Author: Laurence Hart

Finally, Some eBook Common Sense

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I LOVE books. I love to hold them, flip through them, lend them, and read them during take-off. While reading a book, rare is it that I don’t decide that I need to flip back several chapters to validate a detail that is triggered by a new development. In an eBook, that is very hard.

On the other hand, the bigger the book, the more I enjoy the electronic version. When I reread Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, I did so electronically. Let’s face it, nobody enjoys hauling a 800 page book on an airplane. It is also easier to carry multiple books to cover the eventual moment when I finish my previous book.

Well, today, Amazon made an announcement that solves one of my biggest problems with eBooks. This takes the music digital download and almost extends it to books. Amazon says it best:

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Security, Real or Imagined?

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I’ve opined on the security of cloud solutions in the past, usually stating that the odds were good that established cloud vendors have better security than the average data center. Yesterday, I saw an shared an article about how researchers reversed engineered the Dropbox client. While this isn’t necessarily a critical issue for Dropbox, it does raise some interesting discussion points around security through obfuscation.

First, the Research

The researchers decompiled the Dropbox client which was compiled in a manner that decompiling was difficult. Once the researchers were able to do it, they hijacked the account. Given that a program would already possess full access to a person’s machine to accomplish this, there wouldn’t be new data to access through the client.

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Fresh Start with Alfresco

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After announcing my departure from AIIM yesterday, today I start my next adventure. As you can tell from the title, it is with Alfresco. That still leaves open a lot of questions.

  • Why Alfresco?
  • What will Pie be doing at Alfresco?
  • Won’t having Pie working with Peter Monks be a bit odd?

I shall take time to answer them all. I will also answer the Why isn’t Pie taking any time off? question. That one is simple. I am very excited and I wanted to get started as soon as possible.

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A Farewell to AIIM

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Today is my last day at AIIM. After today I shall cease being their Chief Information Officer (CIO) and return to the ranks of the Professional Member. As I leave, I want to make sure that I share a few important things.

An Education

Boy, did I learn things. I learned a lot about:

  • The Association Business. It is a business and it has many unique aspects compared to other businesses with whom I have ever worked. Many of the unique aspects will help me look at problems in other organizations with a fresh viewpoint.
  • Association Management Systems (AMS). While hand-in-hand with the former, I learned that implementing an AMS as a system isn’t that different from any other business system. Translation: It takes planning, communication, and work. I also learned why they are important pieces of software and not simply a domain-specific CRM system.
  • Marketing. I thought I knew a reasonable amount about Marketing when I started at AIIM. I spent every day after that learning how much I didn’t know as I learned more and more.

That isn’t counting all the new technology tidbits and personal interaction skills I picked-up along the way. It was an intense time.

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Box Defends Against Office 365

In case you missed it, Box introduced some new pricing last week. While the details are not relevant right now, the key detail was that if you have only 10 people, your price per user is now $5. This is great if you are a small shop because you don’t need as many features and you do need secure sharing.

So why bring Office 365 into this? Because this new price range is same as the Office 365 Small Business tier. Sure you can get more with Office 365, but Box still has that “easy to use” feature going for it.

Still, why Office 365? Because Office 365 is great for small shops. It bundles email with SharePoint and Lync. For a organizations with minimal to no infrastructure, it is a very quick setup and before you know it, you have your basic productivity tools.

I suspect that Box is looking at Microsoft as the big Gorilla in the corner. If they aren’t then they should be doing that. Microsoft has a decent cloud solution and a ton of money. It should be possible to fix SkyDrive, make an interface that works on Apple, and market to the same people that Box targets.

Box used to market against SharePoint to get attention. Now they need to work against them to make sure they stay safe.

The Real Job Description

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Had a couple beers the other night with a former boss of mine. He hired me at Washington Consulting and I have always liked him because, despite his fascination with the Red Sox, he and I see eye-to-eye on things. As he currently has an ownership stake in a consulting firm right now, I chose to view our similarities in a positive light.

One of the things that came up during the second beer was the nature of the job. How should an owner be spending their time? The answer is simple,

An Owner should do whatever is necessary to insure the success of the business.

Anyone disagree?

If that means getting your hands dirty to keep a key client happy, that is what you need to do that day.  Sure, you shouldn’t spend your whole year down the proverbial rabbit hole, but as an owner, your job is to do whatever it takes.

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A CIO’s Hierarchy of Needs

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Early on in my role as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of AIIM, I read a Harvard Business Review Article by Ray Wang. In it, he outlined the Four Personas of the Next-Generation CIO. I felt a certain resonance with the article.

After having been a CIO for about 18 months now, I’ve decided that Ray only got it about half right. He beautifully covered the roles but he neglected the relationship between the roles.

The Four Roles

While you should read Ray’s article yourself, I thought I would list the four roles here for convenience.

  1. Chief “Infrastructure” Officers focus on cost reduction, and account for 65% to 70% of the overall IT budget. Most of this CIO persona’s projects prioritize keeping the lights on and managing legacy environments…
  2. Chief “Integration” Officers connect internal and external ecosystems. With 5% to 10% of the overall budget, this CEO persona must bring together a hodge-podge of business processes, data, systems, and connection points with legacy systems and newer cloud-based approaches…
  3. Chief “Intelligence” Officers empower the business with actionable insights. Representing between 10% and 15% of the overall budget, this CIO persona must improve business-user access to information. A key theme includes placing the right data to the right person at the right time on the right interface…
  4. Chief “Innovation” Officers identify disruptive technologies for pilot projects. Investing 5% to 10% of the overall budget, this CIO persona must drive innovation on a shoestring. Typically from business backgrounds, these leaders move fast, fail fast, and move on…

The article goes into more detail but it misses on the dependencies between the “roles”. In fact, I’d argue that you can’t focus on some roles until the others are mastered, or at least under control.

The Hierarchy of CIO Needs

These roles are really priorities for the CIO. Just like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, they build upon each other and you cannot readily execute each subsequent level if the previous one isn’t sound. This isn’t to say that work won’t be done on multiple levels at any given time. It is just to say that each level must be predictable and under control before you can turn your focus to the next level.

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Review: Every Leadership Book

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Over my life, I’ve been through a lot of training outside the traditional classroom. Starting in Scouting and then transitioning into my professional life, I’ve been exposed to a lot of different Leadership principles. When mixed in with my professional experience, I think I have a firm understanding of what it takes to be a Leader.

I have read a few books on Leadership in my day. I’ve been impressed with none of them. When I saw this Dilbert strip, it all made sense to me.

Dilbert explains all leadership books to his pointy-haired boxx

No system works for every organization. No system works for a single organization all of the time. The Leadership style that creates a startup may not work when that startup is a market leader. The Leadership style for a software product company may not work well for an Association.

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Ready to Prove Yourself at AIIM 2014?

AIIM13 KeynoteThe call for speakers is out for AIIM 2014. As an employee, I can only speak as either a backup or as a keynote, though John Mancini seems to have that job locked-up.

You, on the other hand, can speak. In fact, you should speak. Your experiences and war stories are the kind of things that make the AIIM Conference useful for everyone.

Why should you speak?

  1. It is a chance to share your pain. Think of it as group therapy.
  2. Presentations are only 20 minutes long. Anyone can find enough useful information to fill that time.
  3. You can validate your ideas and experience among some of the leading minds in the Information Management profession.
  4. It is a chance to tell your favorite “war story”. (Those are the best presentations)
  5. Your boss is unlikely to say you can’t go if you are a speaker.
  6. You can tell people I am wrong without me being able to interrupt you.
  7. Looking smart in front of potential future colleagues is always a good thing.
  8. Why do lists always have to have 10 items? This is hard.
  9. Gaining the respect and admiration of your industry peers goes a long way.
  10. Who doesn’t want to spend a week in Orlando?

So start thinking about all the nuggets of wisdom you want to share and submit your idea today.

Review: The Introvert’s Guide to Success

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The Introvert's Guide to Success in Business and Leadership

Years ago, I started following Lisa Petrilli on Twitter as I had found some of her blog posts interesting. She had written several blog posts on how Introverts can leverage their skills to be valuable leaders.

I loved the posts because I am an Introvert. If you don’t believe me, then you’ve never seen me hibernate after a large conference or noticed how I am always easier to find in the first few days of a conference than the end of the event. Being moderately “successful”, the posts usually helped to explain why what I was doing was the right thing or gave me tips on how I could do something better. When The Introvert’s Guide to Success came out, I quickly bought it. Then like many work-related books that I buy, it took me a while to read.

Glad I did.

Serial Readings

As I read the book, I was reminded of many Science Fiction classics. Not in tone or topic, but in style. Many early works were actually a compilation of a series of short stories published in one of the magazines of the day. As such, every few “episodes”, a basic tenet of the imagined universe was restated. This makes a lot of sense in a series that is read over a year or more, but not as much sense in a novel.

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