OpinionCategory

How much does it cost to manage your data? In an early job, I was making a projection to purchase more disk to expand capacity on our Exchange mailbox servers. At the time, disk was relatively expensive, and the capacity that I had projected for 3 years would have also… Continue Reading Save Money – by buying more disk

Strategy is a word that is often over-used so much that it has become poorly defined and understood. You can have a ‘strategy’ to buy your groceries before you buy alcohol … it can be a ‘strategy’ to start a meeting on time… the term has become watered down and… Continue Reading The Hallmarks of a Strategy

As you may realise from this blog, I’m a Principal Consultant – and that means not only do I work with customers, I also need to lead other Consultants on their journey in consulting. I work with some exceptional and smart people, but the top 5 “rules” for consulting can… Continue Reading Top 5 rules for consulting

Corporate culture can be formalised, or it can be “this is the way things are done here” lore that defines how people act, react, make decisions, and deal with problems. The impact of corporate culture on a business can be significant to the way that corporate culture in IT projects… Continue Reading The importance of understanding corporate culture

I recommend that all businesses perform a paper exercise of running a BCP drill, as a way to tease out the conceptual and procedural issues related with planning for business continuity. It can be a desktop process of running through the BCP plan, and it helps to have a critical… Continue Reading The BCP Drill

It has finally happened – many years ago, when I worked at VMware, there were internal rumors of a rebootless upgrade being worked on since vSphere 5.0. And now, with the release of vSphere 6.7, you can upgrade the hypervisor without rebooting. What happens is the hypervisor will re-load, without… Continue Reading VMware rebootless upgrades are here!

The old Waterfall methods of project implementation are less able to cope with a dynamic and changing landscape. The approach to front-end a project with planning, scoping, preparation, and documentation are often at the expense of taking the lessons learnt about previous failures – from project postmortems. There is huge… Continue Reading Premortem for project delivery success

Are you retaining a backup for 10+ years? Can you still use the data? How useful are your backups? A necessary burden Backups are a necessary task for all businesses. A hundred years ago, if there was a fire at a business, then everything would be lost – a paper… Continue Reading How useful are your backups?

As Rear Admiral Grace Hopper said – “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission”, and this is true in many areas of change. When I am fighting against “this is the way we have always done it“, I find that the path to success is to… Continue Reading Ask for Confirmation, not Definition

The role of the IT department has changed, and modern IT functions need to re-invent themselves to maintain their relevance and role within the modern enterprise. The changing IT department is moving from the nerds in the basement to real business partners. The Changing Face of the the IT Department… Continue Reading The changing face of the IT department

Humans originally evolved to be dependent on fear. In modern life, the fears that we had evolved around are no longer relevant; we are not going to be hunted by large animals, we have conquered the dark, winter and times of hunger are distant memories. It may be true to… Continue Reading What was a fear, becomes a strength

You may know about ToR, top-of-rack (for) switches. It’s the practice of placing a physical switch within each rack, so that the network switching for the rack is close to the servers or devices that need to connect to it. The ToR switches will allow servers to communicate with each… Continue Reading Top of Rack switch placement in a rack – not at the Top!

You have probably heard the expression that entrepreneurs want to “fail fast” – and that you should do the same for your business… but what does it actually mean – and do your customers want you to “fail fast”? Why would you want to fail at all? It’s important to… Continue Reading Fail fast does not mean you want to fail

What is an ‘Older Worker’? According to a Chandler McLeod report: “Coming of Age – The impacts of an ageing workforce on Australian business”, “variations exist in the definition of an employee as ‘older’ or ‘mature aged’. The Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations classifies workers and job seekers… Continue Reading Aging workforce and obsolete computer systems

Consumerisation of IT refers to the transferring of consumer market IT solutions to the workplace, used to resolve enterprise needs. Among others, the use of laptops, tablets, smartphones, and software applications such as social media, web conferencing, cloud storage, smartphone applications and even delivery models used to make solutions available to… Continue Reading Consumerisation of IT

Many of us have to give directions; it might be in a project, when managing a team, instructions for someone to pick something up for you from a shop, defining a business strategy – but the way to give directions is important. What is wrong with the way people are… Continue Reading The best way to give directions – destination first

In a 2014 report, Gartner identifies the challenges of the IT organisation in view of the nature of the demands they need to satisfy: provide innovative solutions with agility; provide operational continuity as “business as usual”.  Gartner’s model establishes these as two different types of needs that require two separate… Continue Reading Bimodal IT – Gartner’s view on IT

If you are new to using the cloud, or are now deciding to move more workloads to the cloud – here are my top 10 tips for cloud adoption 1. Switch off dev/test when not using it Probably the biggest advice I can give is to understand the differences between… Continue Reading Top 10 tips for cloud adoption

Who defines how your business operations are performed? How does your business operate? Is it based on a definition of what is best for your business and customers, or is it because that is the process that came out of a shrink wrapped application? Shrink Wrapped Applications vs. Custom Build… Continue Reading Shrink wrapped applications