Risk vs reward or CYA at all costs

Interesting things happened this week and mostly on the exchange migration project.  Seems there are those were not happy with putting Outlook 2007 with an Office 2003 product.  they huffed and they puffed and they claimed that patch management is much more difficult.  Yeah like having to do them in a certain order is something we cannot train chimps to do.  Anyhow seems the higher ups have decided that we are going to put in a lower quality product.  I am not completely happy with this decision as I have always been one who would strive to put in the best product possible for the users and make the changes administratively that were necessary to suppor it.  Seems this is not the prevailing view.  The view tends to be more along the as long as the product can meet minimum requirements then lets choose the one with the lowest possible risk factor. 

Not that either side is completely wrong, but the risks here can be easily mitigated.  Any way I look at it its irrelevant at this time the decision is made and old software has been the victor.

This whole situation has gotten me thinking about corporate life and what are the ethical dilemas that permeate it.  I have seen so many times that the safe has been the choice and it has handcuffed the inventive, the progressive.  Seems this mindset is what makes some corporations average.  Lets look at Google, out there doing great and yet we all can name a bunch of initiatives that didnt pan out.  Some large purchases too that were a flop.  Yet their culture is one of trying, experimenting and striving for the next level, somewhere few have been able to succeed.  It is with this attitude that they have built what so few have.  Now I never want to advocate throwing all caution to the wind, but the safest is not always the best and more often then not it stems the flow of true innovation.

Ok I vented and rambled enough for a holiday morning

Back Again

Seems like I went away but really I am still here.  A few things have been going on.  First , and most important, is that we had another baby on 8-14.  A strapping 7lbs 7oz boy named Austin. The pregnancy and the birth had me distracted.

The second is the turmoil here at work.  With the addition of Wenda Millard and the absolute jumbling of everyone else things have been lets say up in the air.  The stock has rtaken a hit, down today to under 13.  This is troubling since the stock has fallen considerably since the addition of Wenda, though personally I think it has more to do with Lauren leaving.  She did a great job with our publishing side, consistently outpacing our competitors.

So what is new hmm lets see….still moving to Exchange from Lotus Notes, should have that wrapped up by Dec 15.  Probably going to put the VoIP migration on hold til early next year, just cant rationalize the cost right now.  The website, which thank god is not my dept, is still blah all around form performance to design to well just everything.  The talk is that the site is going to be a push in the next year but the minds controlling the push are the same ol folks who did the last revision, so I for one am not terribly optimistic.  Be nice to see them use any technology from the last few years on it.  Maybe they will use more of the Flash, yes adobe did announce the hd flash today…sweet, but I would be surprised or rather shocked if they did any HD on the site.  For a company that strives for innovation they are technology prehistoric in their thinking.  I hear the complaints that they cant get ajax working, this seems to me to be more mismanagement than anything else.

Infrastrucutre side we are revamping all roles and responsibilities, lets see how that falls out.  Generally our problem is that we have a glut of staff who haven’t kept up with technology, and those hard chargers that we do have are being wasted in roles which limit their drive.  Yeah such fun but I am just rambling

Exchange migration begins

Looks like today begins the first day of planning our migration off of Lotus onto exchange.  I dont see this as nearly as big a deal as some here do, heck we only have 850 employees, but I am sure it will end up somewhere in the middle.  Now comes the tricky part of the whole thing, the massaging of egos etc to get and keep everyone playing together nicely.  At times I miss the govt or private enterprise where this stuff didnt matter.  The whole get on board or get out of the way mentality, just not there anymore. 

I swa that Roddick lost in the first round of the French again.  Whjen will this guy get his head out of his butt and develop more of his game.  It is becoming clearer and clearer that the serve forehand game is not going to get him to the next level.  You would think Connors could talk some sense into him but it does not seem to be taking.  I guess Gilbert wasnt all bad since his results have not been nearly as good without him.  Wonder if Andy regrets that decision?

I am not happy with my conditioning nor my play since my return from fla…I need to get back on this more especially with such nice weather, no excuses

anyhow just wanted to drop a quick ramble

A crushing defeat

Wow I lost my tennis match last night, my first loss in a long time and I am not happy about it.  I was a bit to tentative and not as sharp as I wanted to be, but take nothing away from my opponents they played well and deserved the W.

I recieved a comment on yesterdays blog from Ed Brill.  I have all the respect in the world for Ed and have read his blog for about a year off and on.  So I will try to be more exacting as to why I dislike notes.  First, its tough to staff Notes Administrators at an SMB.  The cost is about 30% greater than an Exchange Adminstrator and most are not well versed enough to tackle other system administrator duties especially in a window environment.  Second, users just dont like the GUI its not intuitive and has alot of real quirky things (ever try to print from a preview screen?).  I agree with Ed in that Lotus 8 is much much better, but the milk is already sour, no one wants to hear about what is on the way anymore.  Third, the Lotus DBs corrupt all the time, easy to fix but an administrative nightmare.  Fourth, the use of Lotus as a development platform is not a favorite of the development community when  compared to a LAMP, .NET etc.  Fifth, the local clients are real heavy thus making them real slow over busy wan connections.

This is just a short list of what turns most of us off to Lotus, and I do hope and even see continued improvement but its still, as a mail system, playing catchup to exchange