So, how do you ensure that your staff work to the best of their ability? Because, no matter how fast your mainframe is, if your expert staff aren’t motivated and engaged, then things will move forward slowly. Upgrades, fixes, ZAPs, etc will be reluctantly and perhaps inappropriately applied. And performance generally will be poor.
Research has generally shown that ‘carrots’ are better motivators in terms of encouraging good behaviour from staff, and ‘sticks’ are not so good at motivating staff. So praising good work by staff seems to be a better way of getting them to do what you want than criticism of their work or blaming them for failures. But simply saying “well done” may have its pitfalls!
Management mostly use the operant conditioning model of learning. In this, reinforcement encourages a particular behaviour and punishment discourages the behaviour. Simple! From that you’d assume that incentives or rewards and praise in the workplace would be successful in getting the best results from staff. However, research indicates that rewards are effective at producing only temporary compliance – they don’t seem to produce lasting change in attitudes or behaviour. And research shows that people who expect to receive a reward don’t perform as well as those who expect nothing! So people expecting praise for doing their job, will, in the fullness of time, do it less well!
One technique that many classroom teachers use to ensure their children behave correctly is assertive discipline. With this technique, clear rules are laid out, and then children are rewarded (praised) for following the rules. For example, one group of children are sitting quietly waiting for the teacher while another group are chatting. Rather than telling the noisy group to settle down, the teacher will say something like: “Look how well these children are sitting”. The inappropriately behaving group learn that to get attention and approval they need to follow the rules.
From that, we might learn that in the work place, bosses should recognize and comment on desirable behaviour from their staff. Basically, they should be offering praise for people doing the right thing.
Attachment parenting takes a different view of praise – and, although it’s obviously aimed at young children, it has an application with staff. So, rather than saying “good boy”, you say what you can see and feel. So, you might say, “you sorted out your pencils and crayons and put them in separate boxes. That’s impressive organization”. The idea behind it is that the praise of “good boy” could easily be taken away by saying “naughty boy” at a different time. Descriptive praise can’t be taken away. So, practice saying things like: “I see you made the IMS system perform more efficiently. That takes determination.”
But what makes a person behave in a particular way? What makes them stay late until piece of work is completed, or go above and beyond their usual role? It seems there are intrinsic motivators and extrinsic motivators. Extrinsic motivation comes because you expect a reward when the task is complete. Intrinsic motivation comes because the task itself is motivating. Intrinsic motivation is really all about autonomy. You control what you do and when you do it. But, once you start rewarding people who are intrinsically motivated, it demotivates them! There is, apparently, a way round this, you can randomly reward them. So again, praising people seems to have a surprising and opposite effect to what you’d expect.
Mark Tyrrell in his blog “Why telling people how wonderful they are isn’t always a good idea” at http://www.unk.com/blog/dangers-of-excessive-praise/?utm_source=clearthinking&utm_medium=email&utm_content=171&utm_campaign=Clear%2BThinking%2Bnewsletter looks further at why saying, “well done” isn’t such a good idea.
He reminds us of a study, published in 1998 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which children were rewarded for simply ‘doing their own thing’ – drawing, playing, and so on. But when the rewards were discontinued, the children tended to lose interest in their preferred activity.
His conclusions were:
- Don’t over-praise people (or yourself) for doing stuff they should be doing anyway. Sure, it’s good I don’t go around stealing from people, but it should also be my normal behaviour. So be discerning and selective with praise. Ask yourself: “Am I being praised (or praising someone else) for normal human behaviour?”
- Focus on the normality of the desirable behaviour rather than implying that it’s exceptional and therefore not something that can happen often.
- Don’t expect praise for everything and don’t always praise others, or you’ll be fostering praise dependency and an inability to pursue excellence for its own sake. If you don’t praise all the time, the praise you do offer has more potency.
- Focus on what is actually within a person’s control (like hard work) rather on nebulous and essentially meaningless characteristics. “You have worked really hard!” implies that success was something they could consciously influence. Telling someone they are “fabulous” for completing something gives them no meaningful information about their input.
He goes on to say: “Sugar is nice, but a little goes a long way and too much can really screw you up.
“The right kind of praise at the right time and in the right quantity can help you develop the habit of excellence, but a diet of uncontrolled praise won’t do you or anyone else any favours.”
It’s interesting to think how this can be applied to staff working on the mainframe, network, and distributed platforms to get the best out of them.
You may not know that ‘red teaming’ refers to the practice of “viewing a problem from an adversary or competitor’s perspective. The goal of most red teams is to enhance decision making, either by specifying the adversary’s preferences and strategies or by simply acting as a devil’s advocate. Red teaming may be more or less structured, and a wide range of approaches exists. In the past several years, red teaming has been applied increasingly to issues of security, although the practice is potentially much broader. Business strategists, for example, can benefit from weighing possible courses of action from a competitor’s point of view.” That definition comes from the Red Team Journal at http://redteamjournal.com/about/red-teaming-and-alternative-analysis/.
One thing that red teams are often asked to do these days is test IT security. The red team will try to infiltrate a company’s IT system in order to identify any previously unknown vulnerabilities. It seems that one of the best ways to get into a system is to be the first to find a new vulnerability in the software that no-one else has spotted. This ‘zero day’ vulnerability can be used to get malware of some kind into an organization, and, from then on, the red team own the IT system. And that’s why it’s a good idea to pay a team of experts rather than wake up one day and find the bad guys have found their way into your IT infrastructure.
Basically, that small piece of malware can be used by the red team to gain access to the network. And from there they can gain access to any documents or databases and download whatever information they want. If you’re company is a bank, they could find a way to steal money. And a lot of the time, no-one would know it was happening until it’s too late.
Internet Explorer has been in the press over the years for the number of vulnerabilities that it once had, but nowadays, Java is a prime target for red teams because Java is meant to run on 3 million devices – providing what’s called a large ‘attack surface’. Stack walking refers to the way that the different components of an IT platform exchange information about security privileges. This makes it an ideal target.
Attacking the software is getting harder these days, but there’s one component of an organization’s computer system that is always potentially vulnerable – and that’s the people who use the computers. In the past there were stories of dumpster diving – where people would look through dumpsters and rubbish bins for information on paper that was thrown away. Nowadays, most companies collect and destroy paper, so that can’t happen. Even so, walking around a building a visitor can still find passwords on Post-It notes stuck to screens. There’s also a technique called spearphishing that can be used. In this, a seemingly legitimate e-mail contains a malicious link or attachment. Once a person clicks on the link or opens the attachment, the malware is on the system. Another technique is to send infected memory sticks to staff, who often plug them in to see what’s on them, and, again, the malware strikes!
Red team members can now use social media to find the names of staff as well as details of their experience, so that e-mails and phone calls from the red team can sound quite legitimate. Part of the answer is SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions. These provide real-time analysis of security alerts generated by network hardware and applications. SIEM solutions come as software, appliances, or managed services, and are also used to log security data and generate reports for compliance purposes.
The other part of the solution is education of staff so that they don’t insert memory sticks or click on attachments from unknown sources. But often, the best way to get access to corporate data is to find a disgruntled employee. So maybe another part of the solution is to ensure that staff are happy – that terms and conditions are going to avoid people feeling disgruntled. And if they are, then policies and procedures must be in place to manage that situation. And that’s not so easy with a large organization.
Mainframes are mostly used by large organizations – which obviously puts them at risk from unhappy employees. The risk is increased because most mainframe sites also use other platforms – PCs etc. And there is a new and huge security risk with BYOD. The red team could, perhaps, get a piece of malware onto someone’s tablet, which then gets connected to network, which then starts opening security doors all the way to the mainframe.
You may feel your data isn’t important enough to warrant the employment of a red team to test out any exposure to vulnerabilities you might have. But most organizations can learn from the types of vulnerability red teams exploit, and take steps to ensure that they are not at risk from them.
Badminton horse trials are taking place over the bank holiday weekend from Thursday 2 May to Monday 6 May this year. Badminton is one of those big events that horse lovers from all over the world like to attend – and so do I. And this week, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at how it does its IT. Bear in mind that it has lots of scores coming from different sources, as well as lots of photographs and film, that all need to be collated and shared with the fans who are onsite and off.
Badminton takes place in the park of Badminton House, in Gloucestershire GL9 1DF, England. The house and grounds are owned by the Duke of Beaufort. Badminton has been going since 1949 and is one of the top three four-star rated events (along with Burghley Horse Trials and Rolex Kentucky Three Day). It’s also one of only six annual Concours Complet International (CCI) Four Star events. Three-day eventing involves dressage, cross country, and show jumping.
I spoke to Dominic Sancto who gave me an overview of how things are set up at Badminton – as far IT is concerned.
This year, scores are entered into PCs and these results are wifi’ed across to Windows servers, where a bespoke database collects them all. From there, the results are written out to flat files and distributed accordingly. That means that the flat files are used to update the Web site and result screens, as well as the Badminton app.
There are three versions of the Badminton app, one for Android devices, one for iPhones, and one for iPads. The app gives details of the timetable and start times, as well as results. It also gives news and social information, video and audio, a photo gallery, the course, the riders, visitor information, and ‘grassroots’ – the BE 90 Class riders (that’s a lower group than the rest of the competitors, but everyone’s got to start somewhere!).
As well as the phone app and the Web site, Badminton’s social media has a Facebook page, Twitter, an RSS feed, Picasa, and YouTube. The Web site at www.badminton-horse.co.uk/
has all the information that appears on the app and more. There’s information, tickets/hospitality, horses & riders, news, shopping village, gallery, and an archive. There is just so much information – it’s excellent.
When it comes to Twitter, there are seven members of the Badminton crew tweeting information, news , and comments about what’s going. You can find them at twitter.com/bht_office/badminton-crew. On Facebook, they’re at www.facebook.com/BadmintonHorseTrials. There were plenty of photos and comments before the event even started, and nearly 47,000 likes by last Monday. Not surprisingly, there are even more photos (including from previous years) on Picasa at picasaweb.google.com/baddershorsetrials. Like most organizations, Badminton IT has moved its movies to YouTube to avoid their own servers being overloaded. You can see plenty of videos at www.youtube.com/baddershorsetrials.
There’s also Radio Badminton on 106.1 FM – and you can buy ear-size radios so you can listen to everything that’s going on in the arena as you walk round the massive shopping village or follow the cross country course.
The whole of the IT is very well suited to the needs of the thousands of people who will be visiting Badminton this weekend. See you there!
Over the past couple of years I’ve been working with SharePoint at various sites, and more recently with Lync and Yammer. Now these are two products that mainframers may not be that familiar with and I thought people might be interested to know more.
Microsoft Lync was called Microsoft Office Communicator. It’s an Instant Messaging client – like MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger – that can be used either with Microsoft Lync Server or Lync Online, which is available with Microsoft Office 365. In fact it is an up-to-date version of Windows Messenger which was used with Microsoft Exchange Server.
As well as running on PCs, Lync 2010 has Windows Phone, Android, and iOS apps. Lync provides instant messaging, Voice Over IP, and video conferencing facilities, and uses Microsoft Outlook contacts stored in a Microsoft Exchange Server. Office can show whether other people are working on the same document, and Lync allows file sharing.
What makes it so useful is those really unimportant e-mails that you don’t need an audit trail for can be replaced by Instant Messaging conversations. That cuts down on the number of e-mails that need to be backed up each evening and eventually stored on the off-chance they’re important. And, of course, you can type or you can talk. And you can set up meetings with people in offices around the country and video conference – assuming your organization has the bandwidth to do so.
Lync and Sharepoint integrate to an extent – they’re both from Microsoft. For example, there’s an “online presence indicator next to an individual’s name wherever their name appears in a site collection in SharePoint”. “Assist in providing colleague suggestions for use in My Sites, My Profiles, and People Search”. And “through Lync, provide access to SharePoint people and skills search including names and skills and a link to the user’s My Site”. Thank you to J D Wade, who’s blog at http://wadingthrough.com/2012/04/04/lync-and-sharepoint-integration-more-than-presence-information/ was the source for these examples.
Yammer is described as an enterprise social network service. It was launched in 2008, but, more importantly, Microsoft bought it last year. Yammer acts like a corporate Facebook service. It allows people to send message to other individuals or to groups. Only people with the same domain name in their e-mail address can access the corporate Yammer network. As well as access from a PC, there’s Android Windows Phone and iPhone apps available.
Chris Wright, in his blog at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/five-yammer-features-that-sharepoint-users-are-going-to-love-020339.php, lists features of Yammer that SharePoint users will like. Chris says “SharePoint has never really had its own ‘messaging’ system, so the Yammer Inbox fills a real gap”. Chris adds: “Yammer polls are a nice quick way to ask a question of people in your community, and will add a lot to the sense of community SharePoint is trying to foster”. Looking ahead, Chris says that documents held in a Yammer feed can be edited in Office web apps. He says: “This is a great example of a few of the features SharePoint is bringing to the table to improve Yammer (rather than the other way round)”.
We know that Microsoft plans to integrate Yammer with SharePoint and Office 365. It appears that Yammer will eventually replace SharePoint’s newsfeed. It seems there’s a plan to share documents with Yammer using SharePoint. And Yammer users will be able to upload and store documents using SkyDrive Pro. A file preview and edit capability with Yammer will work in conjunction with Office Web Apps. There’s even talk about translation capabilities being added to Yammer. Eventually Yammer and Lync (and Exchange) will be integrated.
The integration of Yammer builds on Open Graph – an open API protocol for following objects external to a social network site used by Facebook. IBMers are perhaps more familiar with OpenSocial 2.0 for IBM Connections. Both provide a way for people to follow things.
What makes Yammer and SharePoint integration so interesting is that staff can use a the type of social media they’re familiar with from home in a business situation. If I can see you’re meeting client A tomorrow, I might ask you to check how he thinks project X is going. Or I might even just want to say hello to someone who is an occasional customer. Yammer is a business tool that is fun and easy to use – certainly compared to the more heavyweight Web parts etc of SharePoint.
The fact that Instant Messaging and social media can be included in a business environment shows that these tools are maturing. And, like BYOD, it shows end users are driving the environment they want to experience at work. I wonder how long it will be, with IBM’s pushing of social media tools, before something like this is available to everyone on z/OS.
There’s a theory that if you take into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert, then the large group’s aggregated answers to questions involving just about anything is typically just as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any individual expert within the group. This is called the wisdom of the crowd.
Of course, so-called experts aren’t necessarily that expert. Most complicated court cases seem to involve expert witnesses disagreeing over the right conclusions to draw from the evidence. Similarly, psychology studies have found, for example, that experienced parole board members are no better at deciding whether a prisoner will offend again than ordinary members of the public. Worryingly, other studies have found similar results with experts being no better using their expertise than members of the public.
So what has this got to do with anything? Well, as you probably have guessed from these blogs, I’ve been doing a lot of work on social media recently with companies and charity groups. We were chatting about how to use LinkedIn, and they wanted to take a look at my profile to see what areas of expertise people thought I had. If you want to play along at home, the URL is http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddolls. At the bottom of the page is the skills and expertise section. The way it works is LinkedIn members can endorse the skills or expertise of others. And, gradually, using the wisdom of crowds, a person’s expertise profile should, pretty much, match up with their real-life skills and expertise – you’d think!
So, I listed my skills – an embarrassing process in itself – and then we compared them to what ‘the crowd’ think are my skills. I thought as I’ve been blogging since 2005, and I blog on the Destination z site each month, and I’ve written blogs that have been published as written by other people, ‘blogger’ ought to be there. I write articles that have been published in numerous publications and Web sites, so ‘writer’ ought to be there. I edited Xephon’s Update journals for 20 years and I’m editorial director for the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, so ‘editor’ should be there. I’ve been associated with mainframes for thirty years, so ‘mainframes’ should be there. I chair the Virtual IMS user group and Virtual CICS user group – so ‘CICS’ and ‘IMS’ should be there.
I’ve also done coaching work with individuals, and a few years ago qualified as a hypnotherapist. I’ve also passed NLP exams. I see clients for these, so ‘hypnotherapy’ and ‘NLP’ should be there. And, for the past five years, I’ve been designing and building Web sites for people – so ‘Web designer’ should be there. And, of course, with my recent focus on it, ‘social media’ should be right up there.
The actual scores on the doors suggest a slightly different profile: 14 Mainframe, 14 CICS, 12 Hypnotherapy, 9 Technical writing, 9 NLP, and 9 IMS DB/DC. Blogging has only 5 votes; as well as technical writing, I have 6 for writer; 5 for editing; and yet I have no endorsements for social media or Web design!
Now, I know it’s still early days, and there aren’t that many endorsements at all yet, and probably, over time, the endorsements will come to match the work I’m actually doing, but it did seem surprising that it should be so different, with some area of ‘expertise’ so lacking in any endorsements. I just wondered whether other people were finding the same thing.
Or maybe, it’s me. Maybe I have an incorrect idea of what I am good at, and there is wisdom in the crowd!
It seems that nowadays is not a good time to be in the world of mainframes, with BMC Software likely to be taken over, Compuware recording a loss, and to add insult to injury, Oracle is talking about releasing a mainframe!
So let’s start with BMC Software, which got its name from its founders back in the early 1980s – Scott Boulette, John Moores, and Dan Cloer. BMC, notably, bought Boole & Babbage at the end of the 1990s and shortly after acquired CONTROL-M and its company, New Dimension Software. But those heady days must seem a long time ago because on 22 April it’s expected to receive final takeover bids.
Elliott Management owns a 9.6 percent stake in BMC, and signed a standstill agreement with BMC last summer, but that ended on 6 April. So they could bid for BMC or nominate directors to its board. People who know about these things are saying that buyout firm Thoma Bravo has joined a bidding group led by KKR & Co LP and TPG Capital LP in order to bid. Their likely rivals are a team comprising Bain Capital LLC and Golden Gate Capital. You can assume people are arranging to have access to large pots of money on the day. Bids are likely to be between $40 and $50 a share. We’ll be watching to see what happens, and, more importantly, what the impact is on users of their mainframe software.
Compuware is probably most famous for its Abend-AID product, which first saw the light of day in the 1970s. In the 1980s, they launched File-AID. Compuware recently reported disappointing fourth-quarter results and said its total year-on-year revenue is expected to drop from $1 billion to between $942 million and $946 million for the fiscal year ending 31 March.
CEO Robert Paul has increased his planned cost-cutting to between $80 million and $100 million over the next two years. (It was $60 million over three years.) A natural consequence of this could be layoffs – and that could impact on the quality of the software mainframe users can get hold of, or may mean longer delays between upgrades.
Interestingly, Elliott Management (see above) is Compuware’s second-largest shareholder, owning 8.7% of the stock. In January, their takeover bid of $2.3 billion ($11-per-share) was rejected by the board. Meanwhile, Sandell Asset Management, which holds 2.8% of Compuware stock, is urging the board to sell the company to the highest bidder as quickly as possible.
And while these mainframe companies are facing financial difficulties, Larry Ellison has launched, what he’s calling, a mainframe-class machine – arguing that any mission-critical app that runs on any Unix system will run better on the new Sparc T5 and M5 servers. In addition, Oracle is claiming that it has passed IBM on integer throughput performance – but that’s compared against IBM Power series.
The big news over at CA Technologies is that CA has filed a patent infringement suit against AppDynamics, which was started by one of its ex-employees. CA got hold of the patents when it bought Wily Technology in 2006. The ex-employee led the design and architecture for several Wily products. You may also remember that last November CA sued New Relic Inc for patent infringements. Again, the founder of New Relic had been a senior executive at Wily.
At least IBM seems to be doing OK. It's just released a $1 billion plan to construct and check Flash technology for enterprise solutions. The technology should assist firms coping with Big Data challenges. The people at UBS have upgraded IBM from ‘neutral’ to ‘buy’, saying IBM has the best strategy of its peers in what it terms the “IT as a service” industry. Plus a new Synergy Research Group study shows that IBM’s share of the cloud infrastructure equipment market has hit a two-year high in the fourth quarter of 2012, reaching just over 19 percent.
Suppose you wanted to access ‘big data’ stored in HDFS or HBase. What would you do? Well, for many people, the first step is to find out what we’re talking about. So, let’s start with big data – it’s data that’s so large and complex that it’s difficult to process using standard and familiar database management tools or applications.
According to Wikipedia, there are issues around data capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization. You’re probably thinking: why not go back to using smaller and manageable data? It seems that people want access to larger and larger amounts of data because additional information can be gained from it – allowing people to “spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions”.
Now that’s clear, what are HDFS and HBase? HDFS stands for Hadoop Distributed File System. It’s a distributed, scalable, and portable file system written in Java for the Hadoop framework. HDFS stores large files across multiple machines, and replicates the data across multiple hosts. HBase is an open source, non-relational, distributed database and is also written in Java. It was developed as part of Apache Software Foundation’s Apache Hadoop project and runs on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), providing a fault-tolerant way of storing large quantities of data.
Each node in a Hadoop instance typically has a single namenode; a cluster of datanodes form the HDFS cluster. So what’s needed is some way to access that cluster. At the moment, the choices are basically Hive, Impala, and Big SQL.
Again, a search on Wikipedia informs me that “Hive supports analysis of large datasets stored in Hadoop-compatible file systems such as Amazon S3 filesystem. It provides an SQL-like language called HiveQL while maintaining full support for map/reduce. To accelerate queries, it provides indexes, including bitmap indexes. By default, Hive stores metadata in an embedded Apache Derby database, and other client/server databases like MySQL can optionally be used. Currently, there are three file formats supported in Hive, which are TEXTFILE, SEQUENCEFILE, and RCFILE”
The Cloudera Impala project allows users to query data, whether stored in HDFS or HBase – including SELECT, JOIN, and aggregate functions – in real time. Furthermore, it uses the same metadata, SQL syntax (Hive SQL), ODBC driver, and user interface (Hue Beeswax) as Apache Hive. To avoid latency, Impala circumvents MapReduce to directly access the data through a specialized distributed query engine.
When you look up information about these things, names like Apache, Cloudera, Amazon, Facebook, Google crop up, but not IBM. You might think that’s a bit strange. Wouldn’t IBM be the organization you’d expect to have experience of big data? I mean just think of those massive IMS databases. So, why haven’t I mentioned IBM? The answer is because I haven’t got to Big SQL yet.
IBM claims that Big SQL provides robust SQL support for the Hadoop ecosystem:
- it has a scalable architecture;
- it supports SQL and data types available in SQL '92, plus it has some additional capabilities;
- it supports JDBC and ODBC client drivers;
- it has efficient handling of ‘point queries’;
- there are a wide variety of data sources and file formats for HDFS and HBase that it supports;
- And, although it isn’t open source, it does interoperate well with the open source ecosystem within Hadoop.
The really interesting thing about this is that all the information is available in one place – Big Data University (http://bigdatauniversity.com). I’m looking forward to taking the course. Big data isn’t going away any time soon.
