Industry Commentary

Enterprise APIs and OAuth: Have it All

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Enterprises often frustrate developers. Why do Enterprises always seem so behind when it comes to the very latest technology? In particular, a trend we are seeing is the continued struggle to marry Enterprise authentication with the burgeoning world of REST … Continue reading →

Shadow IT is a Good Thing for IT Organizations

Thu, 10 May 2012 05:00:00 EDT

Shadow IT is a good thing for IT organizations…and here’s why… It is important to first understand what Shadow IT is and why it happens. Shadow IT is commonly referred to when non-IT organizations delve into the delivery of technology solutions…without IT’s involvement. It happens for a number of reasons. But the most common is [...]

Is HTML5 Web 3.0?

Tue, 08 May 2012 06:00:00 EDT

About six years ago I wrote a blog titled “I have no idea what Web 2.0 means“. That blog had link to a video where IT leaders were helplessly trying to explain what Web 2.0 means. One guy said something like this, “Everyone wants to do it, and you can’t find enough people to do [...]

How Media Can Slice Through Always-On

Mon, 07 May 2012 07:30:00 EDT

In my last column, I discussed how Always-On can now be seen for what it is: a potential biological addiction. In a world where we are never far away from an electronic, online screen, we increasingly feel an inner urge to check our emails, social media pages and IM in every circumstance, despite how inappropriate that situation may be. The internal impulse to check our messages at such challenging times is fostered by the brain. By checking our messages in such circumstances, the brain rewards our apparent furtiveness with a minute release of dopamine. Dopamine is a hormone and neurotransmitter related to the pleasure system of the brain. In large doses, it can provide a real high.

Why You May Be Screwed If You Don’t Take Google+ Seriously

Sun, 06 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

If you have recently checked your category’s Google search results, you may well have been as surprised as was when I recently checked our first page placement in the ‘content marketing’ topic.

Google Plus for Business?

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:45:00 EDT

I can barely control my indignation when I read articles about Google Plus as a tool for “social collaboration”. These articles sometimes come from writers I respect. I guess we have a difference of opinion on this. Here are my reasons why I think Google Plus is not a tool for social collaboration (even remotely).

The Spectrum of Hardware for the Cloud

Fri, 04 May 2012 03:45:00 EDT

The Key to Private Cloud Is Removing IT Stratification

Thu, 03 May 2012 06:00:00 EDT

One of the leading problems plaguing IT organizations is the high costs of operations and maintenance. The industry average is roughly 70% with some organizations going as high as 90%. Picking apart these costs one often finds a stratified organization focused on narrow bands of computing with little crossover between the bands. Moreover, the weighting [...]

Amazon and the Enterprise IT Monoculture Myth

Thu, 03 May 2012 06:00:00 EDT

I didn’t know whether I should chuckle cynically or slow clap the recent hubris of an Amazon executive, quoted in InformationWeek, with a tech prediction set to be fulfilled in a mere ten years: Amazon: Era Of Data Centers Ending: The era in which most big companies operate their own data centers is coming to [...]

Measuring Best Practices with Comprehensible Metrics

Thu, 03 May 2012 06:00:00 EDT

Best Practices are defined as a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. What this means is that they have actually been proven. Proven? How do you prove that one method or technique is objectively better than another?

India 2.0: Innovation in India Happening More Slowly Than Anticipated

Thu, 03 May 2012 05:45:00 EDT

I just spent 3 days in Bangalore for a board meeting. Staying in south Bangalore around JP Nagar and Jayanagar area feels like the old Bangalore of yesteryears – greenery all around, spring flowers, no high rise apartment buildings, and … Continue reading →

Is AWS Marketplace an Oversimplification of the Cloud?

Thu, 03 May 2012 05:00:00 EDT

Recently Amazon Web Services has launched the AWS Marketplace. It is certainly a welcome move that brings all the available software on Amazon EC2 under one roof. This is especially good for ISVs to get visibility and become more accessible to potential customers. The interface inherits the classic look and feel of Amazon shopping experience [...]

What Is Consumerization of IT?

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

If you are unfamiliar with the term “Consumerization of IT” or CoIT then you may think that it means “IT has become a consumer product”. But that is not interpretation which is generally accepted. Traditionally, adoption of Information Technology used to start with defense & government followed by the business enterprise. Those technologies used to be sold in low volume and high cost. Only over a period of time cost used to come down making it affordable for the individual consumer to adopt such technologies.

Twelve New Programming Languages: Is Cloud Responsible?

Wed, 02 May 2012 05:00:00 EDT

Do we need programming languages? You may think that the answer is no. But, if you go by the recent trend you may need to change your mind. Why is Google working two (GO, DART) new programming languages? Why has IBM (X10), Cray (Chapel) and Red Hat (Ceylon) working on creating a new programming language … Read more

Fast Data Hits the Big Data Fast Lane

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:00:00 EDT

While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion. Of the 3 "V’s” of Big Data – volume, variety, velocity (we’d add "Value” as the 4th V) – velocity has been the unsung ‘V.’ With the spotlight on Hadoop, the popular image of Big Data is large petabyte data stores of unstructured data (which are the first two V’s). While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion. "Fast Data” refers to processes that require lower latencies than would otherwise be possible with optimized disk-based storage. Fast Data is not a single technology, but a spectrum of approaches that process data that might or might not be stored. It could encompass event processing, in-memory databases, or hybrid data stores that optimize cache with disk. Fast Data is nothing new, but because of the cost of memory, was traditionally restricted to a handful of extremely high-value use cases.

The Importance of the Well-Designed API

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:15:00 EDT

We have worked with many APIs here at Layer 7. And over time we’ve seen it all, ranging from the good to the bad. We even see the downright ugly. Now a good API is a beautiful thing; it encourages innovation, abstracts appropriately, and is designed with enough forethought that nobody needs to change it down the road. Resiliency is a good quality in an API. APIs are a little like cockroaches in that they will likely outlive the human race.

Client Case Study: When Business Tools Break

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 09:15:00 EDT

I got a call a few weeks ago from a NYC-based foreign language school that was looking for a software makeover. They were using Google Spreadsheets to manage their student, class, and payment information, and for the previous year were happy as can be. After all, Google Spreadsheets offers some awesome collaborative capabilities: simultaneous spreadsheet [...]

Clout vs. Klout: Why They Aren’t the Same Thing, And Never Will Be

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 05:00:00 EDT

There’s been a lot of noise lately about a company called Klout, which recently rounded up another $30 million in venture capital funding from several big firms. Klout, for those who don’t know it, attempts to put a single numerical value on your online influence across social-media sites.

Agile Adoption – Crossing the Chasm

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:15:00 EDT

Everybody acknowledges that IT has to plays a key role in any new service or product design. Therefore, IT needs to align with business and be flexible to changing business needs. It is a question of how to be agile rather than should we be agile. Then, why is there such a gulf between the people who evangelize agile processes and those who look at them with great suspicion? Any application is built to satisfy a business goal. The process has two major steps where the step one is to define the application behavior which will help in meeting the business goal and the step two is to translate the application behavior to a working application. The definition of the application behavior is the requirement specification and it is the link between business and IT. In the waterfall methodology, development starts after the requirement is frozen. It is assumed that if business users can unambiguously and comprehensively specify the application behavior, IT can build the application satisfying the stated behavior. All the management practices based on waterfall methodology is build around this assumption. Times have changed and many of the IT applications are an integral part of the product or service offering. Significant part of the users are external to the organization. The focus has shifted from following the best practices to having innovative offering. If all these points are added up, it becomes clear that requirements will change. This has led to the realization that we need agile processes which works when requirements are constantly changing rather than spending time and energy on freezing requirement. As a result agile processes were born. The key principle behind any agile processes is to have a mechanism where the users can try out the application as it is being built and give feedback so that: - Gap in understanding is reduced - Sub-optimal solution can be improved - Application can be realigned to any change in business goal

What the Title “Senior Developer” Really Means

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:00:00 EDT

When I post a job opening for a Senior Java Developer, people send me resumes, and their titles match my post title. But the meaning of the word “senior” varies depending on the geography. Here in the USA a 22-24y.o. person graduates from college and starts as an intern or a junior programmer working his [...]

Did Citrix Stack the Cloud Deck?

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EDT

With an estimated $200 million bet on Cloud.com, if nothing else, executing an all-in open source strategy proves that Citrix doesn’t shrink in the face of high-stakes decisions. Cynics call this recent move an act of desperation – a Hail Mary in the absence of a better play. Others see it as a coolly calculated strategy to disrupt OpenStack momentum by capitalizing on vulnerabilities exposed by slow product advancement and signs of potential misalignment within the community. My tendency is to dismiss the cynical assertion as sour grapes and competitive mud slinging. After all, CloudStack is certainly the real deal as measured by product maturity and customer adoption. Half-baked, it is not.

Will IT Share the Fate of the Titanic?

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:45:00 EDT

Like their business counterparts, IT has proven to be amazingly adaptive in times of challenge. Wary for business’s growing dissatisfaction, with a few wise course corrections, for example the adoption of data virtualization, IT can continue as business’s vehicle for success. Business dissatisfaction with IT is well-chronicled by TDWI and others. IT responsiveness surveys1 show an average time to add a data source of nearly eight weeks, with another seven weeks added-on to create a new report or dashboard.

SAP and Databases No Longer an Oxymoron

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:13:51 EDT

With emergence of Big Data and Fast Data, energy shifted back to the data tier given the efficiencies of processing data big or fast inside the data store itself. In its rise to leadership of the ERP market, SAP shrewdly placed bounds around its strategy: it would stick to its knitting on applications and rely on partnerships with systems integrators to get critical mass implementation across the Global 2000. When it came to architecture, SAP left no doubt of its ambitions to own the application tier, while leaving the data tier to the kindness of strangers (or in Oracle’s case, the estranged). Times change in more ways than one – and one of those ways is in the data tier. The headlines of SAP acquiring Sybase (for its mobile assets, primarily) and subsequent emergence of HANA, its new in-memory data platform, placed SAP in the database market. And so it was that at an analyst meeting last December, SAP made the audacious declaration that it wanted to become the #2 database player by 2015.

SAP Acquires Syclo - A First Analysis Over Coffee

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 04:00:00 EDT

My first thought when I received the news that SAP is acquiring Syclo, was, "Smart move SAP!" I respect the fact that SAP is willing to double down on enterprise mobility. I also respect the fact that SAP is willing to brave the inevitable criticism for having bought the same solution twice. SAP has smart leaders. They have made an aggressive and brave decision with this acquisition. I think they recognized an unmet need, estimated the impact, valued the market and fixed it. I am sure this was not an easy decision. It will raise many questions, but I am sure it will make Sapphire 2012 even more interesting (perhaps even more than Van Halen in concert).

HP Dumps SQL Server and Picks Up MySQL

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:07:00 EDT

HP seems to be courting Oracle, its one time bitter foe, by choosing Oracle's MySQL (it's not Oracle's original stuff but was part of Sun Microsystems suite which it acquired in 2010) over SQL Server. This reminds me of the famous quote (I forgot to who it must be attributed) that, "there are no friends, no enemies, but eternal interests". Why did HP do it? Perhaps MySQL’s adoration by the Open Source developers (it's really poor man's RDBMS compared to MS SQL Server's and may cost a lot less than SQL Server) and by those with smaller budgets. Perhaps, HP wants to motivate the investors to make bets (see chart below), or perhaps there are more small scale players using Amazon Cloud with MySQL as their backend choice testifying to its popularity with small scale implementations which really do not care for bells and whistles that SQL Servers offers, or perhaps Oracle, Amazon, HP ganging up to beat up Microsoft. In any case, one cannot be sure of one's friends or one's enemies.

The End of Software? And That's a Good Thing

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:30:00 EDT

The age of Software might just be over. And I’m glad. It’s not that software will disappear forever, but increasingly, it will be difficult for the traditional software business model to compete against “Software as a Service” business models.

Why Is Scrum So Widely Adopted and So Very Dangerously Deceptive

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:45:00 EDT

I was sitting in a meeting sometime ago with a company that was embracing Scrum like a ten year old being offered a warm plate of chocolate chip cookies. They were grabbing at it as fast as they're little hands could reach out and grab the goodies. Watching this made me wonder what is was about Scrum that made them embrace it so emphatically. They had claimed to be an Agile shop for years, but were still failing to deliver quality software on time with in budget. Over the past years they refused every single proposed process improvement recommendation made by dozens of consultants. They literally went from zero process (using the name Agile to execute no process at all) to zealot Scrumbots overnight. After spending some time pondering this and interviewing a few people I found the answers I was looking for. Scrum was allowing them to preform the magic trick of perceived success better than they had ever been able to before just using the generic fake Agile process. A scary realization. This of course was not the fault of the Scrum process. It was the team's refusal to truly change anything except a few timelines, titles of individuals, and a few names like iteration to sprint.

ITaaS Business Value Alignment

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 02:00:00 EDT

One of the primary objectives of our Drummond Cloud report is to establish the ‘ITaaS Business Value Alignment’ program within our Cloud Best Practices. A foundation part of moving to Cloud services is a moved from fixed cost IT, where you pay up front for your hardware, software and implementation services, to one where it is all packaged as a rental.

Whatever is Meg Thinking?

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:30:00 EDT

The sound of Meg Whitman’s voice telling HP stockholders that the company’s has “real financial challenges” and that its “cost structure is not sustainable” was still in the air Friday when the board went and upped HP dividend 10%. At the current 12 cents a share, that’s not much but evidently HP needs the money elsewhere.

Application Transformation: CIO Lessons from YouTube

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:00:00 EDT

Application transformation is happening all around us and we are now compelled to reshape much of what we do in the enterprise IT space to meet the new challenges being thrown up, some of which stem from a change in user behavior outside of the workplace. Information technology phenomena including virtualized desktops, use of new cloud-based applications and the so-called consumerization of IT are being amplified by Bring Your Own Device trends, which see users making direct choices over which type of device form factors they want to use in the enterprise.

The Build vs. Buy Debate for Integration Continues...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:00:00 EDT

The build vs. buy debate for integration stacks continues unabated. Robin Smith from Virtual Logistics interviews Hollis Tibbetts to get to the bottom of this important issue. I had a great phone conversation with (SaaS Integration pioneer) Boomi founder Rick Nucci about a month ago on the build vs. buy topic - specifically why some continue to believe that building their own integration middleware stack is a good idea, despite the mountains of evidence that it makes no sense to do so. For the most part, nobody today thinks about building their own Relational Database (I remember when that was not the case) - yet people persist in wanting to build their own integration stacks.

IT-as-a-Service and the Facebook Effect

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:30:00 EDT

I’ve recently been theorizing around a new model for IT transformation. There’s anecdotal evidence that, in general, business problems tend to change slower than the rate of technology innovation. Thus, we can discern that IT has focused on the application of technical innovation to solve existing business problems in more effective ways versus using technology [...]

Viewpoint: B2B Marketing – Evolving or Stuck in the Mud?

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 07:30:00 EDT

There are a few things bugging me that I'd like to air out. Over the last few months, I've seen and experienced some things that make me wonder if B2B marketing is evolving or stuck in the mud and applying old thinking that no longer works in a new context.

Is Mashable Worth $200M to CNN?

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:15:00 EDT

According to Reuters.com blogger Felix Salmon, tomorrow - Tuesday, March 13 - will see an announcement by CNN that it is intending to buy Mashable.com for $200 million.

Network vs Application Layer Prioritization

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 04:30:00 EST

Why SPDY and similar techniques could succeed where coloring TOS bits failed

Back in the day, before VoIP was common and we were all chatting over Skype, there was a very real concern about how to ensure the network could support it. Jitter was the most common source of issues making VoIP less than desirable, leading to the conclusion that prioritization of voice over data traffic was an essential component to any VoIP-enabled network.

So we tried using TOS (type of service) as a solution. TOS bits – long since obsoleted by the Differentiated Services field – specified parameters for the type of service requested. The belief then was that we could use these bits to prioritize traffic along the same lines as we did customers – gold, silver, bronze. Hence the nomenclature, “coloring bits”. The problem wasn’t that this approach didn’t work – it did – as long as every network component in the traffic path honored the bits. Obviously you can see the problem with this approach. The Internet is not a single-owner network, and thus getting agreement across backbone providers to honor each other’s prioritization was something of a problem. Quality of service is a differentiator for providers, and prioritizing competitor’s traffic over your own wasn’t exactly going to enable you to sell on the strength of your network.

Being reliant on the Internet for transport with its stochastic behavior and having failed to find a means to prioritize traffic across provider control boundaries, QoS continued to be a source of research and frustration. Prioritization at the network layer had failed to achieve performance nirvana. Not even the adoption of differentiated services really solved the problem for the majority of users, as the same restrictions applied to it that applied to TOS – it still required dependence on the honor system.

IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT CONTROL

Even though today’s Internet is much faster and fatter than in the early days of VoIP, there is still a need to prioritize data exchanged between clients and services. What we’re seeing today is a more application-layer focused approach to prioritization that trusts the Internet to deliver data with alacrity and instead focuses on enforcing priority in those pieces of the flow we can control – the application and its supporting infrastructure.

This approach is not a replacement for traditional bandwidth management techniques that address performance issues in the network, but rather the means to address performance issues related directly to capacity and load – processing latency – and in situations where control over the network is not possible or exceedingly difficult. Prioritization of traffic at any layer requires control, something we simply don’t have end-to-end. Thus we leverage other technology to counter that lack of control in conjunction with enforcing priority at the application layer where we have much greater levels of control.

One of the interesting additions to the web comes with SPDY and specifically it’s support for prioritization. SPDY allows specific requests to be prioritized so that, say, the server could be instructed to process dynamic content over static, or requests for streaming objects before images. One of the things that does is allow both the application and application network infrastructure to more intelligently manage requests architecturally to ensure if not a faster at least a more consistently performing application. It’s not unlike network queuing technologies that honor packet-based prioritization, in that when queues begin to fill, packets with higher priority are pushed to the front of the queue. With SPDY, if load or capacity is in question, the application or application network layer can push priority requests first to ensure processing while allowing other requests to be processed in a more leisurely fashion.

There exists a wide variety of potential architectures based on application layer prioritization, including scalability domains based on priority-based processing. In many ways such an architecture is not unlike the notion of storage tiering, where fast (and more expensive) storage is used for only specified data and slower (and less expensive) storage is used for lower priority data. A tiering-based scalability architecture at the application layer based on request priority enables compute, network, and storage resources to be more effectively provisioned to ensure consistently performing applications.

But it requires control; complete control over the application and application network infrastructure, just as its bit-coloring predecessors required control over the entire network path. Lack of control along the application exchange path at strategic points can have adverse effects including that of negating the benefits of prioritization in the first place. A SPDY-based application hosted in a public cloud environment leveraging rudimentary application routing (load balancing) techniques will not be able to take advantage of the burgeoning protocol’s prioritization facets, effectively negating much of the benefit of enabling priority in the first place.

As we continue to relinquish control over the lower levels of the networking stack, we will need to harness the flexibility and control over the application layers of the stack more effectively. Taking advantage of application layer prioritization through strategic points of control in the network may be one of the ways in which we can improve application performance without relying on an honor system in an environment where such a system works against itself.

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How to Ensure Scalability as Complexity Drives Consolidation

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 06:15:00 EST

The growing complexity of managing more users from more places using more devices will drive consolidation efforts – but maybe not in the way you think.

Pop quiz time. Given three sets of three items each, how many possible combinations are there when choosing only one from each set? Ready? Go.

If you said “27” give yourself a cookie. If you said “too [bleep] many”, give yourself two cookies because you recognize that at some point, the number of combinations is simply unmanageable and it really doesn’t matter, it’s too many no matter how you count it.

This is not some random exercise, unfortunately, designed to simply flex your mathematical mental powers. It’s a serious question based on the need to manage an increasing number of variables to ensure secure access to corporate resources. There are currently (at least) three sets of three items that must be considered:

User (employee, guest, contractor)
Device (laptop, tablet, phone)
Network (wired, wireless, mobile)

Now, if you’re defining corporate policy based on these variables, and most organizations have – or would like to have - such a level of granularity in their access policies, this is going to grow unwieldy very quickly.

These three sets of three quickly turn into 27 different policies.

Initially this may not look so bad, until you realize that these 27 policies need to, at least in some part, be replicated across multiple solutions in the data center. There’s the remote access solution (VPN), access management (to control access to specific resources and application services), and network control.

Complicating even further (if that was possible) the deployment of such policies is the possibility that multiple identity stores may be required, as well as the inclusion of mobile device management (MDM). On top of that, there may be a web application firewall (WAF) solution that might need user or network-specific policies that tighten (or loosen) security based on any one of those variables.

We’ve got not only the original 27 policies, but a variable number of configurations that must codify those policies across a variable number of solutions.

That’s not scalable; not from a management perspective and certainly not from an operational perspective.

SCALING ACCESS MANAGEMENT

One solution lies in consolidation. Not necessarily through scaling up individual components as a means to reduce the solution footprint and thus scale back the operational impact, but by consolidating services into an operationally unified tier by taking advantage of a holistic platform approach to (remote) access management.

The application delivery tier is an increasingly key tier within the data center for enabling strategic control and flexibility over application delivery. This includes (secure) remote access and resource access management.

Consolidating access management and secure remote access onto a unified application delivery platform not only mitigates the problem of replicating partial policies across multiple solutions, but it brings to bear the inherent scalability of the underlying platform, which is designed specifically to scale services – whether application or authentication or access management. This means dependent services can scale on-demand along with the applications and resources they support.

A consolidated approach also adds value in its ability to preserve context across services, a key factor in effectively managing access for the volatile environment created by the introduction of multiple devices and connection media leveraged by users today. It is almost always the case in a highly available deployment that the first component to respond to a user request will be the application delivery controller, as these are tasked with high-availability and load balancing duties. When that request is passed on to the application or an access management service, pieces of the contextual puzzle are necessarily lost due because most protocols are not designed to carry such information forward. In cases where component-component integration is possible, this context can be maintained. But it is more often the case that such integration does not exist, or if it does, is not put to use.

Thus context is lost and decisions made downstream of the application delivery controller are made based on increasingly fewer variables, many of which are necessary to enforce corporate access policies today. By consolidating these services at the application delivery tier, context is preserved and leveraged, providing not only more complete policy enforcement but simpler policy deployment. This is why it is imperative for application delivery systems to support not just specific applications or protocols, but all applications and protocols. It is also the driving reason why support for heterogeneous virtualization and VDI platforms is so important; consolidation cannot occur if X-specific delivery solutions are required.

As the number of devices, users, and network medium continues to expand, it will put more pressure on all aspects of IT operations. That pressure can be alleviated by consolidating disparate but intimately related services into a unified application delivery tier and applying a more holistic, contextually aware solution that is not only ultimately more manageable and flexible, but more scalable as well.

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Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Disruptive IT Firms

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 05:15:00 EST

Andreessen Horowitz has a model I have not seen at any other Venture Capital firm, and that model is paying off for a broad ecosystem of companies, investors and enterprise IT professionals. From the standpoint of an enterprise technologist, the payoff will come by their support of firms fielding capabilities that will make a positive [...]

What Kind of Software Company Should You Work For?

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

I met Peter Griess last night and heard him talk about his career. Even though he still has plenty of years ahead of him, he has already worked for NetApp, Yahoo, and now Facebook. He was part of a nine-person … Continue reading →

Hiring Teams of Offshore Software Developers

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

Over the last five years one of my responsibilities was interviewing and hiring software developers and many of them were physically located overseas. In this post I’d like to share with you my thoughts (and get your feedback) on one of the aspects for offshore hiring: pros and cons of hiring individuals vs. teams.

Getting a Bathroom Makeover Is a Bit Like an IT Project

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:30:45 EST

As anyone who has gone through any home improvement project will tell you, the experience can be relatively energizing, frustrating, soul destroying or all of these. Bathroom refurbishments in particular seem to be extraordinarily stressful due to the uniquely intimate nature of this being the place of ablution. The choice of DIY versus outsourcing is a combination of factors; not least of these is personal competency, tools, and of course budget. There are a tremendous number of parallels between this activity and what you might consider doing about implementing an IT project.