Somehow, largely on accident, this week’s topic got taken over by the idea of fire trucks.

First, there’s a fire station at the end of our block. They’ll occasionally serve as a backup alarm clock for us, especially on weekends. Small price to pay for having them close by, especially when they’re such good neighbours – they never bring their work home with them. Today was one of those random wake-up calls, compliments of the lads in station #2.

Second, well before I decided that I’d be a soldier when I grew up I was absolutely mad for being a fireman. When I was about three, I was captivated by the television show ‘Emergency.’ It launched in 1972, so I’m fairly certain that I was watching the show religiously from the first season on. Between that show and the military medicine dramedy M*A*S*H, I was reared on a steady drumbeat of self-sacrifice and public service messages: take risks, act decisively, and go help people because it’s the right thing to do. [1]

Third, while I was catching up on my periodicals this morning I stumbled across a small blurb in the back of last week’s copy of Autoweek [1] that set me to laughing:

Plenty of space for a drinks cabinet, and lots more headroom than your average estate car

‘Ever been stuck in a traffic jam in Moscow? They’re bad – so bad, police are now stopping and checking medical vehicles after discovering that some commuters were paying $200 to ride in “ambulance taxis” with working sirens and lights to avoid sitting in traffic.’

I find that idea to be absolutely hysterical. You have to adore the Russians’ sense of ingenuity. When Americans want to mitigate traffic jams, we engineer massive ‘smart roads’ and plough millions into inventing ‘autonomous driving vehicles.’ The Russians take a shrewd look at the rules of the road, find an inexpensive loophole, and charge gleefully through it. From the same blurb:

‘According to a Russian newspaper, the out-of-service emergency vehicles are equipped with luxury, limousine-style interiors, and are used by businessmen to reduce their travel time in the often grid-locked city.’

Problem: everyone’s stuck in traffic. Take note that emergency vehicles get to bypass traffic. Therefore (per pragmatic Russian logic), use an ambulance to bypass traffic. To the garage!

As funny at that story is, that article tied the other two pieces of this thread together for me, and lopped me back around to the subject of cyber threat mitigation. Really. Put all three elements together, and you get this simple recipe for disaster in the workplace:

1. People generally want to help when they perceive others in need

2. When confronted with an obstacle, people are likely to get wickedly creative

3. When a problem is perceived as an emergency, the perceived need to immediate action can justify doing things that might – under normal circumstances – be considered unauthorized or even illegal

Some employees have difficulty putting their problems into perspective

I’ve run into this phenomenon a lot over the years while working in the IT field. A user logs into a network PC and then lets a customer set down at the machine and make use of his session. A manager doesn’t want to wait on facilities to rearrange an office, so he severs all the phone and network cables while changing out the furniture himself. A frustrated worker needs to extend the network to a new space and plugs their personal Wi-Fi base station into a network jack. A supervisor needs to finish a project over the weekend, so he downloads his entire network share to an external hard drive and schleps it home on Friday night. [3]

Each of these cases features a frustrated employee who genuinely wanted to get work done for the betterment of the company. When they encountered an obstacle and didn’t get the help they felt they deserved from the proper service provider, they took matters into their own hands … solving one problem while inadvertently creating several more. The intent was never evil; in each case, the wayward employee believed (wrongly) that their actions were justified because of their perceived emergent need.

Ah, users. Your own people are often as much (if not more) of a threat to the integrity of your network than the Sc@rY HaX0rs will ever be. [4] Most users don’t mean to be; they just don’t understand how their rash decisions are putting the rest of the organization at unnecessary risk. Using the excuse that “it’s an emergency” might buy the offender some leniency, but only if the baddies don’t capitalize on the opportunity first.

This is why every organization larger than a roadside lemonade stand needs to have an effective cyber security training regimen. Giving people technology empowers them to do their jobs, yes … and also empowers them to use their shiny kit in creative, unexpected and potentially dangerous ways. The driving purpose behind a good security-training program is to teach people how and why their actions can expose the company to risk.

‘In retrospect, perhaps I didn’t need to take that corner quite so aggressively’

With sufficient education, employees can become virtual extensions of the security department – looking outside for threats, inside for vulnerabilities, and all around for mistakes. That’s what we want in the end: optimally, we want all of our users to be actively engaged, with the company’s best interests in mind. We don’t want to stifle their sense of initiative or their zeal to help; we do, however, want them to think first before doing something rash.

Beyond the essentials of security mindedness, we also have to teach employees to understand the broader picture. Security measures and protocols aren’t implemented out of spite; a good IT department employs defensive measures in order to strike a reasonable balance between getting work done and keeping the company viable.

To be sure, real emergencies do happen in business. Sometimes, drastic and dangerous measures are the appropriate way to respond. When such events arise, however, it’s critical to the survival of the company to actually validate that there are no better solutions available first, and that action cannot wait.

When teaching this principle, I tell new employees to imagine the business as a castle under siege. [5] The baddies outside the walls will cheerfully take advantage of any breach in order to get in and pillage. Therefore, no matter how well-meaning the cause, Bob the Blacksmith doesn’t get to arbitrarily throw open the gates – he can’t see where the baddies are outside the wall, he doesn’t know the disposition of the castle’s defenders, and he probably doesn’t know what the king’s intent is. Therefore, if Bob’s got an urgent need to get outside the walls, the right thing to do is to bring his situation up with someone in authority first, before embarking on unilateral action that will let a thousand vandals inside while Bob is stepping out the pub. I’ve found that most folks seem to grasp the concept it when explained this way, but use whatever metaphor works best for your own people.

No suburban office park is ever going to look this awesome

However you explain it, get that idea across to all your people: just because you perceive your problem to be an ‘emergency,’ that doesn’t give you the right to expose the entire company to a risk that they didn’t agree to accept. Ask first, before you do something rash. If you don’t … there likely will be an emergency declared in HR. The kind where someone is invited to ‘pursue other career options,’ effective immediately.

[1] My father had been an Army medic in the 60s, so I followed in his footsteps when I first became a squaddie in the 80s. I suspect that TV shows – consumed early on as a tyke – can have a tremendously powerful effect in influencing career choices later in life.

[2] 29^th April 13 edition, page 72.

[3] Yes, every single one of those examples actually happened on my watch, and I had to clean up the resulting mess. The aftermath was never pretty.

[4] ‘Scary hackers,’ in normal-speak.

[5] If they’re slightly nerdish, I’ll throw in a Helm’s Deep reference. Moderately nerdish types get Winterfell. Hard-core nerds get The Keep on the Borderlands, with my compliments. Whatever hooks your audience the best.

POC is Keil Hubert, keil.hubert@gmail.com

The post Emergency mismanagement appeared first on Business Technology.

I wanted to cover something that would resonate with the members of our profession for this week’s piece since this my fiftieth (50^th!) column for Lyonsdown. I started the conversation last summer with a discussion about how and why IT people are still vitally important for businesses of all shapes and sizes. I submit that little has changed in industry since then – yes, the global economy has continued to sour, but business grinds on, and we boffins are still important to our employers. What has changed a great deal over the past several years is how our IT role within the business has lost cachet, even as the demands placed upon us have significantly increased. This has led to some peculiar notions among upper leadership about what constitutes an appropriate IT leader.

I was chewing on several different topics this morning when I saw where Ms Maryfran Johnson, Editor in Chief of CIO Magazine, had touched upon this idea in her column in the week’s print edition. [1] To quote the editor directly:

‘These days, the ideal IT manager is seen as someone deeply technical yet business savvy, wonderfully communicative and, of course, a strategic thinker. In other words, as mythic a creature as a unicorn.’

I can relate. When I first started working in tech, the IT department was usually considered a utility, much like plumbing. In fact, we tended to use plumbing metaphors to explain to tech-oblivious managers how network congestion worked. For years, my fellow nerds struggled to explain to all and sundry how we in IT were critical enablers for our respective lines of business. We automated and streamlined and reinforced and made possible the actual production of goods and services. We mattered. We were rarely understood, but we slowly gained some respect for our contributions.

In all that time, we’ve gained some ground. We’re now an indispensible part of the modern business – but we’re also a despise-able element thanks to our inability or unwillingness to explain ourselves clearly. If we over-promise a technology’s capabilities, we’ll fall short and get blamed for missing production targets. If we conservatively under-promise our capabilities, then a slick sales weasel will convince our higher-ups to buy a useless piece of shiny kit, and we’ll get blamed when it doesn’t deliver. No matter what, the folks who don’t understand how tech works will always be deeply suspicious of us; they sullenly suspect us of scamming them. Truth be told, some members of our brotherhood have done exactly that, and (in doing so) have made life infinitely harder for the rest of us.

Over time, this has led to our upper executives to develop one of two very different expectations of what an IT leader is supposed to be: they demand that a prospective Top Geek be either ridiculously over-qualified or staggeringly unqualified.

It would probably be easier to genetically engineer a bloody unicorn that it would be to qualify for some senior IT positions.

The over-qualified.

When many top executives go out looking for a new top tech head, they build lists of ‘requirements’ that no legitimate human can offer. Sometimes this is to ensure that only a single human (i.e., their pre-selected golfing buddy) can make it through screening. Most of the time, I suspect it’s because the people advertising the position have no clue what it actually requires.

Back in 1996, I read a posting for an IT director that required the applicant to have a ‘minimum of 15 years VMS and Windows NT integration experience.’ Given that Windows NT was barely three years old at the time, I had to assume that anyone who qualified for the gig must also own his or her own time machine. Or a magic wand.

I once sat an interview for a CIO position where one of the board members asked me to explain a cryptic acronym to him. I asked him if he was referring to the ‘Plans, Programs and Budget System’ that governed his funding. The interviewer sneered and told me ‘No, I mean the secret internal program that uses the same name, but is completely different and is only used here inside the organization.’ Having nothing to lose, I asked how many applicants were interviewing for the billet from inside the organization and, therefore, might have such mystic insight. The answer was ‘no one.’

I was flown cross-country to an interview once where, upon arrival, the hiring manager demanded that I prove that I was already be an expert on the protocols that made up their core product line before they’d consider me. In that same discussion, one of the company’s engineers admitted that they were the only company in the world actually developing a product using their chosen protocols, and no one inside the division had the management skills needed to take over the role.

In all of these examples, no applicant could ever ‘qualify’ for the role. Posting the billet was a waste of time; the interviews were equally pointless.

‘The spirits tell me that I’m wasting my time talking to you.’

The utterly unqualified.

It goes the other way, too. Many times, the powers-that-be are so intimidated by the boffins that they’ll only hire someone to lead their IT arm that doesn’t frighten them. Anyone who actually knows more than the other executives is considered inherently terrifying. Therefore, the only ‘acceptable’ candidates are ones who have no idea what their boffins are doing. Many are too oblivious or too proud to bother to learn, as well. Scott Adams made a career out of telling these stories in the person of the Pointy-Haired Boss.

I’ve been to a lot of places where the proficiency gulf between the top tech leadership and the line was so vast that translators were needed inside the department in order to facilitate basic decision-making.

Back before the bubble burst, I was building a Dot Com outfit in Houston. I got into a nasty scrap one day with the IT director over ‘how many nines’ our department was going to guarantee. When I told her ‘none whatsoever,’ she went berserk. ‘We must,’ she said, ‘deliver either four or five nines of uptime to the business.’ I pointed out that she’d refused my original technical design to run the business with a UNIX solution because she was only ‘comfortable’ using Microsoft Exchange. When she blinked like a dog that had been shown a card trick, I suggested that we’d be lucky to keep downtime under 1-2 days per month. [2] The director threw a public temper tantrum and demanded that we go ‘buy some more nines.’

I once rebuilt a knowledge management solution for a development house that was about to default on a make-or-break contract. The owner of the company asked to add me to his ‘distribution list’ that was, he said, used for all official business. I discovered very quickly that his ‘official business’ communiqués were all forwarded urban legends. The man was so gullible that he couldn’t differentiate between truth and obvious fabrication, which was why his technical employees had been able to snow him for months about a product that had never worked. When I gently pointed out that his product wasn’t ready to ship, he (thankfully) cut off all communications with me … and shipped the broken product anyway.

I understand how some of these people came to occupy positions of power that far outstripped their ability to deliver. Back in the 1990s, the post of Chief Information Officer was usually a sinecure given to a political ally, golf partner or drinking buddy of the CEO or CFO. Those appointed CIOs didn’t have to know anything at all about technology; they simply had to green light whatever new piece of shiny kit the CEO wanted. They didn’t even need to have a track records of success – when their bad decisions caught up with them, they simply sacrificed a minion from within the IT team and moved on to another CXO job. When I went to NDU for their Defence CIO program, we spent an entire forty-hour block of instruction discussing this problem, and how to mitigate it.

Unless your leisure activities involve running enterprise-class networks, your activities outside work rarely qualify you to run the IT department.

What we really need.

Let’s go over Ms Johnson’s list of requirements for the ‘ideal IT manager’ one more time and see if they make sense:

• Business savvy
• Technical savvy
• Strong communications skills
• Strategic perspective

I see nothing whatsoever unreasonable about those requirements, so long as the bar for each is set at a reasonable level for the position. It’s ridiculous to assume that that a candidate must have written a best-selling novel in order to be considered to possess ‘strong communications skills.’  Likewise, there’s little reason to demand that an applicant possess either a computer science degree of an MBA in order to manage a team of desktop support techies. What qualifies a lad or lass for technical leadership is their track record of success within the tech field.

I submit that IT leadership is a synthesis of technical knowledge and leadership ability. You can have one without the other and be suitable for a lower-level position so long as you have the demonstrated ability to learn. For a higher-level position, you need a reasonable and relevant mix of both tech and leadership skill. Certifications and degrees and awards all suggest that an applicant is qualified, but only a comprehensive interview can tell you whether or not they can actually do the job.

For higher-level IT leadership position (e.g., CIO-level, Director level, or even Senior Manager), I’d only add two more critical elements to Ms Johnson’s list of unicorn traits. Perhaps these additional criteria will mark the difference between a pedestrian unicorn and an elite, left-handed unicorn:

• Demonstrated leadership skills
• Healthy cynicism

Both of those characteristics are pragmatic, which makes them testable. As we talked about last year, you can cheaply and easily weave practical exercises into your hiring boards that will definitively confirm or disprove whether an applicant actually possesses the skills that they claimed on their CV.

For the leadership aspect, do this: Bring a ‘problem employee’ into the room and challenge your applicant to learn how and why the employee isn’t performing, and then task them to craft a corrective action plan on the fly. If they can perform admirably on the spot, with no warning, and with zero assistance, hire them. If they can’t, see if there’s a less demanding position where they might contribute while you mentor them. Leadership is a function of getting results from people, not from products.

As for the cynicism aspect, do this: Present your applicant one of the many security warnings that flooded the community last week about the disposable mi-fi appliance that shipped in some copies of Forbes. Ask them to evaluate the actual security risk and to draft a plan on the fly to protect the organization from it. If the applicant slings some horse crap about how the little mi-fi toy could bring down Western civilization, politely show them the door and shred their CV. If, on the other hand, they talk about taking reasonable precautions and suggest some practical user education, put them on your short list as a contender.

Even if we’re not receiving the consideration that we might deserve, that’s okay. IT leadership still has an important role to play. No matter what people might allege, we’re critical to conducting business. We’re necessary. That doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily appreciated or respected … and that’s okay. In order to be taken seriously as profession, we need to demonstrate that we understand our business, our bosses, our co-workers, our market and our own limitations. We need to clearly communicate that we’re as committed to the operation as everyone else in the office. Finally, we need to be sure that we’re presenting ourselves as reasonable, approachable, and authentic people – not mythic or arcane caricatures straight out of pop culture.

Conforming to silly stereotypes can be fun, but is usually counter-productive.

The magic unicorn archetype might have fit for a Top Geek in the 1970s, but we’ve evolved beyond that. Next time you’re in an impossible interview for a top IT job, help the selection panel understand that you’re not ‘Gandalf the Grey’; you’re just Bob Gandalf, the friendly bloke from Systems & Network, and you’re here to help. Let’s all do our best to help obliterate the myths about our profession that make our lives so unnecessarily difficult.

[1] 1^st May 2013 edition, page 4, paragraph 3.

[2] This director was eventually relieved for cause after misrepresenting the IT department’s architecture to the board of directors. In that same outfit, at about the same tie, the company’s CFO was relieved for cause once it was discovered that the man couldn’t use Microsoft Excel. Small wonder, then, that the company folded not long after.

POC is Keil Hubert, keil.hubert@gmail.com

The post Left handed unicorns appeared first on Business Technology.

Some days, the world writes my columns for me. Today is one of those glorious days.

I’d barely made it to work on Tuesday last when my new message chime started ringing like an indignant air raid klaxon. Friends of mine from all over the country were alerting me to a cutting-edge ‘new’ cyber security threat that threatened to corrupt our youth and precious bodily fluids, all thanks to the ingenious malevolence of … Forbes magazine. Oy vey …

The gist of the problem (I won’t insult you by calling it a “threat”) is that today’s issue of Forbes comes with a ‘special surprise’ … for a few, ‘select readers.’ By ‘select,’ I mean ‘not me.’ By ‘surprise,’ I mean a nifty little disposable mi-fi appliance. It’s a cardboard sleeve with the guts of a cell modem, a battery and a wi-fi hot spot all crammed inside. It’s actually pretty darned neat from a strictly tech perspective … I haven’t seen anyone craft an advert quite like this before. I’ll go on record saying that it’s a cool idea.

That’s what it’s all about: it’s a marketing gimmick. Microsoft (remember them?) apparently wants to boost awareness of their new Office 365 product. Giving away a free, disposable, mi-fi unit to key journos and influencers who don’t need it and can easily afford the real thing is catchy, clever, and bound to get talked about. Give Microsoft credit where it’s due: I hadn’t been paying any attention to Office 365 before now, but this campaign got my attention.

It’s increasingly difficult to get your brand to stand out in a universe of aggressive advertising.

Not, that is to say, for the reasons intended.

About half of the messages clogging my inbox on Tuesday were security warnings from earnest colleagues. The gist of their dire prognostications was that an unwitting subscriber might toss their new copy of Forbes into their briefcase and then carry it into the office, where (supposedly unbeknownst to them) the “hidden” networking gizmo would turn itself on and start doing … bad things, presumably. Steal your critical secrets … breach your perimeter … spay your house pets … do something bad, at any rate. “Make sure that you leave your dead-tree-based leisure reading outside of sensitive work areas,” the security minders said.

That’s generally sound advice, but (I submit) it’s also by and large unnecessary. First, the promotional photos of the “enhanced” copies of the magazine have a GIANT RED STICKER on the front cover alerting you to the fact that you’ve won a prize. Second, you’d have to manually clear out whatever fail-safes the manufacturer had installed before it would activate – the safeguards that prevent the device from activating early and discharging its battery while in transit. The odds of someone not noticing the much heavier and sticker-adorned special copy are low. The odds of such a device spontaneously activating are also low. The odds of both of those things happening and having said device getting smuggled into a super villain’s secret volcano lair are ridiculously low. Low enough that no panic is necessary. In fact, it’s barely worth a mention as an idle curiosity.

Admittedly, if you live in a secret volcano lair, you might have larger problems to deal with.

I suppose it might be more dangerous if these things were shipped with every copy of the magazine, but they’re not (at least, according to the publisher). Or, if these gizmos were shipping with a publication that significantly more people were likely to read and retain. If one of these gadgets shows up in the next issue of Top Gear Magazine, we might have grounds to be concerned. Slightly concerned.

There’s also the issue of where this little Trojan horse might wind up. If you’re so bored that you feel the need to take leisure reading material into the critical heart of your organization’s skunk works or ops centre, it’s a darned good bet that you don’t have enough legitimate work to keep you occupied, and you’ll soon be working elsewhere.

I suppose that your typical henchman for a super villain might be the sort most inclined to fall prey to this sort of vulnerability. Most normal people that I’ve worked with, though, are accustomed to leaving unnecessary materials outside of operationally sensitive areas. They leave their mobile phones, tablets, and briefcases outside of “secure” areas. Heck, most of them pre-emptively leave these things outside executive board rooms, just so that they’ll be safe from having one of their devices go off in the middle of a executive’s presentation. That’s a faster path to unemployment than infecting the corporate network.

I understand the methodology of bypassing an adversary’s physical security defences by “dropping” an innocuous device for an unwitting stooge to discover. Remember Stuxnet? It’s a great attack vector that works well against human greed, curiosity and indifference. Could this Office 365 mi-fi toy be part of an insidious plot by international ne’er-do-wells in the cyber community? Eh … theoretically, yes, but only to the degree that the network penetration plot in Skyfall was believable.

‘A suspicious storage device found abandoned in a car park? It couldn’t hurt to check it for adorable cat pictures …’

The other half of the messages that I received warning me about this terrifying non-threat posed the question ‘Why didn’t anyone think about the potential security risks associated with this idea?’ I replied to all askers that they assuredly did. The companies behind this marketing campaign big-name players: Microsoft. T-Mobile. Forbes. There’s a very real probability (bordering on certainty) that the team who designed this campaign included a savvy security boffin (or eleventy-twelve). All very rational, very well educated, and very clever lads and lasses who would have had to have war-gamed all of these what-ifs months ago – long before production of the appliances started.

I’m confident that this campaign isn’t a ‘gaffe’ on Forbes’ part. They’re a world-renowned print publication catering to people much wealthier than I am. [1] Look at a random issue: they sell advertising. The bigger and more complex the advertisement, the more money they make. That’s their bloody business model, and they’re quite good at it. They’re just doing their job. If anything, this tempest in a teapot is likely to raise their brand awareness for a few weeks, which might even lead to a slight increase in new customers.

As for what it’ll do for the fortunes of Office 365 … I suspect that it’ll have very little impact. Flashy adverts are amusing, but content is king. Office 365 will live or die based on how well it gets work done for its early adopters. Regular, one-license-at-a-time, copies of Office will still be sold in massive quantities to corporate and government types the world over. This new subscription-based version? We’ll see. I bet my mates here twenty quid that (a) it’s better than people give it credit for, and (b) it’s different enough from ‘conventional’ office that it’ll get unwarranted negative reviews. Good luck, lads. [2]

Most end users don’t care about application licensing paradigms.

Finally, what about all those well-meaning armchair security wonks? I’d like to think that they’ll have a chat in the break room about it and will come to the same conclusions that we’ve discussed here. Namely, it’s just not a big deal. Be aware that such a thing exists, learn to spot it in the wild, and consider what reasonable steps you might take to pre-empt a potential problem. As IT pros, we’re supposed to be doing that all day, every day about everything … not just when we receive a frenzied message in our inbox. Or eleventy-twelve duplicate warnings.

[1] Or will ever be, unfortunately.

[2] If you’d like a review, send me a demo copy. I’ll write a column on it and will tell you how that works out.

POC is Keil Hubert, keil.hubert@gmail.com

The post Much ado about adverts appeared first on Business Technology.

Brand loyalty is a wonderful thing – if you can get it, and if you can maintain it. I’ve written quite a bit recently about the criticality of using Internet technologies to stay actively engaged with your customers. One follow-on point that I’d like to make is that your web presence and Twitter feed are only effective in retaining customer loyalty so long as your employees don’t foul everything up at the point where your customers directly interact with your brand. Case in point: Dallas’s old CompUSA chain.

Back in early 1990s, my university roommate and I would drive up from San Antonio to Fort Worth most every weekend to visit his family and to work on academics without the worry of on-campus distractions. One of the traditions that we held to for those road-trip weekends (and for several years after graduation) was to make an outing to nearly Arlington on Saturday morning. We’d have lunch at the old Tia’s as soon as it opened, and would then walk off our post-enchilada feast with a stroll through the CompUSA retail store there in the strip mall.

Back in the early 90s, there weren’t that many places to go to get your hands on PC tech, at least not where we lived. There were the campus bookstore, a few office supply stores, and the occasional mom-and-pop PC assemblers, but nothing that carried all of the parts, supplies and accessories that we need to keep our dorm kit working. CompUSA was the only accessible exception, in that they had an entire Macintosh division to accompany their collection of IBM compatible PCs. Remember: there were no Apple Retail Stores back then.

Back in the late 80s, a box of these cost more than dinner out

Things that we take for granted now – like effective customer service – just didn’t exist back then in tech retail. When we took our walk through the old Arlington CompUSA, none of the employees were interested in providing service of any kind. The people you met wearing corporate livery were just as likely to sneer at you and walk away as they were to answer a question. We’d walk the aisles and find what we needed without expecting or receiving help from the people expected to provide it. If we ever had a question about a part’s compatibility, we couldn’t just whip out a smart phone and look it up. Many purchases were crapshoots, given how little useful data there was there in the store.

Still and all, it was the only place to go (and the Tex-Mex food beforehand was great), so we made the trip about once every four to six weeks. We’d meet up with local friends, exchange news and generally catch up [1]. If we were lucky, one of the engineers or computer scientists we knew would show up for lunch and would stick around for the traditional walk-through. That’s how I first learned about Windows NT 3.51 and OS/2 “Warp.”

The “redshirts” manning the floor, meanwhile, had only one thing to offer: pressure to buy whatever useless piece of kit they were poised to get the highest commission on. After the Arlington location closed down and shifted to Hurst, I’d still visit occasionally, usually on the weekend when I needed a cheap part that wasn’t worth having shipped. On several occasions, I watched the store’s smarmy sales weasels intercept confused-looking customers in the Apple “store-within-a-store” corner and vector them over to the PC area with outlandish claims of how the customer could get “exactly the same computer for less.” The redshirt would then escort the cheated customer to the register to ensure they got their pound of flesh.

The chain became a running joke among people in my corner of the tech sector. It was a caricature of a tech business; not a legitimate place to purchase goods and services. No one that I knew took them seriously.

‘With all the dosh I saved buying her that off-brand PowerBook, I can afford to drink until I forget that she just left me in disgust.’

Once Internet commerce became de rigueur, visits to the old neighbourhood CompUSA dropped to once a quarter, to once a year, to never. Even when you needed something desperately and they were the only store in the city likely to have what you need, it was just too irritating to put up with the employees’ condescending behaviour.

I violated that self-imposed rule two years ago early on a Sunday morning. I was on my way to my oldest son’s Eagle Scout Court of Honour ceremony and discovered that the laptop we’d been planning to use to display some of the multimedia content at the venue was inoperable. I needed a DVI-D to VGA video cable adapter immediately. It was too early for any of my preferred vendors to be open, but I had to find something … I dashed up the road to my nearby Wal-Mart (they didn’t have it) and Target (ditto). I drove across the motorway to the nearest OfficeMax (closed) and spotted a brand-new CompUSA down the strip that had its front doors open.

‘Open for business’ … Don’t say it unless you mean it.

Dare I hope? [2]

I parked and made a beeline for the store. The doors were propped open and all the lights were on. I walked past a knot of employees who were chatting idly by the tills – not the least bit surprised when none of them greeted me or asked if they could help. I found the right aisle, found my product and went up to the till … which was, by then, unmanned. I had to interrupt the smoking-and-joking crew by the front door to get the lethargic floor manager’s attention.

“We’re not open yet,” the lead jack-wagon said.

“Really?” I said. “The front door is open, and it’s two minutes before your posted opening hours. I’m desperately in need of this part, I only have a twenty, and you can keep the change.”

“We’re not open yet,” he said again, and turned back to his co-worker’s riveting anecdote about a recent drunken sexual escapade.

The irrational animal part of me wanted to Hulk-out and lay waste to the complex, reducing both it and its denizens to smoking rubble. Since that course of action was both physiologically improbable and the probability of getting arrested would have made me late for my boy’s ceremony, I dropped the cable on the counter and walked out. I never went back.

Alienating the wrong customers can have explosive downstream effects on your business.

Those negative experiences with the CompUSA brand stuck with me (especially the last one). It didn’t matter how slick their web presence was, [3] or what kind of special pricing they offered. I was not about to give one red cent to their brand thanks to the way I’d been treated by their employees.

As a aggrieved customer, I have the power of the crowd (literally) in my pocket. Back when the incident happened, I could have captured the entire encounter on my smartphone and uploaded the video clip to YouTube to lampoon the previously-mentioned jack-wagon. I could have posted a scathing store review to a dozen different user-review sites. I could have recorded a podcast deconstructing the poor customer service in excruciating detail. I could have drawn a darkly satirical web comic about it. I could have written a humorous ‘blog post [4] about it, and so on. Now, I could also take my message to Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook. There are hundreds of places to post a rant, thereby not-so-subtly influencing dozens or hundreds or tens of thousands of other customers.

Social media and other indirect engagement tools are great ways to keep customer attitudes generally positive after a customer’s first brand encounter; those tools are, however, next to useless if your own employees are irredeemably poisoning customers’ attitudes in one-on-one encounters the first time a new customer encounters the brand. Or the tenth time. Or the hundredth time. Customer loyalty may start with a TV advert, but it usually dies after a reasonable customer experiences an unforgivable snub.

[1] This was pre-Facebook, remember; these things were done “in person.”

[2] No.

[3] It wasn’t – I thought it was awful to the point of being unusable.

[4] I have to point out that the old CompUSA brand is now defunct, which suggests that today’s column will have about as much impact to the old brand as a neutrino pulse.

The post Terminal customer disservice appeared first on Business Technology.

Karl Marx famously urged the proletariat to ‘seize the means of production’ in order to change society such that everyone would be treated more equitably. Had he been born a century later, he might have exhorted us to ‘seize the means of promotion’ instead. These days, your online reputation is more influential to your corporate and individual survival than what you actually produce.

Consider: most everyone has a smartphone in his pocket these days. We all have ubiquitous Internet access, 24/7. We have the ability to post photos, videos, documents, opinions, and pithy comments any and every time the mood strikes us. This has led to a curious new democratization of reputation management and information protection: everyone around the globe that has even a cursory interest in your brand can (and will!) chime in on your company’s every move, often before you realize that you have a problem. Worse, the quality of a post can often have more influence than the official status of its creator. If ‘AngryEssexFishmonger47’ drafts a catchy post that resonates with readers, it’ll get greater exposure than anything coming out of your official public relations office.

‘OMG! … AngryEssexFishmonger47 just associated that product I’ve never heard of with “dysentery.” I have to forward this to everyone I’ve ever met.’

This shift in control over your brand can have devastating consequences if you’re not actively engaged in defending your image. All companies, big and small, have their fans and their detractors. All companies make mistakes. When your brand stumbles, it’s guaranteed that someone outside the organization will take notice. Living on the Internet means you’re always being watched’.

Also, you can no longer count on your own rank-and-file to circle the wagons in stony silence when confronted with disgruntled customers. More often than not, the news of your misstep – or even the cause of the misstep – will come from a rogue employee inside the company. When everyone has an Internet-connected camera phone, every customer, employee, contractor, janitor and passerby becomes a potential security risk.

Twenty years ago, a blunder might have earned you a negative mention in the press. Ten years ago, you’d likely see a reporter ‘blog about your gaffe separate from what made it through the editorial gauntlet to make it into print. Now, any misstep can trigger dozens or hundreds of posts, tweets and cross-linked jokes dissecting every aspect of your problem. God help you if you do something that inspires a new Internet meme; the actual precipitating event becomes irrelevant compared to how strongly the joke resonates with the global audience.

‘Why is everyone still upset? I thought people liked cake …”

It’s not enough to have a recognizable logo and a public website anymore; to compete in this era, you need a clever team of evangelists working day and night to get your version of events posted for public consumption. Social networking is the new battlefield for mindshare, and ceding the field constitutes your brand’s unconditional surrender. Halfhearted engagement, likewise, constitutes capitulation to your critics and competitors. If you want your brand to survive in the face of constant, unlimited exposure from within and without, you have to commit extensive resources to actively engage your friends and foes alike, and you cannot ever quit the field.

POC is Keil Hubert, keil.hubert@gmail.com

The post Full Marx for effort appeared first on Business Technology.

It’s no secret that I’ll be changing employers over the course of the next year. I’ve known for years that my current contract couldn’t extended, no matter how much my current boss might wish it otherwise. The way our rules are set up, you can only remain on the books for so long, and then you have to go elsewhere. [1] I’m glad that it hasn’t been a sombre thing. Quite the contrary, it’s been smiles and handshakes and well-wishes all the way around. My last division supervisor was even kind enough to let me take a little vacation time to go visit an employment fair over in Dallas during some downtime in the production schedule.

I’ve been helping my own people to prepare for new opportunities for years, so I felt reasonably confident when I reached the Dallas Convention Centre. It was your typical seekers’ faire: narrow booths separated by narrow isles, lots of precariously leaning signs, and far too few cheery HR spokespeople to manage the crush of nervous un- or under-employed folks decked out in suits. I’ve been to a lot of these events over the years, and this one was a great example of demand out-stripping supply. Most of the exhibitors did their utmost to collect CVs and re-direct would-be employees to online job boards as swiftly as possible. Kudos to the event’s organizers for making the best of a difficult situation.

As you’d expect, the tone of each company’s booth was different from its neighbours. Some outfits sported a contagiously upbeat tome [2] while others were more sombre and … reserved. [3] Some outfits deployed what seemed like an army to the floor [4] while others were represented by one or two overwhelmed reps who struggled to hold back the tide of résumés. [5] In some cases, you couldn’t even get close to the booth to speak with anyone. [6]

For the most part, though, the 124 of the 125 outfits carried on like you’d expect from seasoned businesses. The reps were genuinely interested in selling their product (their company) to the 3,000 eager customers. Given the CVs I snuck a glance at while I was stalled in the crowded aisles, it looked like a buyer’s (rather than a seller’s) market. I was surrounded by lots of highly-qualified, richly experienced folks with lots to offer. Most everyone stood to make out well from the event. Prestigious multinationals like Intel and IBM were sure to pick up some strong new talent.

As an aside, there was this one company that didn’t seem to fit in …

I’d already completed my circuit of the floor and had run out both CVs and throat lozenges. I was tired, hungry and desperate for a coffee. I was about to call it a day when a young lady nudged my elbow and said hello to me.

I smiled at her. I didn’t recognize her booth or (once I saw it) her company’s name, but that was no reason to be anti-social. I said hello back to her, and made a joke about how crowded it was around us.

The woman shrugged off the comment, stared past me as if already done with me, and then said, “What do you do?”

“I.T. leadership,” I replied.

“What’s high tea leadership?” she said.

I blinked. All right, it was a bit noisy in the hall, and I do drawl when I’m tired. High tea? That was probably my fault.

“No, eye tee leadership,” I said. “Information technology leadership.”

“Oh,” she said, nonplussed. “What’s I.T. leadership?”

I turned to see if she was taking the piss out of me. Her disinterested expression suggested that she was simply running on autopilot and hadn’t given the question any thought at all.

I was struck dumb for about ten seconds as my diplomatic filters all slammed down like airtight blast doors following a hull breach. I felt a bit like the Terminator, scrolling though a menu of optimal responses. The snarky and emotionally-satisfying response that appeared at the top of my list was “I’m sorry for troubling you. Do you have an adult here that I can speak with?”

Explosive decompression should be as vigorously avoided in conversation as it is in orbit

Hence, why the metaphorical blast doors slammed closed before I could speak. That quip probably wouldn’t have gone over well, and would no-doubt have been looked upon poorly by passers-by. It was a silly question, but there was no need to be rude over it. The young woman clearly wasn’t fully engaged in our conversation.

I smiled and finally [7] said, “Well, generally, I.T. leadership is the person or people who guide and oversee a team of I.T. professionals in order to ensure that business objectives are met.”

She nodded, still not focused on me, and said “Is that like programming?”

I blinked. See previous, re: defensive filters.

The lass’s body language suggested that she wasn’t trying to have fun with me. It seemed that she genuinely didn’t know and didn’t care what I was talking about. I asked a few gentle questions about what she did, and quickly got her measure: In her world, “I.T.” was simply something arcane that other people did somewhere else for reasons that didn’t matter to her. She’d most likely seen Hugh Jackman in Swordfish and had made the logical leap that all us tech people were like Hugh. [8]

That brief moment of being utterly gobsmacked provided me with a welcome chance to reorient and change my approach. I’ve dealt with a lot of folks who shared this lady’s perspective; I just had to rummage around in the back of my conversational kit bag to find something suitable to reply with.

I’ve found that most small and medium non-tech-sector businesses neither understand nor appreciate the technologies that keeps their company running. E-mail and voice calls simply happen because they happen everywhere, all the time. You push some buttons and your iPhone sends a text or forwards a cute cat picture or places or acknowledges a phone call. It may or may not be magic making it happen, but how it works is immaterial to getting through your day. You take it for granted, and just assume that it’ll all work when you want it to. Then, when it doesn’t work, you get irate.

This young lady just happened to be one of those folks. From her vantage point, her company’s profits came through delivery of services. Technology simply wasn’t her problem, since she didn’t have to worry about all the telecommunications and financial and process control and messaging systems that made it possible for her employees to perform their required labours. No wonder she seemed surprised at my assertion that there was such a thing as “I.T. leadership;” in her world, there was no obvious, logical need for such a thing.

Hers is not an isolated perspective. I’ve consulted for many small outfits where the proprietor’s tech base consisted of a closet full of mysterious boxes featuring blinky lights. When pressed about what had gone awry with the kit, the proprietor had no idea – “It just broke,” they’d say, without being able to articulate what “it” was or what “it” did for them.

When I was first starting off as a tech sector entrepreneur, I’d (foolishly) embrace these challenges, thinking that a successful small businessman must have some interest in or understanding of how their critical systems functioned. Time and again, I was astounded when I discovered that my irate client simply couldn’t give a damn about the core systems that ran their business – they just wanted their current problem to “go away” (whatever it was) so that they could go back to doing the things that they understood: stocking shelves, running a till, recording sermons, or whatever.

After several years, I stopped doing technical support entirely as a line of business. The decisive moment for me came from a painful engagement with the marketing department at an import/export concern. The marketeers had cobbled together an ad hoc network in order to share digital files and a colour printer. Their printer had stopped working, so they called. It took me several hours to sort things out and get the machines re-built. I’d under-bid the job in order to earn a long-term client, thinking (foolishly) that once they were sorted, they’d put some effort into staying sorted.

Two weeks later, the client called me again for a late-night emergency visit. It seemed that their shared colour printer wasn’t working. When I reached their shop, I found that the employees had forgotten how to access the shared printer … and that had inspired one enterprising soul to physically pick up the printer and carry it from deck to desk, plugging it in as a directly-connected peripheral each time … and she’d then set each computer up to re-share the bloody thing. In less than two weeks, there were over five-dozen iterations of this one printer on their six workstations, as each PC mounted the printer and then shared it to the others, who (in turn) re-shared it with the rest of the network, ad infinitum. Their print jobs were, unsurprisingly, disappearing into the ether.

Not all printers are designed to be “portable”

I wasted four hours undoing all of that damage, all for a measly hundred quid. As I left that night, I warned the manager that the employee with the “good idea” should be forbidden to configure anything ever again. I explained what had gone pear-shaped, and how to keep things running smoothly. She swore that she understood.

Of course it didn’t take. The company called me again a week later. Same problem. I asked if the “good idea fairy” had taken it upon herself to change everyone’s print settings again. “Yes,” the manager said, clearly vexed. “Because the printer had stopped working. So we had to fix it and now it isn’t working for anyone.”

Ten years later, that outfit serves as a shining example of why any business large enough to need a production network needs someone in an I.T. leadership role.

To be clear: this little company didn’t warrant a Chief Information Officer. An I.T. director would have been overkill. Even a dedicated I.T. manager was probably more than they required. Someone, though, needed to be on staff to oversee the company’s tech functions and to ensure that everyone abided by certain rules in order to keep the operation running smoothly.

This import/export business already had a sysadmin – they employed three full-time fellows to run their servers, manage their accounts and keep the cables connected. I met them. Their techs were Windows-only men, and the client who had hired me came from the a department which had decided to go Macintosh-only. Rather than (a) learn how to support the alternative workstations, or (b) provide the workers with PCs that would meet their needs, the sysadmin and his two assistants had simply washed their hands of the entire department and left them to their own devices (literally).

It was no wonder that the marketing department’s equipment was in awful shape; not a single one of the marketeers felt that they were responsible for learning how to use or maintain their tools. They treated their computers like appliances, and then got miffed when their toasters broke. When they went to get help from the resident boffins, the supposed tech department closed the proverbial door on them. Rather than learn to be self-sufficient, they got petulant and ruined their own kit.

That’s where I.T. leadership comes into play. A reasonable and responsible manager would never have allowed the situation to degenerate the way it had at this company. All that these people needed was working tools, policies for how the equipment would be supported, basic controls over untrained users’ ability to destabilize their gear, and some training in how to troubleshoot common errors. The leadership part of that isn’t execution of those tasks – it’s understanding what the business needs, assessing what the employees can and can’t do for themselves, and then enforcing the required standards of conduct. It is as much a diplomat’s art as a boffin’s task-list.

The larger the organization becomes, and the more kit that’s involved, the more there’s a critical need for I.T. leadership. The tech director’s job isn’t a sinecure; it’s a critical position, akin to a ship’s navigator. If you want to get your organization to reach the captain’s objective, then someone has to plot the course and monitor the team’s progress … all the while point out the problems on the horizon that need to be avoided.

All of that history flashed through my mind as the young lady at the jobs booth asked me what I was on about. I smiled at her, cleared my list of snarky replies, and told her, “It isn’t programming, really. It’s more like getting all of those programmer working together effectively.”

The HR lass shrugged her shoulders, unimpressed, and asked if I had a CV that I wanted to give her to pass on to someone in HR.

I smiled and said (honestly), “I’m fresh out. Sorry. But thanks for asking.”

She gave me a reflexive half-smile and went back to listlessly scanning the crowd.

As I made my escape, a gentleman that had been close enough to overhear my exchange with the young lady rolled his eyes in empathy.

“Can you believe that?” He asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I see it all the time.”

[1] There’s an exception that allows you to stay if you replace your boss, but there’s no realistic way to do that given how many people are competing for so few positions. Luck of the draw.

[2] ‘Best of show’ went, hands down, to United Health Group for fielding the most effervescent and cheerful reps on the floor. I spoke with three of their people and couldn’t help but tap into their collective good humour and intoxicating sense of optimism. Well done!

[3] Out of courtesy, I’d prefer to not name those folks.

[4] I’d bet you twenty quid that J.P. Morgan Chase had darned near three dozen reps on the floor. Those folks came in force.

[5] More kudos to an outfit called Glazer’s Distributors. A very cheerful gentleman named Anthony not only answered all of my off-the-cuff questions about his business, its century of history, it’s place in American law, and their product line … He tackled everything I could fire at him while greeting everyone who drifted into the orbit of his booth. Never missed a beat. I thought briefly about hiring him for my outfit just to secure his communications skills.

[6] Amazon: I’m looking at – but not getting to converse with – you. Gadzooks, what a scrum.

[7] Once I’d F5’d my response menu until an appropriate option appeared.

[8] If only …

POC is Keil Hubert, keil.hubert@gmail.com

The post High Tea leadership appeared first on Business Technology.

According to a survey of 1,000 commuters in London, carried out by Infosecurity Europe, 29% of people look at emails – on computers or smartphones – and catch up on work while they’re in bed, especially if they can’t sleep. Apparently, 15% of them do this at the same time as their partner is doing exactly the same thing. 

Three quarters of those who work in bed admit to spending more than 30 minutes a day, (three and half hours a week) doing it – and 22% spend more than two hours a day working in bed, which amounts to 14 hours a week.

When people can’t sleep, the most popular activity is to watch TV (23%), followed by reading a book (20%), or going online (17%) – with ten per cent turning to social media or checking emails. Having a cup of tea is the least popular option.

When asked about the first thing they do when they wake up in the morning, 32% of people said they check their phone for messages. Only six per cent opted for kissing their partner. Thankfully, from a hygiene point of view, brushing teeth (19%) ranks ahead of checking emails (14%).

Technology seems to be having a major impact on how we interact with each other both professionally and personally – including how we don’t interact with our partners in the bedroom (or at least not until after we’ve checked with the technology). Since people admit to checking their phone messages and emails before – at the very least – kissing their partner, does the development of mobile technology mean that romance (in the bedroom, anyway) is dead and that smartphones and the internet now dominate our lives?

By Bob Little

The post Technology alters bedroom activities appeared first on Business Technology.

We’re always being watched. This should not come as a surprise.

This morning, I drove my youngest down to the grocer’s to take part in a fundraising event for his Scout Troop. While setting up their table and signs, my youngest bumped into a ceramic planter that was sitting by the kerb as part of a “spring into spring!” gardening display. He hit it at just the right angle to send it toppling over the edge of the kerb where it broke in half.

“Pick it up,” I told him. “You broke it, so now you have to pay for it.”

He dutifully policed up the shards – one piece of which sported a tag valuing the pot at nearly $50 – and marched straight into the grocers to queue up at a till and make things right.

When we reached the cashier, the woman saw the pieces and immediately called the store manager. She returned several minutes later and said that the Top Man has dismissed the charges for breaking the pot. They knew it was an accident, she said, because they saw it happen on video surveillance. Since my boy had immediately taken responsibility for it without trying to weasel out of his responsibility, the store was willing to cover the loss.  This was the kind of customer they wanted to keep, they said: an honest, forthright one.

We’re always being watched, I reminded him. Watched, and judged. Darned fine life lesson to reinforce.

It’s safest to assume that these are everywhere and, therefore, act accordingly.

On the back page of the local section of the Sunday newspaper this week, a saw a small celebrity news item that spoke to this same point: the paper reported that Representative Steve Cohen [1] “… said he wasn’t flirting with singer Cyndi Lauper last week when he tweeted to her that he ‘couldn’t believe how hot’ she was.”

Oh, for crap’s sake …

If you buy the Distinguished Gentleman’s excuse, he sent the tweet “as a joke” in order to get publicity for his city. Really? I submit that the best response to the Congressman’s flimsy excuse comes from Mr Pratchett’s character  Moist Van Lipwig: “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.”

Twitter wasn’t created to facilitate political self-destruction, but it’s darned effective at doing it. In many ways, Twitter is an optimal mechanism for showing the world that your judgment is suspect. You can take your smartphone or tablet at any time, day or night, and fire off a message to World + Dog. Blitzed or sober, rational or addled, serious or whimsical, you can show the world an artefact of your character with no consideration of the logical consequences.

Once released onto the Internet, embarrassing content is out of your control forever.

Former Congressman Anthony Weiner [2] discovered this truth the hard way [2] back in 2011 when he Tweeted photos of his gentlemanly attributes to several of his Twitter followers. The resulting denials and exposure cost him his credibility … and, later, his job.

In 2010, Wisconsin state Senate candidate Dane Deutsch tweeted, “Hitler and Lincoln were both strong leaders …” and (as one might expect) promptly lost his election bid.

More recently, the Daily Mail posted this on 6^th April: “Britain’s first youth police commissioner was facing urgent calls to quit last night after she tweeted a torrent of foul-mouthed rants boasting about her sex life, drug taking and drinking binges. Paris Brown, 17, also posted violent, racist and anti-gay comments.”

Twitter gaffs are now so commonplace that we’re rarely surprised when a public figure (political or otherwise) says something shocking that undermines the credibility of both themselves, and (by extension) their organization for having the poor organizational judgment to put someone with poor personal judgment in a position of power. Just because these scandals are commonplace, however, does not mean that they’re tolerated.

“I did not want to see that. I can never un-see that. You have ruined ‘My Little Pony’ for me forever.”

Here’s the thing:  we all understand that 99.9999% of people are not paladin material. We’re all flawed creatures, rife with irrational beliefs and biases, and a tendency to make stupid decisions. That’s human nature. However … when you’re operating in your official capacity, you’re expected by your constituents (or your customers) to make a good faith effort to comport yourself professionally, responsibly and admirably. It may not be in your essential nature, but it’s expected of you.

This is the same lesson that we teach to young Scouts as part of their education on basic citizenship: the Scout Oath and the Scout Law are codified ideals that young men are expected to strive to live up to. They’re a code of conduct that differentiates a Scout from a non-Scout. Failure is going to happen; you can’t exemplify high ideals every minute of your life. You can, however, deliberately and willfully struggle to live up to those high ideals. You can choose to exercise sound judgment, and you can take responsibility for your mistakes.

Do your best, and the public can be forgiving of the occasional manifestation of human weakness. Act like an unrepentant git in public, however, and the public will likely lose faith that you’re making an acceptable effort. Can’t figure out what’s forgivable? Here’s a hint: (a) your genitals, (b) praise for Hitler and (c) racial epithets are rarely ever received warmly by the general populace. I’m glad we could clear that up.

If you’re in business or politics today, you’re generally expected to engage with your public via Social Networking Services. Twitter is a popular option. Twitter is potentially useful … provided you have the ability and willingness to get a sober second opinion of your content before it’s released into the wild. Make it standard policy to always have someone other than you review your work, just to be sure there isn’t some way that it could be misunderstood. If your wingman determines that your Tweets are likely to undermine public confidence in your character, then terminate your account before an example your ill-chosen words become a bit on 10 O’Clock Live or The Daily Show.

If a teenager can learn this concept and live it, then the rest of us adults have no excuse. Think before you tweet.

[1] U.S. Congressman from the state of Tennessee.

[2] U.S. Congressman from the state of New York.

[3] No pun intended. Sorry.

The post U R SO HOT #CareerSuicide appeared first on Business Technology.

Throughout most of the world, business is expected to be a sober and rational affair. You can (and should) have passion for your product or service, for customers or “for quality,” but the overall operating environment is usually supposed to be one where the various buyers, makers and sellers all agree to buy, make and sell products and services and leave it at that. If you’re not a church or a manufacturer of church paraphernalia, then your personal religious beliefs aren’t supposed to intrude upon one’s business.

Supposed to. Unless you live here in “The South™” …

Have you ever been here? If you haven’t, I submit that it’s an interesting place. I’ve been living here on and off for over twenty years. The American South is culturally rich, full of culinary, literary and historical gems. It can be a wonderful place to visit. It’s a highly recommended place to vacation or work … unless you’re allergic to proselytizing. [1]

Here in The South™ a great many people have a tendency to be quite forward about their religious beliefs. That’s not normally a major problem in everyday social situations; most of the time, you can simply nod noncommittally and steer the conversation around to football [2] without invoking any drama.

Receiving the blessing, Texas style

It’s not always a problem in the workplace either, so long as people behave themselves. As we’ve discussed in previous columns, it’s important for me to know who my employees and my customers are. I enjoy taking time to learn more about what’s important to them. I don’t have to agree with someone else’s viewpoint in order to show respect for and interest in them.

Some people, however, aren’t content to answer my questions when asked. Some view their faith as an evangelical mandate and carry their crusade into the office like a crusader breaching a castle wall. These in-your-face, confrontational folks can make a routine business transaction into a pretty ugly affair.  Here are a few examples of how some very nice (but overzealous) folks turned routine business transactions into terribly uncomfortable encounters.

First example: I was invited to a conference call with a major supplier to discuss getting some demo products for our R&D team. After fifteen minutes of negotiations, the lead manager for the supplier surprised everyone on the call by insisting on “leading the group in prayer” in order to solicit God’s explicit approval of the transaction. The fellow’s stream-of-consciousness invocation went on for what felt like an hour. Everyone in the conference room with me was cringing, not wanting to express disapproval, but really not wanting to be there.

Second example: I was asked to install a departmental file server for an educational client. During the pre-engagement site survey, one of the clients stopped the discussion about storage requirements cold. He demanded that everyone in the room “pray for guidance” on the endeavour. The man’s expression and tone made it quite clear that if I didn’t agree to participate, my company wouldn’t be awarded the contract. He even insisted on everyone at the conference table holding hands while he did his thing.

This is perfectly appropriate at home; is it still appropriate if the dinner table is replaced by a conference table, and the children with outside contractors?

Third example: During a meeting of section managers that I attended each week, the division’s senior manager announced that we were going to receive some “professional development.” He then popped a DVD into the conference room player and subjected the team to a recording of an hour-long sermon from his church’s pastor. The sermon held about two minutes of actual applicable content; the rest was an admonition for non-believers to convert. Utterly inappropriate, but no one felt like they could object without triggering retaliation.

This kind of behaviour is unfortunately common throughout The South™. People openly wear crosses (some small and tasteful, others large, bejewelled and garish). People decorate their offices and cubicles with pictures and knick-knacks festooned with crosses and Bible quotes. People put religious decals on the back windows of their vehicles. [3] Most of the time, it’s not a big deal; freedom of expression and all that. The displays only become pernicious if you’re not within one step of your co-workers’ beliefs. Deviate too far, and … Well, some folks can get ugly with you. It’s rare, but it happens.

I’ve worked with atheists, Muslims, Jews, Native American spiritualists, Wiccans, Catholics, and one Pastafarian. Representatives from every one of these faiths has complained to me privately over the years that they’ve felt alienated and ostracized by what they perceive as constant pressure to participate in Protestant Christian practices in the office – essentially, pretending to be someone they’re not in order to maintain workplace harmony. Over time, the need to stay “in the closet” around their co-workers leads some people to transfer departments or even to resign. [4]

Which critical team member can you afford to alienate?

This isn’t meant to be an indictment of Southern culture or people. It’s just an artefact of how some people were raised. I’ve found that around half of adults will sincerely apologize and back off when you point out to them that you consider their proselyting to be offensive or unwelcome. What frustrates me is that a lot of these folks had no idea that their evangelism could possibly be considered offensive.

So, what does all this have to do with the intersection of business and technology?

Here’s the thing, folks: The South™ is on its way to your door. This isn’t a rant; it’s a warning. You’re going to have to learn how to deal with this phenomenon, too.

I’ve reconciled with this aspect of living here in The South™. I know how to smoothly manoeuvre my way through a confrontation to avoid causing unnecessary offense. I’m experienced in counselling employees on why they need to change their behaviour. I’ve had a lot of practice at it. If you haven’t had to deal with this yet, I’m sorry to tell you that it’s inescapable. When a phenomenon like the Harlem Shake video can ricochet all over the planet in a matter days, you’re subject to other peoples’ and other cultures’ idiosyncrasies no matter where you live.

Like it or not, instantaneous global communications and ubiquitous bandwidth are making it easier than ever before for these moments of cultural confrontation to affect you no matter where you are, be it in Cardiff or Glasgow or Bradford … Really, anywhere that you have a cellular or Wi-Fi connection, you can find yourself caught up in someone else’s cultural conceit.

“Surely, the overwhelming tide of schmaltzy cat photos can’t reach me in the middle of an isolated loch.”

I noticed this happening via network tech around twenty years ago when people started jazzing up their *.sig files on the university mainframe with pithy quotes and boilerplate closings. Today, lots of employees will use their work e-mail to subtly proselytize – the most common where I live is to close one’s e-mails with the phrase “Have a blessed day,” instead of “sincerely” or “respectfully.” Some folks will replace the automatic closing text on mail sent from their smart phones from “Sent from my BlackBerry handset” to “Have a blessed day!” or “Bless your heart!’ Because it’s a one-time, set-and-forget feature of the phone or e-ail client, the evangelist can set the phrase once and have it apply every time they send a message.

Exploiting new technology to proselytize is nothing new; look at the printing press. Then look at pretty much everything else invented since then.

I don’t object to that form of use for a given technology; I do object to using my company’s implementation of said technology (like our mail server and official company dispatches) as a tool to spread your faith. Our company welcomes employees and customers from all beliefs and walks of life. It’s our official company policy that we don’t discriminate over religious preferences, just like we don’t discriminate based on race, gender, ethnicity, etc. Believe what you want to believe; your faith is none of our business.

Most people understand that who you are outside of work is none (and, sometimes, nun) of their business

That’s not enough for some people, though. There are some employees who feel entitled to misuse company resources to further their outside agenda, be it political or philosophical or religious. These people naturally take advantage of new technologies, and that inevitably leads to unnecessary conflict. You’ll see it with video teleconferencing, Voice-Over-IP calls, desktop sharing, e-mail, social networking, video, podcasting … even flags. If the tech can convey a message, then enterprising evangelists will use it to spread their message. When Google’s Glass project finally make Augmented Reality a commonplace thing, you can bet your last pound coin that the evangelists will mark their cars, houses and offices with religious iconography so that you have no choice but to acknowledge their declaration.

The problem is not, and has never been, about faith itself. Nor is it about freedom of speech. Decorate your home and your car and your cubicle and your accessories however you like. The problem comes when your speech (in whatever fashion it’s delivered) becomes overtly confrontational with another person. It’s one thing to wear or to display a symbol; that’s passive. A viewer can choose to comment on it or not. It’s something else entirely to force a discussion about your beliefs. When a person interjects their non-work-related beliefs into a business encounter, especially in a business environment, it puts the other participants in an awkward and unacceptable position. People don’t come to work to have their religion changed; they come to do work, collect a pay packet, and go home.

Most businesses don’t allow employees to introduce sexual topics or artefacts into the workplace for fear that they could be sued for creating a work environment conducive to sexual harassment or other misconduct. Oddly enough, a great many businesses don’t have a similar policy regarding the introduction of spiritual topics and artefacts. I’ve come to suspect that this is because religion is such a touchy subject; companies don’t want to be sued over allegations of religious discrimination.

Unfortunately, those lawsuits are going to happen if you don’t set some kind of policy regarding not being a jerk around the office. One well-meaning employee with a personal mission to convert others can cause irreparable harm to employee morale and productivity. Conflict-averse people will avoid the offender, even if it interferes with the execution of business. Customers will disengage. Suppliers and partners will distance themselves. It’s unnecessary, and it’s counter-productive, and therefore it doesn’t belong at work. Knock it off.

Everyone in this photo is earning £500/hour. End the madness.

I propose that rather than try to regulate “acceptable” speech via corporate policy, we advance the following push/pull doctrine in the workplace:

“Here at Company.com, we respect and encourage all people’s outside views and interests. When you’re at work, we expect you to engage in responsible, consensual speech with one another. If someone asks you about a subject that is not related to the conduct one your official duties, (e.g., sex, politics, religion, sport, etc.), speak freely for as long as the requesting party is comfortable with the discussion. Once they tell you that they’re no longer willing to discuss the subject, stop discussing it and don’t brig it up again until and unless asked. Do not force anyone else to engage with you on topics that are not work-related without their expressly and clearly communicated consent. Respect others’ privacy and beliefs and they’ll respect yours so that we call can get along.”

That means taking “bless you” out of your e-mails, memos and phone calls. I appreciate the sentiment behind it, but you have no way of knowing whether or not someone else will respond negatively to it. Therefore, leave it outside the workplace if you work anywhere other than a church.

[1] Or if you go out of your way to provoke the natives. Remember when the Top Gear lads took their tomfoolery a step too far in their visit to The South™ in series 9? Yeah … that’s not recommended.

[2] American football, that is. Also known as the official religion of Texas high schools.

[3] One of the most popular decorations here in Texas is the silhouette of a cowboy and a horse kneeling before a cross. During my trips to London, I’ve walked for hours and hours, and have never once seen one of these on a vehicle.

[4] In some places I’ve worked in The South™, you were far more likely to be reviled for “coming out” as an atheist than you were “coming out” as a homosexual back when being non-hetero constituted grounds for termination.

POC is Keil Hubert, keil.hubert@gmail.com

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Anti-spam group Spamhaus was hit by a wave of cyber attacks last month after trying to block internet traffic from CyberBunker, an organisation which provides websites for firms offering what it describes as “anything except child porn and terrorism”.

CyberBunker, which is based in a Cold War bunker in the Dutch countryside, has been accused of involvement in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where a site is overwhelmed with service requests – often from hijacked computers – to the point that it cannot deal with legitimate traffic.

Web performance company CloudFlare, which was called in to deal with the Spamhaus attack, has described it as “the DDoS that almost broke the internet” and says it may have made internet services “sluggish”, particularly in Europe.

A CloudFlare release on the attack reads: “Over the last few days as these attacks have increased, we’ve seen congestion (…) primarily in Europe where most of the attacks were concentrated, that would have affected hundreds of millions of people even as they surfed sites unrelated to Spamhaus or CloudFlare.”

Method of attack

And, while the extent of its fallout has been disputed, the method of attack could cause huge damage in the future.

Professor Alan Woodward, a visiting professor at Surrey University who has previously worked for the government, disagrees with claims that the onslaught managed to slow down the internet, but says it highlights a new method of DDoS which could result in chaos – unless people wake up to the threat.

“In the past, what’s happened in a classic DDoS attack was lots of PCs sending simple requests to a web server until it’s too much to deal with – it’s essentially an electronic sit-in,” he says.

“But this attack used a different technique, involving Domain Name System (DNS) severs which translate domain names into IP addresses – essentially the phone book of the internet.

“When we make a request to the DNS, it sends back up to 100 times what you sent it. The Spamhaus attack involved making requests to the DNS with a spoof user name.

“The attack did cause some disruption, but it only used 30,000 DNS servers – but there are 25m that could be subverted this way.”

DDoS attacks have dealt blows to major banks – including American Express – in the past, but the new method could result in much bigger attacks.

Time to pay attention

Woodward wrote a BBC post on March 27, 2012 – exactly one year before the “internet-busting” Spamhaus attack – warning about the new attack method, and says people now need to “pay attention”.

He says: “I got hate mail from people saying ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’, but they need to pay attention to  this now.

“You can solve the problem by reconfiguring the servers, but the issue is nobody wants to be responsible for it. The government can’t do anything, because they don’t run the infrastructure.”

A large-scale attack could deal a huge blow to businesses and services across the world. In one estimate made two years ago, cyber security specialist BAE Systems Detica said UK firms could lose £27bn from cybercrime and cyber espionage every year.

In an article about the recent attack, a Spamhaus representative writes: “Core internet infrastructure may be overwhelmed by the amount of traffic involved in an attack.

“When that happens, all traffic that passes through that part of the internet is impacted.”

Grave threats

But Woodward warns there are much graver threats than those to business and internet services.

He says: “The threat isn’t just to UK PLC – the threat to the national infrastructure is what concerns me most.

“There are all these stories about countries planning to build nuclear weapons. But why would you bomb a country into submission, when you can just turn the lights off [using a cyber attack]?

“The threat is quite widespread – you even have videos on Youtube advertising DDoS attacks.”

Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer for global cyber security firm Bit9, says the Spamhaus case could lead to more advanced attacks of its kind.

He says: “We are witnessing the largest DDoS attack in history. Today it’s that one company, but now that information is out there for everybody.

“People with other motives are now going to be able to do that.”

And cyber attacks are not likely to stop. While hacker groups such as Anonymous seem determined to keep going after their targets, disputes such as the one between Spamhaus and CyberBunker could keep flaring up – leading to more friction and attacks.

And with CyberBunker’s general manager Jordan Robson criticising Spamhaus for making “childish claims” about his organisation’s activities, this spat looks unlikely to die down. The results for business could be disastrous.

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