Article: Better Service Through Training

Robert Bogue July 23, 2012 No Comments

The relationship between effective training and fewer, better support center calls is well known, if not very easy to quantify. Sixty-seven percent of support organizations differentiate between incidents (unplanned work required to fix something) and how many are service requests (nothing is broken, but a service is required), but only 43 percent measure those calls separately. It’s difficult, though, to predict the effect of better trained customers on those numbers. Of course, perfect training is an improbability, but certainly there’s room for improvement and room for fewer calls.

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I wrote this article for HDI’s SupportWorld magazine, which you can get from the HDI site — If you have a subscription. If you don’t have a subscription you can see just the article here.

Evangelization

Robert Bogue July 14, 2012 No Comments

It seems like we’ve all got social stigmas against evangelization. We think about the sales associates at electronics stores who, hungry for the next commission, stalk customers until the leave the store. We cringe when the doorbell rings early on a Saturday morning hoping that we won’t find the Jehovah’s Witnesses on our front doorstep. We have an internal fear of used car salesmen who seem all too eager to tell us anything to get us to buy. In the Nine Keys to SharePoint Success, evangelization is the last of the activities that organizations miss. There’s little doubt that this one is missed because of the discomfort most of us feel about evangelization but let’s look at how we can regain a healthy respect for the word.

To Thine Own Self Be True

There’s a special detection mechanism that we all have for detecting insincerity. It doesn’t work perfectly but when we realize that someone is being insincere it causes a very large reaction. That detection of insincerity is one factor that leads us to avoid evangelism. We’ve come to equate that someone who is evangelizing must at some level be insincere.

In some cases that’s absolutely true. We’ve all seen insincere people evangelizing. Think about the person in the chicken suit holding a sign for Great Clips. We know they’re not happy to be there.

Knowing this, the suggestion isn’t that you should be insincere in your evangelization of SharePoint, in fact that would be detrimental. However, just because it isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread doesn’t mean that there aren’t good things that you can talk about.

Zealot

In some cases the person who is knocking on your front door on a Saturday morning isn’t insincere – perhaps misinformed – but they’re not insincere. They believe with all their heart what they’re "selling." The problem with this sort of evangelization isn’t an insincerity problem. It’s what I call PhD.

I’ve noticed as a rule that those folks who have earned a PhD have developed a very nasty and debilitating disease. I call it Perfect Hearing Disorder. The disorder prevents folks who have a PhD from hearing other people. Their ego has become so inflated that the ears no longer function – or rather they’re not connected to the brain any longer. (Before I offend too many folks, I do have friends who have earned a PhD who have not developed this disorder but they are somewhat of an exception.)

This is the core problem of a zealot. They’re not interested in your position, situation, or perspective. They don’t want to hear it. I encourage you as you’re evangelizing SharePoint to listen to the alternatives and evaluate other options. You can’t imagine how powerful it is for me to say "SharePoint isn’t a good fit." Or "Work on the core business problems now and get to SharePoint later." I’ve not had to pick any clients off the floor – but that’s probably because they were already sitting down.

One of the other characteristics of a zealot – because of the hearing problem – is that they talk about the features of what they’re selling – and not how it solves a problem you have.

Problems and Solutions

Perhaps software companies are not zealots but they do spent a lot of time in marketing the features of their products. They talk about how the XYZ feature revolutionized the market or how with ABC you can make the best posters – without any indication of how to do that or who decided they were the best. The problem with this approach is that users don’t need features. Users need solutions. They need solutions to the problems they face.

As you’re evangelizing SharePoint in the organization, I’d strongly encourage you to focus on the problems it solves rather than the features. For instance, there’s a problem that 30% of an information worker’s time is spent trying to find the information they’re looking for. The solution is SharePoint. The features are search, metadata, and version control – however, those don’t solve the findability problem – they are the tools to solve the findability problem.

If you continue to focus on how you’re solving problems – rather than being a purveyor of features — you’ll find that users will start to actively look for your communications because you’re doing something impactful for them.

WIII-FM

Everyone’s favorite radio station is WIII-FM – that is "What is in it for me?" It’s not a matter of being ego centric, it’s about being human. We are always trying to translate what is happening around us including the opportunities, changes, and threats into what it means to us. Perhaps that’s still a bit ego centric but it’s the way evolution hard wired us – we have to look out for ourselves. To do that, we also need to ascribe meaning to the events around us.

When you propose a solution that will save the company money but it requires some additional action on the part of the individual, you’ve got some selling to do. The traditional rational model of thinking would say that employees want to support the organization and therefore what is good for the organization should happen as a matter of course. However, take this simple example. If you’re working from home you probably have unlimited long distance. When you call in to a conference call you almost invariably will call into a toll free number. The organization pays a per-minute fee for those toll free number calls. Calling a toll number is actually cheaper for the organization but almost no one dials them.

Sure that’s a silly example, but the point of it is that just because it’s good for the organization doesn’t mean that someone will automatically do it – you have to make it personal to them. Run a campaign which offers gift cards for folks who routinely use the toll numbers for conference calls and you’re likely to change behavior – because they’re something in it for them.

I’m not saying that you have to incent every behavior you want – rather, I’m saying that you have to make the value personal and not some abstract concept of how it will make the organization better someday.

Urgency

There’s no time like the present. That’s rarely a motto that someone inside the organization has posted on their cube wall. Most organizations have everyone doing so much that it’s a constant juggling act just to keep things going. Some employees feel like they’re the proverbial plate spinner working on something just long enough to keep it from crashing.

In this environment, where you’re overworked and you have too many priorities how do you get employees to spend their time learning about and using SharePoint? The answer is to make the problem that they’re solving urgent. We’ve all seen those advertisements that explain that this is a "limited time offer." Perhaps we’re even aware of businesses that are perpetually having a "going out of business" sale. They’re trying to create a false sense of urgency – which as you might guess from the discussion above I’m not advocating.

There are times when you can see the problem more clearly and sense the impending danger of the lion on your heels. The more clearly you can articulate the danger of the problem (and the impact to the person with whom you’re speaking) the greater their sense of urgency and the greater the likelihood that they’ll work on the issue – instead of burying it with the other thousand or so things they can’t get to on a daily basis.

Energy in Evangelism

As we wrap up, the trick here isn’t a trick. It’s being honest and sharing openly the opportunities that you have to make the business better. If you focus on how SharePoint can solve common problems and creating a real sense of urgency to solve those problems you’ll avoid the negative stigmas associated with evangelism – and create a lasting impact for the organization.

Planning Measurement

Robert Bogue July 13, 2012 No Comments

In my blog post, “The Nine Keys to SharePoint Success” I called out Planning Measurement as the number three key to success. In this blog post we’ll delve into what measurement is – and how to measure the right things.

Measurement Basics

Measurement is at its heart a standardized way of evaluating something. The essence of measurement is knowing that one road is longer than another based on the measurement of its length – without having to have traveled them both. Sometimes we wrap up the usefulness of the measurement and the fundamentals of measurement and confuse whether a measurement is “right” or whether it’s “useful.”

Central to the discussion about measurement are two broadly misunderstood terms: accuracy and precision. Precision refers to the repeatability of the result – multiple measurements of the same thing will result in tightly clustered values. Precision does not, however, tell you how close those values are to the real or true value – that’s accuracy. Accuracy is, in other words, the “rightness” of the results you get. If I throw four darts at a dartboard and hit the very top, very bottom, very left, and very right of the dartboard, my dart were accurate in that they average to the center. They are not, however, very precise because they’re all over the board. Conversely, I could put four darts practically on top of each other on the rightmost edge of the board and I’d have precision without accuracy.

Sometimes we find that in our quest for precision we’ll often overlook simple ideas that lead to accurate but less precise results. In the case of SharePoint, let’s assume we’re trying to determine the relative levels of activity on different days of the week. We could take the file sizes for the IIS request logs – rather than the individual number of requests and get a roughly accurate comparison between the days.

The precise answer would require we count every request, eliminate those not caused by users, and establish daily request values. However, this level of precision is probably not necessary if we have a few weeks’ worth of logs to evaluate – the relative sizes of the log files will roughly equate to the volume based on day of the week. Measurement is as much about knowing how to find the level of accuracy needed – without driving unnecessary precision.

Measure What

One of the interesting challenges about measurement is that in most cases performing measurement means effort on the measurement process – which ostensibly takes away from the ability to spend the effort on production. This begs the question “How do you know what to measure?” Certainly there are some measurements which will be clearly impractical to perform. However, in many more cases the decision between deciding to measure and not to measure is difficult.

Douglas Hubbard, Author of How to Measure Anything suggests the following, slightly complex, set of questions for evaluating a measurement:

What is the decision this measurement is supposed to support?
What is the definition of the thing being measured in terms of observable consequences?
How, exactly, does this thing matter to the decision being asked?
How much do you know about it now (i.e., what is your current level of uncertainty)?
What is the value of additional information?

However, I believe these can be simplified into a simple litmus test. The litmus test question is: “Can I reasonably expect that I’ll make a decision based on the result of the measurement?” If you will never make a decision based on a measurement then you probably don’t need to do it. You’ll note the word “reasonably” in the question. It’s there to extend it to situations where you don’t know for sure what you’re going to get – and so measuring the results for at least a short time are called for. The word “reasonably” is also to constrain the analysis from the radical extremism that we can sometimes enter into in a meeting. Sure anything taken to an extreme would lead to a decision but is that case even remotely likely?

Leading, Coincident, Lagging

When we’re measuring, we have to look at what we’re measuring not only from the perspective of value but also from the perspective of their place in time. Ultimately our measurements turn into a set of numbers and those numbers are indicators. They’re indicators of the level of some function.

The indicators that we’re measuring can be leading – in that they signal an event to come, lagging – they demonstrate something that’s already happened, or coincident – signaling something that’s happening right now.

Let’s say that your goal is to monitor the amount of cash we have on hand – our cash flow. A leading indicator for cash flow is invoices. We can be reasonable assured that we’ll receive money for an invoice we produce. A coincident indicator would be a bank deposit. We’d be seeing the actual amount deposited at the moment it was deposited. A lagging indicator would be the bank statement. It would say what has already happened in terms of cash flow.

The good news is that lagging indicators are almost always correct – they’re documenting things that have already happened. Coincident indicators are mostly correct. In most cases you’re measuring something that is happening so there’s little chance for accuracy issues. However, leading indicators are sometime wrong – and are often subject to manipulation. For instance, in our invoice example above, it’s possible to create fake invoices which customers will never pay. This would make the invoiced indicator look good leading to the conclusion cash flow would be good – until you realize the invoices aren’t real.

When planning measurement you have to consider what decisions you’re going to be making and whether a leading, lagging, or coincident indicator is the best answer. The obvious answer is that you want to have a leading indicator so you can make changes before things happen – but the obvious answer is sometimes so difficult to get that the right answer might be a coincident or even a lagging indicator.

Measuring the Right Things

Some organizations believe that they have the metrics problem down. With sophisticated tools they measure service availability, utilization, and hundreds of system-automated metrics. From a systems management perspective they have all the data they need – however, despite all of this data they still cannot communicate whether their solutions are adding value. The fewer the number of links between the item you’re measuring and business profitability, the better the measurement is at measuring something that matters.

In the following sections we’ll look at measurable metrics and their ability to illuminate business value in a solution.

Service Measurement (Availability)

If you’re in IT service delivery then the metrics that you care are about are largely the metrics for which you have service level agreements (SLAs). You’ll be concerned about up-time and performance – how many seconds that it takes for a page to load. These are essential service delivery metrics but they don’t tell you much about the users or the business. They tell you exclusively (or nearly exclusively) about the system itself.

Scalability Measurement (Visits)

Often a marketing or communications department will insist on metrics like the number of hits or perhaps visits that the site receives for a certain period of time. The metrics can be generated through sophisticated tools or simple IIS log analysis and provides a level of awareness of what the users are doing – or at least that they’re showing up and using the system. However, this is a measurement of activity. It doesn’t talk about the results that are being driven through the system.

Even if the monitoring can tell you the number of new documents uploaded or the number of records edited in addition to just the number of visits, these still don’t lead to business results.

Business Measurement (Dollars)

Business measurements are those measurements that are tied to business results. An example might be the value of the increased number (or percentage) of closed deals. Another example might be the amount of reduced costs based on the use of the system.

Most of the time in SharePoint projects when I start to talk about measuring business value, the IT folks in the room start to squirm. That is because SharePoint is delivered as a platform to enable business solutions – it is rarely sold with a specific set of objectives. That means that there’s little direct value from deploying the platform, except for the occasional cost replaced by an older system. The other problem is that measurements tend to get used for bonuses and performance appraisals. A technologist doesn’t want the messy business stuff to get in the way of their compensation.

If the measurement is reduced cycle time for responding to a request for proposal (RFP) then the technologist is being judged not just on whether the system is available, or even how many people use it, but also on the ability of the business to use the system in a way that transforms the way the business works – and that’s scary stuff. Measurements based on the business outcome being driven force the technologist to get in the boat and row with the business towards mutual goals. While this is scary – sometimes to the business as well – it helps get the alignment that’s necessary for success.

Putting Measurement Together

The key thing to remember about measurement of your SharePoint project isn’t the distinction between accuracy and precision (though that may help); the key is to realize that no matter how difficult you believe measurement will be there’s almost always an easier way to get a “roughly right” result. You can then use these “roughly right” answers to start to measure more important items pertaining to the SharePoint implementation – like how much money it made (or saved) for the organization.

Book Review-The Anatomy of Peace

Robert Bogue July 10, 2012 No Comments

Reading The Anatomy of Peace completes the trifecta of books from the Arbinger Institute. I’ve already written reviews from Bonds that Make Us Free and Leadership and Self-Deception. All of these books are really a continuation of the thoughts of Martin Burber in his book I and Thou written in German and translated to English. Continuation in that they make real and accessible the wisdom of I and Thou.

The Anatomy of Peace offers a few key things to the insights of the other works. In the Anatomy of Peace we get to see the four kinds of boxes we can get into – the four ways that we can see others as objects rather than seeing them as people. The boxes are:

Better-than box – In this box you see yourself as better than other folks. They’re not as human as you because you’re better.
I-deserve box – The key world is entitlement. You don’t see others as people because you’re not getting what you believe you’re entitled to.
Must-be-seen-as box – In this box you are focused on your appearance – and because of that you can’t see folks as people. You’re too focused on how you appear to be.
Worse-than box – In this box you believe that you’re not worthy and therefore can’t relate to others as a caring person.

The book also offers helpful suggestions for getting out of the box:

1. Look for the signs of the box (blame, justification, horribilization, common box styles, etc.).
2. Find an out-of-the-box place (out-of-the-box relationships, memories, activities, places, etc.).
3. Ponder the situation anew (i.e., from this out-of-the-box perspective). Ask
- What are this person’s or people’s challenges, trials, burdens, and pains?
- How am I, or some group of which I am a part, adding to these challenges, trials, burdens, and pains?
- In what other ways have I or my group neglected or mistreated this person or group?
- In what ways are my better-than, I-deserve, worse-than, and must-be-seen-as boxes obscuring the truth about others and myself and interfering with potential solutions?
- What am I feeling I should do for this person or group? What could I do to help? Staying out of the box
4. Act upon what I have discovered; do what I am feeling I should do.

Finally, the Peacemaking Pyramid offers suggestions for how to build to a place of being able to resolve problems – and how much time you should spend on the things that go right compared to the time you spend when things go wrong. Take a look:

The book will help you determine how to create peace, not just find it. That’s a pretty cool thing.

Article: Secure Search Can Protect Your Sensitive Information

Robert Bogue July 9, 2012 No Comments

Two guys walk into an office. The first one asks, “Do you know what’s different between searching the Internet and searching your intranet?” The second one exclaims “Just about everything!” Sometimes it can seem like everything that you know about searching on the Internet just doesn’t apply to your intranet. You expect when you search the Internet you’ll find something. (It may not be the right thing but that’s not relevant right now.)

eDiscovery activities can leverage search to dig up more dirt than a Caterpillar convention. Do you want to know the best data discovery tool that auditors have right now? It’s your search engine. You’ve already indexed the content. All they need is an account and they can find any piece of information that you didn’t want found by just anyone in the organization. Maybe they’re searching for credit card numbers for a PCI audit, or social security numbers for a PII audit, whatever it is the search tools are going to find it. And yet, when you want to find something you’re left out in the cold.

Building Trust: Make, Renegotiate, Meet

Robert Bogue July 9, 2012 No Comments

For whatever reason over the last few weeks I’ve been asked in several different ways how to build (or rebuild) trust. I’ll share an oversimplification here and recommend you look at my book reviews of Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace and Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships and Life, if you’re interested in more details, techniques, or background.

Building or rebuilding trust is as simple as: making commitments, renegotiating commitments, and meeting commitments. Whether you’re in an organization or are working one-on-one this seems too simple to be true – however, sometimes the solution isn’t as large as the problem.

Make

Making a commitment may seem like something that you do every day – however, if you’re like most folks you don’t really make commitments daily. Most folks make agreements daily but rarely do you find someone who makes commitments. What’s the difference? Well, it’s indifference. If you have any level of indifference about whether you’ll be able to actually do the thing you’re making an agreement but not a commitment. Commitment means committed.

I don’t mean the sort of “I’ll do it or die trying” level of commitment is required for everything you do but when you’re building or rebuilding trust even small things can be big. You want to ensure that you’re meeting every commitment so that you develop a pattern of the other person expecting you’ll meet your commitments. (Sounds a bit like trust doesn’t it?)

One key point in terms of making commitments is the level of specificity that you use. The problem is sometimes that we’re not specific enough about our commitments so we have one idea of what we’re committing to and someone else has a different interpretation. All the time we have folks commit to get something done by Tuesday. However, they may be thinking end of day – where we’re expecting first thing in the morning. For even more clarity we might define end of day – what time? 5PM? 6PM? 11:59PM? What timezone? In our multi-location business world sometimes even the timezone can trip us up.

Any commitment you make, you should fully expect to meet.

Renegotiate

This is an odd placement. You would think that the thing you would want to do most when it comes to commitments is meeting them and yet that’s our third item not our second, why? In short, renegotiation can be a positive thing – even more than meeting a commitment – but only if it’s handled before the time to meet the commitment has passed – and only if done in the right spirit.

It’s possible to renegotiate because of truly exceptional circumstances (a death in the family) or truly trivial circumstances (I wanted to watch a TV show.) The greater level of respect that you show the other person through what you renegotiate for, the quicker you’ll build trust.

Clearly you want to minimize the number of times that you have to renegotiate in the first place, however, the key is to renegotiate openly and that you do it before you’ve missed the commitment in the first place – if you can. If you happen to miss your commitment and don’t renegotiate first, don’t give up. You should still renegotiate the commitment, just know that you’ve lost some ground and what you’re doing with the renegotiation is trying to not lose more.

Meet

Meeting a commitment has the same level of apparent simplicity as making a commitment and the same level of possibility for misunderstanding. Certainly you should meet your own standards when meeting a commitment – you shouldn’t try to “pull one over” on yourself and say it was “good enough.” That is a slippery slope and one that no one ever navigates for long. However, more important is that you get the party (or organization) to whom you made the commitment to positively acknowledge that you’ve met the commitment.

For instance, on occasion I’ve presented to a group where we made a list of things to cover in the presentation on the board. During the presentation as I believe I covered a topic I went to cross the item off the list – and as I did I asked the person that raised it to acknowledge that I had met their expectations – or they told me what I didn’t meet and I tried to work on it. In short we renegotiated because their expectation couldn’t be met – or I delivered the missing material. Notice here I’m not perfect in setting expectations or communicating my commitments either – I use renegotiation to help me get more clarity when necessary.

Wrap Up – Expectations and Perfection

Really when you’re building trust you’re trying to create the expectation that you’ll do something. You’re trying to build an expectation that your word, your commitment means something. Trust is really that expectation. It’s someone else accepting an expectation as more or less a fact.

I need to end that you won’t be perfect in meeting your commitments, no one is. What you want to do is be as close to perfect as you can be. The best way to do that is to make and meet small commitments and gradually expand them larger and larger. If you’re an alcoholic don’t make the commitment to never drink again – ever. Make the commitment to not drink tomorrow. After a while you may expand and commit to not drinking for a week. 12 step programs, of which Alcoholics Anonymous is the creator, recommend one day at a time. It’s good advice. Commit to things that are so close that you know you can meet them.

Good luck.

Six Myths of Social Software

Robert Bogue July 7, 2012 1 Comment

So for the past five years or so, I’ve been a skeptic when it comes to social software. (Take a look back early in my quest at my review of Wikinomics, Groundswell, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Long Tail, or Linked.) It’s not that I don’t believe that social software can’t add value – rather it’s I believe that it’s too often poorly understood by business and it’s seen as the cure for whatever ails an organization. Over the years I’ve tried to keep a healthy respect for folks who are social advocates while simultaneously viewing the prospects of social in the enterprise with some level of doubt. Over the years I’ve had experiences with how people and organizations have trumpeted the value of social only to leave it on the broken road of failed initiatives quickly thereafter. In all fairness, I’ve seen an unreasonable number of social projects killed because of management misconceptions and fears. So as a result I wanted to post my top six social myths that organizations believe with the warning that some of these support the deployment of social software – and some do not.

6. Build It and They Will Come

When Amazon.com started reviews it didn’t take off. Seriously, Amazon.com people. When they built it no one started reviewing. They had to kick start the review process to get it to a critical mass where the reviews would keep coming in on their own. They had a cold-start problem. No one knew what reviews were supposed to be so no one did it. It took seeding the system with reviews, getting folks to take that first step to get the ball rolling to the point where it’s a very effective review center now. It should be said that Amazon.com’s marketing and analysis engine sending out reminders for folks to do reviews even today is probably a contributing factor to their success – but I come back to reviews weren’t easy even for the juggernaut of the Internet. So what makes you so certain that on your Intranet you can get folks to review – or even rate – documents?

Ultimately every social initiative in the organization will have a cold-start problem. There won’t be any social norms and most folks neither want to create them nor violate them because they didn’t understand them. As a result there’s a huge inertia to getting a social project started. If you think that you can just build it and the “social” will magically happen, you’re likely to be quite disappointed. So if you’re planning to implement social software, plan how you’re going to launch it – and support it for at least 90 days and ideally longer.

5. “It’s Just as Easy to…”

Someone will say something like “With Yammer I can post a short update to a group that cares about what I’m working on.” The immediate response from IT will be, “You can post that to a discussion forum in SharePoint.” Um, yea. Sure, 20 clicks later you’ll have an update that people can find if they do the same 20 clicks – instead of having a “river of news” type update on their screen. You’ll excuse me this isn’t the same. Ease of use and the experience of the interaction does matter.

A fundamental lesson I learned from eCommerce years ago is every action you require decreases (sometimes exponentially) the probability of the result you’re looking for. In the eCommerce world that was a sale. Take a look at Amazon.com’s checkout process. There are few steps (who came up with one click ordering?) and the number of distractions when you’re going through them is cut to the minimum. In the organization that’s simple communication (and coordination) – or it’s an attempt to capture knowledge. (See my book review of Lost Knowledge.) So there is a difference between 2 clicks and 20. Between seeing something without action and requiring action.

If you organization is ready to share information and the tooling is getting in the way – you may need to deploy a social tool to reduce the friction in communication and collaboration. When you deploy it, you’ll want to make it clear what the expectations are, make it easy to get to, prominent, and easy to use.

4. Pent Up Demand

I opened the door to this myth. I opened the door to the idea that an organization may have a large unmet appetite for a social tool that has not yet been deployed. This myth is so prevalent there are law suits from big foot and the lochness monster asking for a restraining order. Everyone believes that the problem is that IT isn’t delivering the social tools that the Gen Yers in the organization are clamoring for. If IT would just implement some sort of Facebook for the enterprise the problems would somehow magically evaporate and every meeting would cease to be boring. I believe, it would be replaced with the incessant sound of people quietly stamping out a million short messages instead of feigning attention to the meeting leader.

There is no doubt that there is some pent up demand. There’s pent up demand whenever you don’t have something – but how much pent up demand is there? I’ve owned a pinball machine for a number of years now. For the first few years I played it a lot. Recently, I’ve not played it so much. (In fact it’s broken if anyone knows a pinball repairperson around Indy.) So there was some level of demand when I got it but not 10 years of demand. How much demand do you really have for the latest enterprise social application?

If you believe there’s pent up demand for social in your organization, measure it. If you don’t know how, check out How to Measure Anything. You won’t be able to get an exact sense for the pent up demand but you’ll have the opportunity to better understand what the biggest demand really is.

3. We’re All One Big Happy (and Dysfunctional) Family

No matter how good the commitment to an organization is, people are people. We may not openly behave as teenage children in high school forming cliques and openly jeering at jocks, nerds, or people who are simply different than us – but the dynamics are largely the same. We form alliances with people in the organization whose ideas and needs are most like ours. We bristle when someone from outside our camp suggests that we’re doing something wrong – or even that we could be doing something better. As much as we like to see ourselves as one big organization we’re really a set of overlapping circles of influence and agreement. (If you want to see the idea of organizations as a network of commitments you may want to read Understanding Computers and Cognition.)

What does this have to do with social software? Well somehow we picture that after implementing social software we’ll have a world with rainbows and puppies and people playing harps around a fire singing Kumbaya. However, while social software may make it easier for us to be more social – to share who we are – it won’t inherently help us to like or respect the folks that we work with.

So if you’re going to deploy social software you’re going to want to get some family counseling too. Make sure that you support the objective of making the organization work better together with the software – not just assume that if you get everyone together that it will all be alright. Do you remember your last family reunion? Do I need to say more?

2. Water Cooler Effect

It’s time to return to an objection leveled against social software that isn’t fair or accurate. One of the often leveled accusations by senior management is that if we implement social software we won’t get anything done. It will be like putting the proverbial water cooler in every cubical. The problem with this thinking is that it ignores the social aspects of our human existence. It ignores our need to be connected and care for each other. Without trust we can’t get anything done and to build trust we have to feel like we know another person. There’s a lot of evidence that a lack of trust reduces performance substantially – so anything that can be done to build trust is critical to long term success. (Even those silly team building exercises – sorry, they work.)

No large business deal has been done without the leaders of the organization going to dinner, playing a round of golf, or connecting in some non-business way. We simply do not function as humans from the perspective of logical decisions devoid of emotion. We need the emotional connection to the other person to trust.

When you create the right atmosphere where everyone wants the best for the organization, the problem of folks wasting their days won’t really be an issue – besides that’s really an HR issue that has nothing to do with social software. If folks want to not do their work – they’ll find a way to do just that. Look for and direct the behaviors you want and deal with individual performance problems as that – individual performance problems.

1. Silver Bullet

No, social software doesn’t kill werewolves, though I’ve not seen any studies to this effect. It really doesn’t matter what your problem is – if you believe it doesn’t matter what your problem is and you believe social software will fix it. (You may need to reread that.) Just like SharePoint, social isn’t a silver bullet. For that matter there are no silver bullets. You’re not going to solve a problem that you don’t understand. So I’d encourage you to look deeper when you’re confronted with a problem that you think social will solve. What is the real problem? Are we dealing with human behavior or some technical limitation?

To believe you need a silver bullet is to believe in werewolves. You might as well believe in unicorns – I think you’ve got an equal chance of finding either in your organization.

Ultimately, I’d support your organization deploying social software if you’ve got an organizational change initiative that it supports. I’d encourage you to rethink deploying social software because “it’s cool” and in the absence of a real effort to change the organization. Please don’t implement technology for technology’s sake.

Special Announcement – Free Gift when you attend SPTechCon in Boston

Robert Bogue July 6, 2012 No Comments

As has been advertised, I’ll be doing a keynote presentation at SPTechCon in Boston in just over two weeks. I’ll be talking about SharePoint Psychology. I’m excited because it’s going to allow me to talk openly about how you can “unstick” SharePoint in your organization. Whether that “unsticking” is getting to governance or getting folks to use it. There are so many simple things that you can do to get past what seem to be immovable barriers.

However, I’m also excited because I was able to work out a deal with my friends at BZMedia to give every single attendee a copy of my Nine Keys to SharePoint Success DVD. Whether you’ve seen the blog post series or heard my interview on RunAs Radio, you realize that these nine keys are essential to success in your SharePoint deployment. That’s why I’m so glad that we’re able to offer this $99 DVD to everyone that attends. The DVD is setup so you can play it on a regular DVD player so you’ll be able to take it back to your office and have a lunch session while everyone watches. (The DVD is 57 minutes in length so it’s a perfect lunch time video.)

Of course, you can still use the discount code BOGUE when you register for a $200 discount off the regular registration price for SPTechCon. I’m looking forward to seeing you in Boston. Just look for the man with the Shepherd’s Crook.

Computer Hard Disk Performance – From the Ground Up

Robert Bogue July 4, 2012 No Comments

Fortunato wails, “For the love of God, Montresor!” Montresor replies, “Yes, for the love of God!”
– Edgar Allen Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”

To say that I didn’t really want to write this blog post would be a massive understatement. I expect the slings and arrows of every disk and SAN vendor as they want to tell me that their solution doesn’t adhere to what I’m about to share. While I’m not perfect and I’ll welcome constructive and meaningful comments where I’ve either missed an important point or made an error. However, to the disk and SAN vendors who want to say these things don’t apply to them, I respond, “Physics are physics.” This post is designed to help anyone understand the key points of hard drive performance. I’ll skip some non-performance features of hard drives in favor for a common sense approach to talking about how drives perform and how at an enterprise level you can think about getting the right performance for your disk subsystems.

Round and Round We Go (How Disks Work, Rotational Latency, and Track-to-Track Seek Time)

So there are two key pieces to a hard drive when we’re talking performance. First, the platters and second the disk arm. Platters are flat, round, disc shaped and magnetically sensitive. They are spinning on a central spindle. Most drives have several of these but it’s possible to have only one. The information on the hard drive is recorded on to these platters in concentric rings called tracks. Each ring is broken into a set of sectors generally measuring 512 bytes of information. In modern hard drives, the number of sectors varies per track.

Sidebar: Most newer hard drives are moving to 4096 byte sectors instead of 512 byte sectors, however, this is largely not important because operating systems haven’t caught up with this so the drives are emulating 512 byte sectors. For the moment, I’d encourage you to ignore the fact that sector sizes are changing.

This disk arm has on it a set of one or more read/write heads. Each read/write heads read or write information to the platter they’re positioned over. The whole arm swings between the different tracks (concentric rings) and once in position the read/write head waits for the right part of the platter to rotate underneath the head so that it can do its work. This results in two kinds of latency (delay) when trying to read information. First, is the track-to-track seek time. Given you’re at track 1 and you need to reposition to track 3, how long will that take? This is measured in ms. The range here is from 3ms to about 15ms to travel 1/3^rd of the distance from the first to last track. For the most part seek time is rarely discussed any longer, though you’ll (sometimes) see it on technical specifications if you look.

The primary way that drives are being sold for a difference in latency is the RPM of the disk platters. It make sense that a drive that’s spinning at 15,000 RPMs takes half the time to get to the same sector on the track as a drive that’s spinning at 7,200 RPM. The average rotational latency for a 15K drive is 2ms. For a 7,200 RPM drive it’s 4.17ms. So you can buy a drive that has a random access time (going to a random spot on the disc to read a sector) of around 5ms and as high as about 20ms. (A 4x difference)

Sidebar: A funny thing to think about is that the amount of data passing under the read/write head on the outer tracks is actually greater than the amount of data passing by on the inner tracks. This is due to constant angular velocity (i.e. RPM) and the relatively larger number of sectors on the outer edges. So technically you get greater throughput from the drive at the end of the drive than the center.

The net of all of this is that when you’re looking for performance look for rotational speed and seek time.

Caching

Nearly every hard drive sold today has some level of cache on it. These caches are nearly exclusively read, so that’s the way we’ll talk about them. Caching on the drive does something different than caching on the computer itself. Often drives do what’s known as read-ahead caching – that is they read the next few sectors after the one that you asked for because it’s quick for them to do that. Literally there’s no latency in seeking the disk arm and negligible rotational latency wait time. The expectation is that the computer will ask for multiple sectors in a row –even if those requests aren’t at the drive yet. Similarly, some drives pre-cache, picking up sectors before the one requested which are stored in the cache as well. The idea is that reads tend to happen in clusters so the more you can pick up “free” data off the drive you should do that to minimize the possibility of having to get it later.

Fragmentation (Sequential vs. Random Access)

Before I leave disk access times it’s important to explain what fragmentation is – and why it’s important to overall disk performance. Sequential access of information is relatively quick. The time to swing the drive arm (if necessary) is small, and in most cases the rotational latency is negligible. For two sectors on the same track the time to read may be less than 1ms – and because of read-ahead it’s possible that it’s already cached on the drive so the result may be returned in nanoseconds. So all things being equal accessing information sequentially is much faster.

When you start to access information randomly you’re back in the 5ms to 20ms camp. So it’s five to twenty times slower than sequential access. This is why I call hard drives a pseudo-random access device. They’re not truly good at random, they’re good at sequential and are reasonably good at fast switching. Knowing the performance implications, you want everything to be a sequential instead of a random access to the drive.

There’s a certain amount of necessary random access. You can’t get everything to line up sequentially – particularly given the idea of multiple applications running on the computer. However, one thing you can do is allocate files on the file system in a contiguous way. If every individual file that you need is allocated contiguously, reading each file results in one seek and then a continuous sequential read. That’s good from a performance perspective.

However, files are often not allocated contiguously. This happens particularly when files are initially created at a smaller size and are expanded over time. Each time the file is extended it’s possible that the new space allocation on the disk won’t be continuous with the previous allocation. This is particularly true when there are multiple IO operations happening at the same time and when the file grows over time.

The solution is to use a tool to reorganize files so that each file is one contiguous allocation. There are numerous programs that try to do this by moving files from one spot to another. They work – but only in situations where the file once contiguous are read sequentially. There’s little impact to applications like databases where accesses are inherently random.

State of the Art (Solid State Drives)

The ultimate answer to performance as most folks know are solid state drives (SSD). These drives aren’t mechanical at all. They’re electronics. They’re based on bubble memory – the same sort of approach as we see in USB memory sticks, compact flash, SD cards, etc. Just like these medium SSDs come in varying speed but from the context of this conversation we’re looking at them as high performance devices. They cost as much as 125 times as much as a SATA drive for the same storage. However, where a SATA drive might return 150 IOps, an SSD may return over 8000 IOps.

A large amount of this difference is that there’s a very low switch time to read from one sector of the SSD to another sector. (Really they’re banks but let’s keep calling them sectors for consistency.) Instead of ms, bank switch times are nanoseconds.

Sidebar: Ultimately, SSD is the fastest storage you’re going to get but in addition to the cost issue, there’s one other issue you need to be aware of. SSDs wear out when you write too much data to them. Each bank/cell is designed for a certain number of write operations. Beyond that a write may fail. The drives handle some of this internally, reallocating space into some extra scratch space internally and remapping things – however, ultimately there’s a maximum number of writes that an SSD can be used for. So unlike a hard drive that has a stable mean time between failure (MTBF) given environmental conditions (power and temperature), SSDs longevity is based in part on how write focused the operations are.

Throughput

Sometimes we talk about the throughput of a device and that can be important with SSD drives since their random access time is so low. High speed SSDs are able to absolutely saturate the bus they’re connected to. However, for the most part the throughput of different hard drives isn’t that different so except for large sustained sequential read or write operations the throughput of a hard drive isn’t a key factor.

Get on the Bus (SATA or SAS)

There are obvious limitations of the transfer bus that have to be considered. The first is the maximum throughput of the bus – 3GB or 6GB or beyond. However, even the interface of the bus makes a difference. SATA has its roots in the old ATA hard drive technology (effectively swapping serial communication for parallel) and while it has added an important command cuing capability, the reigning king for performance is SAS which grew up from the SCSI standards. There are numerous technical capabilities of SAS that outstrip SATA but from a performance perspective SATA drives with the same specifications as a SAS drive should perform similarly.

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) was a great idea when it was first conceived. There were several levels that were initially defined but really we’re left with a few key RAID levels today:

RAID 0 – Striping. No redundancy but allows multiple drives to be treated as one.
RAID 1 – Mirroring. Complete 1:1 redundancy. Every bit of data is on two drives at the same time.
RAID 10 – Mirroring and Striping. The benefits of mirroring while striping across multiple drives.
RAID 5 – Checksum. A mathematical checksum is created across the drives (minus one) and written to the remaining drive. Technically the checksum is spread out across drives so that the checksum isn’t all on one drive.
RAID 6/DP – Checksum times 2. Same as RAID5 except there are two checksums written. Handles two drives in the stripe failing at the same time.

Snake Oil Note: Some folks talk about RAID 0+1 and RAID 1+0 being different. It’s a technical matter that makes no difference. For me they’re just RAID 10.

So let’s look at what we’re looking at for performance and storage for RAID 10, RAID 5, and RAID 6.

	RAID 10	RAID 5	RAID6
Storage Capacity with 4 drives	2 drives	3 drives	2 drives
Storage Capacity with 8 drives	4 drives (number of drives/2)	7 drives (number of drives-1)	6 drives (number of drives – 2)
Performance Random Write with 4 drives	2 drives	2 drives	1.33 drives
Performance Random Read with 4 drives	4 drives	3 drives	2 drives
Performance Random Write with 8 drives	4 drives (number of drives/2)	4 drive (two writes/operation)	2.66 drives (three writes/ operation)
Performance Random Read with 8 drives	8 drives (number of drives)	7 drives (number of drives-1)	6 drives (number of drives – 2)

There’s a key to the preceding which is I’m talking about small random writes. RAID 5 will perform at n-1 for writes when they’re large and sequential. I’m also assuming there aren’t any communications or processing issues that interfere with raw disk performance. One other thing that you need to know – and the thing that can have a substantial impact on performance — is the size of the stripe.

Taking Your Stripes (RAID Striping)

RAID 10 can operate at a sector level – that is only writing a sector that’s changed to two drives, although many RAID10 implementations follow the same model as RAID5 and RAID 6. However, RAID5 and RAID6 have to work from the perspective of a stripe of data. That is they collect a set of sectors across the stripe and calculate the checksums based on the stripes. A stripe can be created as small as 2K (4 sectors) but a more typical setting is 64K (128 sectors). The checksums are calculated on this stripe of data and therefore anytime one of the sectors in that stripe changes the entire checksum must be rewritten. With this in mind, let’s look at our example above. To get to 128 sectors of information in a 4 drive RAID5 we’re looking at 43 sectors per drive and a 43 sector checksum. So to change a single bit we have to write 43 sectors of information on the checksum drive. So in that way a write is 44x times less efficient. (44 total writes vs. 1 for a non-protected drive). However, it isn’t really that bad. The primary reason for this is the writes to the checksum drive are sequential. There’s normally no seek time (assuming the sectors are all in the same track) and there’s little rotational latency because the sectors are sequential.

Ways to minimize this are to reduce the stripe size – which increases waste and increases the overhead of calculating the checksum on the controller – but depending on how the drives are being used this may be a good idea. This is particularly true as you start to consider how the drives are being used. Really this impact is seen with write operations – for read operations it’s possible for the controller to just read the disk with the information on it.

Putting Walls Up (Master Boot Record and Partition Tables)

Thus far we’ve been talking about drives from a raw perspective – but that isn’t the way that they’re really accessed by an operating system. There are partitions indicating which parts of a drive – or array of drives – are addressed and how. Operating systems write a partition table to the first few sectors on the drive to indicate what sectors are used for what. In fact, there’s space for what’s called a master boot record – it’s what the computer reads from the drive first and it’s what kick starts the booting process. Both of these make up some space at the beginning of the drive. This is important because it will offset the start of a partition to the start of a stripe on the RAID array. As we’ll see in a second misalignment between stripes and partition boundaries can cause performance issues.

The Right Format (Partition Formatting)

Inside of the partitions created by the partition tables is a format of the disk. Disk formats allow for the organization of files, allocation of space, and so on. FAT – File Allocation Table, NTFS – New Technology File System, EXT3, etc., are all different file systems that are based fundamentally on two key principles: an allocation map and a folder structure. The allocation map simply indicates what sectors are available and which are not. The allocation map is used when files are added to find a spot on the drive which isn’t already consumed. The allocation map is also cleared when a file is deleted. The folder structure starts with a root folder and from there other folders are connected in a hierarchy. The key challenge as it comes to performance is the way the allocation map is handled.

On the one hand you want to be able to use every spare bit on the drive, on the other hand you can’t track the availability of every bit without having another bit for allocation – that’s pretty inefficient. Disks have their own natural sector boundaries at 512 bytes. So one could easily register a bit per sector to indicate whether it’s available or not. However, that would create a very large table for the allocation map – one which would exceed a four byte – and even an 8 byte integer quickly. This makes indexing into and checking the allocation map difficult and inefficient. So in order to manage performance of the allocation map, allocation is handled in clusters. A cluster is a grouping of sectors which will be allocated and deallocated in a block. A typical cluster size for a moderate disk might be 4K. Thus every allocation is for 8 sectors.

So let’s say that our stripe size for our RAID array is 4K – but the alignment of our clusters and our underlying drives isn’t the same. It’s possible for this misalignment to result in a practical performance decrease of 30%. Newer Windows operating system address this during the partitioning process to align the partition boundaries on natural stripe boundaries to resolve the performance issues.

SAN or Direct Attached Storage

From a performance perspective, when you’re comparing a Storage Area Network (SAN) and Direct Attached Storage (DAS), DAS is faster. This isn’t me saying this – take a look at “Which is Faster: SAN or Directly-Attached Storage” However, I need to say that the reason for doing a SAN isn’t for performance. There are many recoverability (i.e. clustering), scalability, and management reasons why you might use a SAN – however, they simply aren’t faster than DAS. (The disclaimer at the top of this article is mostly aimed at this paragraph.) SAN vendors will tell you about their backplanes, switches, controllers, and caching. It’s possible to get faster performance if you change the equation – but this shouldn’t be why you’re looking at a SAN. Doing the same techniques locally on a disk controller will be faster than a SAN.

The only thing a SAN can do is slow down your access to disks because of increased latency, or saturation of a switch, connection, or controller. That is to say that you have more bandwidth available to locally connected disks than to a SAN. If you get to high throughput, you’ll potentially saturate the connection between the SAN and the local system.

I’ll stop here because this is about understanding disk performance not a flame war with SAN vendors.

Measuring Performance

Fundamentally there are two ways to measure disk performance. The first is to look at the number of Input/Output (Read/Write) operations per second. Known as IOps this is a measurement of how the disks are capable of performing. The other perspective is to measure response time or latency between the request and when it’s serviced. We saw latency in the disks above and we’ll come back to that in a moment, but for now let’s talk about IOps.

Shooting at a Moving Target – IOps

So I can tell you how many IOps a drive array supports – but there’s no way for me to tell you whether that’s sufficient for your application or not – until it’s in production. The problem is that IOps changes day-to-day, hour by hour, and minute by minute. When you have everyone in the organization coming in at the same moment and opening their email, your mail server needs a large number of IOps to respond to the users. However, at 3 AM when all that’s going on is SPAM filtering, there isn’t much of a need for IOps.

There some things you can say in a general sense. Databases require the highest number of IOps. Mail servers need less but still more than file servers. However, even in this there’s a great deal of variation. Some databases are “really hot” – requiring a high number of IOps – and some are “cold” requiring basically no IOps.

So what does that mean? If you’re comparing different configurations, or you’re getting bragging rights with your friends, measure your IOps, if not, they’re not likely to help much.

Are you Ready Now? (Latency)

The real measure of disk performance is: “What is it doing when you’re using whatever system it was intended for?” The measure for this is latency – or the average time it takes to get a response from the disk for a read or write operation. The shorter the time it takes to respond, the better the performance. The longer the time it takes to respond, the worse the performance. It’s really pretty simple. An average between 20ms and 10ms is pretty good. Above that and you may have a problem.

There are some exceptions to this. If you’re doing a disk-to-disk backup your backup disk may see times higher than this – but then again your target disk is really a bottleneck. So you’ve got to use some sanity with these thresholds and not just blindly say that your backup disk having an average response time of 200ms is a major issue.

Sometimes folks will talk to me about counters like the % disk busy that Windows will return as a counter – and my response is that this doesn’t matter. I don’t care whether the disk is busy or not – I care whether the disk is returning results quickly.

Summary

Hopefully this gave you enough of a background to understand how disks work and how you can think about creating performance disk subsystems.

Book Review-Leadership and Self-Deception

Robert Bogue July 2, 2012 No Comments

Self-Esteem is something we’re pushing into our children. Dr. Spock’s guidance to parents in the 1950s led parents to work on a child’s self-esteem to the exclusion of proper discipline. Here’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in Finding Flow:

“Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose advice about child rearing was so immensely influential among at least two generations of parents, in the twilight of his life doubts that the stress placed earlier on training children to be unfettered individualists was such a good idea. He now feels that it is at least as essential for them to learn to work for a common good, and to appreciate religion, art, and the other ineffable aspects of life.”

However, as a society we’re often focused on self-esteem – mostly ours – but self-esteem none the less. The book Leadership and Self-Deception is written in the form of a story but is designed to teach an important lesson about our feelings, our perception of reality, and how others may not be the only ones who are wrong.

Let me seek to summarize quickly. We betray ourselves – we all do it. It’s as simple as having a thought and failing to follow up on it. The book makes a point of explaining that we can’t do everything that we might like or might be possible for every person – but rather we should seek to betray ourselves less. The problem isn’t self-betrayal itself as much as it puts you “in the box.” Inside the box you seek to justify your own self-betrayal. In order to justify your own self-betrayal you must vilify the other party and take upon yourself the position of the victim. Victims have a sense of helplessness which reduces the ability to break free.

Once we’re “in the box” we’ll distort reality and lash out and invite others to be hurt and enter their own box and thereby we collude with each other to keep ourselves in the box – and away from being open and honest with each other.

The problem is that we have delusional self-images. The book Switch pointed out “A full 25 percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others.” Clearly 24% of people are wrong about the way that they see themselves – but which 24% remains a question.

So self-betrayal leads to being “in the box.” The act of being in the box leads to seeing others as the only ones having the problem. That isn’t to say that others don’t have problems – but we do too.

One important point is that when we’re in the box the pull to defend our position, to cover our self-betrayal is like the event horizon of a black hole – it’s an almost inescapable proposition. Certainly we’re not going to wiggle our way out by trying a technique or skill to manipulate the other person or to suppress our self-betrayal. We can’t cover up the self-betrayal – it will leak through and will be seen by others. Instead, we have to gain power through acknowledging and — in so much as it can be done – addressing the self-betrayal.

The solution to getting out of the box is to be open and honest with one another, to acknowledge that no matter what the flaws in the other person we have our own role in the drama that’s unfolding between us.

Leadership and Self-Deception is an easy read, is deceptively simple and deliciously subtle. It’s worth picking it up and reading it. I’ll close with two direct pulls from the book, a summary of Self-Betrayal and What Doesn’t Work “in the box”

Self-Betrayal

An act contrary to what I feel I should do for another is called an act of “self-betrayal.”
When I betray myself, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal.
When I see the world in a self-justifying way, my view of reality becomes distorted.
So—when I betray myself, I enter the box.
Over time, certain boxes become characteristic of me, and I carry them with me.
By being in the box, I provoke others to be in the box.
In the box, we invite mutual mistreatment and obtain mutual justification. We collude in giving each other reason to stay in the box.

What Doesn’t Work “in the box”

Trying to change others
Doing my best to “cope” with others
Leaving
Communicating
Implementing new skills or techniques
Changing my behavior

Public Speaking