Above the RIM

OTR: Commuting Cost Lockdown

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 23:57:00 +0000

I was thinking about this the other night while I was driving home from the office. I'm doing the "hybrid" work schedule these days. We're asked to be in the office three days a week. However, I am working on a project that requires a fair number of meetings with colleagues in Asia, so I have days where the first call starts at 7am and the last call ends after 8pm. My normal commute is about an hour each way and that will make for a very early start and a very rushed dinner if I want to catch the late call at home. So I try to get in a couple days a week and add a day if I need to meet in person with someone.

Now add in the price of gas. I have a decently efficient VW Tiguan that generally gets north of 30 miles per gallon for my commuting. My prior car averaged around 22mpg, so that is actually a big improvement. Gas is pretty much double what it was during Covid and close to doubling pre-Covid, so even with better mileage, the savings are gone if I drive to work every day. A shorter workweek helps matters, but I'm sure that many people are feeling the pinch, especially when coupled with inflationary increases on everything else.

This makes me wonder if we're headed back to knowledge workers staying home, simply because going to work costs too much. I know that Metra (the commuter rail system) is experimenting with $100 monthly passes that allow unlimited rides anywhere on the rail system. I suspect they will get some takers and draw people back to the train if they are heading into Chicago from an outlying suburb.

In any event, the new ways that we work and the resistance of many people to leaving their bunny slippers behind, coupled with higher expenses, may accelerate the "Great Resignation" as people look for "remote" job opportunities or work that is closer to home. It will further exacerbate the real estate challenges of many organizations where predicting capacity needs will become a nightmare. And, very likely draw a bigger divide between employees who have to come to the office / factory and people who can work from home.

As a side note, as I watch gas prices continue to climb, I noticed that those big gas station signs with the digital numbers on them only go to $9.99. I had a flashback to 1980 when gas had to be sold by the liter because the mechanical price reels on the pumps only went to $.999. We may be seeing that again soon. In the meantime, you might want to invest in companies that make those big gas station signs -- or the temporary number ones that will be bolted to the signs.

OTR: Electric Vehicles

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 23:18:00 +0000

I saw this article this morning and it pretty well sums up why I won't be buying an electric car anytime soon. https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-car-road-trip-highlights-issues-driving-cross-country-charging-2022-6

Why?

1. Base cost of the vehicle. Any decent car is expensive these days, but electric cars are around $10,000 more expensive than gasoline powered cars. Yes, you avoid gas stations and oil changes, but you're still paying for electricity.

2. Infrastructure. You have to recharge the vehicle and that means adding a charging station to your garage. Depending on what you need / want, that can be a minor electrician expense or the need to add electrical capacity to your residence. Plugging the car in at night to a regular outline will likely not give you a full charge if the battery is drawn down. On the road, you have to find one that is available and fast. Many of the charging stations out there aren't yet set up for high speed.

3. Range. If I'm just back and forth to the office (40 miles each way), an electric vehicle is fine. But if you're making a longer trip, you're going to need to stop about every 300 miles and hope there is a high speed charger available. My Tiguan can go about 500 miles on a tank of gas -- that's about as much as I can drive by myself in a single day. Getting from home to see my in-laws likely would mean sweating out the last half hour of the drive. I normally will make that trip with one bio break. Having to park and recharge the car for a half hour (or more) is not worth it.

4. Durability. I like to keep my cars for ten years or so. Post-Covid, maybe longer because the miles aren't piling up like they used to. I'm not convinced that electric cars have that durability yet.

Chicago to New Orleans is between 900 and 1000 miles -- around 14 to 15 hours of driving. In my Tiguan, I'd likely be stopping in Tennessee for the night. The reporter indicated that the trip took far longer than expected (although the linked article doesn't give numbers that reflect reality). It sounds like, to be safe, you're stopping for extended charges at least three, and probably four, times. That's going to require good planning. I've read articles that advise people to just plan to have a sit down meal while the car charges. Well, yeah, but when I'm going somewhere, I'd like to get there -- and while leisurely meals are something you probably should do on vacation, that also means you need to find an available charging station near a decent place to eat. You also want to hope that your hotel has a charging station -- and another guest doesn't plug in and head to bed.

So while the prospect of $6 a gallon gas certainly has me looking for options, I'm still not sold on electric cars quite yet. Yes, there are some tax incentives and other means to reduce up front cost, but I think we are still very early in this lifecycle. I'm not ready to be an early adopter.

OTR: The New Workplace

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 03:38:00 +0000

Corporate America has a big problem. It's called real estate. Many companies have too much of it because the workforce has decided that it doesn't need to come back to the office.

As I drove up to the office this morning, I took note of various office building parking lots along the tollway. There was Allstate's huge campus -- deserted. That property has been sold and the workers are either staying home or going to other facilities. Next up... Walgreens. Also pretty empty. Trustmark... empty. Tenneco...empty.

The Abbott Park campus for AbbVie and Abbott looked more populated, but there are a fair number of scientists and production workers who need to be there. At my office building, home to the IT folks, parking was quite good. I went in and walked to my office, saying hello to a few people. But my end of the floor was pretty empty. As the day progressed, I had some folks drop by, and I stopped to say hello to others in the office. But my meetings were on Microsoft Teams.

Pre-COVID, our building was just about maxed out for occupancy. Offices were hard to come by, and the Facilities folks were trying to hold down moves so they could get a handle of space availability. Moves have resumed and we're starting to sort out where people can be to work more effectively when they are in the office. But it is clear that something will need to change -- companies can't continue to pay for space that isn't being fully utilized. That means changes -- likely to "hoteling" sorts of space arrangements. You don't have a permanent spot, but maybe get assigned a "neighborhood" or get together with other folks that you need to collaborate with on a given day. You come to the office when you need to meet or work with others. These arrangements have plusses and minuses. As a manager, I like having a door for employee meetings or discussion of sensitive matters. And no one really wants to have to sit by the boss... People who have experienced these sorts of arrangements say that sitting cheek by jowl with folks means that the office gets loud. The noise level means that people then live with headsets and earbuds in all the time, not really collaborating with those around them. Some people like to "nest". They like to make their office or cube their own, but that is hard to do when you don't have your own space.

I'm a nester.

So it is likely that we will again need to adapt to changes in how we work -- and when we work together in person. But that also means getting folks to willingly come to the office. If you're going to spend a couple hours commuting every day, incurring public transportation or increasing gas expenses, there needs to be a good reason to make the trek. I've found myself surprised to find that I need the social aspect of the office more than I thought, but I also know that sitting in an anonymous, sterile workspace, plugged in to a headset, having meetings online, isn't exactly what I want to come back to. I suspect that we are going to have to learn how to work differently.

So how do we maximize the value of being in the office? There's the million dollar question. As you look through the window into my office, know that there is nothing in that picture that I don't have at home. In fact, as you may have read in a prior post, I have some better things in my home office. I'll quickly admit that I'm lucky in that regard. I have a dedicated office space, high speed Internet, a huge monitor, and a really nice ergonomic chair. But others love to work from their laptop in a recliner or in bed or even at the kitchen table.

For knowledge workers, then, the value of being in the office has to be realized. Management can't talk about sunk cost of facilities, "fairness" to other workers who have to come to a company facility, or collaboration benefits that haven't quite been worked out. As we adapted at the beginning of COVID, we have to adapt once again.

When I think about a collaborative workplace, my mind is drawn to the old Dick Van Dyke Show of the 1960's. The "office" scenes were Dick's character, Rob Petrie, and his office mates putting together comedy sketches and routines for a weekly variety show. The team of writers continually collaborated to put together a show. That type of creative work is all about collaboration. When I was consulting, some projects required us to document a particular business process. We'd go out and gather information from the client, then come back together and document the different elements of the process, making connections between individual elements. Ultimately, we had to find ways to streamline the process. That required some collaboration.

When I think about what I do -- and what many of my colleagues do -- we're quite siloed, working in distinct business processes, cranking out particular pieces of work. Often when we come together with others, they aren't in the cube or office next to us -- they are in Europe, or Asia, or Latin America.

In my mind, then, the question is -- how do we normalize collaboration for otherwise siloed work? We can't force it. We likely have to look at our work differently. Is this a task that we could knock out more quickly if several of us sit down and work through the task? Is there value in a more junior person scribing the decisions made (and thus learning the process and the interpretations)? Do we hold off on answering email until the afternoon? Do we set expectations around what kinds of communications are necessarily synchronous, and which ones are asynchronous? Do we have meeting free days for more focused siloed work, training, and one on one meetings with managers?

Do we change the way that we utilize our workforce? Do our most valuable knowledge workers become an internal consulting force, dedicated to one or two simultaneous projects that are completed in an accelerated manner? Do we identify subject matter experts or do we ensure that subject matter expertise is spread around? Do we silo only the complex, repeatable tasks that can't be moved to a managed service?

The other question is -- how do we hold people accountable when we can't see them every day? That's a huge learning curve for many managers. It requires a change to how we set expectations and define deliverables. Knowledge workers are often firefighters -- having to address an urgent, unexpected need that wasn't in the day's plan. That causes work to be set aside and deliverables delayed. Which then means we have to better define what is important and what can wait -- and how we measure the work we do.

The workplace has been altered in a significant way. The way we work and where we work has been changed. Companies are faced with empty real estate and unhappy employees -- employees who have to work away from home and employees who can work from home, but aren't allowed to do so. These dynamics will force the next change in how work gets done.

OTR: Working from Home -- 18 Months Later

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 02:15:00 +0000

Fourteen years ago -- yes, I have been sporadically blogging for that long -- I wrote a post called, "The Two Minute Commute". I had forgotten about that post until I re-read it this evening -- after I finally finished this post. It took a while, but I've been living that life now for most of 18 months. What's interesting is how I imagined it would be and how it turned out. Oh, and that long ago work style never happened. Massive downsizing tends to make space available in a company.

For most of the past 25 years, working from home has been an option for me. At first, it involved tying up the household phone line with a noisy modem connection. But I had a laptop and the ability to produce work away from the office. During that time, my home workspace evolved from a cluttered table in the kitchen or basement to a dedicated office space with a door after we did some remodeling.

Early on, working from home was a rarity -- a critical need or weather would force the issue. By 9/11/2001, working from home was more common. I recall being at home on that fateful day and being able to turn the TV on and see what was happening. I was home that day because my wife was ill and we had a pre-school child who needed to be looked after.

Through the next 20 years, I improved my workspace. I bought better monitors; added KVM switches to enable me to easily switch between my work computer and my home computer using the same keyboard, video monitor and mouse; I bought better seating and work surfaces; and I added a TV in my office. Working from home was now a treat -- but mostly a way to avoid bad weather or work while recuperating from some back surgeries where I was able to work, but not drive for a month. So at the point that Covid showed up, I had worked at home for some extended periods and had a comfortable workspace with most of what I needed at hand.

On Monday, March 16, 2020 -- my last day in the office -- I locked up my cabinets, turned off my monitors, and grabbed a few things that I thought would be useful at home. My Dilbert calendar remained on my desk because we expected to be home "for a couple weeks".

I got home, popped my laptop in the docking station I had purchased previously for my home office and took stock. The prior Christmas, my daughters had gifted me with a Samsung 43-inch curved, flat screen monitor (now apparently no longer available). I had been looking for a second monitor for my home setup and stumbled on this monitor instead. It had a built-in KVM switch and after a bit of fiddling, I had gotten it to work seamlessly with my home setup. I knew that I'd like that monitor, but I had no idea how much.

I dug out an old webcam that I hadn't used since my prior job and dusted off a couple sets of USB headphones that I had squirreled away. Up to that point, I had been using headphones with my landline phone for conference calls, but we were shifting to video conferencing with our relocation to home.

That first week was a major learning curve for everyone. With huge numbers of people working remotely, plus schools shifting to remote learning, a lot of technology crashed and burned. Our technology folks moved quickly to deploy new tools and enable capabilities that had only be discussed previously. Co-workers were often scrambling to find places at home to work. But work continued. After all, it would just be for a few weeks...

At the end of May, my employer merged with another company. The merger happened while most of the people who would be involved in making companies come together were working from home. It has been a remarkable process.

As Spring turned to Summer, we began to realize that this would go on for a while. We started scheduling "water cooler meetings" to check in on our teammates and share our latest Amazon purchases or recipes. We had some late afternoon cocktail meetings just to be casual and maintain connections. I hired two employees -- who I never saw except through my monitor. I decided to buy a new office chair -- one that matched my in office ergonomic chair. I found that I could customize it and decided to get a longer piston so I would sit a little higher. Unfortunately, I didn't check dimensions with a tape measure and discovered that the lowest setting on the tall piston put my knees at desktop height. A phone call and FedEx resolved that problem.

Along the way, I did manage to get out a little. A few visits to a friend gave me some change of scenery and company. The Internet kept me working like I had been, minus my big screen and nice chair.

Summer started to turn to Fall, and it looked like we might head back to the office. Some people did, but the check in protocols and in office safety protocols didn't make it very conducive. Covid ramped back up and we all stayed home. I started experimenting with different desk lamps to deal with early darkness and late night meetings.

Fall became Winter and the vaccines started to arrive. Some people went back in again, but we mostly stayed home. Winter turned to Spring. The company started to offer vaccine appointments, with factory workers and scientists who had to be in the building getting first dibs. Eventually, my turn came in April and May and it looked like we might finally be returning to the office. At the end of May, the safety protocols were lifted and I decided to venture back in mid-June.

On June 9, I opened my office door for the first time since I had closed it 450 days previously. There was my Dilbert calendar. There was a 20th anniversary Lucite plaque for someone on my team who had the anniversary while we were gone, and had taken another job in the company during the interim.

There was amazingly little dust and a sign on my desk proclaimed that my office had been sanitized at some point. For the next couple weeks, I went into the office a few times to reacquaint myself with the commute and start to see people I had missed. Traffic wasn't bad and parking was great. The vending machine company, however, had given up on stocking our machines.

Within a couple weeks, we were invited back to the office. We found some treats on our desks to welcome us back.

Most of my team was able to come in, but there were still some challenges. Parents didn't have day care or summer camps for their kids. Office moves weren't happening, so transferred employees couldn't come in to their new location. Then we started to use our "work from home" conferencing technology and had a whole new learning curve. Our conference rooms were mostly set up for audio conferencing and trying to make video conferencing work was... difficult. We had a cookout in the parking lot during week two and ice cream during week three. We started having in-person meetings again. We rediscovered hallway conversations that enabled us to avoid meetings. But the population was definitely not at pre-Covid levels. Parking was quite good, however.

Then Covid got another vote. The in-office safety protocols ramped up again and it seemed pointless to drive for an hour each way so I could lock myself in my office all day. On August 2nd, I locked up my cabinets, turned off the monitors and power strips and went home. The Dilbert calendar came with me this time.

So I'm home again, although if I need to be in the office, it is open. People who have gone in say it is back to being a ghost town.

While I was back in the office, I managed to get my laptop replaced -- it was getting very long in the tooth and showing its four and a half years of use. That led to a new set up at home that wasn't working as well as the old setup for some reason. The new computer didn't like the way it was switched over to the monitor and was fussing about USB connections. I decided to turn to Amazon for a new KVM setup and after a couple days, that seems to have solved the problem. That gave me a good excuse to reorganize the wiring spaghetti and do some dusting.

It's hard to say how long this work at home period will last. I suspect that we may not return to "normal" for a while. One thing is for certain, our expectations about where we work won't be the same.

ATR: Technology Marches On

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 23:20:00 +0000

I actually started this musing a couple years ago, but never quite finished it. Publishing it today, ahead of a completely new post.

*****

I was talking with someone, and it occurred to me that if you are roughly 45 years old or younger, you have likely never worked in an office setting that didn't have email.

My daughter, who teaches high school, reminds me that every kid in high school has been born in this century. The Kindergarten class of 2001 are starting to pick up their Doctorates.

Tempus fugit.

I often shake my head at the apparent pace of change in the workplace. Twenty years ago, it was a rare hotel that offered Internet access. Today, we complain if a hotel doesn't have a reliable connection, no matter where the hotel is.

Let me step through the changes over the past thirty years or so...

In 1985, when I first started working in an office setting, a desktop computer was a novelty. You'd see some computer terminals that were used to access mainframe applications, but the average worker was using paper and pen. You may have had a typewriter at your desk, or shared one with a few others. If you were a boss, you had someone to type your memos and letters. Everything was likely paper-based. Memos were copied and circulated by Inter-office mail. Letters went out through the postal service or, for something urgent, a facsimile machine was available. A reply to a letter might come in a week or so.

In 1988, I started my second job. I walked in to the office and saw a brand new desktop computer at my workspace. I had little idea of what to do with it. I had a learning curve. At first, it was a glorified typewriter. But I learned that we could design forms and start to create databases and spreadsheets. Then we networked the computers in the office together. We could share files and more effectively share the printers. But it was still paper-oriented. We were still an organization of memos and letters, but we could create more of them, faster.

By 1992, when I started my next job, I expected to find a computer at my desk. These were networked for printer and file sharing and we had something called PROFS installed on the computer. PROFS enabled us to email other people in the company. It even had a point to point single line texting capability.

At home, I bought a computer in 1993 and started using America On-Line. It was an isolated world, but I could get email from far-flung places using something called the Internet.

In 1996, the consulting firm I joined handed me a laptop computer. I was amazed when I walked into an office in another city, plugged in my computer, and it worked just like it did in my normal office.

In 1998, my next employer also gave me a laptop -- from here on out, I never used a desktop computer. Shortly after I joined the company, I traveled to another city and found myself in a hotel with Internet access. The firm was trying out a new way to get email over the Internet and I was once again amazed at a new breakthrough.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, I stopped using dial up and started using DSL and had full time Internet availability at home.

Email was rapidly becoming a problem. For a company with over 10,000 employees, email had piled up to over 3 Terabytes of data and was expensive to maintain. We put a project together to reduce the storage by one-third and save $3,000,000 a year.

When I started a new job in 2007, I attended a meeting early on about the storage problem we were having with our document management system. It had passed 50 Terabytes and people were becoming concerned. We quickly determined, however, that the cost of storage was actually a minor point and the cost of holding meetings to discuss storage costs was probably more expensive than the storage we would eliminate.

By 2017, when I started my current job, a terabyte hard drive on a laptop or desktop computer was a common thing. You expected to walk in to your workspace and find two wide screen computer screens set up. And now the cloud is coming on strong. Access to work email and stored files is as close as your mobile device. Not having that access is seen as "behind the times".

I sometimes think about my work journey. When I started working, I carried a huge briefcase because I was going out in the field and filling out paper forms that needed to be brought back to the office and sent to someone to type up. Today, I carry a smaller computer bag, with very little paper in it, but a whole lot of access to data. Heck, the mobile phone on my belt can enable me to work anywhere on the planet at any time, as long as I have a data or wi-fi connection. We produce data at prodigious rates. Email is our primary means of communication. We easily communicate globally. Libraries of information are at our fingertips. The people coming to the workplace take all this for granted. They expect things to happen quickly.

My former career was based upon managing records. In 1985, those records were mostly paper. Today, they are seldom paper -- or only exist in paper form for a brief period of time. I passed someone in the hall one day carrying three big accordion files of paper records. He had found them and was on his way to the shredder.

OTR: Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 20:22:00 +0000

Apple is in trouble... again. Tim Cook says people aren't buying iPhones. He blames a lot of factors, but I don't think he's really being honest.

I'm one of those folks who didn't buy an iPhone again. Why? Too darn expensive for one. I was generally good on price points up to $500 when I could see incremental value on the next iteration of the phone. But dropping up to $1000 on a cell phone? Nope. I can get a decent laptop for that.

I moved over to Android and found some Motorola (Moto) phones in the $200 to $300 price range, unlocked, with more storage and decent features. I've taken that $1000 and bought three different Motorola phones in the past 18 months or so to find out what works for me. The android world is full of options -- and many of those options are at really good price points.

I use a cell phone to make a few calls, look at email and my calendar, do some internet searches, take an occasional picture, and poke at some apps from time to time. Yeah, I'd like my iTunes, but I still have an iPad and I get iTunes there when I travel.

So why are people really not buying iPhones?

1) Cost. Reaching in your wallet for $500 to $1000 every couple years, times the number of phones in your household, is just a non-starter for most people. And adding $30+ a month to your bloated cell phone bill to pay for a new phone is also a non-starter.

2) Functionality and innovation (or lack thereof). What does the new phone do that the old one didn't do? Not very much. Maybe the CPU is a little faster or there are more pixels in the pictures, but I'm not wowed by the feature set anymore. There's nothing that I must have in a new phone.

3) Saturation. Most everyone has a smartphone, so first time buyers are few and far between and phones being purchased are generally replacements for dead or lost phones. You're not going to give your ten-year-old a $1000 iPhone.

In moving to Android and Motorola, what are some of the things that I really like?

1) MicroSD cards. I have a phone with 32 GB of storage onboard, but I've added 128GB of storage in a MicroSD card -- so no futzing with storage issues.

2) Dual SIMs. Not a huge thing, but I've played with this on a couple phones and it is a feature that some people likely must have.

3) The Google ecosystem. Say what you want about Google, but if you have the Chrome browser, Gmail and Google Drive in your life, an Android phone makes a lot of sense. And setting up an Android phone is a breeze. Couple in ChromeOS devices, and you can move from screen to screen with little difficulty.

Apple also has an ecosystem. But I don't find it as mainstream as Google, particularly when you look at email and browsing. That is the sole saving grace, outside of people who simply worship all things Apple. For people with (literally) a huge investment in iTunes, I suspect that is a driving factor, but I haven't found much more. I know that my daughter loves moving from iPhone to her Mac pretty seamlessly, but that isn't me.

Apple is at the same place plenty of other companies have been at. I was at Motorola when the RAZR fell off the cliff. Motorola was printing money with the RAZR and got stupid, failing to invest in R&D for the next big thing. Steve Jobs came and learned how to make cell phones and the rest was history. All Motorola could do at that point was come up with new colors for the RAZR. I'd argue that RIM / Blackberry had the same experience. RIM owned the "smartphone" space, but made it too much of a walled garden as people started to want more consumer functionality. RIM would have been smarter to become a software company rather than try to do both hardware and software.

Is Apple in the same place? Well, when your CEO starts making fairly lame excuses for why people don't buy your product, I'd say so. Apple is a bit of a walled garden because it ties the OS to the hardware and reserves certain applications (iTunes in particular) to its mobile OS. On the one hand, you're not waiting for a hardware manufacturer to sort out getting an OS update released, but you're now solely tied to Apple's determination of a product lifecycle. When Apple decides the device is EOL, that's that. And I think that is another factor to consider. While I don't think that Apple has started to compress the product lifecycle, there is a consideration to be made there for when someone buys a device. If you wait until an iPhone model is no longer the latest and greatest, you likely have allowed a year or so to go by. Apple currently says that it will maintain a five to seven year lifecycle, but that assumes you buy the device when released. Instead of making the next generation of devices compelling to buy (from both feature set and cost), the new phones don't have any significant innovation and might sit at prices points that are .5X to 2X what the consumer paid for the now obsolete device that is only a few years old.

There are also considerations for product serviceability. If you can't easily replace a worn out battery on a device that is only a couple years old, you're going to have a bad attitude about that product.

The same thing happening to Apple also happened in the personal computer space. In the early 1990's, computer CPUs were popping out almost annually, with more power and speed. There was a new OS every year and software was being developed at an incredible pace. You couldn't afford to not upgrade every couple years. There always was something new under the sun. Now, PCs are sold mostly as replacements for ones that break down or simply can't handle whatever application the user needs to have. There are always some enthusiasts who need to have the latest and greatest, but most users buy a computer and keep it until it dies.

The net of this is that Tim Cook really isn't being honest and needs to find the next big thing. That was the one thing that Steve Jobs was simply ruthless about.

OTR: Saying Good Bye to Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 18:57:00 +0000

Back in the early days of the online world, I was an enthusiastic participant in the world of AOL -- America OnLine. The nightly melody of my modem connecting, followed by a hearty, "You've got mail!". I discovered a whole new connected world -- and the ugliness of much of it. Long before the term "troll" was used widely, AOL hosted plenty of them in chat rooms and I learned the meaning of the phrase, "If you roll in the mud with pigs, you're going to get dirty and the pig will enjoy it." I learned early on to try not to engage with people who were just there to provoke you -- but it didn't always keep my fingers off the keyboard.

When Facebook came about, I wasn't a real early adopter. I finally joined and became somewhat addicted to it, accumulating over 300 connections to family, friends, and acquaintances. They represented almost every aspect of my life from grade school friends to former co-workers. I had one hard and fast rule -- never connect to a current co-worker. By and large, these were folks who I knew fairly well at some point in life. Some connections were re-established courtesy of Facebook and it was fun to see what people were doing, often decades removed from when we last connected in real life.

Much of Facebook was fairly benign -- vacations and food, kids and random thoughts. Sunsets, pets, an interesting article. I posted much of the same. But over the past couple years, Facebook has become a place to vent your spleen. I've learned much about the political leanings of friends and colleagues. And I didn't always like what I saw. People that I respected as colleagues made me angry or caused me to question their intelligence. I unfriended a few at the fringe of acquaintanceship and stopped getting posts from a few others. But then I saw people that I knew fussing at each other, with others clearly posting things to incite people. While I treasured looking at Facebook for the fun and happy things, I found myself getting angry and depressed about what was out there.

The security guy inside me started to worry about posting real time pictures on vacation or during work travel. And what was left was a lot of stuff that not a whole lot of people likely cared much about.

Then all the blather started about how Facebook was selling data. While I knew that was pretty much always the case (I've used the cartoon above a lot over the years), it became much more real. I thought about pulling the plug on my account. But I kept coming back for connections with people that I truly cared about and didn't see much. I wanted to see the latest pictures or video of my grand-nephew. I wanted to see what was happening at the train museum or the Air Force Museum. But people kept making me angry.

I finally decided to pull the plug on just about everyone. Family generally got a pass. Neighbors and my longest friends got a pass. And I hung on to a few friends who hadn't ticked me off yet. Everyone else was unfriended. Well over 200 people. In the process I also realized that four of my friends were no longer with us, except on Facebook. I really didn't want to unfriend them, but it seemed silly to maintain a connection that would never be active again in this life.

I cleaned up some other things, deleting some "likes"and continued to do so in my News Feed as it settled into its new content. Suddenly, Facebook seemed a lot calmer and quieter. I was seeing content that I really cared about. And I didn't feel like I had to check in regularly to see what I had missed.

I'll continue to whittle things down as I adjust to my new view of Facebook. I want it to be about family and close friends, fun and happiness.

So if I disappeared from your feed, now you know why. No offense. You may never have raised my blood pressure, but it was time to take stock and refocus. If you're a professional colleague, you can find me on LinkedIn. Odds are, we had that connection as well. And yes, you can find me in real life, too.

OTR: Mobile Phone Mobility

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 16:21:00 +0000

I got my first cellular phone in the early 90's. My Dad had a "car phone" pretty much when they came out in the mid-80's, but the price points weren't good for me until 1994 or so. Even then, you didn't use the phone for continual talking and you were mighty careful about "roaming charges" when you were outside of your home coverage area. And those phones were heavy -- and battery life sucked.

I'm not sure that I could name all of the phones I've had since then, but I'm pretty much managed to keep the same phone numbers and service provider (Cellular One turned into AT&T) for almost 25 years. Along the way, I've also had employer-provided devices at different times, but always maintained a personal mobile phone account. At different times, I carried two phones until "BYOD" became more popular and I decided that I could use my personal phone for limited business purposes.

One of the keys along the way was that getting the cell phone from the carrier was rarely a heart-stopping financial proposition. The phones were "subsidized" and could generally be purchased (with a two-year contract) for $100 to $200 or so. That has stopped and top of the line smartphones are now a $600 to $1000 expense. Phones that are a generation removed from what's current are cheaper and there are dozens of phones out there from various manufacturers at many price points. But if you want the new iPhone or the latest Galaxy, be prepared to pay up -- or pay the phone company on an installment plan.

About a year ago, as my iPhone 5 aged and I found out that Apple had set an end of life date (no more updates), I started to think about a replacement. But the thought of dropping $600+ on a cell phone wasn't where I wanted to be. I can get a decent laptop at that price point and while my phone is always with me, I'm just not prepared for that kind of expense on something that I'll likely be looking to replace in 24 to 36 months.

At the same time, one of my daughters was going to be spending the summer abroad and needed a phone that worked locally for emergency purposes. I had decided by then that I probably needed to move away from Apple and look for an unlocked phone that had global capabilities. If I could find the right phone at the right price point, my daughter would have a phone to use for the summer abroad. When she got home, she could go back to her iPhone and I'd use the phone she had taken on her trip. It was time to shop.

Once you leave the Apple ecosystem, your only real choice is something Android. With Android, you're wedded to Google, which isn't horrible. It's just a different ecosystem. The problem, however, is that with lots of different phone manufacturers, you can't be sure what flavor of Android you're going to get and how long it will be updated and supported. But poking around Amazon, I found more palatable price points. These days, your market-leading Android phones tend to be from Samsung. The challenge of Samsung is the price points are similar to Apple. Once you get past Samsung, you see a lot of names you might not be familiar with. I knew of some of these companies from my past employer and had varying degrees of distrust of some of them. I ended up going back to look at Motorola. Even though Motorola is owned by Lenovo now (just the mobile phone company), I still know a few people there and I know the phones are still mostly designed and engineered in the US.

I turned to features. I wanted a removable memory card so I could add the amount of storage I needed for photos and apps. I always seem to be out of space on iPhones. One feature I was keen to try out was dual SIM capability. The mobile phone can hold two SIM cards and thus operate on your "home" carrier as well as another carrier. This is useful when traveling abroad because you can purchase a local SIM card and use that for calls where you are, while retaining access to your "home" number and text messages. This reduces the roaming costs abroad. However, no US-based carrier sells dual SIM phones. So I was off to Amazon. After some searching, I found a Motorola G4 with dual SIM capability (model XT1621). The phone had a nice look and after reviewing Frequency Check (https://www.frequencycheck.com/), I found that it had very good support for most carriers globally -- and particularly for the country where my daughter was going. The price point was under $200. I picked up a protective case and a 128GB MicroSD card (the nice thing about Android phones is that they have expandable and removable memory capacity) for another $50 or so.

The phone arrived in a couple days. First thing I noticed when setting it up was that it was a phone designed for Mexico and Latin America, so I had to change the language setting to English. After that, it was fine, but when device updates show up, you see the update description in Spanish. A minor issue, to be sure. Android devices are easy to set up, assuming you have a Google account. What was interesting is that Google remembered my prior Motorola Android phones, even though I hadn't used Android in a number of years. So I was reunited with a few apps. Setup was quite smooth and easy. I stopped by a Target store to pick up a TracFone SIM card so I could try out the phone before committing to it. That process wasn't as smooth as I would have liked, but I was able to get the phone functioning and making calls.

I played with the phone for a week or so, getting used to the interface again and then decided to move my primary SIM card over from my iPhone. Ooops. The SIM card was the wrong size. A trip to the AT&T store solved that issue. So now I had two SIM cards functioning in the phone. What's interesting with this setup is that you can select which SIM card does what. In theory, you could have a SIM card that is used primarily for data, and one that is used for voice calls. Or you can make one used for most things, with the second just listening for calls. When you make a call or send a text, you can also select which SIM is used. I did notice, however, that you needed to put the SIM for data use in Slot 1 to benefit from high speed data connectivity. The radios associated with Slot 2 were slightly degraded, so Slot 2 is best used for voice and text only.

My daughter came home from school and I proudly showed her the phone. She poked at it for a bit and declared that she didn't like the interface. She ended up taking her iPhone with her, but only using it for wi-fi, which actually worked well. She ended up getting a local phone from her host family because she could never find a SIM card that worked right.

Since I had the phone set up, I continued to use it, ultimately upgrading to the Motorola G5 Plus (XT1681), which is also a dual SIM phone. Frequency Check confirmed that it was compatible around the globe. I've hung on to the TracFone SIM because it is a nice back up and super cheap -- although I sometimes wonder about who had the number previously because I've gotten a few odd phone calls. That phone was a little more expensive, but still below $300. That's been my everyday phone for six months. It works well, has a nice screen size, and I have few complaints. The biggest complaint is that they apparently had to remove one feature to accommodate the second SIM slot -- the magnetometer that is used as a compass. Not a huge deal, but sometimes the GPS gets confused. You also can't use one of my favorite apps, Sky Map, because the app can't track the orientation of the phone against the sky. But I live outside Chicago and you usually can't see a whole lot of stars in the night sky anyway.

The nice thing is that I've purchased two phones in one year for less than an iPhone. They work well and have greater flexibility. Both will work well in most countries around the globe, and if I want to get a local SIM card, I won't be fussing with AT&T to unlock my phone. If I get bored with the phone or see a new one, I'm not wrestling with justifying a huge price tag. If I lose or break the phone, I'm not going to be crying over the cost to replace. I've found mobile phone mobility.

OTR: The "Free" Conference Invitation

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 15:16:00 +0000

It's been a while, but there was a period of time where it seemed like I was getting fairly regular invitations to be "qualified" to attend educational conferences for "free" -- just get to the venue and the education, lodging, and meals were "free". (You'll note that I keep putting quotes around "free".)

Most of these conferences had a technology or legal angle. Most of them held no interest for me. Finally, one came my way that actually looked pretty good. I did a little research on the organization that sponsored the event and didn't find any big red flags. Some people complained that the organization didn't pay for transportation, but that didn't seem to be a big deal.

The "qualification" process was pretty extensive and, in retrospect, boiled down to whether or not I have some authority to buy stuff and whether or not I was in the market for various things associated with the focus of the conference. As it happened, I was looking for a solution and also wanted to look across the marketplace. So I qualified. Apparently it also didn't hurt to have "Director" in my job title, as this was an "executive conference". The contract (wait, what?) came and I found out that not only did I have to commit to be there, but I also needed to have sit downs with something like six or seven vendors. (Uh. oh.) The sit downs were supposed to be for no more than ten minutes each and I could actually find the required number that I wanted to talk to. The fine print in the contract indicated that if I didn't show or failed to make the requisite number of vendor meetings, I'd be on the hook for the full price of the conference, lodging, and meals (multiple thousands of dollars). Had the lawyers take a look at the contract and sign on behalf of the company and I was good to go.

So off I went to some faux chateau winery setting an hour out of Atlanta. The venue was nice, the accommodations were fine, and there was a good crowd. The sessions were good enough, if not memorable. The meals were heavy. The days were long. The vendor sit-downs were... interesting. Think speed dating with vendors. In my itinerary, I had a schedule of vendor meetings. There were dedicated times during the day where you had to take the meetings. Picture a ballroom full of curtained 8 by 8 spaces consisting of a vendor name, a small table, and a few stackable banquet chairs. First you had to find your "date", then a chime or something started the conversation. Awkward introductions, a quick outline of what the vendor could do, then you got to talk about what you needed. Then a chime and you were off to find the next one. After the first day, the vendors were looking pretty ragged. They talked to a lot of people and I got a sense that a lot of the attendees were not planning to buy anything, so there were lots of very forced conversations. The funny thing was, while I got the usual post conference blizzard of mail and phone calls, the people I talked to generally had done a really bad job of taking notes and recalling what I was interested in. Wasn't a very effective sales process.

The lesson that I learned, though, was that when you're offered a "free" conference, you're probably paying for it in some way.

OTR: Autonomous Vehicles

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 22:56:00 +0000

I spend a couple hours of each day rolling up and down the Tri-State Tollway going to and from work. The road is pretty busy when I'm out there, with lots of trucks, but the flow of traffic, when it is moving well, is usually quite a bit above the posted speed limit. It's not quite a "black diamond" driving experience, but certainly one that will keep your attention.

I've often thought that these commutes would be perfect for autonomous driving. I'd love to be able to handle email, participate in conference calls (shared screens and all), or catch up on my reading. There would be two hours of time turned productive! Instead, I surf SiriusXM for some good music, think about issues at work, mentally compose blog posts, and so forth. I also react to the drivers around me. Trucks have a bad habit of wandering from lane to lane and driving in the lanes that they aren't supposed to drive in. Automobiles show evidence of distracted drivers, with sometimes very severe evidence in the form of a crash or two. I tend to drive very defensively and leave a fair amount of space between myself and the car ahead of me -- probably to the chagrin of other drivers. I try to moderate my speed and use that space to slow down gradually, rather than slamming on the brakes. It keeps the adrenaline level moderate -- and the brakes last longer.

In my musing, I think about all the things a driver needs to be aware of -- speed, distance, cars proximate to your own car, road hazards, things falling off of other vehicles, badly marked lanes, changes in lane availability due to construction or accidents. When I think about programming software to manage all of those variables, my head hurts. But clearly, the software and surrounding technology has been developed, because it exists in a number of forms.

The question is how good that software might be. In recent weeks, we've seen an accident involving a pedestrian who was hit by an autonomous vehicle. We've also seen a fatal accident where a vehicle utilizing some aspects of autonomy allegedly did not perform as expected. In both instances, a human driver was at the wheel, but did not take control in time to avoid the accidents. The root cause of each accident has not yet been determined. It could be software; it could be sensors; it could be integration of software and sensors; or it could be human error. It also could be something that the sensors or the software weren't prepared to identify and react to.

I think about driving on Chicago-area roads, where moon-crater potholes bloom before the tulips. Many of the same roads suffer from worn out paint demarking the lanes, or paint that was clearly not mixed to specification for use on roadways. There's a manhole in a travel lane on I-290 that was not constructed to be level with the roadway and I've learned to avoid rolling over it each day. I've learned that a vehicle having trouble maintaining its lane and speed is probably being driven by a distracted or impaired driver and needs to be given plenty of room. An exploding truck tire in front of you will result in a lot of flying debris in a hurry. Mix in some unplowed snow or something that has leaked out of a vehicle, and there are lots of things to consider when letting the vehicle find its own way down the road. How will sensors "see" through heavy snow piling up in front of them? Think about the number of cars rolling down the road with inches of snow on the roof and a just a small spot on the window for the driver to see out. What about cleaning of salt or mud or other substances that get in the way of the sensors?

Perhaps the biggest problem and barrier to autonomous driving is that the roads will remain full of human-piloted vehicles for the foreseeable future. That adds a ton of unpredictability and variability. In a homogeneous environment when all vehicles are automated, the vehicles can "talk" to each other and the rate of predictability should increase -- although that will likely require standardized communications protocols and standardized reaction programming.

Looking forward, I think about the future vehicle (possibly a shared vehicle) with no human controls on board. Each day, I let Waze guide me on the quickest route to and from work. It's a remarkable tool, but I often deviate from it. I see a train blocking the road that Waze wants me to go on. I see flashing lights on a different road and realize that an accident just happened. Whatever. I also know that Waze can't get me to the front door of the building I work in. For some reason, it points me to a nearby building.

And here's the practical question -- where will that autonomous vehicle park? I guess in that future, the vehicle will drop you off in front of the building, then go find a place to park that really doesn't matter to the human. And who will fuel or charge the vehicle? I guess maybe there will be automated fuel or charging stations that the vehicles will seek out during the work day.

The other thing is that there really will be no more opportunity to "just go for a ride", with no destination in mind, just exploring back roads or seeing things you've never seen before. If you're not steering, trying to set up a wandering route will likely cause you to spend more time with your head down in a navigation app.

I'm not saying that the autonomous future will never come -- we're just at the birth of the technology. In ten years, I'll probably laugh at this post.

OTR: Thoughts on Searching for a Job

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 14:34:00 +0000

Last Summer I began an involuntary sabbatical that ended up lasting about five months. I'm happy to say that I landed a new opportunity with a great company and I'm quite happy. I only wish I'd known that the "sabbatical" would end as it did and when it did. I would have enjoyed it more. I'd like to reflect on the time I had away from work and offer some things that I've learned along the way.

Whatever the reason for your separation from your prior employer, let it go. That's hard. If the event was a surprise, you're likely replaying what happened like a traffic accident, wondering what you could have done to avoid it. Sure, there are some lessons to be learned, but it's important not to wallow in self-pity or anger. Move on as best you can.

Take some time for yourself. Regardless of the circumstances, take some time to relax. Take a vacation if you can; a staycation if you can't. Go somewhere -- even to a park or the local zoo. Do something that you wouldn't otherwise do during the workweek. Sleep in. Stay up late. Work out. Play video games. Binge watch that program you've been meaning to see. In all likelihood, your final days, weeks, months (or even years) with your former employer have been stressful. You need and deserve a break.

Once you've caught your breath, decide what your next role will be. You may want to step up a notch; you may want to step down a notch. Maybe you want to do something entirely different. Write down the skillsets that you have and what you want to emphasize to a potential employer. Think about location. Do you want to stay where you are or are you interested in relocating? What areas are out of the question? If you think you want to relocate, do some research. What is the cost of living in that area? Will you need a higher salary? Could you take a pay cut without losing ground? You're going to need to do this no matter what. What is the minimum that you'll work for? What about bonuses, profit-sharing, stock? What industries interest you? Where are your strengths? Do you want to try something new?

Dust off the resume.

The resume that has always worked for you in the past may not work today. If you're like me, you've used essentially the same format for your entire working life. It is likely time to start over with a blank piece of paper. If you have outplacement services as part of your separation package, run, don't walk, your resume to them for a refresh. The most important lesson that I learned from this process (and I stubbornly waited a couple months) is that you need a list of results, not a list of activities. I know that I got wrapped up in laundry lists of all the things I was doing on my prior roles. The coaching that I got said that I should have a list of skills separate from the particular roles, because odds are, you pretty much do many of the same things at every job in your field. So when you describe each particular role, focus on what is unique and what you delivered. If you are well-experienced in your field, you need not list every job you've had back to the beginning of time. First, that will date you and that could be a negative to some employers. Second, most of those early jobs may not be relevant to where you are today. The exception to that might be (and the emphasis is on "might") when you're returning to a career field from early in your working life or you want to emphasize an industry where you have experience. But be very judicious about that. You can always address those things in a cover letter.

A tip that I learned from the resume writer was to leave off your graduation dates, unless you recently received a degree. It is quite easy to calculate someone's age from when they graduated college, so limit the temptation of a prospective employer to discriminate by taking away that bit of math.

You also want to update your LinkedIn profile. Again, watch our for age giveaways, don't list every job you've ever had, and put in a professional photograph. LinkedIn is social media, but it's not Facebook. A remarkable number of recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates and you want to present yourself well there. At the same time, be judicious in who you connect with. LinkedIn isn't a game to see how many connections you can get. Watch your privacy settings as well. LinkedIn is a great source of information for social engineering and phishing attacks.

Where are the jobs?

The first place to start is with professional associations in your field. If they have job boards, sign up and do some mining. If they allow you to post your resume as a job-seeker, do so. If you know of some headhunters in your profession (think about people who may have reached out to you with a request to let them know if you know anyone interested in a particular job), let them know that you're in the market. Next, work your network of friends and colleagues. Let people know that you're looking. Then broaden the search. Here are the sites that have borne the most fruit for me:

Indeed.com: Indeed is an aggregator. While they do source some of their own jobs, they do a really good job of combing various job boards and employer career sites. The search engine can be a little goofy sometimes, but you can get a pretty good set of results sent to you every day in email. Be careful with geographic restrictions, particularly in large areas, because the results may omit positions just outside of the area. I also noticed that Indeed would periodically send me some stale results (jobs several weeks old). I'm not certain if that is because the employer reposted a role or if the search engine just missed it when it was first posted.

Glassdoor.com: Glassdoor is very interesting. I had always thought of it as a place for people to go and complain about their current employer, but it has clearly evolved. It has a decent search capability and you can limit the search to jobs in particular geographies, but again, be very careful in limiting the geography because you will miss some opportunities. Once you identify an opportunity, you can take a look at what people think about the company and also get an idea of the salary range for a particular role. Keep in mind a couple things, however. First, people who are unhappy tend to post to these sites more than people who are happy. Second, pay is also self-reported and a small sample size may not be accurate. But it may give you an idea of what to expect. But I found the jobs that I found on Glassdoor were generally high quality and relevant.

LinkedIn.com: LinkedIn is the most valuable site you'll use. You want a good profile and you want to aim for a "Profile Strength" of "All Star". Like your resume, use results-oriented language and be cautious in announcing your age. Have a professional photo and connect to people judiciously. LinkedIn is not a contest. Your goal is to have connections that you know, not simply a lot of connections. LinkedIn also has job postings and these are also quite good. You can also limit searches by "Experience Level", but I recommend that you play with that a bit to understand how LinkedIn rates job postings. The nice thing about LinkedIn is that it will highlight people in your network who work for a company that you're considering. That's a good way to get an inside track to, and view of, an opportunity.

Beyond those sources, I had very mixed results. Careerbuilder generated a ton of spammy offers from recruiters from franchise companies and insurance companies looking for agents. Ladders doesn't seem to offer much unless you pay them. Experteer is similar to Ladders -- they like to show you some potential jobs, but then want you to pay them to see the details.

In my case, I had either missed the ad for the job I ended up getting or skipped it because of the location when it first came up. I saw it pop up later in a more broad search, then used my network to reach out to someone I knew who let people know that I was interested. So the search tools helped me know there was an opportunity, but someone I knew opened the door. Having someone on the inside is not a guarantee that you'll get a look, but it doesn't hurt.

Set goals. Do your homework.

I set a goal that I would get two or three applications out per week. That doesn't sound like much, but this is a marathon, not a sprint. You don't want to shotgun out 50 applications a week unless you're willing to take just about any job that comes along. Set a focus and look for opportunities that are right for you. I can't say this enough. When you see a match in your job search results, look beyond the job description. Do some research. What are the key products or services? How are their finances? What news is in the media? Is this an organization that I really want to work for? Is the business something that will cause me personal conflict? (As an aside, years and years ago, I interviewed with a tobacco company. I'm not a smoker and my mother died of lung cancer. I had justified the application because the company also owned a food company and I hoped to end up there. As I sat in a conference room waiting for the next interviewer, I had to push aside an overflowing ash tray. The next interviewer asked if I minded if he lit up. At that point, I decided that perhaps I should have never applied.) If you can't align yourself with an organization's mission, it will be an unhappy experience, so make sure you understand what the organization is about.

Pay attention to the companies that pop up regularly in your search. Are they simply on a hiring binge or is there a lot of churn in positions in your field? Seeing the same jobs for the same companies could be a red flag.

When you apply for a position, print off the job description. Once you have ten or so applications out there, you're going to forget what you applied for. It's also important to review the job description when you're interviewing.

Open a file for each application that you make. Have the job description in there, along with any other research you've done. When you speak to someone at the company, keep track of who you talked to and when that happened.

Echo the Requirements.

Many companies use automation to weed through applicants. Take a close look at what the job requires and make sure that your resume and cover letter are echoing the terms and themes that you find. You may find that you have to adjust your resume a few times to create the right "match". That doesn't mean that you should lie or exaggerate -- but you should make sure that you can bring focus to why you are a fit.

Proofread and then Proofread Again.

Ugh. There's nothing like punching the Submit button and realizing that your cover letter contains the name of a different potential employer. If you plan to cut and paste cover letters, make sure you take the time to make them perfect. Get someone to look at your resume for errors. Read a cover letter backwards to look for spelling mistakes. Take a deep breath and do it again.

They said there would be no math.

One company was quite unique in the application / interview process. I did all the usual form filling out in the online application. After I submitted that, at the point where you normally get the Veterans' status / disability / EEOC questions, it popped up what amounted to a curious combination of behavioral multiple choice test and algebra exam. So after a set of, "When it comes to conflict in the workplace, I describe myself as a person who: a) embraces conflict b) runs away from conflict c) tries to find some way to diffuse conflict..." questions, they would throw in one that involved trains, speed, departure times, mileage and what time Bob gets home for dinner. A couple of those hurt my head. I'm still not sure what that was all about. It did get me a couple phone interviews, so I guess I did ok.

Don't Get Discouraged.

Again, this is a marathon. When you look for a job when you have a job, you likely aren't keeping a clock. You don't realize that you've been poking at position postings for a year or 18 months when the new opportunity finally lands. Sometimes that perfect job just happens to land in your lap and you feel like you got hired with little or no effort. When you can hear the clock ticking, the wait for a reply can be excruciating. Keep your network alive. Check in with people that you think might be able to help.

Titles.

I had a fairly senior title for my last role. When I interviewed for positions with what seemed to be a lesser title, I was invariably asked if I was ok "only being a XXX". Have a good answer for that question. My answer was that I was interested in what the job was going to do, not what the business card said. My ego wasn't tied into the title. Another interviewer asked me if I would feel constrained by not being part of the leadership team -- I answered that being a leader is not about your title, but how you lead and that leaders can be found at all levels of the organization. (That might not work with every organization, but it got a good head nod for me.)

The Interview(s).

It seems that the typical approach for most organizations is that you get a screening call with the recruiter, then the hiring manager calls you, then you come in for interviews with three to five people, and maybe you go another round with more senior people if they can't make up their mind.

Again, do your homework. Go to the organization's website. Learn about what they do, what the products or services are, and who the key leaders are. Used LinkedIn to take a look at the people who will interview you -- see who they know that you know, where they went to school, who else they have worked for. Read the Annual Report of a public company. Search for news articles. Know who the competition is. See if you can understand their culture and strategy. Learn their history if that's available. See what current employees have to say about the company in GlassDoor. Take a balanced approach. You want to show that you've made an investment in knowing about the company, what it does, and the people that you're meeting with. It also allows you to ask some smart questions.

Interviews were all over the place. I tended to find that most hiring managers had some very specific topics to cover -- they were looking for certain skillsets. One wanted to know if I had worked with zero-base budgeting. Another wanted a detailed accounting of document management system implementation. The other folks doing interviewing tended to ask softer, more culture-fit questions. Then there were the companies that did "behavioral interviewing". Those questions always start, "Tell me about a time when..." Generally, they have to get to how you handle certain kinds of events, so what sort of behaviors do you own.

I had one company have me do a video interview. That was interesting. After a short talk with the recruiter, she sent me a link to a website. I needed to have a webcam and microphone on my computer. The technology took control of those devices and I watched a video of the recruiter. The recruiter would then ask a question and a timer would start. You had a minute (unless you wanted to respond sooner) to consider an answer, then the app would start recording you. You had two minutes to answer the question. This went back and forth for about ten or so questions. The app then closed and fired off your recording. It was a bit awkward because, even though I speak in public a lot, I hate being filmed. I forget my own name when I see the red light. I also have my webcam set up for videoconferencing and it sits on top of my screen, so I have to look up to look into the camera. It wasn't an outstanding performance.

Follow Up.

I wasn't very good at this and in retrospect, it was a mistake. I didn't want to seem over-eager or desperate, and I suspect that I may have come across less interested in some opportunities than I really was. Try to get a business card from everyone you talk to. Thank then in writing afterwards. Highlight takeaways from your conversation. Ask the recruiter or the hiring manager when they will make a decision and when (or if) you should follow up with them (as well as who your contact should be).

The Offer.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, you're probably going to talk about money sooner than you think you should. In some respects, that's good. You do want to screen out the roles that aren't going to pay and honestly, those employers don't want to insult you or waste their time with a recruitment process that will disappoint everyone. It can be a bit of a two-edged sword, however, because you might be excluded from an opportunity that would have more value in professional growth and / or you might walk away from an opportunity that could allow you fairly rapid advancement.

Hopefully, you've taken the time to decide how you want to speak about compensation and what the bottom line is for your requirements. They will flat out want to know what your pay is now. Depending on where you are in your career, the answer to this varies. As I was working my way up the ladder, I was advised to put a number on the table that I aspired to be paid, then expect an offer somewhat above that. As your pay increases, that is not an optimal strategy if you think you might be above the market for the role. I had one recruiter advise me not to settle on pay or sell myself short. The challenge is trying to figure out what the role will pay. At the end of the day, you need to put a number on the table that you're comfortable with. If you lowball things, you may end up frustrated that you're not being paid what you think you should be. My emphasis was always on base pay. Bonuses and stock and so forth are variable pay. If you rely on bonuses and stock to get by every day, then you really should add those numbers in to your base and put that down as your line in the sand.

Be prepared to speak to bonuses, variable pay, and stock (options and/or restricted stock). When the offer comes, look at it closely. Understand all the elements. If there is a relocation package, what is covered and how long is there an obligation to stay with the company? (Some companies require that you pay back a pro-rated portion of the relo package if you leave their employment within a fixed period of time.) Is vacation / PTO negotiable? (Generally, no, in most large companies.) What are the actual costs for benefits? This is an interesting factor to consider because it does have a direct bearing on what you take home. I saw a significant difference in costs per paycheck between my prior and current employers for effectively the same coverages. If the organization offers deferred compensation (usually a 401(k) plan), is there a company match? How much is that match? Does the company put funds into Health Savings Plans? Is there a pension? (Yes, there are organizations that still offer pensions.) That overall benefit package may have a significant bearing on the weight you put on take home pay. Even something simple like a subsidized cafeteria could be worth better than $1000 a year against fast food or an unsubsidized cafeteria.

And for your final bit of calculation, think about commuting costs. How far will you drive? Are you taking public transportation? What about tolls? What about parking? These costs might be quite a bit different than your prior job, so you need to account for them, better or worse. Adding $300 a month of commuter parking and train tickets to your life when you had a short drive and free parking could add up in a hurry -- but what if you walk to the train and get rid of your car (car payment, insurance, and maintenance)?

When that first offer comes to you, you also have to take a step back. If you are in a situation like I was, you have the sound of a clock ticking echoing in your head. You probably are in different stages of interviews with other organizations. Perhaps you've gotten yet another, "We've chosen a candidate more in alignment with our requirements" letter. Perhaps you just applied to a position that feels like a perfect match with a great company. Now you have the "bird in the hand" dilemma. Are you going to jump at the opportunity that will get you back on payroll in a couple weeks, in a role that you're interested in, but not thrilled about, working for an organization that's just ok? The answer to that will depend a lot on your personal situation and your personal risk tolerance. I suppose that, in this day and age, there is no shame in walking away from a company that you just joined, but honestly, that doesn't feel right to me. Certainly, if you find yourself in a truly horrible situation, you may want to run away quickly, but if you signed up with an organization in good faith, I think you have to have some commitment. It's not an easy decision, but I think the guiding principle is not just to grab on to the first job that makes you an offer, just because it is an offer -- and honestly, as you go about your search, you shouldn't be shotgunning applications to every organization that has an opportunity that you could have an interest in. If the company is not that interesting to you, the job is very likely going to be a problem for you as well.

Consider Alternatives.

One hiring manager asked me if I would be interested in a 90 day "try it before you buy it" contract. I was caught flat-footed by the question and, frankly, felt insulted. I declined that opportunity. I didn't want to lose 90 days of a job search and I didn't have a clear plan or set of expectations around such an offer. Interestingly, I recently heard from a colleague who is also in the market for an opportunity and she received a similar offer. The commonality was that both she and I got these offers from companies that were in industries outside of our core strength, so it seems logical that the hiring manager might want to assess the candidate's learning agility and pace of learning uptake. If you think about a short term contract, think about what you need in compensation, but also think about how you define "success". You want some very clear measurables in the contract so you don't find yourself giving away discounted knowledge to an employer that wasn't really interested in committing to you.

In a similar vein, I see a lot of contract employees at my new job. In speaking to some folks in these roles, many find the contract work path very refreshing. They actually get paid fairly well and in IT at least, find themselves getting new assignments regularly, particularly if they perform well. It is sort of like being a consultant, but without the sales overhead. Some convert to regular employees over time and many stay on the contract employee track because they like it, not because it is necessary. The downside is that you don't get benefits in most cases and you aren't eligible for bonuses, stock, and other employee perks. Still, it might be an opportunity for some folks. I'll probably write more on that as I learn about it.

No matter what your situation, I wish you good hunting in finding that next opportunity. They are out there and you'll find it.

ATR: The Death of Email

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 17:04:00 +0000

Mark Twain was famously reported to have once said, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." For a while, now, various pundits have been proclaiming that the use of email was in decline and email would be passed by for other communications technology. Millennials didn't use (or want to use) email, etc. Sitting in a large corporation, I was in the Mark Twain camp, with regard to email. If anything, the volumes were increasing.

I have to wonder, however, if the adventure of Hillary Clinton's email server and the recent series of Wikileaks releases of hacked email accounts will begin to put a stake in the heart of email. Email is a tool that has been around for about twenty to twenty-five years in business. That means that workers who are under 45 or so have never worked in a place where email was not the primary means of textual communication. And those same workers have likely never been without a mobile phone as a means of voice communications. Young people coming into the workplace not only have never known life without the Internet, email, or mobile phones, but they have likely never owned a mobile phone that couldn't get to the Internet or send email.

I've said for a while that I felt something of a sea change in the use of email over the past ten years. One of my biggest pet peeves was what I call "ping-pong email" -- email messages that are brief and go back and forth between people when a phone call or instant message would be a better means of communication. I'd noticed in my workplace that as instant messaging became more ubiquitous, those messages went away. I also noticed the "Let's go to lunch" email was extinct. The business messages that I was getting were more substantial. Email was becoming more formal in the workplace. People were tending to think about what they were writing. Cringe-worthy email was rapidly disappearing. The message that you should think about what you were typing seemingly had gotten through to a lot of people. And we noticed this in our investigations as well. While there are always outliers, the days where people were circulating chain emails, recipes, and racy pictures in business email systems was diminishing. Undoubtedly, a lot of this was changing due to the growth of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and similar social media tools, but I also believe that people started to understand that email isn't very private and tends to hang around for a while.

So if all of that is accurate, why was my Inbox so full? My sense is that email became an asynchronous conference call. Let's unpack that. A face to face conversation or a phone call is generally considered synchronous communication. You're talking to another person in real time. A conference call is generally synchronous communication. Voicemail moves the synchronous conversation to asynchronous by allowing a recording to be retained and listened to later on. A written letter on paper is an asynchronous communication. Instant messaging is intended to be synchronous, but is often asynchronous. Email is something of a hybrid. It behaves asynchronously, but in those "ping-pong" email situations, effectively becomes synchronous. That's all well and good, but I still have a full Inbox. Why?

In a global organization (or even in any organization with team members spread across multiple locations), getting a team together for a meeting or conference call is an arduous task. Someone always can't fit the meeting into their calendar, particularly on short notice. An email is drafted and circulated for comment -- thus, the asynchronous conference call. If the topic seems to require lots of comments, "Reply to All" then fills up the Inbox. Compound this by including extraneous people on a "CC:" or "BCC:" list, and the number of email messages increases almost exponentially. That didn't happen in paper communications days. Certainly, some letters or memos might be circulated to a number of folks, but it was pretty rare for all of those folks to reply to the entire distribution list. With email, one click and everyone gets your thoughts. One more click and you can send the message thread on to people who were never part of the original distribution.

The ease of circulation of an email communication is, in my opinion, what people are becoming aware of. I think everyone has had the experience of finding out that an email that was believed to be private was suddenly being circulated to places never imaged -- often with unfortunate results. Now couple in the recent exposure of political email messages. Messages once thought private are posted for all to see on the Internet. Messages that are, perhaps, less circumspect than the author would be in a public forum. "Missing" messages are found in other email accounts, backups, and archives. Huge message volumes are easily searched. Single messages are taken out of context, "tone" is interpreted differently than intended. I've said for a long time that I dread the day where I have to testify about an email message and try to interpret the meaning of an emoticon or someone else's "LOL". (Thankfully, there will likely be a whole new realm of attorney objections to that.)

But let's go back to the top. Is email dead? I'd suggest that we will see considerable change in how people use email over the next few years. Stronger and more user friendly encryption, not only of the communication in transit, but while at rest, will become commonplace. People who do not want their communications read by others will simply stop using email. New technology to deal with "asynchronous conference calls" (think tools like Slack) will come into more common use. I also suspect that email may revert to status as an "envelope" which carries either a formal attached message (likely encrypted) or a link to content that requires authentication to view. This will enable sensitive information to be protected and access controlled, with the additional ability to ensure retention periods.

As with many things, a long, slow evolution, coupled with revolutionary change in response to perceived threats and unintended consequences.

ATR: On Associations and Information Governance

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 05:01:00 +0000

I imagine that I'll tick off more than a few people with this post, but my blog, so my opinion.

Don Lueders recently posted An Open Letter to ARMA on his blog. I'm not going to work through it point by point, but I would like to add my voice to a seeming cacophony of voices on AIIM and ARMA and the profession that I've grown up in.

Associations

Both of the major information management professional associations, ARMA and AIIM, are being disrupted. As someone who spent most of my career volunteering for one thing or another for ARMA (and I still do a few things), it's painful to see. There are many factors at play here and the disruption certainly isn't unique to these associations. I don't think it's fair to say that membership declines are solely due to young people wanting to network in different ways. It's about time and value. Let's face it, going to your employer and getting money to belong to a professional association isn't as easy as it once was. Getting funding for monthly meetings or an annual conference is also quite difficult. Travel and education budgets are usually the first victims of corporate cost cutting. Many companies put it kind of bluntly -- "There are 20 of you who want to go to conferences, belong to associations and go to various meetings. We figure that costs us about four grand a nose. If you want us to continue doing that, who doesn't want to be here next year?" That's a pretty brutal summary, but for many of us, it is the calculus in play. So that means the employee needs to think very carefully about the value of his or her own money going to these activities and for many people, that's not in the family budget, either.

The other big factor is time. Few of us work "just" a 40 hour week. We're tethered to email; we journey to the cloud from home computers to crank out a bit more work in the evening; We're doing the work that several people would have done in years past. And at home, our kids are overscheduled, we have to work out, or we need to binge watch that great show that we didn't have time to watch in real time. When I was a kid, I can remember my Dad having time to join a bowling league, go to the Moose Lodge, and make a Holy Name Society meeting from time to time. (And, by the way, those organizations are probably struggling as much as, or more, than professional associations.) Going to a monthly association meeting means taking three hours out of the office -- which will have to be made up somewhere. And that becomes another value calculation.

"Value", it was once said to me, "is getting more from something than what you put in." So if you're the sort of person who goes to a conference and comes back with a raft of business cases that immediately generate savings far in excess of the cost of the conference, I can pretty well guarantee that you'll be going to that conference in the future. If you're paying for a meeting out of your own pocket and going to the meeting yields a business contact that becomes a mentor to you, you might just keep going to those meetings. If you're a vendor and the conference booth yields sales that profit far in excess of the cost of the booth, you're going to keep buying booth space.

For professional associations to grow and prosper, they have to add value for members, their employers, and the vendor / sponsor communities.

I have opinions about ARMA and AIIM and where they fall short for me. I don't want to bash these organizations. They have hard-working, earnest employees, and many, many dedicated volunteers. But they aren't adding enough value.

ARMA

(Most of you know that I'm a Fellow of ARMA and a former International Treasurer. I've been a fairly frequent speaker at the ARMA Conference and Chapter meetings. I have a long list of volunteer activities with ARMA, so I have some insights and biases. )

ARMA's struggles come, in my opinion, from having to serve three constituencies: 1) The Old Guard. These are the bulk of members who "grew up" in records management and remember the days when the records manager's goal was to have the million dollar budget and 40 staff members. A high school diploma and some basic management training was enough to advance you up the career ladder. Paper is still king and this technology stuff can be managed just like paper, but nobody listens. 2) The Masters. They've broken through the cardboard ceiling, have all the certifications, make the "big bucks", get decent visibility, and understand technology, but desperately need more than ARMA offers. They're bored with ARMA but come to Conference to see their friends and network in the hallways and bars. They want to give back to the profession, but get frustrated a lot. 3) The Solutions Seekers. They got stuck with an assignment to "fix" records management, but come from other disciplines. They want a solution so they can be a hero and move on to the next challenge. They are befuddled by the secret societies and cliques within ARMA. They can't find a good guidebook or recipe. They drift over to consultants to fix the problem. They'll be gone in a couple years and someone else may or may not take their place.

The big problem with ARMA is that no one ever took the time to develop a standard body of knowledge about records management. Sure, there are standards out there, bust most deal with some small sliver of the profession. ISO 15489 has no teeth. There's no COBIT, no ISO 17001. The CRM lacks a Body of Knowledge similar to the CISSP. So we point to the ARMA Bookstore, which contains a lot of good information, but it is often dated, or conflicts, or isn't relevant. So we muddle around. "How long do you keep email?" is the question -- and fistfights break out. "How do you manage records in a database?" and shoulders get shrugged. No standard or requirement says that when you build an application, you must build in retention and disposition. Everyone invents a solution for their situation. Or not. We fussed over The Principles, created a great foundation, and saw them land with a dull thud that was then savaged by folks who further fussed over how they came to be and whether or not they had any validity. So the really hard work of building controls and standards on top of The Principles never happened. The organization latched on to Information Governance, but never really set a definition of the space. The IGP is about building a vague program and not much about what the components of the program should be -- or what actual subject matter knowledge is required. Oh, it's there to some extent, but it's not leading the definition of the profession. So many of us are left to our own devices.

AIIM

I'll admit that AIIM and I have never seen eye to eye, outside of a brief period when I needed to understand imaging in a hurry. AIIM, in my opinion and perception, has two problems. 1) It is driven by vendors. That's not a horrible thing, but it hurts the organization. While the vendor members leading AIIM have always had a decent business sense and a good nose for new opportunities, they have tended to force the organization to chase trends. The dominance of vendors led to the practice of using educational sessions as sales opportunities. 2) It chases buzzwords. To an outsider, it always seemed like AIIM was reinventing itself as the flavor of the month and I couldn't expect to find solid ground or a consistent direction of travel. Once the microfilm industry started to crash, AIIM had a major problem. It rightly shifted to imaging, but as the Internet took off and the need to convert paper to electronic images began to fade, it had to latch on to something new. I forget all the buzzwords. Then it became a certificate factory. Then it dabbled in a certification, but never put much effort into it. AIIM's strength was in generating true industry standards, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside. Granted, some of those standards were to the benefit of the vendor members, but they made the effort to actually output real standards.

When I've gone to AIIM events, I knew that sales calls would dog me for the next several months, whether or not I ever talked to an exhibitor. I reminded myself that "when AIIM offers a free lunch, you're the main course". That approach -- and very naked sales pitches in AIIM conference sessions (that I paid to attend) drove me away.

I'm not sure if I really know what either organization wants to stand for. Right now, I know they both share one goal -- survival. ARMA has always had a strong chapter network, but the chapters suffer from leadership burnout and little direction from ARMA HQ on topics of interest to the membership and truly competent speakers. They also lack shared technology to reach members who don't want to travel to meetings -- or technology to enable multiple chapters to share speakers by video or audio conference. Few chapters use social media effectively. They struggle to find good venues at low cost. AIIM's chapters are fewer and suffer the same problems. The leadership of both organizations face declining revenues, declining conference attendance, and member ambivalence. That's a potential (and probable) death spiral.

Both organizations are run by association professionals. I would expect they have plenty of options to consider to rebuild their organizations -- but what both need is clear identity and mission. That can only come from the people who choose to belong. Fistfights be darned.

Enter Information Governance

If you browse back through Above The RIM, you'll see that I've been using the term "Information Governance" to describe the scope of what I do for some time. (I had a brief flirtation with "Information Overlord" on my business card at one time and I am very glad I didn't follow that impulse.) Anyway, I have poked at the various definitions that are out there in Gartner, the newly sprouted IG organizations, and even Wikipedia, but nothing quite matched what I do and what I define as my space. A couple years ago, I had the opportunity to keynote a lawyer's conference on e-discovery and information governance and I decided to throw my own definition into the ring. It goes like this:

Information Governance

A system of policies, controls, procedures, and tools governing the lifecycle of an organization’s data that matters. This system ensures appropriate ease of access to data when needed and defensible disposition of data when no longer needed. This system limits business disruption, while maintaining appropriate security, within an auditable framework in line with the organization’s risk appetite and regulatory environment.

It's not a far stretch from historical understandings of records management. But it encompasses a lot more -- e-discovery, data privacy, risk, audits, security, and so on. The core is "data that matters". While I recognize that some might see this as a fancy way to say "records" in the technology age, I think it is broader than "records", yet narrower than "information".

Foundationally, you better understand the basics of records management. Knowing what data is in the organization -- and whether or not (and how) it matters -- is critical. And this definition presupposes knowledge of how risk-adverse an organization might be and what legal guardrails constrain the organization. It further expects that the data is maintained securely and that everything can be subject to real audits.

A proper IG team encompasses a variety of professionals. My team holds -- or has held -- the following certifications: CISSP, CISM, CISA, CRISC, CRM, CIPP, CIP, CGEIT, EnCE, PMP, among others. The six members of my team also all hold Master's degrees. I even have one staff person who sought out a paralegal certificate. They represent professional competencies in IT Risk, Data Privacy, IT Audit, Business Continuity, E-discovery, and yes, Records Management. In the past, I have had computer forensics experts as part of my team.

Where I'm going with this is that Information Governance is a whole lot more than Records Management 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever. The various disciplines that work together all have their own professional organizations and certifying bodies. IG is not just a rebranding of records management. It's more powerful than that. Parallel to my organization is an IT Architecture team that drives data management -- the platforms for our IT systems, the underlying technology, the means of storage, and the connections to the users. There are some people who might think this should be in scope for Information Governance -- some call it "Data Governance". Arguably, with the right leadership, the two areas could come together, but IT Architecture has far different skillsets. So I don't worry about the technology how -- I worry about how long data gets retained, what regulatory standards need to be met, the risks incurred, the mitigations required, and how we ensure that standards, regulations and controls are being met. And we adapt as the organization evolves.

Where Do We Go from Here?

What I would call for is that ARMA extends and expands The Principles into a Body of Knowledge that truly couples with the ICRM to ensure that there is a consistent foundation for records management. If ARMA (or AIIM, for that matter) wants to truly define the Information Governance space, then the organization has to understand that it can't define the space in a vacuum. It has to partner with other professional and certifying organizations to integrate a consistent and defined space that is Information Governance, then cooperatively build an ecosystem that supports knowledge sharing and networking.

ATR: Thoughts on Email

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 04:23:00 +0000

The media is abuzz with stories about a certain former US Secretary of State using her own email server to send and receive official email related to her office. There is certainly plenty of fodder here for political accusations at each party and I'd rather not get into that here. My focus is on information governance and records management, so let's focus there.

From the time that I was but a wee little records manager, I learned that the basic definition of a "record" included language akin to "...recorded information, regardless of physical form or characteristics...". In slightly later days, the litany of types of records included as examples of records was amended to include "machine readable" or "electronic" records. The foundation for this definition has historically been the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations. This is not something new. The laws and regulations have been on the books for decades. They were purposely written to ensure that the advancement of technology did not negate the effect of the law or rule.

Part of the problem over the past 20 years is that the pace of technology has outstripped the ability to manage the information created by technology. Whether in the public sector or in the private sector, email volumes have grown exponentially. The US Federal government, particularly as embodied by the National Archives, has been stymied in efforts to manage electronic records. I can recall efforts from the mid-1990's to get a handle on electronic records in the US government.

The Code of Federal Regulations (36 CFR 1220 et seq.) has been quite clear that a Federal Agency is responsible for managing its records. There's no provision for storing paper records in your basement or electronic records on a server that you built in your garage. While certain agency policies have been cited relative to third parties hosting email, I don't think that was ever intended to allow a government employee to deploy file or email servers. I would expect that the intent of those allowances was for services hosted by Microsoft or Google or some other appropriately contracted and vetted service provider.

A variety of state and Federal officials have been dragged into this frenzy because it became known that they had personal email accounts during their terms of office. From my reading, it appears that some of them have admitted to using personal email accounts for official business. Importantly, though, this usage has not been exclusive and has not been on email servers that they housed in their residence or under their direct control. I can certainly understand that a politician may want to use a third party email system for purely political or personal purposes. They may also take great pains to keep that information apart from their official actions. So from that standpoint, I don't fault the former Secretary's interest in keeping her personal (and political) email separate from her official email. In that regard, she was well within the provisions of US law and regulations. But by mixing her official correspondence with personal correspondence on a server that she (and her apparently personal staffers) controlled, I'd suggest that the law was broken with regard to maintaining official government records in accord with 36 CR 1220.32, "Agencies must create and maintain authentic, reliable, and usable records and ensure that they remain so for the length of their authorized retention period." By removing the email from the server and printing it out -- and not maintaining a full audit trail of what was deleted (although interestingly, there seems to be knowledge of the number of emails deleted), I would suggest that it is very difficult to prove the authenticity or reliability or any of the emails produced in paper form.

Now let's turn to information security. It's safe to say that every Federal agency head and Cabinet-level appointee is a likely target of nation-state-sponsored hackers. Most historians are quite familiar with the Zimmermann Telegram, which is one of the earliest examples of "hacking" electronic communications by a nation-state. The former Secretary stated that the email server was secure because her home was protected by the US Secret Service. Well, that may have protected the server from a physical attack, but it stands to reason that there were plenty of hackers who could have had an interest in that server and "owned" it quite easily. After all, the State Department's own network had been successfully penetrated. We'll take the former Secretary's word that she was cautious about not transmitting Classified information with her email, but suffice to say that her communications with other officials likely contained strategic direction and discussions based upon Classified intelligence. If nothing else, a hacker would have been likely to easily collect foreign policy decisions ahead of their release as well as insider discussions and debates about foreign policy. As we have seen with other emails released by hackers, email exchanges between ranking government officials can be quite direct and revealing when no one appears to be watching. It may be many years before we know what access hackers had and what secrets they had access to.

While the violation of various elements of the US Code and the Code of Federal Regulations is bad enough (as well as the likely sanitizing of the historical record), the bigger issue is the breach of security. I would hope that someone with access to the highest levels of the US government; who likely had access to the most highly classified information; who should have been briefed on the ongoing threats to national security by nation-state-sponsored hackers, would have (or certainly should have) known that she was a high value target and acted accordingly. Even if the minion who set up her email assured her that it was properly protected, it seems reasonable that a thinking person would have had second thoughts about her own cyber security when she learned about successful state-sponsored APT attacks against some of the country's most protected government agencies and private companies.

OTR: Trains, Planes, Fire Trucks and Computers

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Sat, 10 May 2014 05:58:00 +0000

It's likely no surprise to my friends that I like all of the things that I mention in the headline of this post. If the mailman pays attention to what he puts in my mailbox, I imagine he must wonder about what I do. There's Airways Magazine, Air & Space, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Trains, the Rail & Wire, Fire Apparatus Journal, some security magazines, and a handful of business magazines.

I suppose that when it comes to these things, I've never quite grown up. I didn't get the "car guy" gene that my brother has, or the boat-owner gene that my father had.

I've been a member of the Illinois Railway Museum for a few years now. I go out there a few times every summer, ride the trains, take some pictures, and get my train geek on. I haven't volunteered out there up to now because, quite honestly, I'm not that handy and taking up welding at my advanced age might be a little beyond me. Besides, I'm pretty sure the family won't let me out of the house wearing striped bib overalls. Nonetheless, I'm heading out there in the morning to see if I can lend some of my knowledge, and perhaps some of my writing ability, to the Museum.

I've observed some challenges, and I think I could help, but I need to see where they want help and how that matches with my time and ability. I get the distinct impression that the long term members value sweat equity over intellectual contributions as the true measure of the volunteer.

I think this is my favorite locomotive out at the Museum. When I was a kid, I had a Tyco HO railroad layout and the train set's engine was in the same colors.

OTR: Whatever Happened to Letter Jackets?

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 19:09:00 +0000

Sometimes I have to remind myself that 2014 is as far removed from the beginning of my high school days as those days were removed from the beginning of WWII. This is one of those times.

My younger daughter and I were doing the Spring Break college tour death march this week. At some point, I commented on the lack of letter jackets among the kids also doing the tours. I found it interesting that of the four letter jackets that I did see, three were worn by female marching band members and the fourth was the only true athletic letter jacket that I saw (worn by a young man). I commented that I didn't think I had seen anyone at her school wearing a letter jacket and I got one of those looks that a parent gets from a teenager when you are clearly beneath contempt for bringing up ancient history. ("The '80's called. They'd like you back. Please go.")

Looking across a number of college campuses this week made me reflect on what has changed. Back in the Stone Age, we carried book bags emblazoned with the school's name. It occurred to me that trying to describe one of these to my daughter was going to be impossible -- she has always known backpacks. Next to my gym uniform, the book bag was one of the first things purchased with the school name on it. It was all but required. I'm not sure what people without the official school book bag used. For that matter, I don't recall what I used in college to tote around my books to class. It seemed like I had to replace that book bag every year because the weight of the books I was carrying tore it up. I know I had an old brief case and a salesman's case, but I don't think I used those every day in college.

At one school, we looked in a museum display case and I saw my late 1970's TI-30 calculator. We were the first class to be able to generally afford calculators in class, and we were also the last class to be taught how to use a slide rule. I toted around the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics for two years, along with a mathematical tables book. I suppose every kid today has an app on his or her phone containing the same information, if they still use that sort of stuff.

I do remember ordering my letter jacket. It was the end of Freshman football and we could only then order our jackets. I seem to recall that it was a relatively expensive purchase for my parents -- perhaps around $100. We ordered it a bit larger than I would normally wear. Weeks went by until it arrived. It was glorious. Deep red wool with real leather sleeves (in white). The school name emblazoned across the back. And it was strangely reversible. You could turn it inside out and wear it with a slight bit on anonymity, although, curiously, my name was stitched on the pocket. It wasn't long before my graduation year was sewn on the jacket, then a minor letter and, finally, the varsity letter! (I still have the jacket, although it long ago stopped fitting me. The girls have never seen fit to wear it to school -- even on a Throwback Thursday.)

I have to wonder if letter jackets went the way of the dodo when our culture started awarding trophies to every kid who participated in a sport.

As I look back across over 30 years, I have to wonder if the adults of the late 1970's were thinking the same things that I am today. Were they feeling, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"? Hard to say, although in the late '70's, I wasn't listening to Glenn Miller with the same enthusiasm that my kids listen to Michael Jackson and the Beatles.

Notice

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:50:00 +0000

Effective immediately, I am no longer a Certified Records Manager (CRM). If you should happen to see an announcement for a presentation that I am making and it shows me as a CRM, that is no longer the case, so please disregard the designation.

I suspect that I may overlook a few places here and there and there is no intent to mislead anyone or disrespect the credential or the ICRM. After 20 years, it became something of a habit, so I have to unlearn that.

ATR: iPad, uPad, We All Pad...

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 19:05:00 +0000

As Apple announced the next iPads recently, it dawned on me that I'm a year into my personal experience with the iPad. Interestingly, that iPad2 has already been put two generations behind, plus there is a new size. Gotta love technology. I'm also now up to iOS 6, which means I have done two OS upgrades since I first opened the box. It feels like 1992 all over again.

The number of folks with iPads in the office has increased modestly. I'm not certain that most are as geeky about them as I have been, but they get plenty of use.

For this one year anniversary post, I thought that I would noodle a bit about the state of BYO (Bring Your Own) and the smartphone / tablet revolution. I'm mainly going to set out some of my observations and analysis.

Trend: Fewer employees have company-issued smartphones. Like company paid Internet access, it seems that many companies are phasing out paid cell phones. While this can be a risk relative to information security and e-discovery, the cost savings are driving this, plus employees can buy whatever phone they desire rather than settle for what the company supports.

Trend: Tablets will represent the general limit for most organizations with BYO programs. While there are companies experimenting with computer / laptop BYO programs, integrating and monitoring unmanaged computers is hard. Virtualization is expensive and often doesn't work very well. HR and Legal have concerns about litigation and acceptable use. Tablets generally don't get onto the company network, have limited storage capability, and represent less risk across the board.

Trend: Smartphones and tablets will see increased security threats. With employees generally becoming smarter about threats to their computers, attackers will turn to smartphones and tablets to gain access to corporate data and networks. Antivirus / anti-malware software is immature and few users utilize the software that is available.

Trend: Monolithic vendors (i.e. Apple and RIM / Blackberry) will tend to become more sanctioned for office use. Android will lose share for devices used for business purposes. Windows will be driven by Microsoft's commitment and security patch velocity. More on this below.

Trend: Laptops will become more tablet-like. For all of Microsoft's efforts to get acceptance of Tablet PC, the real limiter wasn't the OS so much as the hardware (weight and battery life). With extreme thinness in, we're seeing laptops that aren't much bulkier than tablets, yet allow greater functionality. The new Dell Ultrabooks with the convertible touch screen refresh an older design in a thin package. That form factor should be the winner over the long haul. The next question deals with the ability of Microsoft to deliver an OS that is nimble.

A significant factor, as I mentioned, is the increased security threat represented by smartphones and tablets. Android devices will be at a significant disadvantage here. My 18 month old Atrix is no longer going to see its OS updated. That means, until I buy a new phone (which, because of subsidy contracts, means at least another six months), I'm not only stuck with an old OS, but I'm stuck with its foibles and vulnerabilities. Imagine that your PC was limited to Windows XP, and then only to the updates from 2003. Now look around your office. How many PCs are still running XP? Quite a few, I'll bet. The security issues with XP would be unmanageable if it wasn't continually patched. Eventually, Microsoft stops patching, but generally at a point where the risk is diminished.

The challenge with smartphones is twofold: hardware and carriers. Each manufacturer builds several different phones each year for each carrier... globally. That could mean several dozen new models every year, tweaked for the numerous cell phone carriers around the globe. And each manufacturer likes different chipsets and other hardware features. That means that "Android" has to be written to the specific phone and carrier, then tested on that network. And the carriers like to enable and disable certain features, as well as add their own bloatware.

Monolithic manufacturers like Apple and RIM control their own destinies a bit more. They are still at the mercy of carriers, but they can manage code updates far better than the Android crowd. This means more frequest OS refreshes and potentially longer life for the underlying devices. That said, smartphones and tablets appear to be destined to have much shorter lifetimes that the current generation of laptops and desktops. That very much parallels the experience of computer users 20 years ago. The computer OS and software changed at very high frequency and computers became more and more powerful with each new chipset, requiring frequent upgrades, replacements and software purchases. Somehow, Microsoft managed to ensure that DOS and Windows could support multiple generations of hardware from disparate vendors. This is what Google has to be able to do with Android at some point.

Corporate support for the BYO world is largely going to be dependent upon security down the road. Right now, the devices have to connect and not mess up the corporate network or cause networking issues. If they don't increase support calls, they are good. That's a given. But at some point, BYO devices will be vulnerable to a new generation of malware and frequent enough targets that enterprise IT will have to insist on protective measures. Otherwise, the noise level just gets crazy and the risk increases.

If I look at my own BYO behavior and computer usage, I would expect that within five years, I will revert to a desktop computer at work from my present laptop. My iPad will either have increased capability or I will switch to a convertible tablet / laptop device that allows for a full keyboard. I will have some sort of corporate-sanctioned cloud storage, and, that convertible device will likely have greater cellular telephone capability (I would expect that there will be some ability to answer calls from your tablet and switch from smartphone to tablet with ease so you don't have to carry around multiple devices). If I need to remotely get on the corporate network, I'll use a virtualization tool via VPN.

It's kind of fun to be an old dog being taught new tricks. Maybe I'll even buy a Mac for my home computer.... nah.

OTR: Citizenship

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 06:15:00 +0000

One of the proudest possessions in my home is a piece of paper. It hangs on the wall in a simple frame. The paper is creased and worn, the ink faded, but legible. It is a document 156 years old. It is my great-great-grandfather's Naturalization papers -- his citizenship.

I sit and shake my head when I hear the various arguments about how requiring identification to vote disenfranchises people. I look at that worn piece of paper and see the folds. It is clear to me that my great-great-grandfather carried that document with him from time to time, folded in a pocket. I suspect that he needed it when he applied for a job and likely when he registered to vote. It was likely a very prized possession, yet one that was frequently carried and used by him. It was so prized that it was saved and framed by a later generation and passed down to today. I don't think that I have a photograph of the man, but I have his citizenship papers. Funny how that old piece of paper can survive, but people today can't seem to be bothered to use modern technology to get a simple piece of identification.

Funny that today, people want to be handed the privilege of United States citizenship just for crossing a line on a map. Or for overstaying a visa. Yes, people want to come to this country. They always have. They want better lives. I'm sure my great-great-grandfather wanted that for himself -- and he worked hard to achieve that life. But today people want to come here and never renounce their allegiance to their former country. They expect driving tests to be given in Polish or Spanish. They expect their children to be taught in their native tongue. It bothers me to ride around the Chicago area on Polish Constitution Day or Mexican Independence Day. I see foreign flags flying more than I see American flags. I can't imagine being free to do the same with an American flag on the Fourth of July in Krakow or Mexico City. People should celebrate their heritage and be respectful of their heritage, but many seem determined to never let go of old allegiances. The beauty of America is the melting pot... that a generation after coming here, the Sullivans and the Schmidts and the Kowalskis and the Perezes and the Roncallis all can speak the same language. They can share the same understanding of what it means to be an American. But I fear that is no longer always the case.

One hundred fifty six years ago, a man named Cunningham renounced his allegiance to Queen Victoria in Geneva, Illinois. He would follow the railroad to Boone, Iowa and be buried less than 20 years later in a prominent place in the Catholic cemetery. His ancestors would carry his family name and hold on to a simple piece of paper. We have pride in our heritage -- a heritage that is Irish and German and French... and likely more than that. But it is first and foremost American. That old creased paper reminds me of that every time I look at it.

Citizenship is a privilege and must be earned. It must be protected and held in high regard. It is not an entitlement or a "right" to anyone who wants to use it. Citizenship, like freedom, is never free.

OTR: Why are Phishing Messages so Lame?

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 17:12:00 +0000

I was taking a quick troll through my spam folders this morning to make sure nothing of importance got stuck there before I flush them. I find that Yahoo! does a decent job of catching spam and phishing messages with few false positives, but Google seems to catch a lot of legitimate messages (btw, Google, if I have a rule that tags a message, that should override the spam filter,... just sayin'). I'm easily amused by a lot of the more obvious phishing messages. I've been of the opinion that the people writing these things ought to invest in native English speakers for more effectiveness. But they keep coming, so obviously they are working on some people.

I read somewhere recently, that one theory about why lame phishing messages continue to be sent is that they work. If someone actually bites on one of these, they are clearly not too bright and if they aren't too bright (and usually greedy to boot), they won't overthink the messages that come next. I guess that is one theory. I suppose another is that there are more than a few people who are either naive or extremely trusting souls and they get hooked fairly easily. These are generally the same folks who fall in with con artists and withdraw money from the bank in exchange for an envelope full of stacked newspaper.

At the Day Job, we see the more advanced phishing messages. These are targeted and are called "spear phishing" messages because they tend to selectively target individuals with "bait" indicative of some knowledge of the individual. There's another class of phishing messages referred to as "whaling", which targets high value individuals -- we haven't seen much of that. But even some of the best spear phishing messages are lame. Seriously, why would a C-level executive send you an email from a Yahoo! account? But people clicked away on that because it was "signed" by that exec. It was a low number, but still... and the funny thing is that the phisher could have done a few simple things to disguise the message, but didn't. So I have to think that even the spear phishers are looking for people who are either too harried to really look at email or simply aren't bright enough to realize that they are being phished.

So for today's lesson: Stop. Think. Connect.

ATR: BYO Mobile

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 03:15:00 +0000

It's been a while since I posted last. The iPad experiment continues with varying degrees of success. I haven't completely given up bringing the laptop home, but it certainly stays in the office a lot.

I'm now looking at my cell phones. As some of you know, I'm seldom found without two phones on my hip. One is the personal phone; the other is the work phone. Some of you likely have heard me talk about why I carry two phones, with the punch line being, "I know what my forensics guys can do." My stance to this point has been that I wanted to keep my personal life apart from my work life. Problem is, in this day and age of smartphones, it is quite hard to do. Android phones prefer a Gmail account in order to function properly and that means the work phone has my personal Gmail account on it. And with smart phones, even a couple short generations apart, there is a lot of redundancy. That said, my personal phone is newer and more capable. And with two phones, I have to buy Bluetooth devices that come with dual pairing capability so I can use both phones in the car.

The work phone is about two and a half years old. It is the first Droid. In cell phone terms, it is geriatric. It is somewhat flaky, and periodically needs a factory reset to behave. I keep taking apps off that phone since my personal phone is more useful to me. Now I could go and have the company buy me the latest and greatest, but I'm finding that I don't use the work phone much for phone calls and it seems like a waste of resources simply to have that quasi-separation of personal from corporate. I'm always going to carry my personal phone around with me, so why have to carry two? Just carrying the personal phone also means carrying one phone charger and only having to find a single outlet in a hotel room. It makes for a little less spaghetti in the computer bag.

We're in the process of looking at our BYO policies and the associated risks. My mindset is changing as I spend time thinking about the issues. For quite a while, the concern has been that litigation would mean turning over a phone for forensic examination. That would mean that personal data could get exposed. In some cases, that might be embarrassing and disruptive. But it seems that cell phones are seldom requested in our litigation. And honestly, I would expect that an opposing attorney determined to take a look at a cell phone is also going to subpoena all mobile devices for examination and likely manage to convince a judge that even the target's personal devices should be examined.

The next risk area is loss of corporate intellectual property. While cell phones and tablets can hold a remarkable amount of data, I can go buy a two terabyte hard drive and walk out the door with much more data that I could manage to get from a mobile device. There is certainly a risk, but the risks from other portable / concealable devices are much greater. That said, mobile devices that contain Active Sync enabled email can generally be wiped by the user or a corporate email administrator with a couple of mouse clicks. So if a device goes missing, it is a relatively simple matter to delete the email from the device (although in most cases, the device will be subject to a factory reset, wiping all personal data from the device as well). That is a significant difference from other portable storage devices. For organizations with a much lower risk tolerance relative to theft of data, they will likely ban cell phones and tablets, as well as other storage devices.

Our focus right now is on risks associated with malware. As the hackers out there seek softer targets, they will write more malware designed for cell phones and tablets. The risks here are several-fold: 1) loss of credentials -- loss of your login ID and passphrases that would enable a hacker to get access to your accounts; 2) eavesdropping -- the concern here being the ability for a hacker to listen in on phone conversations or use the phone as an eavesdropping device (while the average employee is not likely to be a target, executives are the biggest concern); 3) leveraging a trusted account -- an attacker taking control of a cell phone or tablet could use the email accounts, IM, or other communications to contact other employees and pass along malicious links or malware-infected attachments that look authentic.

At the same time, I'm not real keen on nuking an employee's phone when they leave, regardless of what the employee agreed to when they signed up for BYO. It seems a little excessive to be that disruptive when all we want to do is kill off the email account. That said, software that creates separate "containers" for corporate and personal data is not inexpensive, and given many competing priorities, is it worthwhile to invest in this software simply to not tick off a former employee? Certainly one argument would be that if the employee is saving the company the cost of the device and service, perhaps the company could deploy some software to preserve the employee's data.

Clearly, every organization has different risk tolerances. Many organizations will find it inconceivable to consider ever allowing a personally-owned device to hold corporate information, regardless of protections, software implementations, policies, and agreements. That's understandable. Certain geographies with restrictive data privacy laws will also find use of personal devices to access corporate data problematic. But I would expect that many organizations will move quickly down this path, with some less thoughtful than others. Point being, of course, that the organization needs to think the issue through and consider their risk tolerance thoroughly.

In my case, I've moved the email container (Touchdown) to my personal phone, along with my RSA soft token. I understand the risks personally, but I'm ok with them. That may change. But the Droid will get nuked in the next few days. And I'll let my forensic guys see what they can do with a nuked cell phone.

More thinking on this topic to follow.

ATR: Changing the Way We Certify

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:29:00 +0000

I've been thinking a lot about certifications lately. On my goals for this year, I'll probably try to get a CISSP via the "boot camp" method, as that certification is more relevant to what I do now than the CRM or the CIP. I'm now 20 years a CRM and I plan to mothball that certification. Records Management isn't my primary job responsibility and the annual dues and hassle of doing certification maintenance paperwork isn't necessarily yielding a benefit to me at this stage of my career. I suppose some will rail against me for this stance, but with my job much more focused on information risk and information security, the CRM doesn't quite measure up. Be that as it may, I'd like to throw into the wind some thoughts that I have about certifications.

You've seen some of my concerns about the CIP. I also raised some issues earlier about the CRM. For the former, the bar is probably too low. For the latter, too high. And that got me to thinking... what about a gradated series of records management certifications. It would be an interesting change, but would provide some differentiation for candidates.

I think the CRM is the best candidate for some disassembly.

Level 1: We'll call this the "RRM" or "Registered Records Manager". Candidates who successfully complete the five multiple choice sections of the CRM exam would have this status conferred upon them. This would reduce cycle times and enable candidates to walk away with a designation more quickly. In some respects, this is like the "ABD" (All But Dissertation) that a PhD candidate can post to a CV. Ideally, the candidate would move on, but some might find it a comfortable stopping point wherever they are in their career. This is still differentiated from the CIP by the number of questions and the depth of the questions, but it enables the candidate who isn't ready for the essay exam to walk away with something after a fair amount of work to pass exams one through five.

Level 2: The existing CRM.

Level 3: I'd call this "FRM" or "Fellow in Records Management". That probably needs work, but it is a higher level distinction. It's also going to be very hard to judge. My thinking is that, in lieu of the essay portion of the CRM exam, the candidate would need to write a proper scholarly research paper on some aspect of records management. That means a minimum page length, proper citations, and so forth. It would have to be juried by records managers with advanced degrees and, like a dissertation, I think it would also need to be defended. Probably not as rigorous as a dissertation, but we'd want to see that the candidate did the work. Perhaps the defense could be a session at ARMA where the candidate defends his or her research for an hour with a distinguished panel, and then the audience gets an hour. I'm not sure there are many folks who would run that gauntlet, but I think it would be interesting to try out. I would also suggest that given the rigor of the process, this level of designation would be permanent. The benefit here would be advancing the profession with proper research that would be published.

In addition, the CRM process needs additional specialty designations. At present, there is only the "/NS" for candidates working with records relating to nuclear energy. I'd suggest that there needs to be a "/LS" for the legal profession, "/FS" for financial services (mainly to cover the specialized regulatory environment), and perhaps a "/DP" for a round of questions dealing with Data Privacy. While the last designation would not substitute for the CIPP, I think it could be a nice warm up or even something that the IAPP and the ICRM collaborate on.

ATR: Rant On, Rant Off

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:56:00 +0000

A colleague forwarded a job ad to me the other day. Not because he thought I needed a job, but because I suspect that he knew it would initiate a launch sequence in me. Houston, we have liftoff...

I'm going to name names because this job posting is a matter of record and frankly, the institution should be ashamed. The B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore apparently needs an archivist. However, they seem to have very low regard for archivists. The position pays between $25,000 and $27,500.

Yes, annually. But you do get benefits. To quote another blogging colleague, "Are you kidding me?"

However, you do need to, "...be able to stoop, bend, reach, crouch, climb ladders and lift up to 40 pounds to retrieve, store, and work with objects." And bring a Master's degree and three to five years of experience with you. And just in case you think this is really something of an intern's job, nope -- plan to manage a budget and train and manage interns, docents, and volunteers. And be ready to scrounge up some money by writing grant requests.

I was paid that sort of money in 1988 by the Archdiocese of Chicago with similar experience and responsibilities.

Now we are talking about a non-profit here. I get that. But this is a non-profit organization with over $20 million in assets, a lot of which is physical plant. They have, however, modestly grown their over $9 million in cash and investments each of the past several years. Seeing positive investment growth over the past couple years is something remarkable. I'm sure they work at that. I'm sure that their budgets are relatively tight. But I fear that those results come at the expense of their "professional" staff. I doubt that someone earning the sort of money being offered could afford a decent rental unit in a safe neighborhood in the Baltimore area. How do you pay back the loans for your Master's degree? How do you even try to get ahead? Twenty-some years ago it was difficult to live on that money, even with two adults in the household working.

The problem is that the archival profession is glutted with unemployed and underemployed professionals so there are plenty of people who are archivists who will take any job to build their resume for the "big" job some day. Supply, meet demand. But for a profession that prides itself on generally exclusive requirements for the positions that become available, AND usually require an advanced degree, this pay is insulting.

This is why I shifted from archives to records management. The pay is better. And we have cookies.

I'll also point out that some archivists "get" this. They are embarrassed as well. And they do their best to embarrass institutions that do this sort of thing. This job hasn't made it to the blog yet, but I suspect it will. http://eatingouryoung.wordpress.com/

ATR: Underwhelmed by Information Certification

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:41:00 +0000

A couple months ago, I wrote about my achievement of AIIM's Information Certification. I took a little while to compose the post and I ran my drafts past both AIIM and the ICRM. The timing was fortunate, as the ICRM was just announcing some much-needed changes to their test process. I wanted to be fair to both organizations and really wanted to try to be objective in evaluating the new Certification against the gold standard in the industry. I found that AIIM's Certification was surprisingly rigorous and the ICRM has taken up the challenge to step up to the plate on some long-desired program modifications.

After a few emails, I finally had my designation acknowledged by AIIM right after Thanksgiving. One email went astray and I was then sent a link to AIIM's website to claim my welcome, congratulations, and certificate. All quite underwhelming. I certainly understand growing pains, but AIIM really doesn't have their stuff together. The certificate is generic. I was told that it is essentially the same format for any other AIIM certificate program. Nothing fancy and it is a PDF, so you print it yourself if you want something for your wall. John Mancini has a generic congratulations letter that promotes other AIIM training. There are links to graphics for the Certification, but how I display the Certification is quite unclear to me. Since it doesn't fit in the typical alphabet soup, initials after your name format, I really don't know how to show it off. Even putting the designation on a resume is unclear. I guess I'm supposed to put the logo on my business cards. Um, that ain't happening. The Corporate business card standard doesn't allow other logos on the Day Job's cards. I still have no information on certification maintenance.

Clearly I got in to this early. But I think that I expected AIIM to be much more mature in running this program. Maybe I got in on beta version .9, but paying full price for a beta leaves a lot to be desired. I'd suggest to the ICRM that they have little to worry about if AIIM continues to handle this program in this manner. It feels slapdash.

Color me underwhelmed.

Comments from AIIM welcome.

OTR: A Tale of Two Customer Service Departments

noreply@blogger.com (Patrick Cunningham, CISM, CDPSE, FAI) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:20:00 +0000

Yesterday, I had occasion to communicate with the Customer Service departments of two companies. It was interesting to see how each responded to me.

When I bought my Motorola Atrix, earlier this year, I wanted a holster for the phone. Phones and my pockets never get along and I like having the phones on my belt. The only holster available for the Atrix was the Otterbox Defender. It's a little pricey, but provides outstanding protection to the phone. I have a tendency to drop my phones on concrete and the rubberized case reduces the impact. It does make an otherwise very sleek and thin phone look quick a bit more massive, however. Anyway, I broke the belt clip on the holster. This is common for me, generally when getting into the passenger side of a car. Seems like one phone always finds the door frame and tries to remove itself from my belt -- the clip usually gives way and I'm off to Best Buy looking for a new holster. This one was no different. As I went looking for a replacement, one store suggested that I contact Otterbox because they heard they have very liberal warranty policies.

Yesterday, I sent Otterbox an email. I indicated that the clip had broken and I wanted to know if there was any warranty remedy. I figured that I get a polite form note back at least asking for proof of purchase and a return of the broken holster before they'd decide if they would do anything. At worst, it would be no reply or a simple turn down.

This afternoon, I received two emails from Otterbox. The first was a shipping confirmation for a replacement holster. The second was a nice note from a CSR named John (with his full name, phone number, and email address) letting me know that a replacement was being sent. Wow. No third degree, no proof of purchase, no shipping of the carcass. Awesome.

My other customer service interaction was with Dish Network. I got a call at home last night from a company that the Caller ID said was "Vitelity". For some strange reason, I answered the phone. After the usual robo-call delay, the person on the other end asked for me. She was calling from "Dish Network" about my service. I stopped her and demanded to know how she could be from Dish if the Caller ID said "Vitelity". I told her that I was not going to speak to her and hung up. I sent Dish a fairly sharp email (once I found a way to email them) asking them who Vitelity was and why they were calling me saying they were Dish. A subsequent Google search found some references that seemed to indicate they do telemarketing for Dish and they are calling to try to sell movie packages.

My reply this evening from Dish's employee "Richard" consisted of an "apology" (likely "CSR Apology Form 1") for Dish not meeting my customer service expectations and an invitation to call them and talk to them. Uh huh. Thanks for taking the time to read and comprehend my email.

Guess which company I plan to continue to do business with?