It’s been snowing here, much more than usual. Despite being confined to quarters already (you may have heard there’s this bug going round), mentally being forced to stay indoors turned my mind to the never-ending list of things to fix indoors.

My father used to use a hammer to do this. Today the hammer has been replaced with a laptop, and an almighty amount of patience. For every one thing in need of some oil or replacement, there seems to be half a dozen more requiring a thorough debugging, or more realistically, throwing out and going back to what we had before.

I’m not complaining, as this is all self-inflicted. You see, I have a bad case of IoT fever. Those of you also suffering from this will recognize the symptoms. It starts with one cool widget you saw on YouTube or Reddit. A Wi-Fi connected lock is the most common gateway drug. For me, it was attempting to solve the issue of opening and closing a faraway gate without having to go outside.

However it starts, once you get used to amazing visitors by just saying “Siri, activate zwave relay switch number 3” three or four times to close the gate you’re standing next to, well, now you want everything to be so easy. Suddenly you are mortgaging your home to buy the latest widget from every cool company selling you on your vision of the future.

You have become a True Believer. Again, knowing how I am.

Having gone through the home computer craze of too many years ago, the IoT version feels very similar. Things our grandchildren will take for granted in the future bring great excitement today. I still remember telling myself the day I unboxed m original Alexa that I will remember it as the first computer I found myself talking to on a regular basis.

And as any — I mean all — early adopters will tell you, being first requires tremendous patience, compassion and understanding. The path to tech-vana is strewn with the dumbest, random and infuriating bugs, dead ends and just plain weird problems. Like the time I figured out after a few months of debugging that I could take my cable modem offline just by having one of my boys walk in front of the doorbell.

True to form, I have just spent most of the weekend dealing with a whole variety of random IoT bugs. These must be resolved as they kind of interfere with living in my house.

For example, one of my HomePods isn’t finishing configuration. The big HomePods don’t play with the small ones. And all of them tell HomeKit to take a hike when you try and make sure they’ve all stopped playing at night. The list of HomeKit bugs is remarkable and could easily drive a dedicated home IoT-er into a very bad place emotionally. To stave that off, I switched to my Level locks.

These things are really very cool. They go inside your door, so you can use your key, and nobody knows there’s a Wi-Fi connection inside it. They worked great in a prior house, but in our current home they keep getting stuck when opening or closing. It feels like the acceptable fitting tolerances are very fine, I’m guessing that between repainting the already thick doors we’re right at the edge of the maximum width. The result: after a successful, repetitive test, a few hours later they begin to stick again. And of course, the only one that’s still working is no longer speaking with HomeKit, I suspect in solidarity with the others who have declared it smart home platform non grata.

Even Siri has been playing games this snowy weekend: saying ‘turn off the lights’ in one room will routinely turn off *all the lights in the house* but when you say, ‘turn on the lights,’ will only turn on lights in that very same room. Well, three of them, leaving the fourth unlit. Puzzling. And so, I add it to the list.

For those of you who think I’m going on too long into my bug list, I apologize. And I assure you, this is a *very* abbreviated accounting of what I’m dealing with here.

But beyond the puzzlements and exasperation, my experience as a True Believer reinforces this fact: new ideas require many, many much less glamorous and exciting inventions to make them work. And these very boring inventors have a much bigger impact than we might think, even if their names are lost to history.

For instance, Eli Whitney’s ‘revolutionary’ cotton gin was the foundation of industrializing the textile industry, ultimately contributing to the start of the US civil war, but it took over 30 separate patented improvements before it could be used at scale. Something as simple as reducing how often threads snap by having a de-tensioner wheel makes a huge difference at scale. Suddenly you can run hundreds or thousands of threads at once. Boom. You’re can now be in the global textile business.

Great fortunes can and are made by solving these boring problems. I recently spoke with an entrepreneur who has spent eight years working on a difficult real world measurement problem that has been holding back his business. He’s tried all kinds of things, even mailing special laser measuring doohickeys to his customers, and nothing really solved his issues until he figured out how to make the product tolerant of the variances. Instead of measuring accurately, he’s found a way to deal with inaccuracy, and now he’s having trouble scaling. Eight years of R&D to solve for a few millimeters!

Problems like these are hard to fix, are way too common, and solutions to any of them have real value.

IoT is no different. Big leaps forward in usefulness, reliability and adoption rates can be unlocked by seemingly trivial improvements, such as eliminating a single step of a setup process, avoiding a common fault or even improving customer service in some specific way (we can all dream).

What’s sets IoT apart though, is, like the clothes the cotton gin enabled, it is utterly ubiquitous. Just taking a look at my own network, for every device I personally interact with, I have twenty-five times as many IoT related devices: every window has a sensor, every door and vent can be opened or closed, every room has a temperature, and so on. Even my gate (the one that got me started on this journey) has an array of sensors: is it closed? is it opened? is something blocking the way? what is the battery level? etc.

This universality not only increases the number of problems, which can be frustrating, but it also dramatically increases the size of the market for the solutions to these challenges. As my father’s generation sought the opportunity represented by the phrase “Go west, young man,” my kids may well find IoT a similarly opportunistic area to develop ideas and expertise in.

Even if you’re not stuck in the snow, we’re all staying close to home in the months ahead. So, if you’re thinking about what to do or build next, why not pick up a few IoT gizmos and start trying to use them? You’ll very quickly see how tantalizing the automated future is, and also just how completely, utterly and unbelievably broken it is right now. I keep believing the effort will be worth it, and my family have grown used to lights just going out for no reason whenever I work on my enormous issue list.

And while I have your attention, I’d love to hear from anyone who knows how to make these darned HomePods work.

How Boring Can Be Exciting was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I love some of the Amazon thinking on decisions, especially this: make reversible decisions quickly, it’s okay to get some of them wrong if you go faster in return. I’m not sure if they invented this concept but they were the ones I learnt it from.

How does this work?

1. Make Reversible Decisions Quickly

For instance, if I choose to terminate a personal relationship, there’s no going back. That relationship is changed forever, no CTRL-Z, no “undo.” So take your time.

But when I choose the wrong paint, I can paint over it. It’s easily undone. A waste of time and money perhaps, yet still totally undoable. Don’t spend more time and money getting the decision right than it might cost to reverse.

The point of this thinking is to speed up decisions by not aiming for a 100% success rate when the decision is reversible, leaving more time for thinking about the irreversible decisions and trusting that things will usually turn out ok for the reversible ones.

2. Make Reversible Decisions with 80% of the Available Data

Another helpful rule of good decision making is to ask “What am I waiting for? What additional data might be available?”

It’s too easy to put off making a decision when it’s not perfectly clear what to do. Analysis paralysis or procrastination, whatever you call it, it’s one of the leading causes of sluggish decision making.

In the real world, we rarely have the time or resources to compile a complete and accurate data set in support of a decision. Part of the skill of decision making is dealing with this reality. In fact, studies show that once we have roughly 80% of the available data that’s typically enough to make a decent decision. Waiting for more data doesn’t greatly improve our hit rate.

Which gives us our second rule of better decision making: make reversible decisions as soon as you have 80% of the available data. It’s like the 80/20 rule, there’s usually not much to gain by waiting for 100%. (Thanks to Peter A. for this great tip he shared with me many years ago.)

3. Get Used to Errors, Avoid Mistakes

And yet…. it’s one thing making reversible decisions with 80% of the data, but what if I’m still worried about getting the decision wrong? What will others think when it all goes off the rails?

This brings us to the other big cause of slow decision making: the fear of getting it wrong, and the impact to our reputation in the eyes of others, such as your spouse/boss/team/customer/board member/secret inner critic (delete as appropriate).

This is where the critical distinction between an error and a mistake comes into play.

An error is a decision which led to a sub-optimal outcome, due to a lack of something: data, time, resources, luck, experience, etc. At the time it was taken, the decision was compellingly a good one, but later something happened, or we got new data, which showed us that in fact it was not the best decision, and another path would have yielded a better result.

There’s nothing wrong with making what seemed like the right decision at the time given the available data. For instance, if you’ve never done something before, it’s unreasonable to expect to benefit from the wisdom of years of getting it wrong. And actually, analyzing errors are a primary way to learn, it’s called ‘experience’.

Doing the math, if we assume there’s a 50/50 chance that some new data will change our decision, and we’re applying the second rule (go forward with 8/10ths of the data), then we can expect a measurable error rate, maybe a much as 10% of our decisions could have been better in hindsight.

We’re taught as children to strive for perfection, yet for reversible decisions 10% is a perfectly adequate error rate, especially when what you get in return is much faster decision making, and more time for irreversible decisions.

Mistakes are a very different beast however. A mistake is an error repeated, or sometimes an error that is continued after it became clear it was actually an error. We should strive to avoid mistakes and study them very carefully whenever we commit them.

This is because a mistake means we did not learn from prior errors, or worse, that we are actively ignoring errors for some reason. Whether it’s ego, fear, willful ignorance, or anything else, when something is preventing us from recognizing an error we will be doomed continue to repeat that mistake until we do take notice of it.

In fact, getting comfortable with errors will reduce our overall decision failure rate, and make decision based setbacks much less serious when they do occur.

This is the third rule of good decision making: get comfortable with errors, try to avoid mistakes.

As you get more and more practice with this, you will gradually lose the urge to make ‘perfect’ decisions, which in turn speeds up both the quality (via learning) and velocity (via rule 2) of your decisions overall. You will make better decisions, more quickly, and have more time to spend on the irreversible ones.

In addition to sleeping better at night, you will grow wiser from studying your errors, thereby deepening your experience and confidence, leading to improved decision making and fewer sleepless nights when things do go wrong.

And who doesn’t want that?

Three Rules for Better Decision Making was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How I Learnt to Love MacOS Screenshots

I like to share bits of my screen on a regular basis. A quick look at my screenshot folder suggests I’ve done this at least 5,000 times in the past five years. Usually I’m sharing something but increasingly I’m making a recording, like a cancellation confirmation or bill payment. I usually forget about these if I don’t need them, but when I do I can dig through my screenshots folder and see what I can find.

The macOS screenshot app is very well made but it does have a weakness, namely it’s a time consuming multi-step process to actually getting the screenshot and attaching the resultant screen snip to whatever medium — email, slack, sms, twitter, etc. — you’re focused on, especially if I want to use my iPhone to send the screenshot but my Mac to take it.

In response, I kludged something together which works really well for me as it provides the following features:

• Automatic copy to clipboard
• Automatic sync between all my devices
• No files left to clutter up my desktop
• Free*

Here’s how you can do this too.

Step 1 — Move Screenshots Folder off the Desktop

There is a way to do this using the screenshot app itself, I prefer the command line. Open the command prompt and type the following command, all one one line, remembering to substituate YOURUSERNAMEINLOWERCASE for your actual user name:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location "/Users/YOURUSERNAMEINLOWERCASE/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Screenshots"

This version of the command will redirect screenshots to your iCloud Drive, where it will sync to all your other devices, including your mobile devices. Of course, you might not have an iCloud Drive, or you might be using Dropbox, in which case try:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location "/Users/YOURUSERNAMEINLOWERCASE/Dropbox/Screenshots"

Or even, for no syncing, just:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location "/Users/YOURUSERNAMEINLOWERCASE/Screenshots"

You can test this now, by pressing the keys CMD+ SHIFT +5, selecting a piece of your screen, pressing return, and then checking to see if it’s in the directory you selected. It may take a second or two to get there, so don’t worry if it doesn’t turn up instantly.

Now you have moved your screenshots directory, possibly to somewhere it automatically synchronizes, it’s time to automatically copy new clips to the clipboard.

Step 2 — Automatically Copy New Screenshots to the Clipboard

Once you’ve got a clip, traditionally you’ve got to open the folder, drag it to your app, maybe send it to your phone. It’s a bit of a hassle. That’s why the screenshots go on the desktop in the first place.

We can do better than that, and copy it immediately to the clipboard. Then you can paste it into whichever app you like, without any extra steps, even if you took the screen cap on your Mac and are pasting it on your iPad or iPhone.

To do this we will use an app called Hazel, by Noodlesoft.

Hazel is a pretty interesting tool that will run an action for you every time a certain event happens. In this case, any time a new file is added to the Screenshots folder, Hazel will copy it to your clipboard.

For what we’re doing here you can easily use Hazel for free in Demo mode. I paid the $42 as I’m using it for other things, but now its free ‘Demo’ mode is just fine. (NOTE: I have no connection with the developers of Hazel and they aren’t involved in nor were notified of this article.)

Older versions of Hazel live in the preferences panel, starting with version 5 it’s an independent app. That’s what we’re going to use here.

First, install Hazel by following these instructions here: https://www.noodlesoft.com/manual/hazel/installation-setup/install-hazel/

Now, go make sure notifications are enabled for Hazel. This option won’t appear in Preferences until you’ve run Hazel once. Even if you don’t plan on using notifications, we need this for the final validation step.

Once you’re in the Hazel app, add the folder you selected above to Hazel. Mine is simply called Screenshots.

Next, select the folder and create a new ‘Rule’. It will need a name, mine is called Copy Screenshots to Dashboard.

Next we will need to add and then configure an ‘Action’ for this rule, on the right hand side of the dialog. Configure it just like the screenshot below (ignore the Just Press Record folder):

For the embedded script, cut/paste the following code:

try
 set pngData to read theFile as «class PNGf»
 set the clipboard to pngData
end try

Very simple. Save everything. If you’re feeling brave you can even close the Hazel dialog as it runs in the back ground.

To test, just take a screenshot again, by pressing the keys CMD + SHIFT + 5. You should see the selected clip appear in the bottom right of the desktop, and then after a second disappear. Finally, a second or two later the Hazel app should show a notification that the file was copied to the clipboard.

You should now be able to paste the screenshot into wherever you like. If you need to trim or edit it, you can do it in the step before Hazel gets hold of it by clicking on the bottom right preview that macOS offers for a few seconds each time you clip.

Step 3— Add Ons!

There are a few ways you can make this kludge even more useful:

1. If you are running multiple desktops, setup Rule Sync on Hazel. This will make everything the same on each desktop. This works best with iCloud Drive/Dropbox, as you will never lose a shot. This is only necessary if you are actively using multiple desktops, like a laptop and a big old Mac at home or in the studio.
2. Add your Screenshots folder to the siderbar in the Open Dialog. This is easy: just drag the folder into the left hand sidebar in any Finder window.
3. Sort by reverse modified date, so the latest screenshots are always at the top. This is a little bit fiddly, in that you need to wait for an application to present the Open Dialog, to select a file from the screenshots folder. Then you can sort by clicking on the Modified column.

Hopefully you’ll find this as useful as I do. Enjoy!

How I Learnt to Love macOS Screenshots was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a group, humans are bad at digesting really big and equally bad news. When faced with disaster, we seem to have evolved, at least collectively, a tendency to become tremendously optimistic. It makes a weird kind of sense, giving us a reason to soldier on versus doing what might seem logical and just give up.

Think of World War 1 or 2, with the mindless optimism on both sides at the start — “we’ll be home in time for Christmas!” — instead of something more realistic like “we’re about to get bombed and starved for six long years, and I might die”.

COVID-19 falls squarely into the same class of catastrophe as a world war: millions dead, global reach, huge and lasting economic impact, and years in duration. So, it’s understandable everyone is wishing it would go away quickly, especially the stock market.

To better understand what’s going on let’s do some near-term forecasting, with our crystal ball set to “medium rosy.” In this scenario the first vaccines get approved for general use by the spring of 2021. Production ramp ups quickly and smoothly, and citizens in most rich countries can easily get some kind of effective treatment by, let’s optimistically say, 12 months from today. People everywhere eagerly seek the jab, which works great, and by 2022 everything’s back to normal.

Right?

Unfortunately, the reality is not even close to medium rosy.

First, there will be real or imagined problems with any vaccine. Remember Desert Storm and complaints of side effects arising from the injections given to soldiers? Or consider the debunked rumors that vaccines cause autism, which are still believed by many today despite all the evidence to the contrary.

In a world which believes in chemtrails, a brand-new vaccine that’s rushed into production is going to be all too appealing to conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers everywhere. And even if nothing goes wrong, which it very well may do, it may not offer 100% protection. (Partial resistance is still useful as it reduces mortality or hospitalization rates, but people will still be dying in large numbers.) Shortages may arise, or production may be paused as unintended side effects emerge. Each of these has happened with flu vaccines before. In short, there are many other ways a smooth deployment of a vaccine to eight billion people can run into issues and delays.

Secondly, once we do have a vaccine there are many headwinds to getting to “herd immunity”, where enough people have taken it that the virus no longer spreads easily. The new vaccine will probably be taken first by front line workers, and then by those who are the most vulnerable (seniors, those with pre-existing conditions, and so on) as well as the 40% of adults who regularly get a flu jab. This still leaves us with about half the population actively delaying or refusing a vaccination. This somewhat understandable desire to avoid being a guinea pig will extend the time needed to get the planet to any kind of meaningful herd immunity.

Thirdly, decades of coronavirus research suggest that immunity may need to be renewed every year as the virus mutates in ways which make long term resistance a challenge. Consequently, even with a widespread uptake of an effective vaccine, we can still expect several years of outbreaks, shutdowns and scares as new strains emerge and local hotspots spread.

All of this will be going on in parallel with a once-in-a-lifetime recession. Twenty-five million Americans are currently without a job, and this is a number that is only going to increase as financial assistance to companies runs out and balance sheets deteriorate.

In spite of the crumbling economic outlook, many commentators act as if a recovery is already established and underway or will be just as soon as the vaccine gets here. This is a tremendously optimistic reading which flies in the face of common sense. In fact, a tremendous loss of wealth is underway as businesses and people stand idle.

For example, the idea that many of the jobs lost in the hospitality industry this year are coming back next year or the year after is simply ridiculous. Even if it’s totally safe to get on a cruise ship or go to a conference in 2021 (hint: it probably won’t be) there are just fewer people who are willing or able to spend in this category than there were a year ago. The confirmation of furloughed workers into permanent layoffs is on-going, and programs designed to reduce or delay evictions cannot continue indefinitely. Both of these will present serious headwinds even for areas of the economy that hitherto have not been directly affected.

With the top 25% of earners (at the time of writing) better off than at the start of the year, it’s too easy to lose track of the impact on the rest of us, many of whom were already living hand-to-mouth even before losing a job, home or business to the economic impact of COVID, or are rapidly exhausting reserves as each hopeful deadline comes and goes.

So, where does this all leave us?

A combination of a slower than hoped for uptake of the vaccine, multiplied by the effects of a long and deep recession will be a tremendous blow everywhere, and no country will be able to completely avoid the pain. Economic adversity will be a reality even for those countries which quickly and successfully tackle the COVID side of this pain equation.

The grim reality is that we may have to wait until 2025 or beyond to begin the healing, economically and literally, in any kind of meaningful way. Just like a world war, it will cost far more to “win” in terms of treasure and blood than we ever thought possible.

It’s not all bad news though, as there may be a silver lining to all this doom and gloom.

Historically, there have been unexpected benefits from major disasters and catastrophes. Many amazing inventions — the jet engine, the computer, spaceships and penicillin, to name just a few — can directly trace their inception to World War 2. COVID will probably be no different.

For instance, co-ordination to fight the virus is happening at an amazing pace and on a global level. And huge leaps are being made in many fields, supported by the spend-whatever-it-takes attitudes of governments and corporations when it comes to fighting the virus. Many amazing medical and technical advances will no doubt arise from all these dollars.

In industry, the trend to manufacture closer to markets, made possible by robotization, will be greatly accelerated by the logistics issues presented when countries close their borders unexpectedly. In even the most pessimistic scenario, we should at least be better prepared for any future pandemic.

There may also be less tangible benefits. Just as WW2 led to the end of European empires and a big push for social mobility, COVID may also lead to improved access to health care, and a realization that hating on each other has an unsustainable cost, particularly during times of crisis. This last effect would not be apparent at first, and if real, will likely gradually emerge in the coming decades as the Zoomers who lived through this era take over the reins of cultural power from Boomers.

It won’t all be jet engines and epiphanies. Many less momentous things will also be invented or improved. For example, it’s already a lot easier to have junk food and groceries delivered to your house. Working from home will remain easy and acceptable well after COVID has been brought to heel. And we will certainly appreciate vacations more once we are allowed to resume our jet-setting around the planet.

I realize that I am assuming the role of Debbie Downer, while also being a total Cassandra. I take this risk because without the right data we will make the wrong decisions. It’s important to measure accurately, doubly so when the data suggests things are this bad.

How does this affect us in the real world? Well, if we really think everything will return to normal next year then one appealing strategy may be to open another bottle of wine, put on a movie for the kids and hold on until the situation improves. Conversely, this would almost exactly be the worst plan if it turns out that 2021 resembles anything remotely like the predictions above.

For example, many families were optimistic that at some point schools would re-open in the fall. Now that cases are going in the wrong direction in most of the OECD, that looks unlikely to happen in 2020, and will probably continue for who-knows-how-long into next year. If you were able to join a learning pod or micro school over the summer because you shared our pessimism, well done, but good luck trying that today, when affordable and qualified teachers have become the equivalent of hoarded rolls of toilet paper.

Wrong decisions such as these have measurable real-world ramifications. In World War 2, the unwarranted optimism meant real chances to end the war sooner were missed. Today it could mean our children missing a year or more of education. It’s a huge cost, and totally avoidable.

So what to do? Well, when things are going badly, hoping for the best and planning for the worst is generally a good strategy, and if you don’t think things are going really badly right now I’d love to meet you (socially distant of course) and learn how you got to be so optimistic. I could do with a bit of optimism myself right now.

For the rest of us, emotionally preparing for the coming toil is an unpleasant but prudent thing to do. Let’s get real and try to make the best of it instead of putting our collective heads in the sand. Hopefully things will turn out better than we had planned for, and we will have made the best of a very difficult situation. And if it’s as bad as it seems it very well may be, we’ll be ready for anything.

Now where’s that bottle of wine?

Fear and Loathing on Planet Earth was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Being an entrepreneur, by definition, means foregoing the comforts that come with a salaried job and venturing out into the unknown. On the one hand it’s very empowering, but on the other it can also be absolutely terrifying.

Entrepreneurs all expect to learn some lessons the hard way, but what if your worst fear actually comes to pass? What if you not only fail but fail big?

Few would guess that I, CEO and founder of Cloudability, have a big failure under my belt. From all outside appearances the company has been pretty successful. We were named one of the most promising cloud companies of 2011 in our first year in business, and we’ve won several awards since. Now set to double our workforce in 2014, we’ve been nominated for TAO’s Tech Company of the Year.

Read the full article at Oregon Entrepreneurs Network

On Failing Big was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Turning the CIO into the Chief Integration Officer

I’m the CEO & Founder of Cloudability. We’re based in cloudy Portland, Oregon. Eric asked me to take a few minutes to talk to you about a big shift we’re seeing in the role of the CIO.

The growth of the Internet of “Things” gives us some interesting data about how the CIO’s role is changing. And, for many companies, this is a change they want — and need — to encourage.

This Internet of “Things” is making us look at the world — the technology world at least — very differently. We are managing more and more devices that feel and look nothing like a computer or even a phone. Even the servers we use to run our businesses are increasingly anonymous, un-named, disposable, and virtual.

In fact, today, technology infrastructure is beginning to resemble a neural network. A network pummeled with bits of data coming at it from millions of devices — these “things” — that few of us ever imagined would be computerized or connected.

It’s this evolving interconnectedness that is forcing us to radically change how we manage the flow of data between all the things: objects as disparate as cars and traffic lights, lamps and power grids, paint chips and bridges, and so on.

We are going to have to rethink how conventional rules are applied in a world where so many things need to talk to each other without humans getting in the way. These challenges of interconnectedness are playing out in parallel inside the enterprise.

CIOs have an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to provide the leadership needed to guide their companies through these challenges; done right, the “I” in CIO becomes more about managing integration and less about managing information.

In one of his blog posts, Eric Norlin has called out the three defining characteristics of this network. He coined it “a bigger network of smaller things.” They will be:

(1) decentralized like the Internet,
(2)interconnected nodes in a dispersed central ecosystem, and
(3) fractal, where the structure looks similar as we zoom in or out.

We can already see what’s driving this: a wonderful mix of cloud computing, data and APIs that glue it all together.

But inside the enterprise, this is pure chaos. Rogue apps, devices and clouds are causing more and more “islands of information” to form. And while startups may thrive on chaos,enterprises struggle with it.

A natural response is to deal with the chaos by blocking anything that isn’t already part of their legacy system. Those of you who have been through the BYOD battle will have had a taste of this already.

Those enterprise who have got past this reflexive response are struggling with how to manage all of this new, distributed stuff, and how to integrate it with the existing stuff. And it’s this chaotic struggle that is holding back innovation and growth in enterprises.

Former Forrester Research president and research director Dave West may have said it best in an interview with Joe Stangarone on the MRC blog:

“Application integration problems are a top reason why businesses — and their enterprise architects and project managers — can’t deliver business innovation at the speed demanded by customers using all these application platforms.”

On one hand, you have IT whose natural inclination is to make the infrastructure as consistent, cost effective and solid as possible… which often translates into descriptions such slow, rigid and bureaucratic. On the other, you have divisions and employees — the nodes, as Eric would call them — who can seem to have tunnel vision at times, focused on only one thing: moving faster.

The CIO’s opportunity sits smack dab at the intersection of what’s best for the overall network and what’s best for the nodes.

I read an article recently that quoted Mark Thiele on this topic. In the article, Mark pointed out that integration is not only a technological opportunity, it’s also an organizational and business one. In the past, the roles of IT and business were separate. Two parts of the same network operating as islands.

At Cloudability, we get to see how the sausage making process of enterprise cloud adoption really works. We see a lot of political discussions on both sides — pro- and anti-cloud — about the wrong things. The people who spent their careers dedicated to building out world class data centers full of hardware that just a few years ago was everything the company needed, are finding it hard to embrace it when business units increasingly bypass them, ignore them, or unfairly compare internal services to external ones.

To go for Cloud services is often more expensive in cash terms right now, but the reality is, for that premium, you are getting less risk and more speed. So both sides need to focus on determining the right thing to do — not every project should go on the cloud, and not every project should go on the public cloud.

And the discussion should be, what are the numbers driving those choices? Not “let’s get rid of the Cloud” or “let’s get rid of internal IT.”

We’re already seeing greater integration of IT into business units as those on both sides begin to better understand each other’s roles and how they impact the overall growth of the organization. In fact, a recent IDC study showed 85 percent of respondents said IT has become a more valuable partner compared to three years ago. A bigger network of smaller things. And it’s that integration — of IT into business — that explains why the Chief Information Officer needs to become the Chief Integration Officer.

To the CIO, cloud computing and APIs are code words that describe a more fundamental shift from servers to services, from Capex to Opex. We feel it’s very similar to the move from mainframes to microcomputers. And it’s driven by the same forces: businesses want more speed, and more flexibility.

Today, you pay for everything up front. You own the hardware and the software, as well as the long term co-location, support and network contracts. And you employ staff to manage and maintain these systems. Well, not for much longer. You will end up with all of the above presented to you as a service: everything, from individual servers to whole applications will be provided as a service.

This has happened before. Over the last 30 years manufacturing industries have evolved from horizontally integrated supply chains — where you owned the factories, the source of raw materials, and even sometimes the cows that made the leather or the trees that made the rubber — to a vertically integrated supply chain based on a global network of suppliers who can make anything from rivets to large, complex components for you.

For example, look at how Toyota builds their cars. They buy components such as car seats from many different manufacturers. Orders are placed every day to a mix of vendors, based on demand. Each seat is identical except for the price, which varies according to the commercial terms in place: minimum order sizes, lead-times, annual commitments, etc.

It takes a lot of serious technology and people to stay on top of that and win.

Another example of this is the most recent US presidential election. It’s been widely reported that a critical advantage Obama had over Romney was technology. If we look at each implementation, they are wildly different.

Full disclosure: The Obama for America campaign was a customer of ours, so we have to be careful what we say here.

What is public is that the OFA team took a completely cloud based approach to the problem. This allowed them to spend almost all of their time focused on algorithms and data. And they were able to scale their successes very quickly when they had them.

The Romney campaign on the other hand took the same approach as every previous presidential campaign had taken. Their project ORCA needed a lot of effort just to get the infrastructure in place, before any code could be written or data crunched. Unfortunately, all this effort failed to pay off: on election day it quickly became overloaded and was unavailable for long stretches of time, just when it was needed most.

It’s generally accepted that this made a really big difference in Obama’s campaign. They had access to the data and could put people in the right places, whereas the Romney campaign didn’t and couldn’t.

I think this is the best and most public example to date about what will happen to you if you don’t get your ducks lined up on this integration.

With the proliferation of cloud applications and personal devices into the enterprise — not to mention existing data silos and platforms already inside the enterprise — organizations are generating more data than ever before. Data that must be corralled and managed. Data that must be tied directly into the company’s revenue and growth.

CIOs will need tools and systems that allow them to visualize and guide the growth of this neural network of things. Think of it as a compute supply chain, with the CIO managing the vertical integration of this chain. Once they can see all of the nodes, they can operate a more dynamic, flexible compute supply chain.

Because of this, we predict the CIO’s office is poised to become smaller but a lot more powerful. This will only happen if CIOs recognize that their role now is to drive integration, and no longer to provide the infrastructure for corralling information. Once they realize that, a world of new opportunity opens up for them and the people they serve, as well as their organization overall.

It’s a transformation whose time has come.

Viva la Chief Integration Officer!

The CIO is Dead, Long Live the Chief Integration Officer was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So you want to be a tech entrepreneur? I may have some advice.

“It’s a wonderful thing to do a startup, but it’s really hard,” I told the crowd gathered Sunday for the finale of Portland Startup Weekend.

For one thing, the pay is terrible. I make the same salary as he did back in 1993, and I don’t get to see my family very much.

Read the full article at Portland Business Journal

How to be an entrepreneur? was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How About Smoked Wagyu Brisket for Thanksgiving?

If you are cooking for more than a dozen guests this Thanksgiving Day, smoking a large piece of brisket is an easy way to keep everyone happy and do something different. Using US-grown Wagyu beef makes for a very memorable turkey day feast.

Thanksgiving Can be Hard Work

A few years ago my wife took over the role of Thanksgiving host for her family’s annual event. I quickly found that cooking enough turkey for 15–20 people was a challenge. A large beef brisket is a much easier way to feed so many people. On the advice of a friend, I tried wagyu beef and we never looked back. We still have turkey — it wouldn’t really be Thanksgiving without it — but American Kobe is the highlight of our Thanksgiving dinner.

The Equipment

1. A smoker. Get a nice cheap one, you’re only going to use it once or twice a year. Mine cost about $150.
2. Wood chips. Mesquite works well. I like to experiment with cherry and apple wood too. Smaller chips work best if you have a cheap and cheerful smoker like mine.
3. A Remote Thermometer. You’re going to run the smoker for 24 hours or so. Again, you’re not going to be smoking meat all year round, aim to spend about $40.
4. Propane.
5. Heavy duty aluminum foil.
6. Oven gloves.
7. Twine (NOT plastic/nylon string!).
8. Squirting water bottle (for dampening your wood chips).
9. Large water container (for replenishing the water dish).

This should set you back about $250 in total if you do it ahead of time.

The Rub

Here’s a great recipe from my friend Tim. There are many alternatives on the web but why muck about with a winning formula?

• 1/2 cup lawry’s seasoning salt
• 3 tbsp ground pepper (white or black)
• 2 tbsp cumin
• 2 tbsp ground mustard
• 1 tbsp granulated garlic or garlic powder (not garlic salt)
• 1 tbsp onion powder
• 1 tbsp chili powder (adjust to your spicyness liking)
• 1 tbsp ground sage (optional)
• 1 cup dark brown sugar

Mix it up real good, taste a pinch of it. You should get a definite sweet up front, then followed by a slight saltiness, spice and smokiness. If you taste super salty, or super spicy add more brown sugar and onion/garlic/mustard/cumin. The cumin brings a latin smokiness to it. Adjust until the flavors are balanced to your liking. You can run a little salty because its a huge chunk of meat.

The THANKSGIVING Meat

I use wagyu brisket from Snake River farms ($140 + shipping). I get the biggest I can find as folks keep eating it until it’s gone.

T-45 days — Order Beef

Order the meat well ahead of time. They run out! I order mine in October and then call and ask for delivery the week of Thanksgiving. Get the meat delivered on the Monday so you can defrost and deal with any shipping delays.

T-7 days — Get all the other stuff

Go get your rub ingredients a week early. They’ll keep forever and you don’t want to run out of anything.

T-72 hours — Beef arrives!

The beef will come in a giant insulated box. Keep this handy, as you’ll need it for resting the meat before serving. Follow the defrost instructions so it’s ready for cooking 48 hours later.

Have a think about how you’re going to place the meat in your smoker. This can be a fun engineering challenge. My smoker is vertically oriented and so I have to hang the meat using twine (not nylon as it melts and affects the flavor of the meat). If you have a bigger smoker you may be able to lay the meat flat. In this case, make sure you put it fatty side up, to enhance the flavor.

Do spend some time to plan this before you rub the meat or you will be left struggling with getting it into your smoker on the big day (this was stressful for me the first time as I didn’t have any twine).

T-30 hours — Equipment Prep & Planning

Timing is the tricky part. If, like me, you are a noob to all this, you’ll likely be mucking around with the smoker constantly on the first few times, and each door opening and gas adjustment will extend your cooking time. Officially it’s 1.5 hours per pound, so a 13lb brisket will take about 19 hours to cook, and a 17lb one about 26 hours. You’re looking to cook the meat all the way through, so all the sinew is broken down, which is what makes the meat so tender. The last thing you want to do is serve it before it’s ready, or have a bunch of hungry folk waiting for your masterpiece.

The good news is that once the brisket is cooked you can keep it nice and hot for 4–6 hours in the box it came in, i.e. it doesn’t matter too much if you screw up the cooking time and finish a few hours early.

I recommend you start to setup the day before, around 3 hours earlier than the official cooking time requires. For example, if you have a 17lb brisket (26 hour cooking time) and you want lunch at 1pm, then start 26+3 hours before, in this case 8am on Wednesday.

Find a nice place outside for your smoker. It shouldn’t be exposed to wind or rain — that will cool the smoker and potentially put out the flame — but don’t put it in your porch, it is a smoker after all! We have a nice big open space right in front of our front door. It’s covered and sheltered but the roof is a good 12–14' above the smoker. Use your head here, the risk isn’t so much from fire as from staining/smoking your property.

Lay down a couple of sheets of foil and put your smoker on top. A lot of fat and other gunk will come out from the bottom of your smoker, and the foil will reduce staining of concrete and other mess. Roll up the edges of the foil and then test with a little bit of water: your foil system should be able to hold a cup of water.

Put your wood chips in the smoking tray and soak with water. Fill the water tray and check the smoker is level: if it’s not you’re going to have fatty water spilling out the whole time. Practice moving the trays in/out. Explore all the flaps and openings on your smoker and familiarize yourself with the manual: these are used to increase/decrease temperature without mucking around with the gas level, which is a blunt instrument to use for finding the right temperature. Do all of this before connecting the gas as they will be very hot later.

T-29 hours — Cooking the Meat

Prepare the rub as described above. For bonus flavor, rub the whole brisket with deli mustard or honey mustard before applying the rub. Applying rub to the meat is fun and very messy — use an apron. Rub it all over, into every nook and cranny, no part should be left uncovered. As it sits, the brown sugar liquifies and it will get sticky and drippy. Plan accordingly going in/out of the house, as your hands will NOT escape unscathed. Multiple towels, tongs, etc are useful.

At this point you should have:
- one smoker setup, gas attached but not on
- one beautiful piece of brisket covered in rub
- very messy hands

Now go put the meat in your smoker. Attach your thermometer, turn up the gas to high and then adjust until the temperature inside the smoker is between 210F and 240F. My remote thermometer measures two temperatures: inside the meat and inside the smoker. Set your thermometer to alarm if the temperature of the oven goes below 180F (this means your flame has gone out) and above 250F (your water has run out).

Keep an eye on the thermometer. The smoker will cool at night (duh) and you’ll need to fiddle with those vents and gas to keep the temperature up. Try to keep door openings to a minimum. The smell will be delicious and you’ll want to stare at the meat but try to keep this to a minimum. Most smokers have a separate door for the water & chips so you don’t have to keep opening the main door.

It’s really important to keep the water topped up. If you don’t, the meat will dry out. You’ll quickly learn how long it takes for your smoker to exhaust its water supply.

T-12 hours — Tuck Your Meat into Bed

There’s a lot of debate about when to wrap your meat. Purists leave it to the last minute, I recommend noobs like me do it sooner than later.

The point of wrapping is two fold: it reduces the chances of you drying out the meat, and it limits the amount of smoke you get into the food. Some folks like more smoke, others like less. You’ll have to experiment to find out what’s best for you.

I prefer to wrap my meat the night before. Take the meat out of the smoker. Wrap it in two full layers of heavy duty aluminum foil like a pouch, then put it back on. Don’t forget to re-attach your thermometer and to top up the water once last time. Wait for the smoker temperature to get back up to 210–240F. Put your thermometer by your bed and dream about how delicious this meat will be.

T-4 hours — The Next Morning

Your goal today is to get the inside of the meat to 180F, at the thickest point of the meat. But first, we’re going to make some burnt ends.

Remove the meat again from the smoker and cut off the triangular hunk at the top (the point). Re-wrap the main brisket, and put back in the smoker. Cut the point into 1" chunks and mix with a new batch of rub. Put on an aluminum dish and put in the smoker. These will make the best part, the burnt ends. They only need to be in the smoker for 1–2 hours, and they make a delicious appetizer to get everyone ready for the main course.

Now all you have to do is wait until the internal temp reaches 180F.

T-1 hour — Ping! It’s Done!

Once the inside of the meat reaches 180F, it’s done cooking. Prepare the cooler — I use the box the meat comes in, but a standard cooler will do just as well — by lining it with some more foil and dumping in some boiling water. Remove the meat from the smoker, leave it wrapped but remove the thermometer, and then dump it in the cooler. Leave the meat there until you’re ready to serve. It should stay hot for 4–6 hours, try to leave it in there for at least an hour. This will “rest” the meat and make it even more tender: it’s literally marinading in its own juices. Hmmm…

When ready to serve, remove from the box, put on a nice large wooden chopping board and slice across the grain of the meat. Try not to eat too many pieces yourself!

Hopefully, it will taste delicious and everyone will remember your Thanksgiving lunch. We certainly do.

Enjoy!

Thanks go to Tim P. and Adam K. for their help perfecting this amazing roast over the past few years.

Smoked Wagyu Brisket for Thanksgiving was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Save big on cloud costs by watching the small stuff

As an IT professional dealing with corporate budgets it’s easy to get wrapped up in the large numbers and consider any sum less than a thousand bucks a rounding error. However, saving money on the Cloud has an immediate and compound effect. A thousand a week here and a thousand a week there saved by checking on the details can certainly add up quickly

Back in 2009 I founded the company that spawned Cloudability. I had many different projects on the go, and when we decided to focus on Cloudability I left most of them running. Maintenance was cheap and the projects were still valuable in some way.

I always suspected that I could probably reduce my cloud costs a bit but I was too busy and never got around to it. After all these projects were only costing me $228/mo. How much could I really save?

Read my full post at the Cloudability blog

Save big on cloud costs was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a talk at the TAO Tech Leadership Forum on August 4, I explained why moving to the Cloud makes cost management so much harder, and why cloud costs require a completely new approach to managing your technology supply chain.

Listen to the whole talk (7:35) and learn the three factors driving the volatile nature of cloud costs, as well as the specific processes and controls that can turn a move to the Cloud into a well-managed business advantage.

Read the full post at the Cloudability blog.

Grabbing the Cloud Cost Tiger by the Tail was originally published in Cloudy Portland on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.