Know Thyself to Recover from Demotivation

In many activities, and most certainly in the process of a job search, it is common and expected to hit valleys of enthusiasm, or feel de-motivated. 

The human psyche constantly moves through cycles of energy or enthusiasm for any activity we undertake - our work, exercise, chores about the home. Quite frankly, we will not be able to pro-actively "level out" these peaks and valleys nor should we. 

What we need to do is understand what emotions and experiences are driving those highs and lows so that we can respond to them in a self-constructive manner.

A fascinating "big data social media" study released by social sciences researchers in 2011 noted that regardless of where you live and what you do, your enthusiasm - your motivation level - is going to naturally cycle through the day, week, month, and year.

The science behind this is explained in a variety of articles and studies and to sum it up, it's normal - there's nothing "wrong" with feeling un- or de-motivated at times. What that signals is that there is an underlying cause for the feeling that requires your response in a timely manner. 


Ask yourself why?

So key to addressing lows or "dips" in your motivation is understanding why you are feeling that way. This can be complicated, and sometimes a bit scary. And let's be frank, I'm not a psychologist or spiritual advisor, I just play one on TV. 

However, to share with you what I've learned through my current process of job transition is that it can often be easier to catch up on missed episodes of your favourite show on Netflix rather than knuckle down to the job search, but if you get at the root cause you will get re-energized and move forward with increased enthusiasm that shows through to everyone you meet.

Taking on new challenges can be exciting and invigorating at first - the motivational peak. But once under-way, the risks or concerns - what might go wrong - start to creep up, and your motivation can (and usually will) slump. Planning ahead for those slumps will help you move through them with minimal impact, and keep you moving forward.

"Plan...and use slow-down periods to re-energize..."

Expect that you are going to hit some lows, some lack of motivation. Plan some time during the motivational peaks to assess what the motivating factors are, and consider the risks that you might find demotivating - then plan, and use those slow-down periods to re-energize, focus, and move yourself forward.

Human emotions - generally - follow the "universal rules" of cause and effect. Take pause to consider the cause and you can affect the effect.

Cloud ReMix - How Personal Use Can Influence Business Decisions

Most of us spend a lot of time reading and thinking about cloud services for business use, and learning ways to ensure we make the best use of these types of services to benefit our business. Gaining the most efficiency, lowest cost, and least risk.

These are all valuable considerations, and important to be focussing on when making any cloud-based investment in IT services.  But what framework do we use use to make these evaluations?

I was recently contacted by a cloud services company called SingleHop and they wanted to share an infographic they had designed. 


The correspondence I had with Dave from SingleHop prompted me to think about leveraging ways I use the cloud in my day to day life to form the criteria used to evaluate cloud services for business use.

...leveraging every-day cloud experiences (makes the) world of business IT services in the cloud ... much less "mystical."

Further to that thought, is the consideration of how we IT professionals can communicate more effectively with other business professionals when we want them to understand how business services are enabled by cloud-based IT services.  

By leveraging their every-day cloud experiences all of a sudden the mysterious world of business IT services in the cloud become much less "mystical."  

What do you personally use the cloud for every day, or each week? I use it for storage of photos and video, collaboration & productivity with partners on various projects, and email. The fact is, Google holds the lion's share of my personal cloud-based activity and why? Because it's convenient, reliable, and inexpensive.

If you think about it, that reflects back on key cloud-service metrics such as agility, quality of service, and economics. And in thinking about how we value these metrics in our personal use of cloud-based services, we can frame ways to better communicate those metrics with others who don't live in the IT world.

So take a quick look at the graphic from SingleHop, and think about how you can influence business decisions about cloud-based business services based on more familiar personal interactions with the cloud.

And thanks Dave for sharing the graphic. Nice work.

To iPad or Not To iPad?

While technically the iPad isn't even available in my neck of the woods yet, that hasn't stopped enterprising Canucks who live near the border from ducking down across the line and bringing one home. Yesterday I got my first in-person glance at one during a meeting downtown, and was suitably impressed at the usability and form. But with the product soon to be more widely available, I have to consider whether I'll indulge in this product and give it the itManageCast "Seal of Approval" or pass it off as another techno-fad?

For the past while I've been coming closer and closer to jumping in and buying myself an e-book reader, but the problem I've had with the products breaks into one of two chief complaints:
a) too small
b) too limited in function

To me, the purpose of getting such a device is to lighten my briefcase, and have some side benefits of an administrative/remote access tool and ideally also include recreation/leisure capabilities.

Screen Size
Maybe it's just the age I'm getting to, but if I'm going to be spending any serious amount of time reading off an electronic platform, it needs to be bigger than a paperback. Especially since a lot of the material I plan to read is technical in nature, and will include diagrams, images, and colour. I want the ability to upload any PDF file or other document format I happen to get technical docs and white papers in, plus various e-book formats. This starts to really limit the field of currently available products. The 5-6" Sony readers are just too small for my uses. The format size on the Kindle DX would work (9.7" reading surface) and the current version supports PDFs natively.

The e-ink technology is amazing in various light conditions; I tried one of these last year at a trade show and was impressed by the ambient direct-light readability of the screen. But it's still only grey-scale, no colour.

Form Versus Function
Tablet PCs can do all of this, but they are WAY heavy; that footprint takes us out of the zone I'm comfortable holding & reading. What they do offer is the multiplicity of functions that I'm after.

So what am I looking for? I need a device that can be my reader and my notebook. If I'm going to move away from carrying paper I want to truly do that. I want a device that will replace my journal/notes and accommodate the copious notes I take in day, random and frequent updates to my calendar, various tech docs I want in my "hip pocket," Internet access, e-mail access, and the ability to create/read/edit simple documents on the go.

I don't think I'm alone in this, am I?

Additionally, if this same device can be used on occasion as a network console connection, all the better.

What's Left to Consider?

So I figure I'm looking at the iPad, but its got me a little jittery - it seems that it does nearly everything I want in the form-factor I want, but it's that "Apple lock-down" I'm not too certain about. Can I connect it to an external USB drive or an external monitor? How reliable and functional is the 802.11b/g/n connection? I've read reports that have noted issues. Not only that, but now the stories break that the 3G signal strength exceeds national standards in Israel. And how many other countries I wonder?

So what are the alternatives?
I recently came across a product about to be released by German manufacturers using a combo of Linux & Andriod for an O/S, and an Intel Atom processor. The product is dubbed the WePad, and it boasts a larger multi-touch display, although shorter battery life (6 hrs vs. the touted 10 of the iPad). WePad is worth looking at in my view, being a bit of an OpenSource bigot... WePad is due out in the market August 2010 in Europe, so I'll tell you what folks at Neophonie; send me a unit to work with for a week or so and I'll get my review out on what I think sounds like a viable alternative to the iPad.

Now I will commence holding my breath.

Security Perspective on Social Networking

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn... all words that can make the IT manager's skin crawl. The simple solution is to block the URLs at the firewall; once people are plugged in at the office, too bad, no social networking on work time. I think that's the way most IT manager's would prefer it. We're a bit of a draconian bunch, largely because this is the kind of stuff that just ends up making problems for us.

But is this the best approach? Other managers in the organisation may be concerned about morale, and want these sites available to their staff - well we certainly don't want to start creating exception rules in the firewalls or network compliance tools to manage which users get access and which don't. More business centric reasons exist as well; some business units may want to use these sites for market research, sales/marketing, recruiting, and other functions.

I've recently seen some interesting and creative use of combining the three main social media sites for marketing and recruitment processes. An organisation I was meeting with last week was telling me about how they use Facebook & Twitter accounts to monitor customer satisfaction with their products and services, and respond quickly to concerns from their customers or deal with urban myths about them that get propagated through these media. From a business perspective, that approach makes a lot of sense. This same organisation also uses individual LinkedIn accounts from their recruitment professionals as a mechanism to reach out to prospective new employees and contractors, and ties it all together with Facebook & Twitter promotion of new positions and recruitment drives.

So in this scenario, the IT team has to work with the other business units (sales, marketing, and HR) to make sure they can get timely access to the tools, ensure that they maintain corporate image and privacy, and verify the content of those sites - both what is "going out" and what is "coming in."

Where do you start?
Ensure first that the leaders of the organisation understand the challenges for the IT team, possible budget implications, and risks.

For certain, a review of existing organisational IT usuage policies. First off, so you have them in place? Secondly, have they been distributed (recently) and signed off? And lastly, does the language (hopefully not too "lawyered up" so that people understand what they are committing to) apply to this kind of scenario?

What questions should you ask?
Once you've established who's allowed to do what, it becomes a question next of enforcing the rules while allowing the business functionality that's been agreed to. Now we get into the business analysis side of the equation. Understand clearly what the business needs are so that your team can work with the rest of the business to deliver the solution that makes the most sense.

You'll need to look at technical considerations, some of which might be:
Will Twitter use be via the web interface, or 3rd party apps like TweetDeck?
Will you allow all Facebook apps, or try and block some (like games, etc.)?
Will this be allowed corporate wide, or group by group?


Who's already looking down this path?
There are developers such as Teneros and SocialWare who are developing middleware-like apps that monitor content for these sites, to ensure that the organisation knows what is going out or coming in. These tools have some limitations, so it's best to research the options closely, but it's good to know you HAVE options! SocialWare is particularly interesting to me and likely may be the subject of a future blog posting.

Check through your personal network (errr, via LinkedIn?) to see who else is in your shoes and dealing with this kind of challenge today. I was surprised to learn recently how many organisations haven't even started to deal with this from an IT perspective yet. I know we're busy, but...

As always, your feedback and input on this article is greatly appreciated; reply with your thoughts and I'll post them for continued conversation.

Five Top IT Security Trends for 2010

#1 Antiviral Products Move Away from Local Signatures
With the rate that variants of viri, trojans, and other attacks are coming out (approx 50,000 per day) signature based AV tools just can't keep up without bogging down the systems on your corporate network. So what are the AV companies doing to deal with this?

The leading AV companies are making a shift to where only a small subset of signatures are downloaded to your PC/network. The bulk of the testing happens "in the cloud" where the AV companies use cloud-based technologies to identify threats and note sites/exploits that need to be blocked and send that info to your AV clients.

The philosophy behind this is that there are basically two types of attacks; social engineering (downloads, phishing, etc) & computer attacks (exploit involved - identifies & exploits a vulnerability pre-existing in your computer).The theory is that they only need to worry about protecting against the vulnerabilities, if they are effectively dynamically blacklisting the social engineering risks via their cloud-based work.

#2 Increased Use of Application Whitelisting
The concept of whitelisting is that you block everything except a concise list of sites, addresses, or ports you wish to allow access to. This technology is being led by companies like Bit9 who have been working in this area for some time. Not a good technology for home users or large organisations to use for desktops because of the nightmare in keeping the list up-to-date, but this is a great tool for appliance-like technologies - ATMs, or any other purpose-driven technology. It is also worthy of consideration for use on servers.

#3 Enhancements in Firewall Rule Optimisation
More and more IT Managers are finding that they are struggling to keep pace with the rate of change they must apply to their firewall rules. This process also leads to omissions and redundancies in the firewall rules and ACLs. Firewall vendors and third parties have been releasing tools like Skybox's Firewall Compliance Auditor that bridge simply optimising your rules for increased efficiency and now start ensuring that they meet compliance rules .

#4 Increased Social Engineering via Social Media
Social Media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and others are continuing to become rampant hunting grounds for cyber-crooks, whether they are associated with organized crime or just script kiddies.

Creative cyber villains will continue finding new ways to exploit people that they'd consider high-value targets - this doesn't necessarily mean wealthy people; but instead it means a combination of the "low hanging fruit" - the people who seem to put a lot of information about themselves and their employers out on the Internet - and people who can be identified as working in organizations that are targeted for attack.


#5 Continual Evolution in Regulatory Compliance
Certainly not last but it rounds off this list as an important topic in computer security for 2010. Regulatory compliance continues to be a pressing topic for the leaders of our various organisations and therefore also for IT managers. As an IT manager, there are some key things that compliance should mean to us:

• audits & audit trails in place & working
• documentation showing current state of network & security (i.e.: configuration management)
• change management processes in place & operating
• clear understanding (& documentation) outlining key business risks how those risks are managed

For more in-depth analysis of these topics please contact itManageCast for a copy of the whitepaper titled "Top IT Security Trends for 2010."