This article isn't going to enlighten you or give you the secret to running a top notch IT organization. And neither are most of the comments that have risen to the top. There is no magic wand. Anyone that tells you otherwise is probably selling something. There's just hard work and a commitment to excellence with the acceptance that there are certain things which are inevitable:
1) You're in business to produce a profit. You're not in business to procure, deploy, or worship technology. Technology is a tool. No different than a screwdriver or a machine press or a clock. It helps the workers be more productive and capable of producing a profit. Nothing more. Nothing less. Used well, technology is power. Used unwisely, it's an anvil around your neck. 2) Organizations are groups of people. People in groups don't communicate well. People one on one usually communicate very well. Whenever you get a large enough group, there will be miscommunication and that thwarts most "techniques" or "methodologies" engineered to negate this effect. The sooner you realize that you can't engineer away humanity, the sooner you'll be successful in using one on one relationships to get most of your wins. ALL organizations will NEVER be in sync at any given time. 3) No matter where you work, there will be a bell curve of capability and skill. You'll have a few rock stars, most people will be in the middle, and there will be a few truly aweful people. It doesn't matter if it's Google or the Army or AJ's Nails and Hair. No organization can attract the best and brightest all the time for all needs. So even if you have good processes and good relationships, they won't always work and you won't always get good results. The best you can do is work hard to provide the best you can and accept the fact that not everyone you are working with is capable or motivated to do the same. Stop complaining and do what is reasonable to solve the problem. That will bring you the most success. And happiness. Read this again, and then lower where you think YOU are in the bell curve. 4) People are relying on you to guide them and help them to make informed and intelligent decisions. To them, what you do is scary and expensive and magical all at the same time. Keep the previous 3 points in mind on how they will present their problem to you and respond to the solution that you present to them.
I've been a CIO for everything from startups to publicly traded companies to companies I've founded. The principals don't change. Just the budgets and egos.
Bullshit. Health care costs have spiraled out of control and there's every reason to believe this will be the next industry in line for a DC bailout.
Don't you find it disturbing that you have more gages for performance/operation of your car than your own body?
Maybe being able to see how choices impact your "vehicle" might be one of the keys to lowering costs of health care for yourself and society.
Rubbish. How many 10year old devices are you using? Even if the real lifespan of the device is actually accurate, the real world lifespan is much shorter.
So I take it that you replace the plumbing and electrical wiring in your house every few years or so, cuz "technology moves on"?
Sure there were alternatives, but they were all either patent-encumbered, or hard to deploy, or too complex to easily develop for. They died. It's called competition. TCP/IP and SMTP came out the other side, and grew into cornerstones of the largest network this world has ever known, in a shockingly short period of time. No, not perfect, but pretty damn good none-the-less.
Not exactly. Some of these technologies were adopted because of market forces as you say, but as they've scaled, alternatives have not been adopted because of "market forces". SMTP is a good example of this. When it was created, there's no way the originators could've imagined the uses of email for rich content, file transfer, and spam. So those requirements never got fit into the spec, and we have the world we live in now. Monopoly and commercial interests keep it there.
VEHICLES are a dumb place to start. At most they only consume 40% of all our energy needs. The place to start is residential and commercial users, where you don't need high end materials, durability, or safety concerns like you do in a moving and often recklessly operated vehicle.
But because everyone in this country is obsessed with driving to do anything, and the price of oil is directly felt when you hit the pump, then that's where the focus gets put. Nevermind the fact that you should be driving LESS, and looking for the dozens of other ways to reduce your reliance on petroleum. We are effectively trying to make a bad problem worse. Try living differently.
That's all well and good but here's the rub: you don't always control how many bits are going down your tube. Things like AJAX, CSS includes, rich media ads, etc all have bit-weight to them, yet you can't control what or how much of it gets downloaded. This is why we'll never be able to move to a metered service and this is why pretty much any policy is going to to have unintended consequences and punish some set of users whether they are "abusing" this service or not.
All broadband connections share resources. The difference between cable and DSL is that cable shares a neighborhood head end as the local switching point, where as DSL shares a switch in the central office. Sometimes it's shared across several central offices, effectively giving you the same problem but across more users.
Not only that, but you can abstract the schema by using views. This will allow you to make changes to the underlying schema, protect the production database from malformed queries, and keep the schema proprietary. You can then populate the views tables any way that the customer would prefer. Problem solved.
That's partially true, but the real reason is that 20-somethings have less to risk (both financially and personally) and don't have the burden of responsibility that most older workers would have (family, mortgage, etc). They also command less money when the business gets going because of inexperience and market rate. This is why financiers prefer to work with younger workforces. More time on the job, smaller costs, less aversion to risk.
There are some empirical evidences that make beauty quantifiable. Most of it is relevant to how symmetrical your face is, and the closer that is to perfect, the better you'll score across subjective ratings. There's also adherence to the golden mean or golden spiral ratios. If you ever watch the Fox Reality show (yeah, I know) Battle of the Bods, you'll see that it's pretty easy to build consensus on subjective measures. While not every group gets every order right, the highs and lows tend to be unanimous. That is to say that it's easy to pick really pretty people and really ugly people, but not relevant to each other within their appropriate group.
While this is true, it should be noted that it hasn't benefited shareholders either. One would think that because profits hadn't been reinvested in upgrades to infrastructure that they would ultimately flow to shareholders, but the telecom sector as a whole has not grown very well over the last 8 years or so. They lag behind other large cap stocks like energy, health, and construction as a function of return on equity. So not only are those profits not being used to upgrade infrastructure, but they're not yielding a higher return to shareholders to generate wealth. Most of those profits have just been siphoned off as waste and lower productivity, which is easily hidden given the last few years of consolidation and subsequent layoffs. So you should be pissed off twice.
HERE HERE! Mod Parent UP! This is the only sensible course of action unless the market's regulations were completely repealed and allowed real competition from the ground up. Putting the plant into a public trust with MINIMAL administrative fees for maintenance through taxes or surcharges would allow all service competitors to focus on SERVICE and innovative applications. Until then, the monopolies will just use the plant as a huge barrier of entry.
This would definitely benefit from being implemented in as many VoIP devices as possible (ie. Linksys SPA-xxxx boxes). Even better if someone can port this to a chip.
What happens when you lose the fob? Or worse, what happens when you're unconscious and someone needs access to the records on the fob? I agree that there's better mechanisms for privacy other than keeping a username and password on Google's site, but carrying around your medical records is probably not optimal.
Because that's NOT why they want Yahoo. Microsoft might be a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them. There is a hidden agenda here that Bill is not revealing and a lot of it probably revolves around a good many things other than just competing with Google.
It's all a ruse. They'll cry about upgrading and how it's so unfair and expensive and the consumer will just bare the burden, but that's just posturing to get something from the regulatory agencies. Once that's accomplished, then they'll cram down some joke of an upgrade that barely impacts margins AND raise prices at the same time. This technique has been going on for decades.
I'll add to that. Because of their duopoly status, there's little or no incentive to upgrade plant beyond what it is because of the obscene profit margin that HSI is bringing to their bottom lines. Consider the history here. High speed cable internet was built out by @Home, an independent company that was only partly financed by cable cos. When Excite@Home had financial trouble (just like every internet company in 2000), the cable co's seized it's assets and essentially stole that product line for their own. Now Comcast makes $38B a year in revenue JUST from HSI products. That number dwarfs their other services revenue. You can't live high on the hog forever. Customers are demanding higher speeds and new services. If you can't compete to deliver those, then you should not have regulated protection of your monopoly status. Open up the plant and let others who know what they're doing provide services in a competitive market.
That's a great idea because it would prove that there's an actual business model to be had here. One that the content industries should've pursued on their own instead of suing their customers.
This is actually a needed component of any overhaul. Right now the discrepancy of what you pay from provider to provider is because there's no market to price the service. There's no market to price services because there's no real data on outcomes. Until you can measure outcomes for any given provider, you cannot possibly price what they are actually providing, and you'll continue to have collusion in the marketplace where one provider will charge an insurance co $1500 for an MRI and an individual paying cash $300.
By this point, I really shouldn't have to say this, but I will anyway: Stop the wars, stop the government waste, tax the rich more than you tax the poor, and put a fucking cap on the raw cost of medical care. There is NO ETHICAL REASON WHATSOEVER that (quoting a previous poster) an MRI should cost $300 for an individual but $1500 for an insurance company, that a mass-produced vial of insulin should cost $75 for one month's supply, that any pill of any kind should cost more than a few cents each, or that the aforementioned back surgery should cost anywhere close to $96,000.
While I won't argue with you that we need to stop wasting tax money on wasteful things (wars, pork, corporate welfare, etc), I have to vehemently disagree with you on this assumption as well as all the other FUD and ignorance in this topic.
Health care in the US is not a free market system. It's very much like the telecom industry where it's a highly regulated oligopoly. There are basically two payers for health services, people's employers and the US government through Medicare/Medicaid/Tricare/VA. The reason why costs from service providers are so high is to make up for all of the collusion in the marketplace because of the way the system is set up. People don't pay. The government caps its rates, and insurance companies are always out to lower their medical loss ratios to the bare minimum. If you are a doctor, especially a general practitioner, you've watched your income go down year after year for 20 straight years. Everyone's hands are in your pocket. And if you're an employer, you've watched benefits costs rise, sometimes at double digit rates, for the last 7 years straight. That's dinging right into your profit margins and is completely unsustainable (just ask heavy manufacturing or textiles cos how that's worked out for them).
People always want to use socialized medicine as the 'cure', but there's two very big problems with this. It will absolutely make things worse because who's paying is NOT the problem (I'll get to that in a second). AND, ask yourself if you want the government running something as important as health care for all of the populace. This is an organization that can't even run the DMV, or figure out what's valid intelligence at the CIA, much less decide whether you really need that second MRI on your sprained ankle or not. The truth is that socialized health care systems all over the world are also broken in much the same ways that the US is. The difference is that because they are state sponsored, they can manipulate the system much easier to hide the problems. That same dynamic will make it much more cataclysmic when their health care costs are chewing up 25%+ of their GDP's in 10 years. Just ask Japan, Germany, France, and the UK how they're going to pay for their baby boom generations when they have negative population growth feeding their systems. The problem is nearly global, with China and India going to face the same problems on a massive scale.
The ONLY way to solve this is to realign incentives along a true market based system. That requires two things: transparency and tools. You've got to open up the system so that consumers (however you define them; employers or individual purchasers) have the ability to see what real outcomes their providers are achieving and give them the proper incentives to do the right thing by their health. Without those two things, you are back in the same boat, except that you've just shifted costs around and someone else is getting wealthy without solving the problem. Outcomes and incentives. That's it. Much like statistical process control for health. Where there are exceptions, they will be properly priced because there will be real market dynamics associated with the treatment. So if you have a rare blood disorder, it's going to be expensive and there will have to be systems in place to truly manage that risk and pay for it. This is how every other open market works and it's the only way for health care to work.
Slashdot Mirror
This article isn't going to enlighten you or give you the secret to running a top notch IT organization. And neither are most of the comments that have risen to the top. There is no magic wand. Anyone that tells you otherwise is probably selling something. There's just hard work and a commitment to excellence with the acceptance that there are certain things which are inevitable:
1) You're in business to produce a profit. You're not in business to procure, deploy, or worship technology. Technology is a tool. No different than a screwdriver or a machine press or a clock. It helps the workers be more productive and capable of producing a profit. Nothing more. Nothing less. Used well, technology is power. Used unwisely, it's an anvil around your neck.
2) Organizations are groups of people. People in groups don't communicate well. People one on one usually communicate very well. Whenever you get a large enough group, there will be miscommunication and that thwarts most "techniques" or "methodologies" engineered to negate this effect. The sooner you realize that you can't engineer away humanity, the sooner you'll be successful in using one on one relationships to get most of your wins. ALL organizations will NEVER be in sync at any given time.
3) No matter where you work, there will be a bell curve of capability and skill. You'll have a few rock stars, most people will be in the middle, and there will be a few truly aweful people. It doesn't matter if it's Google or the Army or AJ's Nails and Hair. No organization can attract the best and brightest all the time for all needs. So even if you have good processes and good relationships, they won't always work and you won't always get good results. The best you can do is work hard to provide the best you can and accept the fact that not everyone you are working with is capable or motivated to do the same. Stop complaining and do what is reasonable to solve the problem. That will bring you the most success. And happiness. Read this again, and then lower where you think YOU are in the bell curve.
4) People are relying on you to guide them and help them to make informed and intelligent decisions. To them, what you do is scary and expensive and magical all at the same time. Keep the previous 3 points in mind on how they will present their problem to you and respond to the solution that you present to them.
I've been a CIO for everything from startups to publicly traded companies to companies I've founded. The principals don't change. Just the budgets and egos.
Bullshit. Health care costs have spiraled out of control and there's every reason to believe this will be the next industry in line for a DC bailout. Don't you find it disturbing that you have more gages for performance/operation of your car than your own body? Maybe being able to see how choices impact your "vehicle" might be one of the keys to lowering costs of health care for yourself and society.
Rubbish. How many 10year old devices are you using? Even if the real lifespan of the device is actually accurate, the real world lifespan is much shorter.
So I take it that you replace the plumbing and electrical wiring in your house every few years or so, cuz "technology moves on"?
Sure there were alternatives, but they were all either patent-encumbered, or hard to deploy, or too complex to easily develop for. They died. It's called competition. TCP/IP and SMTP came out the other side, and grew into cornerstones of the largest network this world has ever known, in a shockingly short period of time. No, not perfect, but pretty damn good none-the-less.
Not exactly. Some of these technologies were adopted because of market forces as you say, but as they've scaled, alternatives have not been adopted because of "market forces". SMTP is a good example of this. When it was created, there's no way the originators could've imagined the uses of email for rich content, file transfer, and spam. So those requirements never got fit into the spec, and we have the world we live in now. Monopoly and commercial interests keep it there.
Tell this to Chris Chelios.
VEHICLES are a dumb place to start. At most they only consume 40% of all our energy needs. The place to start is residential and commercial users, where you don't need high end materials, durability, or safety concerns like you do in a moving and often recklessly operated vehicle.
But because everyone in this country is obsessed with driving to do anything, and the price of oil is directly felt when you hit the pump, then that's where the focus gets put. Nevermind the fact that you should be driving LESS, and looking for the dozens of other ways to reduce your reliance on petroleum. We are effectively trying to make a bad problem worse. Try living differently.
That's all well and good but here's the rub: you don't always control how many bits are going down your tube. Things like AJAX, CSS includes, rich media ads, etc all have bit-weight to them, yet you can't control what or how much of it gets downloaded. This is why we'll never be able to move to a metered service and this is why pretty much any policy is going to to have unintended consequences and punish some set of users whether they are "abusing" this service or not.
All broadband connections share resources. The difference between cable and DSL is that cable shares a neighborhood head end as the local switching point, where as DSL shares a switch in the central office. Sometimes it's shared across several central offices, effectively giving you the same problem but across more users.
This reads more like a resume.
Not only that, but you can abstract the schema by using views. This will allow you to make changes to the underlying schema, protect the production database from malformed queries, and keep the schema proprietary. You can then populate the views tables any way that the customer would prefer. Problem solved.
That's partially true, but the real reason is that 20-somethings have less to risk (both financially and personally) and don't have the burden of responsibility that most older workers would have (family, mortgage, etc). They also command less money when the business gets going because of inexperience and market rate. This is why financiers prefer to work with younger workforces. More time on the job, smaller costs, less aversion to risk.
There are some empirical evidences that make beauty quantifiable. Most of it is relevant to how symmetrical your face is, and the closer that is to perfect, the better you'll score across subjective ratings. There's also adherence to the golden mean or golden spiral ratios. If you ever watch the Fox Reality show (yeah, I know) Battle of the Bods, you'll see that it's pretty easy to build consensus on subjective measures. While not every group gets every order right, the highs and lows tend to be unanimous. That is to say that it's easy to pick really pretty people and really ugly people, but not relevant to each other within their appropriate group.
While this is true, it should be noted that it hasn't benefited shareholders either. One would think that because profits hadn't been reinvested in upgrades to infrastructure that they would ultimately flow to shareholders, but the telecom sector as a whole has not grown very well over the last 8 years or so. They lag behind other large cap stocks like energy, health, and construction as a function of return on equity. So not only are those profits not being used to upgrade infrastructure, but they're not yielding a higher return to shareholders to generate wealth. Most of those profits have just been siphoned off as waste and lower productivity, which is easily hidden given the last few years of consolidation and subsequent layoffs. So you should be pissed off twice.
It's top of mind again so that Walmart can have the profit margins to deal with this.
HERE HERE! Mod Parent UP! This is the only sensible course of action unless the market's regulations were completely repealed and allowed real competition from the ground up. Putting the plant into a public trust with MINIMAL administrative fees for maintenance through taxes or surcharges would allow all service competitors to focus on SERVICE and innovative applications. Until then, the monopolies will just use the plant as a huge barrier of entry.
Yes, just like the transition from tube to solid state ruined a whole generation of EE's.
This would definitely benefit from being implemented in as many VoIP devices as possible (ie. Linksys SPA-xxxx boxes). Even better if someone can port this to a chip.
What happens when you lose the fob? Or worse, what happens when you're unconscious and someone needs access to the records on the fob? I agree that there's better mechanisms for privacy other than keeping a username and password on Google's site, but carrying around your medical records is probably not optimal.
Because that's NOT why they want Yahoo. Microsoft might be a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them. There is a hidden agenda here that Bill is not revealing and a lot of it probably revolves around a good many things other than just competing with Google.
What about a stirling engine?
It's all a ruse. They'll cry about upgrading and how it's so unfair and expensive and the consumer will just bare the burden, but that's just posturing to get something from the regulatory agencies. Once that's accomplished, then they'll cram down some joke of an upgrade that barely impacts margins AND raise prices at the same time. This technique has been going on for decades.
I'll add to that. Because of their duopoly status, there's little or no incentive to upgrade plant beyond what it is because of the obscene profit margin that HSI is bringing to their bottom lines. Consider the history here. High speed cable internet was built out by @Home, an independent company that was only partly financed by cable cos. When Excite@Home had financial trouble (just like every internet company in 2000), the cable co's seized it's assets and essentially stole that product line for their own. Now Comcast makes $38B a year in revenue JUST from HSI products. That number dwarfs their other services revenue. You can't live high on the hog forever. Customers are demanding higher speeds and new services. If you can't compete to deliver those, then you should not have regulated protection of your monopoly status. Open up the plant and let others who know what they're doing provide services in a competitive market.
That's a great idea because it would prove that there's an actual business model to be had here. One that the content industries should've pursued on their own instead of suing their customers.
This is actually a needed component of any overhaul. Right now the discrepancy of what you pay from provider to provider is because there's no market to price the service. There's no market to price services because there's no real data on outcomes. Until you can measure outcomes for any given provider, you cannot possibly price what they are actually providing, and you'll continue to have collusion in the marketplace where one provider will charge an insurance co $1500 for an MRI and an individual paying cash $300.
While I won't argue with you that we need to stop wasting tax money on wasteful things (wars, pork, corporate welfare, etc), I have to vehemently disagree with you on this assumption as well as all the other FUD and ignorance in this topic.
Health care in the US is not a free market system. It's very much like the telecom industry where it's a highly regulated oligopoly. There are basically two payers for health services, people's employers and the US government through Medicare/Medicaid/Tricare/VA. The reason why costs from service providers are so high is to make up for all of the collusion in the marketplace because of the way the system is set up. People don't pay. The government caps its rates, and insurance companies are always out to lower their medical loss ratios to the bare minimum. If you are a doctor, especially a general practitioner, you've watched your income go down year after year for 20 straight years. Everyone's hands are in your pocket. And if you're an employer, you've watched benefits costs rise, sometimes at double digit rates, for the last 7 years straight. That's dinging right into your profit margins and is completely unsustainable (just ask heavy manufacturing or textiles cos how that's worked out for them).
People always want to use socialized medicine as the 'cure', but there's two very big problems with this. It will absolutely make things worse because who's paying is NOT the problem (I'll get to that in a second). AND, ask yourself if you want the government running something as important as health care for all of the populace. This is an organization that can't even run the DMV, or figure out what's valid intelligence at the CIA, much less decide whether you really need that second MRI on your sprained ankle or not. The truth is that socialized health care systems all over the world are also broken in much the same ways that the US is. The difference is that because they are state sponsored, they can manipulate the system much easier to hide the problems. That same dynamic will make it much more cataclysmic when their health care costs are chewing up 25%+ of their GDP's in 10 years. Just ask Japan, Germany, France, and the UK how they're going to pay for their baby boom generations when they have negative population growth feeding their systems. The problem is nearly global, with China and India going to face the same problems on a massive scale.
The ONLY way to solve this is to realign incentives along a true market based system. That requires two things: transparency and tools. You've got to open up the system so that consumers (however you define them; employers or individual purchasers) have the ability to see what real outcomes their providers are achieving and give them the proper incentives to do the right thing by their health. Without those two things, you are back in the same boat, except that you've just shifted costs around and someone else is getting wealthy without solving the problem. Outcomes and incentives. That's it. Much like statistical process control for health. Where there are exceptions, they will be properly priced because there will be real market dynamics associated with the treatment. So if you have a rare blood disorder, it's going to be expensive and there will have to be systems in place to truly manage that risk and pay for it. This is how every other open market works and it's the only way for health care to work.
Ri