What happens when the natural tendency of confirmation bias meets the game of connect the unrelated dots?

How many dots does it take to draw a giraffe?

Using confirmation bias, data points are enhanced to support the preconception.  These data points are connected to form a patten or a conclusion despite the fact that these dots are flawed with no true picture of the rejected data surrounding the decision. In the extreme, one dot can be used to draw a substantial conclusion – akin to using one dot to draw a large giraffe!

Rarely talked about is that many preconceptions are formed based on personal bias – the like or dislike of individuals in an organization. This typically builds over many years with many technology battles waged and lost and a secret score of the campaigns now influence the personal bias of the winners and losers.

No Silver Bullets

Presumably, an organization would want to eliminate these biases but most don’t challenge strong personalities or politically connected leaders. Management gets defensive when their judgment is questioned and a defensive manager can be a vengeful manager!

Vendors also have their own built-in biases that support their self-preservation within their customer’s ecosystem.  One technique to validate important decisions is to use peer reviews facilitated by vendors who can be objective.

These reviews rely on your staff presenting their data points or dots and the vendor facilitates the objective discovery of the resulting conclusions. Most internal staff detest these reviews. Incumbent vendors also fear these reviews because they shine light on their inefficiencies. Outsiders readily identify the confirmation and personal bias and ask uncomfortable questions that linger long after the initial engagement.

The game of connect the unrelated dots is in daily use as individuals advance their causes.  Challenging the conclusions that were based on potentially biased data requires strong leaders and outsiders willing to ask uncomfortable questions.

E-Oasis conducts peer reviews to help organizations with technology projects, budget allocations of competing projects, acceleration of stalled projects, and termination of weak projects.  Contact us to learn more. Learn about our data center relocation services here.

Microsoft joins a robust technical community in Longmont and they are no strangers to Colorado with a presence in Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, and now Longmont.

Welcome Microsoft Corporation to Longmont!

Is your company considering relocation to Colorado or elsewhere? Check out our data center moving resources including our free data center moving guide.

1. Have you migrated to a current and supported version of Exchange (that supports the mobility users want with their mobile devices)?
2. When was the last time you audited both the backup and restore elements of your infrastructure?
3. Are you taking full advantage of virtualization in your data center?
4. Can you complete an eDiscovery request from your legal department in an organized manner?
5. Did you kill any weak and resource-draining IT (Information Technology) projects?
6. Do you have a Windows 7 strategy for replacing Microsoft XP?
7. Have you looked at consolidating your data center and actually retiring unneeded applications and their servers?
8. Did you fix any of those vulnerabilities your last security audit discovered?
9. Have you refreshed your storage infrastructure with more efficient and higher capacity equipment?
10. Is your disaster recovery and business continuity plan real or imagined?

The hard, boring work of 2011 might not be as exciting as moving to the cloud or filling your organization with iPads, but isn’t it essential for your business to get the basics working well?

Maybe not. After all, expending extraordinary effort for ordinary gain is how some advance their Information Technology careers.

Where is the sense of urgency?

A sense of urgency is often missing in these boring IT projects but a well-run shop is characterized by few surprises and stable, working (and documented) infrastructure. Not all leaders recognize this and get caught up in the latest trends pushed by the trade press as silver bullets of cost savings and hyper-coolness.

What will you prioritize as important for 2011?

Blaine Berger is the President of E-Oasis and a business and technology veteran with over 25 years of experience. You can contact Blaine via e-mail at blaine@e-oasis.com or connect with Blaine on LinkedIn.

Frustrated, you send that e-mail to the CEO to get some attention on something that should have been fixed a decade ago. Interestingly, this touches off a pattern of waste that is repeated daily in organizations everywhere. Allowing  pedestrian problems to ignite into full-blown all-hands-on-deck emergencies is completely avoidable.  Sadly, it’s more the norm than the exception.

Even worse, real emergencies often go unrecognized while extraordinary effort is expended for ordinary gain.

If this happens frequently in your organization, isn’t it time to look beyond the fire fighting?

1. Do you have chronic issues that are never completely resolved?
2. Do the same people make the same mistakes unable to turn a lesson learned into a lesson remembered?
3. Are resources stretched so thin that a satisfactory root cause analysis is omitted in order to fight the next fire?
4. Is Executive Management seemingly oblivious to the perils since they often benefit from extraordinary effort exercises?

Breaking your organization’s dependency on fire-fighting as a normal reaction is not a quick-fix proposition. Finding a way to measure and report the cost of extraordinary efforts and contrasting them against the underwhelming, ordinary results they produce is a good first step.

Getting someone to act on that data is the real trick.

Nothing Concentrates the Mind Like a Hanging

A sense of urgency is often missing in IT projects. Milestones are missed with regularity and it’s often unclear who is responsible for deliverables. The expectation that a Google search will yield the technical recipe often substitutes for seeking out experienced help.

It’s not uncommon to hear some imaginative reasoning for why a project missed a deadline or failed to accomplish the objective. Most of these reasons are just fabrications. Sometimes the simple steps such as having clear consequences (the hanging) and an immovable deadline (at dawn) are not sufficient to provoke any meaningful results.

Now what?

It’s no secret that most people inherently avoid conflicts. They know what they should do, but inexplicably can not confront the situation before them. It’s no different with a technology project but there is a twist. You may not be able to overcome the imaginative technical fabrications in addition to confronting the individuals involved.

It’s time to seek out a peer review of the project and place a technical expert in direct conflict with your in-house resources.

What happens next will be the real test of your own leadership.

Start at the Beginning

To get started, you’ll need to read Erik Cederstand’s HOWTO talk SOAP with Exchange and get the fundamental stuff working.  For some common problems, also check out the ongoing thread http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?p=171001 . Additionally, the MSDN reference at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx is where you need to educate yourself on Exchange Web Services, XML, and error messages.

Know what XML you are forming

The Microsoft Developer’s Network is the place to start for XML examples. Here’s the XML we’ll form for our CreateItem example:

/*

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?> <CreateItem xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xmlns:xsd=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema” MessageDisposition=”SendAndSaveCopy”>

<SavedItemFolderId xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/messages”> <DistinguishedFolderId Id=”sentitems” xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/types” /> </SavedItemFolderId>

<Items xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/messages”>

<Message xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/types”> <ItemClass>IPM.Note</ItemClass>

<Subject>YOUR SUBJECT</Subject>

<Body BodyType=”Text”>YOUR BODY TEXT</Body>

<ToRecipients> <Mailbox> <EmailAddress>SOMEONE@e-oasis.com</EmailAddress> </Mailbox>

</ToRecipients> </Message> </Items> </CreateItem>

*/

Use PHP-Soap to form the XML request

Debugging Soap errors can be frustrating, but if you “stare and compare” against your XML you can typically find the problem. Here’s the PHP code to form the XML request. Note how the attribute of BodyType is passed within the Body tag using Body['BodyType'] and the content of the Body tag is passed with Body[_] = “YOUR BODY TEXT”; .

//CreateItem Sends e-mail through Exchange 2007 $CreateItem->MessageDisposition=”SendAndSaveCopy”; $CreateItem->SavedItemFolderId->DistinguishedFolderId->Id = “inbox”; $CreateItem->Items->Message = array();

for($i = 0; $i < 1; $i++) {

$CreateItem->Items->Message[$i]->ItemClass = “IPM.Note”; $CreateItem->Items->Message[$i]->Subject = “YOUR SUBJECT“; $CreateItem->Items->Message[$i]->Body[_] = “YOUR BODY TEXT“; $CreateItem->Items->Message[$i]->Body['BodyType'] = “Text“; $CreateItem->Items->Message[$i]->ToRecipients->Mailbox->EmailAddress = “SOMEONE@e-oasis.com“;

$CreateItem->Items->Message[$i]->IsRead = “false”;

}

$result = $client->CreateItem($CreateItem);

Was this helpful?

If you found this helpful, we’d appreciate a comment or other PHP-Soap examples that can help others.  Until PHP-Soap access to Exchange 2007 becomes more common-place, these examples will be huge time-savers for everyone.

E-Mail blaine@e-oasis.com or twitter @e0asis

1. Will Twitter find a way to make money? (Apologies to Fred Wilson)
2. Is Twitter useful for <insert favorite use>?
3. How does Twitter <help><hurt> me <my business>?
4. What the heck is Twitter anyway?
5. I <hate><love><don’t care about> Twitter.
6. You should not use  Twitter for <insert-your-favorite-rule>.

Ignore the fail whale, the fanboys/girls,  and the crowd-based do’s and don’ts. Even Captain Obvious can see that Twitter is a work in progress as evidenced by the good folks at Twitter explaining they will scale first and seek revenue second.

Suppose instead you conduct this thought experiment:

Every Person on the planet with a wireless phone or computer is a Twitter user.

And these millions of Twitter users are all talking at once all in the same room.  Some in small groups and some in large. Some organized and most ad-hoc. Some talk is polite, some is rude, and most is seemingly without context.

What then becomes important when you realize these conversations, occurring in real time and possessing the possibility of crowd consensus, are about your brand?

About your industry? About something you care about? Maybe even about you personally?

What becomes important once Twitter scales?

What will matter when the discordant din from Twitterville is loud, overwhelming, and impossible to manage with the current tools?

Listening.

Not eavesdropping, but really Listening.

Listening at the flash-point of need.

Responding is an entirely different post.

But Listening is something you can start right now. This reason alone may not be compelling enough to compete for your time at this point in Twitter’s development.

Maybe there’s plenty of time and you can relax while Twitter is the rock your competitors break themselves against.

Or maybe others have the Listening part down and they’ve moved on to Responding?

Diagnosis Twitter: Relevant, not yet at scale, and ignored at the expense of your brand.

What’s your story about listening at the flash-point of need?

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After reading Randy Bias’s post on Cloudcenters from GoGrid, I have to admit I’m rooting for the cloud. What stands out in the GoGrid description is the understanding of the Enterprise IT zeitgeist and the real-life concerns that must be overcome to use a cloudcenter.

I still believe there are two major impediments that bar the Cloud from any widespread adoption by the Enterprise:

1. Performance – Users want good response time. Most Enterprises can’t afford the bandwidth required to locate their computing off-premise (i.e. “In The Cloud”) and still deliver a satisfactory user experience.  Something has to change (cheaper bandwidth or different approach for desktop to application computing).
2. Security – Corporations can’t even keep their own on-premise data properly classified or secured. “Encryption at Rest” is the natural minimum requirement. Which leads you back to Performance.

Keep your eyes on GoGrid and read the Cloudcenters post right now to understand how a Cloudcenter looks remarkably similar to your existing data center.

Source: GoGrid’s Cloudcenter

However, like “Web 2.0″ before it, it’s questionable if the term “Cloud Computing” can be used in any meaningful way. There are efforts to create a taxonomy of meaning to keep track of all the objects living in the cloud.

Cloud Computing = Off-Premise Computing

The only delineation seems to be if the computing takes place on-premise or off-premise. If it’s off-premise, then marketing will brand it Cloud Computing. You’re reading this blog in the Cloud which makes E-Oasis and you a Cloud user.

Practically, Enterprise businesses will continue to rely on their on-premise computing. The reasons are easy to understand. Let’s look at just two:

• Performance – Users want good response time. Most Enterprises can’t afford the bandwidth required to locate their computing off-premise (i.e. “In The Cloud”) and still deliver a satisfactory user experience. The math is simple. A typical user desktop has a  dedicated 10/100/1000 mbit/sec connection to their servers versus a shared Internet connection that is typically less than 45 mbit/sec and more often around 5 mbit/sec. Common tasks like file sharing in an Enterprise would be glacially slow. We won’t even discuss redundancy (i.e. multiple Internet connections to the cloud).
• Security – Corporations can’t even keep their own on-premise data properly classified or secured. Do you believe they will allow third parties to manage this important function? They’re not and they won’t.

If you use off-premise computing, it’s just a matter of time before your marketing department highlights that fact in a Proud Cloud Press Release. Take some comfort that this term will fall back to earth as soon as another one can take it’s place at the hyperbole feeding frenzy.

A $100 Billion Dollar Market?

Don’t forget that the First International Cloud Computing Expo is happening on the 19th of November if you just can’t get enough Cloud. After all, we have experts predicting that this is a $100 Billion dollar market. Did that get your attention?

That should be an easy number to achieve and may even be low. After all, Cloud Computing is just the sum of all off-premise computing. To achieve any meaningful adoption rates for the Enterprise, the pipes connecting the Enterprise to off-premise computing must both get fatter (more bandwidth) and cheaper. Way cheaper.

Arguments such as “management nightmare”, “simplified support model”, and “less moving parts” don’t measure up to the economic realities that thin clients don’t bring a significant cost savings over a desktop deployment strategy.

Thin isn’t in because it’s not cheap enough to motivate an economic decision.