Perhaps that’s why a post in today’s Computerworld suggested that it might be better to hire someone who has a deep understanding of business and some technical knowledge, rather than the other way around.

Earlier in my career I was a technical writer (software manuals, online help, etc). My mentor who got me started once said, “It’s easier to teach a good writer to be technical than it is to teach a technical person to be a good writer.” Using that same logic, it may be easier to teach a business pro how IT operates than it would be to teach a traditional IT pro about business.

Once again, however, if you click through to that Computerworld article, it paints a pretty ugly picture of IT and its relationship to business:

“Patrick Thibodeau recently interviewed organizational psychologist Billie Blair, who described IT managers as viewing “…the world in terms of ‘us against them’ and seeing others in an organization as pests or threats to their IT universe.”  Even if you take issue with this, you’ve got to admit that IT staffers don’t always mix well with the outside.”

Whether or not you agree with the notion that you need more business knowledge in your department, it couldn’t hurt to take this description seriously, and maybe step back and look for ways to make your department a bit more friendly to the people you are supposed to be serving.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about running IT more as a business offering a set of services. If you want to be a cost center, you need to think like a business and it’s going to be useful to understand how your business venture fits within the overall business needs of the organization.

In my post yesterday, I wrote about my experience working in publications production in the 80s (before I was a tech writer). Part of that was running an in-house copy center that charged projects for our services. One of the advantages we had over external copy centers was that we were employees, and project managers could make (sometimes outrageous) demands on us and we pretty much had to do it because we were there to service the business.

Whether you want to admit or not, the same goes for you. You are there, not as an independent entity to act as the arbiter of all things technical, but as a part of the business, which just like my copy center back in the 80s, is there to service the business.

Christopher O’Malley writing on Computerworld earlier this month made the argument that most IT departments weren’t service oriented enough to even call what you provide services:

“Unfortunately, despite all this talk, corporate IT is still not very service-oriented at all.  In fact, in some ways, it is the very opposite of service-oriented.  And one of the main ways this lack of service-orientation reveals itself is in IT’s opacity,” O’Malley wrote.

It was harsh, but in many cases he’s right.

You need to start running IT like a business.

If you set up a private cloud in the fashion I wrote about last Friday with a Services Portal (there’s that services word again) you will be charging departments a price for the services they purchase. That means you will in effect be competing with outside services like Amazon Web Services. You have to provide similar services at a decent price with similar guarantees you get from the public vendor.

This isn’t that different from the way any internal cost center has always been run inside a company. Back in the 80s I worked for a small boutique consulting firm in Boston in publications production. We had an internal copy shop for which we charged projects for our services. Consultants were free to use ours or the copy shop down the street and we had to offer a level of service to justify our existence (although I doubt very much most businesses would have put up with as much as we did as employees). Still, there was a choice.

And today, we have a similar model developing with IT as you compete with outside service providers to offer similar sets of services for a cost. That means you have to display pricing, provide top notch service to support those services and offer an up-time guarantee.

That’s right, you have to be willing to refund the cost of your services if you are down for a given period of time. Are you willing to take it that far? You should be.

As I wrote on Friday, end users will start to see the value of the services you offer when you put a price on them, and when you guarantee those services with an up-time agreement, the respect will grow.

When you sit in the data center and everybody opens up the data spigot and lets it run for however long they feel like it, there’s no way anyone can see the value in that, but when you associate a cost with turning it on and guarantee it will be on, then they can’t help but see the value — and everybody wins.

In his post, Hulme waxed about why there are so many cloud haters, then described the way game maker Zynga mixes the private and public cloud.

“Zynga’s goal, as stated in GigaOM was to launch new games into the public cloud, where workloads may be spiky and were also unpredictable. They’d then bring those workloads to their private cloud as demand became known and stabilized,” Hulme wrote.

And there’s nothing wrong with that approach. It’s a perfectly valid strategy, but it’s not the only way to see private clouds, which could also provide a way for you as IT to build your own private set of IT services housed in your own data center — not unlike the kinds of services you may pay a fee for on Amazon Web Services.

The way it works is that you build a services portal with a set of pre-defined services. You can use physical and virtual hardware as you wish, and this will enable you to scale up and down as needed to deal with your own peak demand periods.

But the portal itself could offer storage, memory, software licenses, pre-designed popular items such as a LAMP stack or other enterprise software development tools — or whatever services you require in your organization.

In fact, it wouldn’t operate very differently from Amazon Web Services or RackSpace, but instead of paying these companies, your internal users would pay you. This produces a couple of positive results.

From an end user perspective they buy what they need and no more because it’s costing the department or project money and they probably don’t have unlimited budgets. Users and managers alike also begin to see IT as a cost center and might actually start to see a value associated with IT services, rather than just the service itself. That’s a direct result from seeing what these services cost.

In a client-server system, users might put up SharePoint site for a project, populate it with data and store bunches of document and abandon it when the project is over. There is no real motivation to take the project down because it doesn’t cost any extra to just leave it there.

But if there’s a cost associated with keeping it up, chances are the project manager won’t keep the site live one day longer than necessary and return those resources back to IT.

You can use private clouds as a place you bring services in-house after testing them on public cloud vendors, as Hulme described, or you can run your own set of cloud services in-house, acting as though you were a vendor. But either way, as Hulme pointed out, you can’t just dismiss private clouds out of hand.

They just makes so much sense for IT on many different levels.

As we’ve seen recently groups like Anonymous have been able to attack public facing web sites of law enforcement, military, business and government around the world in high profile blitzes. The Reuters article says the Pentagon’s computers are under a virtual constant assault and finding people who can fend off the hackers is not always easy, especially since these folks tend to be fiercely independent, not terribly social and don’t deal with authority of any kind.

In other words, they don’t make ideal soldiers.

Last July, former Bush security advisor Richard A Clarke, wrote an Op-Ed piece for Boston.com, the online site of the Boston Globe newspaper, outlining the Obama Administration’s broad strategy for dealing with a potential threat of cyber warfare. He thinks Congress, the Administration and the American people need to have a more serious discussion about preventing and defending against possible attacks.

In fact, Clarke wrote a book called Cyber War, and in a video clip on his personal web site, he explained he wrote this book precisely because he and his co-author, Robert K. Nake, believe “Cyber war is real and we believe it deserves national debate and discussion.”

As hackers growing increasingly clever and their methods become ever more sophisticated, it seems that those in charge of protecting cyber-space are left forever to play catchup — not unlike what many of you experience inside the enterprise trying to protect your own data centers.

The problem becomes how to protect the free flow of information across an open Internet while finding a way to protect and defend the underlying infrastructure. I believe Clarke is right that we do need a spirited discussion about this, but for once, we need to get the IT experts who understand this better than anyone in front of it.

We can’t leave it to politicians who have shown just how little they know about technology in recent months, and how easily they can be mislead by people with their own agendas.

That means it’s up to developers and IT pros who understand at a very granular level how networks and programming function and where the vulnerabilities are to step forward and help create systems and programs that can help thwart some of these attacks without sacrificing Internet freedom in the process.

It’s a huge challenge, and if the Reuters article is anywhere close to correct, it’s going to require some of the brightest technical minds to solve. We have seen what havoc hackers can wreak on web sites, and we need the best and the brightest to figure out how to solve these issues or we face a future where the Internet itself could be the battle ground.

Chuck Hollis, who is VP and Global Marketing CTO at EMC Corporation has been writing about this frequently in his blog, Chuck’s Blog. Just last week, in fact, he wrote a post called New IT, New Roles, New Tools in which he discusses this trend and links to some other pieces he’s written about it before.

Hollis argues that IT is transforming with new approaches to service delivery and new roles for IT personnel. For workers used to operating in a certain fashion, this transformation is no doubt startling, but it can make IT a kinder, gentler organization to work with instead of one that’s seen as obstructionist and even obstinate.

That’s why he thinks making that transition requires some unique skills and leadership on the part of IT management.

If you want to know how some people in the company view the old top-down IT that is probably still in place in many organizations, you need to read the post, Self-service Architecture to avoid the water-scrum-fall in which the writer argues for using public Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings  to give developers a way to bypass IT because frankly, it’s too hard to deal with. This is how the writer describes an interaction with IT:

“Collaboration with operations used to be like this. Me: “I need a continuous-build server.” Them: “Why do you need to introduce something new? How big does it need to be? What software does it need to run? Does this software comply with our standards? We don’t have anybody available to manage this software right now…”

And it goes on. I cut it off in the interest of space, but you surely get the idea, and if you work in IT, it had to make you cringe just a little bit as you read it. Is it really that bad? If perception (and this author) are any measure, then clearly it’s going to take work to go from that automatic list of question to “How can I make this work for you — quickly.”

The author of that piece sees PaaS as a way around the bottle-neck, so your goal in your IT services transformation is to create a menu of services such as storage, servers, a LAMP stack, a SharePoint project community and so forth and make them as easy to provision as a public PaaS provider such as Amazon Web Services.

If that same programmer could go to a web site, find the services he needs to set up his application and do it as quickly and simply as going to Amazon (and for a similar price), he’s probably going to use your services because you’ve made it easy to choose that option.

Making this transition to private cloud or public/private cloud hybrid is by no means a simple step, but if you’re more like that IT department that says “No” all the time, maybe it’s a road map to becoming the IT department that says, “How can we help you?”

When she told me this story, it got me thinking about how many IT shops operate this way. You probably have a number of locations, possibly around the world, and IT tends to be in one place, probably the headquarters wherever that may be.

In many cases, that’s not a problem. You can access desktops remotely and solve the average problem without difficulty and everyone’s happy, but the exceptions can be a problem, especially when IT is off-site and the software isn’t Microsoft Office, but some specialty software, even IT is probably unfamiliar with.

In those special cases, an IT pro needs to get in the car and drive to the site (or worse, get on a plane and fly to it) and while he or she does that, the party with the software problem has to wait and wait because without that software, the person can’t do their job and that’s a big problem.

Once the IT Pro arrives, it’s time to get up to speed. If it were any easy issue, well, you wouldn’t need to be onsite to fix it, right? And that’s the problem. In my wife’s case, she had to sit around most of the day without access to her computer while the IT guy tried to figure out how to solve the problem.

It wasn’t his fault he didn’t know this software. How would he? But this type of situation must get repeated on a daily basis around the world. You can’t be familiar with every piece of software, yet because you get sent to an unfamiliar situation, the end user is agitated and why wouldn’t she be? She’s stuck without a computer and can’t do her job.

It’s not an easy problem to resolve because you design workflows to deal with the most common problems, not the exceptions, but the challenge comes with situations that fall outside the norm.

And it’s not just an end user productivity issue either because an IT pro stuck off-site trying to solve an issue is also an IT productivity problem. That employee could be back at the office doing his or her regular work.

I’m not suggesting there are any easy answers to this type of situation because I’m sure someone will complain that I’m not offering more practical advice here, but it’s clearly an issue and one that IT departments have to deal with and consider.

How does your company deal with workflow exceptions? Does it have to be a productivity suck for all. Leave me a comment and let me know.

During the season, it would seem people would use their mobile devices and laptops while watching the game to socialize with friends and to keep up with popular Fantasy Football leagues. And that may be true during the season, but it didn’t bear out on Sunday when Sandvine’s Better Broadband Blog reported that the Super Bowl created a “super dip in traffic.”

In fact other than the streaming version on NBC, which accounted for an impressive 6.2 percent of traffic at 9 pm on Sunday night, most folks (like me) opted for the big screen instead of the small one. Unless I was in a place where I couldn’t watch the game, there is no way I would watch it on a small screen.

And that could account for the reason that most sites were reporting their traffic was down Sunday night, way down. Popular streaming site Netflix, which usually accounts for a good amount of Internet traffic, was down 40 percent Sunday night, while overall Internet traffic was down 20 percent.

Part of the reason for that is that it was a riveting game, still in question in the last minute as New England quarterback Tom Brady desperately tried to lead his team down field in a fight against the ticking clock he eventually lost.

I can say from personal experience, I was watching on a big screen. And while I usually use the commercials to post to my social networks, the commercials too were appealing because after all this was the Super Bowl.

Yet even with that, Sandvine reports that Facebook and Twitter were well represented as people must have found time to whip out the phone and make a quick comment, especially on the Giants’ final drive when Eli Manning lead his team down the field for the winning score.

I would be curious to see, however, what traffic looked like right after the game ended because I’m willing to bet it had a major spike. I know I went on my phone right after it ended and started posting and conversing with online friends for a good hour after Brady’s Hail Mary pass fell to the ground as the last second ticked off the game clock.

But it seems, social networks aside, that given the choice of watching a good game on the big screen or going online, most folks opted for the game. It’s not a choice we make on most nights, that’s for sure.

So how did your traffic statistics look Sunday night? Were you way down? How about after the game?

While Android comes with its own set of potential mine fields, a Network World report from MacIT, the IT track of the Macworld conference, indicated there were complaints aplenty from IT folks who are stuck supporting devices that are clearly designed for consumers.

IT is left to deal with iTunes and Apple IDs and how to bill back app purchases. This is probably not what you had in mind when you decided to go for a career in IT, but it’s part of the brave new world of IT support.

Network World puts it in more blunt terms: “adapt or die.” And from what so-called Apple experts were saying, you’re left with little recourse, because well, Apple doesn’t seem to listen to anyone. They don’t have to.

As a reporter, I can tell you Apple rarely if ever responds to requests for information. If you check Apple’s Facebook page, it has over 2 million fans, but as Nicole Ferraro points out on Internet Evolution, its wall is empty and it doesn’t allow anyone to leave comments, whether to complain or praise them — and you can be sure there would be plenty of complaints if they opened up from people upset about their labor practices in China to people ticked off that there aren’t even rudimentary tools for IT to deal with Apple products on an enterprise scale.

Yet people love Apple products and there’s the rub for you as an IT professional. As an Apple product user myself, I totally get the appeal, but I could also see if I worked inside a large organization I might want some tools to help me support my users that were geared toward my needs.

Oh you can complain of course. As the Network World piece pointed out, you can leave nasty messages on the Apple forums, and I’m sure that will get you far, or you can simply accept the fact that Apple doesn’t seem to care enough to listen to its customers because we buy the products anyway.

The bottom line is this though. As long as your users (and probably you too for many of you) are using Apple products, we have to accept this situation or use our power collectively as consumers to complain and force Apple to bend to our will — not the other way around.

Unfortunately, it’s been more than a decade since Steve Jobs began the turn-around, and even though he’s gone, there doesn’t seem to be any sign that Apple is going to be any more responsive any time soon.

That leaves you in IT between a rock and a hard place where you must adapt or die. Having fun yet?

Anonymous protest (Photo credit: Ludovic Hirlimann)

The Naked Security blog had a post today about an Anonymous hack of an FBI-UK law enforcement conference call. This is just frightening on so many levels and obviously has implications for enterprise users who also want to keep their business away from prying eyes or ears.

It appears Anonymous hackers got hold of an email with the call-in details; the kind we all get when we are invited to participate in a conference call. In this instance apparently the hackers used the information to join the call and record it, a pretty chilling thought.

The question is how you defend against something like that. Well, for one, perhaps you give each participant a unique ID, and if more than one person tries to use one, it raises a red flag. Most companies probably don’t consider this because we are just trying to make it as simple as possible to call in.

But if you’re discussing strategy, new products or law enforcement; you have to take extra precautions, and these people clearly didn’t even take rudimentary security seriously.

The problem is you have an illusion that you’re secure, that nobody’s watching, but Anonymous has shown that its hackers are extremely resourceful and clever when it comes to getting at information they want.

Lest you think this was a prank or Internet myth and it didn’t really happen, according to the Naked Security blog post, the FBI actually confirmed that their call was hacked.

And as an IT Pro, when you look at security, you have to begin to think in worst cases such as this one, rather than most cases (where nothing happens and you have your conference and you’re done). But at the same time you need to balance the needs of your business users with the security you require. You can’t make it so hard to have a conference call, that nobody wants to do it.

Most business users shouldn’t have to jump through the same security hoops as say a crucial meeting or one set up like this example of law enforcement officials. When you’re discussing hackers, you might want to take some extra precautions.

But that’s not to say that you can dismiss security concerns in all other instances, only that law enforcement or anyone discussing sensitive information of any kind, needs to think about how to be sure that conversation is secure before you get on the phone.

What Anonymous has shown with this stunt is that it has great reach, and everyone in IT needs to be thinking about how to make their systems more secure. Clearly what we are doing now isn’t working and it’s going to take a concerted effort by some of the greatest minds in technology to change that.