Is your career “portable”?

Who knew, all this time I had a “portable career”? This is the first time that I have heard the term, which I guess has been popular among workforce circles for quite some time. It refers to a job that you can take with you, when you need to relocate because of a spouse or because of a lifestyle choice.

Six years ago this weekend, my wife and I left Los Angeles and set out to live in St. Louis. It was a leap of faith for me, having never lived in the Midwest or really spent much time there. Little did I know how much the area would grow on me and now I really enjoy living here. My job, as it has been for most of two decades, has been working for myself, doing freelance writing, consulting and professional speaking on IT topics. Mine is very portable as careers go since it is just my computer and I. Sometimes I do need to sally forth into the world, and then it would be nicer if we had better air service to the parts of the country where I am a frequent visitor. But that isn’t a problem unique to St. Louis anymore.

I came across the term after reading my friend Blair Forlaw’s piece here about military spouses. Which is quite appropriate, given today is Memorial Day. Our military likes to move its folks about the world regularly: my first wife’s dad was a Coast Guard captain and they moved almost every two or three years like clockwork. Many other military families that I know suffer similar circumstances. So having a spousal unit who can bring their job along no matter where they are posted is a plus.

Forlaw’s article talks about some of the unemployment stats for military spouses and also cites some great resources that even non-military people can take advantage of if this direction is appealing. But I think having a portable career is also part of the new wave of entrepreneurism and single-shingle types of businesses that are popping up everywhere: if it is just you and your PC, you have an edge over someone else who has less flexibility.

Going to Sydney in July for the Imagine Cup 2012 Finals

I have been asked to be one of the judges for Microsoft’s 10th Imagine Cup software competition. This brings together students in high school and colleges from around the world to compete in several different categories, including best software for mobile phones, Xbox games, and general IT apps. You can see a full list of the finalists here.

Some of the code is pretty, well, imaginative. Team FlashFood from the United States created a real-time food recovery solution for families in need, using web-applications and smart phones to coordinate same day food donation deliveries. This year, many of the teams have created prototypes addressing health issues. For example, the Australian team developed a cloud-powered, mobile-hybrid stethoscope (pictured) for early detection of pneumonia, the #1 early childhood killer. Other teams, such as the Software Design team from Canada, were passionate about addressing environmental concerns; this team created a sensor system that will determine when to turn fans and lights on and off. Controlled by sensor or by voice this system is already proven to save electricity in their lab at school and the voice control also makes it suitable for someone with a disability to control their environment.

If you are going to be part of the competition or near Sydney in early July, let me know!

Using Symantec’s Backup Exec.Cloud To Protect Your Small Business

My latest screencast review video from Webinformant.tv is posted, on how to use Symantec’s Backup Exec.Cloud to make backups to their cloud-based service. It is relatively inexpensive, easy to setup, and supports both Windows desktops and servers too. You can watch it here.

The bane of office bullpens

Do you work in a bullpen-style open office? You are certainly not alone, both literally and figuratively. Lately it seems everyone is moving towards this kind of seating arrangement, but the lack of privacy doesn’t necessarily balance the potential productivity.

So says a story in the New York Times this past weekend.

It is another example of the cycle of history. My first job out of college, back in the 70′s, was working in such a bullpen for an insurance company. We sat in rows of desks, with several of them sharing a single desk phone. There were no partitions. There were no computers. There were no white noise (now they are called pink noise) systems deployed. Managers sat in offices with windows and doors around the periphery.

I recently began watching the first season of Mad Man and their office layout was similar. If you were a worker-bee back in the day, you didn’t have much privacy. Of course, we had electric typewriters back then and it was a pretty noisy place all around.

We got to these bullpens via the cubicle concept, and there are some places that have large fields of them, so at least you can’t see your fellow workers and there is some semblance of privacy and your own space. Not any longer.

Back in the 70s, we had our own desks. Now we have share large work surfaces in these modern bullpens. At the offices of one trendy company, you are so closely packed that you can reach over and touch someone. There are special “conferencing” spaces that resemble diner booths or living room areas where two or four people can gather for an ad hoc conversation, away from others. These are popular too.

But the open plan and close quarters really has the effect of people bringing in headphones and listening to music to mask the sounds of others. Which is ironic, because the whole idea of the bullpen was to make it easier to collaborate. Now that we are surrounded with our cocoons of computing, you tend to use the same communication tools that you would if you were geographically separated: email and IM. That seems odd. One source in the Times piece was quoted as saying “You talk to more people in an open office, but I think you have fewer meaningful conversations.” Or people remove themselves entirely, and work from home when they need to concentrate on something for extended periods of time. This is progress?

Many companies have experimented with background noise systems. At Autodesk, they had the system running for months in secret. Then one day they turned it off to see what happened. Complaints poured in. (On the Times website, you can play some of the sample sounds of these systems.) These systems seem essential nowadays.

I guess I am lucky: For many years I have had my own office, which I share occasionally with one other person. About the most noise that I get are the trash trucks barreling down the alleyway. The rest of the time you would just hear the clicking of keyboards.

Learning From Failure

About a month ago, on ReadWriteWeb ran a link to a TED video about learning from failure. It spoke to me and I started thinking about some of my failures in my professional life over the past years. I have had more of them that I initially thought of, and while that was a little depressing, it was instructive to collect all of them in one place. So why not share them with you, dear reader? After all, I usually tell you about my insights. Here goes.

I have written three books, with two of them actually published. While you may think of that as a success, in reality neither of them made any real money. My last book came out the week before 9/11, and that was a dark period for so many things, including trying to sell any books. With each book that I wrote (the first one was never published), I learned more about that business. Now I know enough to skip finding a “real” publisher entirely, if I ever have another book in me. There is still a lot I need to learn about the self-publishing industry, but that seems like the way to go in the future.

One of the most important decisions about a book is its title, and typically new authors don’t have final say-so on their titles. I was working with an established author on my first published book (which is always a great idea anyway, because you have much to learn). But our proposed title didn’t grab the publisher’s attention, and we ended up with a real dog that didn’t do much for sales. Oh well.

How not to run a website. Over the years I have worked on the editorial content for more than a dozen different websites involving technology information. Some of them have done better than others. But one thing that I have learned is you need the right balance between content, sales, and page views. All three (and in the right proportions) are important: if one is lacking, your site is doomed. If you have more content than sales, you also aren’t going to get very far. Having too many chiefs or people that think they are in control and not enough worker bees is also a recipe for disaster. On one site, we had an experience imbalance: we had very experienced editors but very inexperienced sales people. That wasn’t good either.

Another way not to run a website is to have quirky analytics which are giving you poor visitor information. At one place, we had one guy who had built his own custom stats package to collect our page view numbers. Trouble is, no one actually believed these numbers, including some of the advertisers. Do yourself a favor and get in bed with Google Analytics or some other commercial product and understand what they are telling you.

Not having the right mix of authority and responsibility. Many of my jobs I started out with a lot of responsibility but not actual authority to get things done, hire the people that I needed, or be able to spend money on contractors or freelance help to fix things. Again, not a good sign. Coming into one job, I was told that I would have a certain budget only to find that each purchase required a near papal authorization. Authority and responsibility need to be in balance too.

One of my biggest success stories was starting up Network Computing magazine back in 1990. I made my boss show me his proposed budgets, and he wasn’t comfortable about doing it but I said that I wasn’t taking the job without seeing the actual numbers. I think he brought me into his office over the weekend and wouldn’t let me leave his sight while I looked over his spreadsheets. We went on to have one of the fastest growing magazines for the parent company, and many of the staffers whom I hired back then are still associated with the magazine (although in its online form now).

Some of my failures come from being part of volunteer organizations that suffer from a lack of quality leadership. It is easy to spot these organizations: the people at the top don’t do a good job of delegating tasks. Or they don’t know how to develop new recruits, because any good volunteer outfit demands a fresh supply periodically as the old hands burn out.

Every job has its natural rhythms and ups and downs. Part of being successful is in keeping in tune with what is going on in your organization, and as the song says, “Know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.” Sometimes I have stayed longer than I needed to with a particular job, or passed up opportunities because I still had unfinished business. Or been fired because of whatever the circumstances that made me and the organization incompatible.

As I said, I have had lots of success in my life, and I am grateful for that. But it doesn’t hurt to look back and review some of my failures too, and hopefully I can avoid repeating them in the future.

Going back to basics with your next startup

I have had the opportunity to mentor quite a few startup companies in the St. Louis region over the past several years. I was asked yesterday why I do it, and it because I want to give something back to my community, help others avoid some of the same mistakes that I did when I started my own business, and also because it is a lot of fun to meet entrepreneurs who are so passionate about their business.

It is also fun to see the widening of the entrepreneurial community in St. Louis: we just had a business plan competition (the Arch Grants) which gave away grants of $50k to 15 different startups, a few of whom are in the process of moving into town (as part of the deal to take the dough). This is just one of numerous other ways startups can raise funds here, as Jay DeLong shows you in this video.

The common theme that I keep coming back to is taking care of the basics of business isn’t always easy. What do I mean by basics? Things like pricing, understanding your market, and making sure that your niche is as narrow as possible. Let me give you a few examples.

One services firm I know was charging too little: in fact after getting some mentoring they doubled their rates! Figuring out what you charge isn’t easy: I wrestle with this all the time, particularly in the down economy that we have today. My own rates have fluctuated over the 20 years that I have been in business, and today I still marvel at firms that want me to do work for them at bargain-basement rates, or better yet, for free for “the exposure.” If I wanted exposure, I would go hiking in the mountains. I keep telling folks that I am not a charitable organization: I work for a living, and so should you. Yes, there are times when I will work for free, but under very structured and controlled circumstances. For example, I will speak at different local community-based organizations’ conferences. A speaker friend I know books up to one pro bono event each month and puts on her calendar. I like that method: you treat these freebies with the same value of paying gigs. She makes her money selling her books and consulting services from these events.

Yes, setting the right price is more art than science, but you do have to spend some time looking at your competitors and understanding that there is an implicit value in your rate: if you undercharge, you will be undervalued.

If you need help with your pricing, spend some time doing some testing: see what you can get at different prices from different clients. While this isn’t very scientific, it should give you an idea of how high your should (usually) raise your rates.

Do you really have the right niche for your product or services? One software firm that I am working with has a very narrow niche for its product, and has done well continuing to focus on what people in that niche need. But what happens if your niche is evolving? You have to evolve with it. As I said earlier, you want to continually find a narrower niche, so you can become the dominant player in that niche. Many new ventures make the mistake of going too wide rather than deep: then you are in different markets with limited resources for each.

The term du jour is “pivot” which used to mean solving a set of linear equations back when I was in grad school but now means that you refocus your startup business. That gives the impression that your original idea wasn’t sound. Instead, constantly refine what your offerings are.

Finally, if you have the right price and the right niche, there is the right market for your goods and services. Another firm I know was focused on the college-age market. They had a second service and designed it around this audience, because this customer is someone they knew and understood. They want to leverage their expertise in this space, not try to be all things to all ages. It is a valuable lesson.

Tom’s ITPro: IBM Trying to Become a Hip Agile Software Developer

At its annual user and partner Impact conference in Las Vegas this week, IBM announced a slew of new products, including new additions to its WebSphere applications family. There are also promises of better integration with software products from its recent acquisitions and a new piece of integrated hardware to its Pure line of expert hardware systems.  Today’s IBM mainframe comes inside a 19-inch rack and runs on Intel CPUs.

You can read more about my coverage of IBM’s Impact 2012 conference this week in Las Vegas in Tom’s ITPro here.

Tom’s ITPro: Gateway to Innovation conference in St. Louis

What is the impact of innovation on the lives and careers of IT pros in the trenches? From the perspective of the Midwest, it seems that innovation is still very much alive and there is plenty of recent activity. The evidence is from feedback from some of the presenters and attendees of the annual “Gateway to Innovation” conference held in April in St. Louis. There is lots of daily innovation happening in the rank and file of IT workers we spoke to, along with some pretty cool applications that were on display as part of some home-grown pride. You can read my coverage of the event here in Tom’s ITPro.

Watson, come here, we need you

I spent some time with Watson over the past week or so at various conferences and I came away impressed. This is IBM’s Jeopardy-solving computer. At the St. Louis Gateway to Innovation conference, IBM had a kiosk showing off its prowess. You had your chance to try to come up with the correct question (remember, the game gives you the answers) before the computer did. Now, I consider myself a fairly decent Jeopardy player: when I watch the show on TV, I can usually get the right question more than half the time. But that is sitting in the comfort of my own living room.

When it came to standing in front of the Watson kiosk, I choked. Big time. It was interesting, because you get to see how Watson “thinks” and formulates its replies. I could barely start typing before it had finished figuring out its (correct) question. The kiosk doesn’t contain the actual Watson computer: it is just a remote interface. You can see a picture of part of the kiosk here, and how it judges among three different possible responses, along with assigning confidence values to each.

Then, at the IBM Impact conference in Vegas, I got to attend one of the sessions where Bob Madey, one of Watson’s developers, was talking about their next steps. Watson isn’t a product: with all the processors and storage it isn’t exactly portable. And you can’t really buy it anyway. It isn’t quite a service yet, although IBM is working on commercial versions for healthcare and financial services, and eventually for other industries such as sales contact management. But what is interesting is how IBM is going to make money from their efforts with this research project.

Anyone who signs up for Watson (and you better believe there is a waiting list) has to agree to a unique arrangement: IBM will take 40% of the calculated savings from its use. So if Watson is helping to diagnose diseases (as was being shown in the session that I attended), the hospital and IBM will come to some agreement as to what the cost savings will be from this activity. It is an intriguing way to sell computer services. The client only pays if Watson delivers.

This differs from usual computer services types of deals where you pay by the CPU minute or the amount of storage or other resources consumed. But that wouldn’t do for Watson, because there are a lot of resources involved in processing its natural language queries and storing all the data it needs to figure out the context of the query and possible answers to your questions. And one other thing: IBM will own all the data that is fed into Watson. You just get the results, and that’s it.

There are 220 people involved in the Watson project and this large staff is needed. It took them more than a week to load in a new database for each Jeopardy build. For the medical apps they are currently working on, it still takes them several days to retrain Watson. Part of the problem here is in understanding how to retire old data, or to assign lesser confidence intervals as you learn new things about the particular subjects you are covering. One of the audience members at Impact raised that issue, and it was an important one. Another asked how long it would take IBM to develop the Watson equivalent of a WebMD.com that anyone could query its medical data online. While Madey was cagey about answering this, if Watson would be allowed to reply the machine would probably agree that was a reasonable goal. I started thinking of the HAL9000 computer that powers the spaceship in 2001. “Dave, that’s a really good idea.”

It was fun to watch Watson on TV last year, although none of the human contestants stood a chance and eventually it was a total silicon rout. I know a bit how those fellow carbon-based life forms all felt: it was humbling just to try my hand at a couple of questions. But it is exciting to see where IBM is taking the project, and I suspect we will be hearing more about this curious machine sometime soon.

A new Dice.com talent community on security

I have begun for the job seeking site Dice.com what they call a new talent community centered around security for IT professionals here. The site will contain links to their job openings in the area as well as resources on where you can security certifications, upcoming security-related conferences, and other materials. Please check it out and let me know how I can make it a better place.