2012 - Let the Talent Wars Begin!

Among many of my professional colleagues they have noticed a significant upswing in hiring in our local area of the Silicon Valley and their local areas across the country. However in many cases while they see the hiring we have not been able to take the time to compare notes on what we see as trends.

While a totally informal poll with absolutely no scientific method, among the executives and technology specialists that I interact with on a regular basis there are a number of areas of growth:

• Cloud. This is both a mix of cloud providers such as SalesForce, Amazon, etc. Also there is growth in cloud enablement or provisioning where organizations are looking to create their own internal clouds.
• Mobile. Everyone I have spoken to has seen significant demand for mobile expertise. While there is a large amount of focus on Apple iOS and Google Android, there is also increased demand in Windows Phone 7 as well. 
• Big Data and it's corresponding analytics. I put both of these together because in my mind there are several facets to big data such as infrastructure/operation, and the very valuable analytics. While it is true that the ideal is to have data scientists, many organizations want the value of the analytics are looking to convert internal personnel to the task and/or looking for tools/services.
• Enterprise Applications. Surprised? As more experienced individuals retire or move away from core enterprise applications, younger talent finds such applications very boring and unattractive leaving large gaps in terms of having personnel capable of meeting the demand. This demand is unlikely to change as enterprise applications are not really capturing the imagination of graduating college students.
• Social Networking. A very fast growing area thanks to the competition between Facebook and Google, many professionals are finding significant demand in this area in terms of services, analytics, competitive products, and consulting. 
• Gaming. Casual and social gaming have certainly increased but the increased interest in gamification techniques and how they can be applied to companies have created a noticeable increase in companies looking for those with some degree of background in gaming. How much this grows remains to be seen but it is interesting.
• Enterprise Consumerization. Many organizations are looking to create large financial impacts by engaging and retaining orders of magnitude of customers. In order to do this, companies are looking at ways to introduce degrees of consumerization into their organizations and ultimately personnel who understand various aspects of this concept and what it entails.
• User Experience. Many companies now realize that user experience is tremendously important to attracting and retaining customers. As a consequence there is a very large increase in looking for designers, user experience experts, and other disciplines. This includes not only creating whole new experiences from scratch but transitional as well moving from existing ones to new ones. 

In addition to these areas, there are corresponding increases for a variety of experience levels ranging from college graduates to experienced professionals. 

Another observation about these positions is a commensurate increase in their expectations along a variety of dimensions: flexibility, entrepreneurial, adaptability, and many others. Many of my colleagues have also noticed that most of the organizations had in fact held conservative stances during the recession which while natural created skills gaps between what the market now demanded and their own skills. As a result, many find seizing these new opportunities more daunting than they had originally planned.

2012 signals a period of unparalleled demand for professionals that we all hope will be shared by others on the road to recovery.

Your Business and the Cloud - What Does the Cloud Mean to Your Business?

A lot of my more recent conversations have involved the use of cloud technologies within companies. It starts at the implementation level but in many cases it moves back into the overall vision of what the cloud will enable within a company. While many leaders understand that the cloud can enable an organization to realize strategic opportunities, there is still a lot of confusion on what the cloud will specifically enable.

For example a simple conversation between business leaders revealed a disconnect in what the cloud would do for the business. Most technology leaders see gains in the data centers and infrastructure where such resources would be more readily accessible in a more self-service manner to business units. However the view most business sponsors have is typically one where they see application services that they use on a regular basis being more accessible and adaptable to their changing needs. Essentially, IT sees their deliverable as Amazon Web Services, whereas the business tends to see what they will receive as more SalesForce-like.

This form of disconnect is reasonable as there are a series of steps that needs to be accomplished for an organization to embrace cloud most of which are not technology-related. Many businesses are not cognizant of the amount of changes to the organization that take place when implementing their own clouds: security of typically what is thought of, yet other concerns such as impacts to other areas such as change management processes, quality assurance, budgets, business process, etc. are not.

For example, a small improvement such as self-service can create significant changes to budgets, and while many organizations find their approval processes adequate on less agile services, when whole divisions can "order" or "provision" cloud services can cause huge wait times and backlogs in approval queues. For example, if an organization is used to approving say 100 items a day, cloud services can potentially increase this level a thousand-fold. 

Another example would be the customer service aspect of cloud services which most organizations see as their internal ticketing system. Many organizations make the mistake of over-simplying the amount of effort and underestimating  the actual impact to their internal workloads. While it can be argued that turning a single ticket around can be faster, like going from 1hr to 5minutes, the number of tickets typically jumps significantly which catches many groups unprepared. Longer turnarounds can lead to SLA breaches which can potentially impact financial charge backs in the form of IT discounts being given or similar actions.

Typically I advise colleagues and leaders to use scenarios around the most basic of cloud services as excellent ways to walk through the process of identifying areas that may be impacted, and changes that need to be made. This process can be painful and slow at first, but after several iterations those involved will be very comfortable with the changing situation.

The most important step is for leadership to make certain that they absolutely on the same page for their cloud strategy and have agreement on it's deliverables. 

Language Wars - Whatever Works!

Over the years one of the most common and perhaps most often misunderstood practice is that of technical professionals to have debates on technologies. The technologies in question are typically ones that each person has had extensive or perhaps not so extensive experience with. Most of the time these discussions are taken in the proper spirit of exchanging insights and improving one's education. However once in a while, the discussion turns into verbal arguments about how technology A is "better" than technology B. To most technical individuals this is part of the territory. However business users and similar non-techies tend to see these debates as highly disconcerting. What are they to make of experts that they respect not reach a consensus about which technology would be proper to use for their business problem.

In my experience it is much less an issue of what technology to be used as opposed to what is the problem that needs to be solved. The age old wisdom of "use the right tool for the right job" comes to mind. In many cases arguments about which database to use still persist in spite of the diminishing return in terms of identifying actual hurdles to solve a problem. A nice recent example came to mind about MySQL vs. Oracle RDBMS. The fact that both products are now supported by the same vendor (Oracle) and both have excellent track records for many large deployments would to most people seem to end the debate on which to use. Yet within many organizations the war still wages. Generally what I see is typically around length of experience or perhaps even age. Most older/experienced professionals tend to gravitate towards Oracle having a veritable treasure trove of industry best practices within past organizations on it's use. On the opposite side, younger/equally experienced professionals who have exposure to different technologies such as Ruby-on-Rails, PHP, etc. have mostly used MySQL. They like the usability, the ease-of-administration, and the elegance of how the technology has worked it's way in many times seamlessly with their toolkits such that others solutions seem cumbersome in comparison. In the end either database is more than likely able to address pretty much any size scale of problem for an organization, however the arguments wage.

These arguments for the most part are not really based on any technical merit. Instead they are based almost exclusively on pre-existing viewpoints and internal politics. For instance building on the MySQL and Oracle example, in many large (and not so large) organizations IT decision makers tend to classify anything for "production, customer facing" to be Oracle with MySQL tagged as "experimental, prototyping". When I inquired about this curious categorization it came down to a perception that the Oracle RDBMS was more "robust/scalable" or had a "better track record" for mission critical applications. Even in spite of pointing out examples such as Facebook or Sabre Holdings the IT leadership continued to stress the use of Oracle. I even had a nice "sit down" session with an executive VP of technology who advised me that even "mentioning" MySQL would cause issues from the CTO and other members of the executive staff. Unfortunately these sorts of encounters far more often than not.

From a technical standpoint pretty much any technology can work to resolve a problem: Java, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Erlang, C, C++, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, Hadoop, MongoDB, whatever. However no matter the technology whether Open Source or vendor-provided, it requires a commitment from the business to adopt it, own it, learn it... basically invest and believe in it. This is tremendously foreign to many companies who tend to see their legacy applications as necessary evils in doing business not as strategic tools for competitive advantage. While many companies see the use of technology as the domain of high-tech companies, the truth is that many organizations in many different industries use technology to solve problems from auto manufacturers, to supermarkets, to dentists, heck even your local pub probably has a computer system of some kind squirreled away allowing their servers to place orders to the kitchen. 

Generally speaking from my experience organizations that tend to not trust technology are really not trusting their internal partnership with technical departments. Now I will admit that a falling out in a relationship is hardly caused by one party but usually all parties, however generally I find that internal technology groups are having a hard time coping and adapting to the changing world around them and trying to meet the business demands. Again while there are many symptoms such as lack of education, out-dated implementation cycles, etc. the core issue is typically a lack of commitment and that starts from the top. Almost all proper working relationships have C-level leaders who are in agreement both publicly and privately with the business needs and strive to do the utmost to give them what they need. However C-levels that "have doubts" whether directly or indirectly carry themselves accordingly; project plans are padded, micro-management is taken up to "insure things run smoothly", requirements are not provided, etc. These views then travel down throughout an organization resulting in a very large cultural barrier in accepting let alone implementing anything necessary to meet business needs. 

Language wars tend to be used as a scapegoat in almost all organizations as to why they are not getting what they want from their internal technology groups. Instead organizations need to understand what type of technology team they want/need (great HBR article on this concept) and then have the commitment to get there.