I use Ubuntu, but these instructions should help you on other Linux variants as well. This process worked for Ubuntu 11.04, but I haven’t tested anything else. Let us know in the comments if this works for you too, or if you have any updates for other distros.

What Is It?

First up, let’s discover some information about the device itself:

> lsusb
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 003: ID 08ff:1600 AuthenTec, Inc. AES1600
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0b05:1751 ASUSTek Computer, Inc. BT-253 Bluetooth Adapter
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 017: ID 19d2:0166 ONDA Communication S.p.A. 
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 04f2:b033 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1164:1f08 YUAN High-Tech Development Co., Ltd
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

The device itself is a ZTE product, an MF821 LTE modem, which for some reason shows up in the lsusb output as ONDA Communication. Take note of the ID code there, because we’ll need it in a minute.

USB Mode Change

This device is one of those tricky ones that pretends to be a storage devices before the modem driver is loaded. When it detects that it’s driver is loaded, it switches mode to become a modem. Under Windows and MacOS it does, anyway. Under Linux, we have to force this to happen (of course).

The utility that does this is called usb_modeswitch. Surprise, surprise. Grab it and its data module:

sudo apt-get install usb-modeswitch usb-modeswitch-data

Depending on how recent your distribution is, you might already have the appropriate configuration in the usb_modeswitch files. I didn’t so I had to add it myself.

Create a file in /etc/usb_modeswitch.d called 19d2:0166, the same as the ID from lsusb output above. That’s how usb_modeswitch knows which set of config to use. Put the following content in the file:

# Telstra ZTE LTE 4g modem
#
DefaultVendor=  0x19d2
DefaultProduct= 0x0166

TargetVendor=  0x19d2
TargetProduct= 0x0257

MessageContent="55534243123456782400000080000685000000240000000000000000000000"

CheckSuccess=20

Some brief explanation: The DefaultVendor and DefaultProduct are used by usb_modeswitch to find the USB address for the modem, so it knows which device to talk to. The MessageContent is a string that gets sent to the device to make it switch mode. I have no idea what that string means, I just copied it from a more recent version of usb-modeswitch-data for the MF820 product. It seems to work fine.

The TargetVendor and TargetProduct are used to check that the mode-switch worked, because we set CheckSuccess=20, which means check for 20 seconds to see if it worked. When the device switches mode, it actually changes its USB ID to a different product ID. Not all devices do that, but this one does, so we need to let usb_modeswitch know.

We want this to happen automatically, which we can do using the magic of udev. Add the following lines to /lib/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules:

# Telstra 4G/LTE ZTE MF821
ATTRS{idVendor}=="19d2", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0166", RUN+="usb_modeswitch '%b/%k'"

Restart udevd and your modem should automatically mode-switch when you insert it.

Driver Support

You now need to make sure you have a kernel driver for the device. The usbserial kernel module already supports it (in 11.04, kernel 2.6.38-8-generic-pae), but it doesn’t detect it automatically, so we give it some help using modprobe configuration.

Add a file into /etc/modprobe.d, such as /etc/modprobe.d/telstra-4g.conf with the following content:

# Set up options for Telsta 4G connectivity under linux
options usbserial vendor=0x19d2 product=0x0257

Now you’ll need to remove the module from the running kernel using:

rmmod usbserial

(and any dependent modules) and then re-insert, it with:

modprobe usbserial

And the modem device should now be automatically detected.

Add to NetworkManager

Click on NetworkManager and Edit Connections, go to the Wireless Broadband tab, and add a connection. You should see a selector in the middle of the window called “ZTE LTE Technologies MSM” or something similar. If not, something hasn’t worked above and you’ll need to muck about with it a bit.

Click forward, forward, etc. until the connection is added. In my setup, the APN was set to “telstra.wap” for some reason, which is wrong. Change it to “telstra.internet”.

You should now be able to click on the newly added connection in NetworkManager and connect to 4G.

You can active your device by browsing to www.telstra.com.au and following the instructions in the little booklet that comes with the device. Or, if you’re me, the website will be broken and you’ll have to ring them and talk to a helpdesk person somewhere in Asia.

Forcing 4G Mode

For some reason, my dongle kept connecting in 3G mode, so I wasn’t getting the added speed and other benefits of 4G/LTE mode.

It looks like the version of modemmanager I’m using (0.4+git.20110124t203624.00b6cce-2ubuntu1) doesn’t know how to switch ZTE modems into 4G mode. I’m not sure, because my C is rusty.

Never fear! You can force the modem into 4G mode, and it appears to remember this from that point on, even if you unplug it and plug it back in the next day (as I just did).

Here’s how.

First, click on NetworkManager and unselect “Enable Mobile Broadband”. This will disconnect NetworkManager from the modem so we can talk to it directly.

Fire up minicom (sudo apt-get install minicom if you don’t have it) and hit CTRL-Z followed by O. Select “Serial port setup” and hit Enter. Now hit A to choose edit the serial device to use, and make it /dev/ttyUSB2. Hit Enter to save the setting, then Enter again to get back to the menu. Select Exit and hit Enter to get back to the minicom session.

Enable “local echo” so you can see what you type by hitting CTRL-Z followed by E.

Now we talk to the modem using Hayes AT commands. The first command is to make sure you’re connected to the modem:

AT

The modem should respond:

OK

Now we force the modem into 4G mode:

AT+ZSNT=6,0,0

Again, the modem should respond OK, and we’re done! Exit minicom.

Re-enable mobile broadband in NetworkManager, and connect. The little light on the modem should be green instead of blue, indicating you’re connected to the 4G network.

Update: You can also use the following code setting to put the modem into auto-negotiate mode:

AT+ZSNT=0,0,0

This should detect 4G if it’s available, and fall back to 3G if you’re outside a 4G zone.

That’s It!

Happy internetting.

Thanks to FreeGeek for the instructions on how to set up usb_modeswitch and udev.

Thanks to the Linux kernel documentation crew for how to pass options to the usbserial device driver.

And thanks to everyone who builds this software for free.

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• Happy Birthday Linux

A tip from the book “The Now Habit”. Open a spreadsheet program and set up 7 columns, one for each day of the week. Down the left side, divide the days into half-hour increments. Or be lazy and just download this PDF of one by clicking here.

Print it out.

Now take it with you and for each half hour, write in what you did. If you did a bunch of things, write in something that describes all of those activities. For example if you “read a bunch of random stuff on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook” you could write “faffed”.

For a week, just take note of what you do. Don’t think about it too hard, just write it all down.

Why is this wise?

This is a handy exercise because it forces you to look at what you actually do, not what you think you do. It’s usually a bit of a shock when I do it.

It’s easy to think “I don’t have time”. Sure you do. You just choose to use it doing other things. At least be ok with that.

Or make a different decision. It’s your life.

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• Wednesday Wisdom: Learn where your money goes
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Get out all your bank statements for the last financial year. Enter them all in. This will take a while, so don’t feel you have to do it all at once. I find it handy to say “I will only do 15 minutes of this, then stop” and find I get into the rhythm and keep going for an hour or so.

You’ll start getting rather intrigued with what you’ve spent all your cash on.

Once you’ve entered all this stuff in, print out some of the standard reports, like “General Ledger”, “Profit and Loss” or “Income Statement”, and “Balance Sheet”.

Now take a look at it. Fascinating, innit?

Why is this wise?

No one else cares about your money as much as you do. If someone else does care, it’s because they want to take your money and make it their money.

I could rant for a good while about how important it is that you get a handle on your own personal finances. Seriously. It’s one of those things they don’t force you to learn at school that, unlike trigonometry, is vital for your future well-being. If I were king, I’d ensure that you had to take personal finance, statistics, and critical reading before you were allowed to graduate.

Looking at what you actually do, compared to what you think you do can be confronting, but in a good way. Maybe you’ll stop spending quite so much on comic books and sex toys. Maybe you’ll decide to spend more. Your call. Quality sex toys are an investment, I say.

Added bonus: when you do this, it makes tax time much, much easier. You can often just dump out a report and give that to your accountant, and they’ll do the rest. Ask them for advice on how to set up the software to make their job easier, such as what accounts to use for various expenses.

For more tips on personal finance, a good place to start is Get Rich Slowly.

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Some entries are mostly due to some extremely intelligent and trustworthy colleagues whom I am sure could be encouraged to accompany me if the price is right. I am nothing if not a team player. See how generous I am in sharing credit?

Hire 1: Marketer

IT departments are completely woeful about marketing themselves to the rest of the business. Marketing people are viewed with the same level of contempt as a used-car salesman, or a politician in a marginal seat. This is largely because IT people have no idea what marketing is, and, like the rest of society, assume they’re advertising people in the mould of Russell Howcroft from The Gruen Transfer.

What IT fails to understand is that the rest of the business views them as far worse. Marketing people are often good-looking and gregarious, and are frequently a source of free schwag and invitations to boozy launch parties. In contrast, IT is full of awkward man-children with poor hygiene and worse social skills, who frequently tell you that you can’t have any more disk space.

So step one is to hire someone to act as the face of IT, preferably one that has been washed recently. Their job is to work closely with hire number two to figure out what the business wants from IT, and what they don’t want. They’ll then work with me to make sure we do more of what the business wants, and less of what they don’t, and that we get paid for it appropriately.

Hire 2: Anthropologist

An anthropologist spends all their time watching people and learning about what they do. This is a lot more useful than asking them, because people lie. Go ahead, ask ten of your friends how often they masturbate.

Rather than relying on some badly designed “how are we doing” survey with poor response rates, my anthropologist will go and watch people using technology in their actual job. This will also help us with a really important point: seeing what people don’t do. People don’t use the specially-developed-at-great-expense knowledge base because it’s usually wrong and it’s quicker to just ring their mate Alan in support. They don’t bother using the complaints form because nothing ever gets done about it, so they gave up trying. Etc.

My anthropologist can also look inwards at the IT department itself and figure out what’s going on, or not going on, as the case may be. IT staff don’t update the knowledge base because it’s boring and it’s not factored into whether or not they get a raise. Besides, no one uses it, so why bother? They have only the vaguest notion of how the business makes money, and have no idea how their job relates to the rest of the company.

Hire 3: Librarian

Information Technology. Guess which of these two words gets the most attention paid to it? I reckon that IT is actually about 5-15% dealing with technology and 85-95% managing information. And a stupidly large amount of that information is in Word documents and spreadsheets (and *shudder* PowerPoint) that no one other than the author can find.

This one really bakes my noodle. How on earth can any decent sized organisation spend so much time and money creating documents that no one can find? They get stored, oh my lord how they get stored, but you’d be better off throwing them away for all the use they are.

Look at it like this: contractors run about $800-$1,000 a day. Let’s say you’re screamingly efficient and can get a design document written in 3 days (Hahaha!). That’s $3,000. Going with a more realistic example, a solution design for a major national company takes 3 weeks, at least, and involves peer reviews, signoffs, etc. A conservative estimate is $15,000 to $20,000. For one document. That you can’t find.

So basically, your IT department buys a new car every month (per project) and then loses it in the parking lot. Then they charge you for parking.

The actual situation is frequently much worse than this. But hey, let’s make sure we track all physical equipment worth more than $1,000 so we can depreciate it.

More to come

Imagine you’re new to the GM of IT/CIO role. Who would you hire first?

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This little play sparks up every year or so: Mitsubishi has been threatened to close their South Australian plant for at least ten years, and Ford or Holden seem to think seriously about it every three or so. But each time, the state or federal government steps in with some sort of financial incentive for them to stay.

For someone in IT, why does this matter?

Low Skill IT

I look at the auto industry, and I see striking parallels to the IT industry. The medium to large corporates in Australia are heavily reliant on humans to do the construction work of IT: Racking servers, installing operating systems and databases. This is, in many ways, manufacturing.

And this kind of manufacturing suffers the same sort of competitive threats: it’s much cheaper to have someone in Bangalore install Windows 2008 on a server. It’s even cheaper to have a robot do it, once you’ve bought the robot.

As operating systems and basic application software has gotten easier to install and use, the skill required to get the basics up and running has been reduced. This turns what was previously a ‘craftsman’ style job into a low-skilled job. Putting in a CD and typing out exactly what’s on this piece of paper here doesn’t require years of training. If that’s all you’re doing, and a company can get someone in India, or China, or the Philippines to do the same job for half the price, why wouldn’t they?

It’s not quite as simple as that, but it’s easy for a manager to ignore the complexity when a 50% budget saving is staring them in the face, particularly if that manager’s end-of-year bonus is on the line. And it’s already happening. The Indian consultancies (Tata, Wipro, Infosys, etc.) are all winning business at major Australian corporates, and the IBMs of the world have offshore staff in play as well.

Differentiate or Die

What I see is a gradual structural change to the local IT industry. There will always be some work for system admins, sure, but not as much. Wages will get squeezed, and there won’t be as many roles in the big companies like Telstra where you can just settle in to a long career herding tin. Again, it’s already happening.

Instead, you’ll have the low-skill work being done by two tiers of (probably contract) workers: rack and stack by locals, and install and configure remotely. At first, it’ll probably be handled by cheaper labour offshore, but eventually, those jobs will completely disappear because they’ve been automated. We’re still in the early stages of the automation/orchestration hype cycle, but mark my words, it’ll happen.

Which means those people who currently herd tin for a living will need to learn new skills. If you’re a contractor, better start now. If you’re permanent, I’d be making sure my development plan includes some sort of insurance policy against the coming outsourcing.

And for the team leaders/supervisors/low-level managers: I’d be very, very worried. Less coalface employees means less need for supervisors. If you’re not already getting your house in order, then be planning your exit strategy.

No Safety Net

Because unlike the auto-industry, there’ll little to no government support for the IT workers in Australia. Quite simply, you earn too much. You’re white-collar, not blue-collar, and you’re not in a union, so traditional Labor MPs aren’t worried about your votes. Liberal MPs love your company bosses (and their donations) more than they love you. The Nationals worry about farmers and miners, because there’s no IT to speak of in central Queensland. Small business is ignored by all sides unless it’s “battlers” like the corner fish-and-chip shop, and then it’s only for the length of the photo-op.

Cynical? Perhaps. But if I’m right and all that stands between outsourcing and the dole is the hope government will step in… well, I’d hate to be in that position.

There will be no bailout for IT workers when the tin herding jobs go. You will be on your own.

Prepare yourself.

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“The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

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I first installed Linux in 1996 as part of a 6 month paid internship at Vodafone. Vodafone had commissioned a professor from one of the universities to write some trunk-link planning software, and he’d chosen Slackware Linux as the base of the system. I was asked to get a spare, oldish PC set up with the software.

And so began several weeks of tinkering with version 3.x Slackware and X-windows, trying to get the bloody thing to run. But eventually, I succeeded, and a fairly industrial little route planning software package (with GUI!) was up and running. I have no idea if it was put to serious use.

Desktop of Choice

My internship in the Engineering department could have been quite pointless. I didn’t get assigned any real tasks, but a couple of minor text processing exercises introduced me to awk, sed and shell programming.

Happily, this led me to making friends with the folks in the Unix and VMS department, who offered me a job when my internship came to an end. I jumped at the chance, and ended up going to part-time uni and full time work.

Herding HP-UX boxes for a living meant I needed the power of Unix on the desktop. Instead of running an HP workstation, I ended up installing Linux. I had a corporate Windows machine for email, Word, Excel, Visio and Project, but my ‘serious’ work was done on the Linux box. Native X-windows and xterms beats Exceed or Reflection any day. Cron! Scripting! A built-in IP stack that worked!

This was in the days of Novel NetWare, when Windows NT 3.51 was the new (frequently broken) hotness. Yeah, showing my age.

Hacker’s Choice

Linux followed me home, so I kept it. I shared a house with two other engineers, and we installed an early version of Debian on a cobbled together PC that lived in the lounge. It became the hack-box, and I remember re-implementing Conway’s Game of Life from scratch, learning about buffer flipping, bit-shifting and binary maths in ways I never had in years of running a DOS PC. The lightbulb finally went on and pointers in C started making sense. Embedding x86 ASM code in C programs (for speed) was a logical extension.

Neerrrrrddddds!

Then I had a couple of jobs where I had a proper workstation (Sun, then HP-UX again). For y2k preparation works, I had to shut down an HP Apollo workstation that had over two years of uptime! NT servers at the time were up and down like the Assyrian empire. Serious workloads were put on Unix servers.

So I ran Linux at home as my desktop. I completely dropped Windows for a time, even for games, somewhere around 1997. The cost of buying up-to-date hardware just for games, compared to the cost of a Sony Playstation console just didn’t make sense. I didn’t need an ultra-powerful PC to run Linux, so I didn’t bother upgrading often. When I did, it always felt like a bargain.

Laptop of Doom

Somewhere in the early 2000′s I got a dedicated laptop for work, since I’d become a consultant and was usually out at client sites. So I’d dual boot: Linux (debian again) for the serious technical work, Windows for documentation and gaming (when at home, of course).

I signed up for dedicated ADSL when it became affordable, and now my Linux home machine became a permanent server. The laptop was my remote client, and I could VPN back in to my own private network.

Rise of Ubuntu

I finally decided to try Ubuntu somewhere around version 5, and was hooked instantly. The Live CD was a brilliant innovation (try before you buy!) and the ease of use based on debian’s package manager meant I got the best of both worlds. I’ve been on Ubuntu ever since.

I was spending all my time in Linux, and I could dual-boot a server at home for games, so I moved to Linux only on the laptop, and at home a Linux only server and a dual-boot desktop.

And it’s been that way for three laptops now, so, nearly ten years. After a dead power-supply took out a server for 24 hours a few years ago, I went virtual for the servers using VMware, and then VirtualBox. Now the email server stays online when I want to play HalfLife or Portal.

Stay the Course

There have been times when I’ve considered ditching Linux. Times when I needed Visio. Or something that could talk to my iPhone or webcam properly. Or something with a less industrial interface and a bit of style.

But I haven’t. Why? Because apart from a few rare things, I can do everything I want to with Linux, for free. Easier and faster than if I used Windows or MacOS. For the things I can’t, there’s dual-boot or virtualisation.

I’ve never had a virus, or had to completely re-install the operating system because something got munged. If something breaks, I can fix it, usually by editing a file after Googling for the answer. If I want to try out some new software, I just fire up apt-get and install it, without needing to reboot anything.

I can figure out what’s wrong using tools that are built in. I’ve always had grep and awk and Perl and Python. I can understand people loving Powershell, because it’s what Unix people have enjoyed for years. Isn’t it great to be able to automate your computer?!

And if it’s really important to me, I can read the source code and fix it myself. I don’t have to wait months or years for some vendor to decide my little problem is important enough for them to fix. That’s helped me on more than one occasion with Linux, and hurt me more than once working with a vendor’s closed source software.

Thanks Linux, and Open Source

I’ve tried to give back to the community with bugfixes, doco, my own software, and occasionally cash.

I still use Windows and Office and Visio, which I paid for. I’ve bought plenty of Windows and Linux games. I use the tool I need to use to get the job done.

And for me, more often than not, that tool has been Linux and Open Source Software.

Here’s to another 20 years.

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There’s a lot of reading in an MBA, and doing it part time as well as working full time and trying to have some semblance of a social life means you don’t have a lot of time for poring your way through Principles of Corporate Finance page by page.

I’m no expert, but I’ve picked up a couple of simple tricks that I figure could help you, as well as Dave, if you have a lot of reading to get through in a short space of time.

Liking It Helps

When you have to do something a lot, it’s a big help if you actually enjoy it. If you’re one of those people who don’t really like reading, you have my sympathy. Also I wonder what on earth you’re doing here, given that the Internet is full of reading. And pictures of cats. But also reading.

Even if you’re not a big fan of reading, you may well be a big fan of a specific topic. Reading about that topic then becomes enjoyable, because it’s about something you’re interested in. Figure out what interests you about a given topic, and then focus on that as you read.

But if you’re not a fan of reading, and have to slog through something dull, never fear!

Just Enough Reading

Speed reading is often recommended to people, and while I once did some classes on some of the techniques (back in high school), I never practised them, so I wouldn’t call myself a speed reader per se. What I do is skim read.

Bad writers (like me) use way too many words to get their point across. You can usually skip at least half of what they’ve written, because they just repeat themselves over and over.

Good writers structure their writing in a way that actually makes skimming easier. They break the text up with useful headings, so you can scan the headings to get a rough idea what it’s all about. The first paragraph contains the main point of the section, so you can just read that and skip the rest if you’re in a real hurry. If you need better understanding, spend more time on the bits that make the least sense.

Bad writers are actually harder to skim read then good writers, because they don’t structure their writing as well. Adapting your skimming to skip over the repetition and pick out the key points takes a bit of practice, but not as much as you’d think.

Practice

This is another reason that liking to read helps. Getting better at reading quickly takes practice. People who liked reading from an early age just did it more, which is why they’re better at it than those people who didn’t.

If you do a speed reading course, you’ll have to practice the techniques quite a bit in order to get good at it. To stay good, you have to keep using the techniques. I’m too lazy to bother, which is why I can’t speed read.

Getting good at skimming also takes practice, particularly with slowing down again after you start skipping repeated ideas from ordinary writers, but nowhere near as much as learning to speed read.

In fact, you’re probably already pretty good at it.

The best piece of advice I had for Dave was: just speed up. You’re probably a lot better at reading quickly than you give yourself credit for, so just give it a go!

Test Yourself

Pick two articles in the newspaper or somewhere online, preferably from the same source so they have a similar style.

Read one of them as you normally would. Once you’ve finished it, write down what you remember about the article on a piece of paper.

Now read the other article twice as fast as normal. Again, write down what you remember once you’ve finished reading it.

Now go back and re-read each article, and compare what you pick up now to what’s in your notes. How’d you do? I’m betting you picked up a lot more from the fast-read article than you thought you would, right?

If you practice this, you’ll find a sweet spot for reading things really fast when you know you don’t need to take much of it in. You’ll also get better at picking when to slow down for things you need to pay closer attention to, and when to speed up again when it gets dull.

Try It Out, and Let Me Know

I learned this “read fast and check comprehension” technique back in, I think, primary school. I still use it, so I figure it’s still good, but I’m interested in if it works for you.

Let me know how you find it in the comments.

Or maybe you have a tip of your own you can share with Dave?

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SNIA have held two of these events, and as an attendee at both, I have some tips based on what worked well, and not so well, on the days held so far.

Before the Event

Before the big day, you’ll need to spend some time preparing. This is a marketing event, so treat it like one.

Would you lob up to a trade show or conference without doing at least some planning? Of course not. Make sure you put some effort in before a BlogFest, too.

If you’re under-prepared, it shows. At both SNIA events, there was at least one vendor who was under-prepared for the event. It was a newish idea then, so it’s at least partly understandable, but it still doesn’t look that good. I’m sure you’d like to look your best, right?

Do your Homework

Before the event, you’ll need to do some research. Ask the host what they expect to get out of the day. Ask who the attendees will be.

Learn about the attendees. Read their blogs. Follow them on twitter. Get a feel for the sorts of things they’ll be interested in.

And figure out what you want to get out of the day. Plan how you’ll handle it. What one central message do you want to communicate on the day? How will you do that?

The best example we’ve seen of this so far was IBM. They were very prepared, ran their session smoothly, and made sure they got their central message across. They also managed to be interesting and engaging, but more on that in a little bit.

Join Twitter

Get onto Twitter. It’s where most of the action happens with BlogFests, and there’s plenty of chatter before the event. If you’re not already involved with social media as part of your marketing, you might want to rethink that plan. Not being where your customers are doesn’t seem like a smart move to me.

If nothing else, if gives you inside information on the other sessions in real time. At least one of us will be live-tweeting the event, so you can see what the other vendors are talking to us about, and adjust your strategy if required.

Engage with the Bloggers

This is for advanced marketers only. Engaging directly with the bloggers means you have a chance to build personal connections and rapport before the event begins.

You can learn more about them, and they you. This can only help to get everyone communicating openly.

The main advantage here is benefit of the doubt. If you’re already a familiar entity to the bloggers, you’ll likely get a more favourable hearing. Why wouldn’t you want that?

Excluding Bloggers

We’ve had a blogger excluded from a session because of a potential conflict of interest. It looked a bit silly, since the people in the session and the blogger all knew each other and work together all the time.

I’m all for avoiding conflicts of interest and moral hazards. That’s one of the reasons SNIA selects only independent bloggers who are there on the day in a personal capacity. If you feel it’s necessary to exclude someone, that’s fine. Just be aware of the way it looks.

We don’t talk about anything under NDA. Anything you tell us is assumed to be public knowledge, or will be shortly, because we’ll be publishing it. As such, commercial conflicts of interest really shouldn’t come up.

The whole point of BlogFest is to share information so that the local tech community, and your customers, can be better informed about your products.

Being overly paranoid or secretive mostly just makes you look silly.

During the Event

As mentioned above, follow proceedings on Twitter. It’s an inside edge at the moment, as few vendors do this.

Note that there’s an external audience watching the tweet-stream, so you can engage with them as well. They’re your customer base.

Be Organised

Most important tip first.

We’re on a tight schedule on these days, and have precious little slack time if someone runs long. Usually it means we end up with 10 minutes to scarf down a quick sandwich at lunchtime before running for the bus.

Do us all a favour and be a well oiled machine, with all the little admin tasks taken care of as much as possible.

If there’s a security sign-in, have all the passes ready to go and needing only a signature.

Have enough chairs in the meeting room. Take coffee orders as we walk in, for those who want one (assuming you’re doing a coffee run, see below).

The less time we spend mucking about, the more time you get to convince us to be excited about what you sell. Let’s focus on what’s important.

Technology Requirements

BlogFest is a high tech day. Bare minimum for the bloggers is a powerpoint and space to set up a laptop each.

Some bloggers like to record audio or video, so choose a space that suits. If audio or video recording isn’t cool, let us all know well in advance of the session, to manage expectations.

There will be big bonus points for a vendor who manages to arrange easily accessed WiFi for the session. The bloggers love them some live-tweeting, so network access is a must. We’re talking simple sign-on (no 97 hex-character passwords) and responsive WiFi. Guest WiFi with 60% packet loss and 2kB/s bandwidth won’t cut it.

We’ve all learned our lessons from early on, so we tend to have either personal phone tethering or mobile broadband dongles to work around non-existent or non-functional WiFi. Still, decent WiFi would win you brownie points.

Do Provide Refreshment

Water and mints are great, since we’re spending all day talking. Have enough jugs and glasses in easy reach so we don’t have to disrupt proceedings to wander over to a sideboard.

A coffee run may be welcome, depending on the time of day, and how many we’ve had already. I’m from Melbourne, and there’s at least one other coffee snob about, so I’ll pass on the drip-o-lator thanks.

Some soft-drinks are generally welcome as well, though not my personal cup of tea.

Tea is a nice alternative to coffee, though.

Lunch

Lunch is usually a sponsored thing by whichever vendor is up just before lunchtime.

Catering places are a bit funny, and often do weird things like cut perfectly adequate sandwiches into soldiers to make them more.. I dunno.. arty? Maybe they’re trying to justify charging $14 a sandwich because they’re cut up in novel ways.

They also seem to favour exotic fillings, like eggplant and lettuce. What’s wrong with a nice ham, cheese and salad roll, say I?

Seriously, just stick to basics. We don’t need gourmet mini-quiches. A plate of sandwiches or rolls with simple ham, cheese, chicken, salads etc. on them is plenty good enough.

Slides

Yeah, ok, if you must.

This is always tough, because marketeers do love them a slide deck. Please, for the sake of avoiding snarky tweets, keep them to a minimum.

If you really want to impress, use a whiteboard. Draw pictures to illustrate some points.

The thing to keep in mind here is that what we’re really after on a BlogFest is a conversation. We don’t want a sales pitch. Many of us will have already seen it, or something very similar, as part of our day jobs.

What we want is the inside goss. How is it special? Why are customers excited about it? Be specific, and concrete, and meaningful.

There’s nothing quite so engaging as someone who knows what they’re talking about and is excited to teach other people about it. And then they go crazy drawing pictures to explain it. It’s more collaborative and fun, and those are the vendors who get the best reviews from the bloggers.

Other Vendors

Pretend there aren’t any, unless we specifically bring them up.

We get it. Your products are awesome, and theirs all suck. We read Twitter; we’re used to the regular pissing contests between the sales teams. Is it really necessary to use your session to talk about their products?

We’re there to talk to you. So talk to us. About your stuff.

If we do bring up a competitor, address our point as a direct comparison on that specific point, and then leave it alone. Often we might be more familiar with a competitor’s product, so what we’re trying to do is understand your stuff by starting from a known place. Help us understand your gear by leading us from what we know to what we don’t.

And then get back to focussing on why your stuff is so cool.

Skip the Trinkets

I speak for myself here when I say that I don’t need any more mugs, dongles, t-shirts or other branded merch.

Some writing paper and a pen are useful, though we all bring our own, and I’m fussy about pens that write well. We have a tradition of full merch disclosure, too, so going overboard will likely backfire.

There’s more potential downside here than there is upside, so better to just leave it alone.

Some sort of information pack that we could take with us would be great, though. Some brochureware on whatever you’ve talked to us about, to give us extra detail. Maybe a whitepaper. That sort of thing.

After the Event

The event isn’t over for us at the end of your session. We’ll be moving on to another vendor, or a de-brief session at the pub.

Some of us will be trying to file stories pretty quickly, so if there’s outstanding information from a session, please get it to us as fast as you can. If you can give us an indication of when we’ll receive the info, so much the better. It helps us plan better.

Be available afterwards for follow-up questions. We might need to clarify something simple, like how to spell someone’s name, or their correct title. We might need something explained to us again if our notes turn out to be too vague, or a few days makes our memory hazy.

Again, it’s about engagement, and making sure that the right information is out there for us to write and talk about your company and your products.

Your Turn

Hopefully these tips can help you to stage a successful blogger session that benefits both your company and the bloggers themselves.

Got any other tips? Share them in the comments!

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Internal IT, at least as we have come to know it, is doomed.

What will emerge from the wreckage will be an entirely different beast. There will be a great deal of collateral damage, and it will catch many currently within internal IT completely by surprise.

Doomed, You Say?

doom. n. 1. fate or destiny, especially adverse fate; unavoidable ill fortune.

or perhaps: 3. a judgment, decision, or sentence, especially an unfavorable one

I would argue that meaning three is already the daily reality of most IT departments. They have been judged by the business, and have been found wanting. For many years.

Suddenly, the shoe is on the other foot, and the business has found they are no longer as beholden to internal IT as they once were. They can, and do!, bypass internal IT completely and buy services on demand from external vendors. If they want CRM, Salesforce.com is more than happy to take their money and deliver it to them that same day. Actually, they can trial it without paying a cent.

Try that with internal IT.

Email? Gmail. Want a server? AWS is just one of the options. Want some database? Again, there are plenty of options for running something up that day and getting on with solving the eternal business problem of getting someone to give you cash for something of value.

IT just isn’t core business for the vast majority of companies. And plenty of them are deciding that running IT themselves is none of their business.

It’s the Marketing, Stupid

Imagine you have 2 choices: you can get what you think you want today, for a known price, or you can get something that isn’t what you wanted, in several months, for three times what the original quote was.

Maybe.

That’s the reality for many businesses. And it’s why they are deserting internal IT in droves. The business has realised that there’s no black magic, just hardware and software they can buy anywhere. They’re starting to measure if they’re getting value for money.

Guess what the numbers say?

The only way to stem the tide is to completely rethink the way you deliver IT internally. Which is where the marketing comes in.

Rather than looking at a bunch of shiny tech – storage here, some VMs there, some database over here – you need to start looking at what the business wants to buy. Even if you think they’re wrong.

Look at how much they want to spend. What do they want it to do? Now, how can you make that happen?

It’s possible that what they’re looking for is impossible, sure. But what if you’re wrong? What if it is possible, and someone else does it? Someone like Salesforce.com? And they offer a superior service at a lower price?

Who’s wrong now?

Change is the Only Constant

Providing the level of service that the business wants, at the price they want, will take a radical overhaul of the way you do things.

It’s exactly the same situation as auto-manufacturers were in decades ago. If you want to make 8,557,351 cars a year, as Toyota did in 2010, you have to do things very differently than the way you did in 1990 (4,212,373 cars produced).

You can’t hand-carve each door any more. No more manually typing in the apache.conf for each new webserver. No more building the OS from a CD.

The process of building and maintaining infrastructure is changing. Has to change. Automation is here (finally!), it’s getting bigger, and if you’re a door carver, best you update your skills.

This is your future.

Automation, on a scale you’re only just getting a glimpse of, is coming, and coming fast. Get on board, or get left behind.

Good News Everyone!

There’s still time to fix your IT, but not much. If you’re not already talking to the business about what they really want you to deliver, get onto it now.

And meanwhile, behind closed doors, be working like absolute blazes, to make it happen any way you can. Get rid of every little inefficiency. Stop hand carving everything. Physically restrain anyone who keeps trying to.

Automate, automate, automate!

Money’s already tight, so if you waste your precious budget continuing to use outdated processes and systems, you won’t have any left to save your own job.

Given your track record so far, and be honest, how do you rate your chances if you ask for more money?

Best get cracking.

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