been with the Dodgers for a bit over 2 years and initially had some success (hitting homers mostly) until it became official that he was using banned substances and was suspended for 50 games. More importantly, he exemplifies the mentality of so many of baseballs' mega stars that think the world revolves around them. They demand (and get) egregious salaries as if they were the only person on the team. Baseball, unlike many other sports really requires the entire team to win games. A great pitcher only pitches every 5th game, a great hitter only hits 1 out of every 9 at bats in the game and usually sees 4 or 5 plate appearances in a game. A great fielder can only field balls that are hit (or thrown) in his general vicinity. Conversely, while basketball is a team sport, a truly great player can carry the team much more significantly than a great baseball player can. The same can be said about a great quarterback (he does need other players but since he touches the ball every single offensive play, he has a much higher contribution to the winning success of the team). My point is, no matter how many home runs you hit, if your pitching stinks, you'll still most games or if your defense boots plays, you'll still lose most games.

Also important to note, in all top level professional sports, everyone that dresses out is the best of the best. There are no bad players in any major league level professional sport, they are all tremendous, the pick of the pick. It just happens that some manage to shine at a higher level than others.

Somehow though we have managed to elevate some of these players into the stratosphere and I do mean "we" as the public fan base. Like all things, these teams come down to money and if a player has celebrity qualities, he will draw the crowds which translates into revenue. Where things go astray is some of these players actually begin to believe that the world does revolve around them and begin to show that in their play. As in Manny Ramirez. He left Boston because of this attitude and I'm sure the behind the scenes reason he was traded from the Dodgers today was the same (cutting his $45M salary probably wasn't a bad side effect either). I used to blame the agents for much of this activity, but I think they are like blood sucking trial lawyers, they just go where the money is and do what they can to enhance their fees. They didn't create these messes, they just enhanced the messes being created all over the place.

I've been waiting for years for a new round of Cal Ripkens and Tony Gwynns to come to the game but I don't see them. People who play because they are talented and they truly love the sport and the franchises. I've boycotted just about everything to do with MLB at least as far as my wallet is concerned over the last few years. I went to the game today because I really love the game and the Dodgers but Manny's episode was too much, I'm throwing in the towel on baseball.

While I'm at it, isn't the purpose of the "commissioner" to regulate the game? In other words, promote what is good and punish/prevent what is bad? Why is it after all of these years and all of the "dirt" coming out and even several Congressional inquiries does Bud Selig still waffle on the thought of across the board drug testing? Why doesn't baseball suspend players for the rest of the year for first positive and for life for a second positive? It is a simple rule, we all know it is bad for the game and yet, it nearly take a federal grand jury to punish anyone at the MLB level.

Since I'm really throwing the towel at baseball, what the hell is up with unions? Since when do people who have multimillon dollar contracts need union representation? Send Donald Fehr and his whole bunch of cronies out to lunch permanently. I could see the value of unions 75 years ago when players were not much more than slaves and property, but lets face it, that ain't the face of today's player. Any occupation who's minimum wage is $400,000/year (2009 minimum) does not need union representation.

So I'm officially through with MLB until it cleans up its act, boots the prima donnas and becomes the national pastime with honor and dignity again. Somebody send me a message when that happens, I'll be busy rooting for Norway in the national curling finals.

My Chevelle project

Some of you probably know something about my car project, maybe some of you don't. Well, its springtime and I've got the bug to get out and do some driving in it. Of course, like other projects, there is always way too many things to be done and never enough time to get to them. Adding a couple little boys into the mix doesn't do much for that schedule thing either.

The car started life with me in 1999 as a more or less basic 1970 Chevelle from North Carolina. The reason I mention where I got it is because that is also where most of the rust in the car came from. When I first bought it, I had big plans for a complete frame off project so I really didn't worry too much about rust and things like that. Also, for the $5,000 I paid for it, I probably didn't have a lot of room to negotiate either. This is a photo of the car shortly after I started working on it over at Donnie's shop. The original 307 small block and 3-speed trans have been removed at this point. What was left was the fake "SS" badging and the fantastic Maaco paint job the covered the original sea green paint but also covered the North Carolina rust patches.

The first steps in the project was to have a motor built for the car and to rebuild the entire running gear. The first part was easy, I called Rob Vischer who owned Rev Racing Engines in Great Falls, MT at the time and asked him to build a blown big block Chevy motor that would make at least 800 hp on pump gas. He got to work on that task and about a year later, I was the proud owner of a 540 c.i. Chevy with a 8-71 blower and a pair of Holley Dominators. On the dyno with a basic street tuneup, the motor made just over 900 hp on bad racing fuel. On pump gas, it made a little over 800 hp. Rob was pretty sure that the motor would make 1100-1200 hp on race fuel with a racing tuneup but since I had no intentions of racing it, we never pushed it that way on the dyno.

At the same time the motor was being built, I attacked the running gear and chassis. The entire suspension and driverain was replaced. This included a Ford 9" from Currie Enterprises, Hotchkis suspension in the front and rear, power disc brakes all the way around and a new 4L-80E transmission from TCI. I wanted to put a Tremec T-56 in but they wouldn't support any installation over 500 hp. There are a number of options now for high horsepower manual transmissions but that the time, it was automatic for this kind of power.

Over the course of the next 8 years or so, I continued to work on tuning the motor to make it run on the street. Unfortunately, the motor as it was originally built just wasn't very streetable and 2 rebuilds later, I think I've managed to get it streetable. Both rebuilds occured because the solid roller lifter's needle bearings exploded and demolished the cam. The first time it happened, I had had the motor for a couple years and had put a few hundred miles on the car. I trucked the motor to Great Falls and asked Rob to rebuild it. After that rebuild, I down jetted the carbs and continued to search for a streetable tuneup. A few years later, basically the same thing happened again. This time, Rob had sold his engine shop and gone off to work for Lotus in Detriot, MI. I turned to a guy in Bozeman, MT, Wes St. John who owns Internal Combustion Machine. Wes had just rebuilt a small motor for a friend of mine and was recommended. Doing a lot of research, I decided to move away from the solid roller lifers and the crazy .750 lift cam that had been in the motor. I opted for a street cam for nitrous motors from Comp Cams and hydraulic roller lifters. This would make the motor more streetable, eliminate the need for constantly setting the valves but at a cost of loss of top end power band. Ok, so I lost about 1000-1500 rpm on the topside and probably 200 hp or so. Probably not much of a loss for my purposes.

Wes is meticulous and very busy. That translated into my engine being at his shop for almost 2 years. However, when I got it back from him, it was in perfect condition, full of new parts and a fresh rebuild. I was happy to get the motor back last summer. At the same time, I added some O2 sensors to the exhaust stream so that I could hopefully tune the motor better using the LM-2 data logger from Innovate Motorsports. By the time I got to working on everything last fall, the summer car season was pretty much over. I did however, have enough time to fire the motor up and play with the data logger a bit. That led to more understanding of what was happening with the motor, which also led to knowing that the Dominator carbs were probably the biggest source of my problems. I simply could not get the motor to idle and operate at a partial throttle without dumping excess gas into the engine. So, the car project was shelved for the winter.

Now, this spring, arrives, with a renewed attack on getting the car up and running. While I would have liked to convert the car to fuel injection, the $4k-$6k for the parts needed for electronic injection just wasn't in the budget. However, a pair of 4150 Double Pumpers specially modified for blowers was, if I could get the Dominators sold. Well, everything worked out and the car now has new carburetors on it and is ready to be tuned up to drive. I just have to have someone hang out with me on a Saturday and get it tuned and running.

I'm sure there will be plenty more to write on the topic of the car but for now, this is going to have to be it.

Bad business sense in the .com era

UPDATE: 23FEB2010

I have been contacted by Casey Hall, VP of Sales and Marketing at Extron, about this matter. I've had a very cordial conversation with him and received feedback about why their channel works the way it does. Basically, they work very hard to control the channel so that the only companies selling their product are companies that are trained on the installation and support of their products. That I can appreciate, but it still doesn't answer one of my complaints about locating these resellers. I gave Casey that feedback and that is something they will have to work on improving.

He also addressed my technical challenges of the lack of speaker bind posts in their wall plate products, summarizing that I had recieved bad information when I had called the company. They don't offer the bind posts, but there is no technical reason, most likely it just hasn't been asked for. Finally, regarding purchasing the amplifier product I originally was searching for, he is putting me in touch with their internal product sales folks to help me purchase the product directly from Extron as a design consultant.

All in all, this effort has turned a negative, grumpy attitude on my part (justified or not) into a positive partnership between our companies. So, I guess the ".com" stuff really does work after all. :)

---------------------- ORIGINAL POST -----------------------------

I really thought that making mention of something in the ".com era" was a phrase of the past. Well, I've been pushed over the edge by a company called Extron. I've specified their multimedia modular wall jacks for several years now, mainly because of the high quality of the pieces. Yes, I've had complaints, namely for as many parts/pieces as they make, it is impossible to get exactly the right combination of modular pieces you want into a single wall plate. That combined with the grief I've had trying to get line input speaker jacks incorporated with their wall plates has given me grey hair.

I've put up with that though because when it comes to quality of the product, it is hard to beat. I've even gone to having a second wall plate adjacent to the Extron plate simply to support speaker bind posts. Extron claims they are concerned about having the high current speaker jacks in the same box as signal lines. While I appreciate their concerns, lets be honest here, anyone putting a system together with the kind of speaker currents that could cause problems on ethernet lines or shielded signal lines is not using this type of product.

This company also makes some very high quality switching and amplifing products for commercial AV installations. I've specified a few of these products for some of the K-12 schools I've designed for the multimedia outlets and the schools are very happy with the products. I've never really looked into buying their product, that is something the contractors deal with through their various distribution channels. Now, I'm getting to my point. Our main conference room in our Denver headquarters needed a small AV amplifier to drive a pair of in-ceiling speakers. I thought (wrongly) that it would be no big deal for me to pick up one of these items that for our internal use.

This is where the whole thing goes straight into the bucket. For some reason, the company protects their distribution channel like they are selling top secret nuclear arms to the US government. Go ahead, try to find some of their AV equipment for sale somewhere. You can find a few of their wall jacks here and there but that is about it. Ok, next step, I contact Extron directly through various links on their website. First response is a canned response that informs me that they only offer sales information to authorized designers and consultants. Second response is from a sales guy at the company who asks a lot of questions and sounds sympathetic but advises me I've just been dealing with the wrong access points into the company and that he was going to take care of me. Says that he will send me a bunch of information on how to buy stuff shortly. Note to sales guys: DON'T SAY YOU ARE GOING TO DO SOMETHING RELATED TO CUSTOMER SERVICE AND THEN NOT FOLLOW THROUGH! Yes, you guessed correctly, no response from the guy has arrived.

Ok, I then try contacting several of the AV companies I know that might be able to buy or resell their product. All of them inform me that Extron makes becoming a reseller very difficult and that they have all given up (or are still considering the value) on becoming a reseller. One does have the ability to sell but after a day of them trying to get pricing for the one stupid little switch device, the best they can do is slightly less than MSRP of $1,300.

Can a business, especially an AV product based company really expect to survive in a world where everyone expects to be able to locate and find resellers of product on the Net? Doesn't it go without saying that 15 years into the ".com era" all companies would realize this? I guess what I'm saying is, Extron can take a short step off a tall building. I don't need this kind of grief and I can put another company's products into future designs.