My Affair with My iPhone

It has been a year since I have been having an affair with my phone – my iPhone. I have been using cellphones since the mid 90s. I remember when battery life was nonexistent and they weighed more than most toasters. My how technology has changed…

I was in the market for a phone since I moved to an iMac two years ago. A phone that I was able to synch my contacts and calendar with – reliably. This has always been a unicorn among cellphones. How do you get your information on a mobile platform and be able to synch successfully each time.

I was able to accomplish this through the iPhone. I migrated my contacts and calendar to Microsoft’s Entourage. I am not wild about Entourage but it does the job I want.

The iPhone has become more then my cellphone. It has become my mobile assistant. I use it to check my email. Yes I check all my email automatically every 15 minutes. I need real time gratification.

I am not big on purchasing apps from the store because I get bored pretty easily but there are a few free apps that have become indispensable.

All Wall Street types should have the Bloomberg app. It keeps me up-to-date on financial news. The Wall Street Journal is also another great app for news.

Google maps has been great in finding my way around. I stopped using my bigger GPS device because it has become easier to use the iPhone.

With the new OS, Apple has made the device faster and battery life last longer. I now get a full day of usage before I have to plug in. Kudos to Apple for listening to their customers.

The only issue I have with the phone is typing. My fingers seem a touch to big to type. So I am constantly retyping. I could only imagine what other people with larger fingers must go through.

Any forward thinking professional should get one. Trust me, within the first week you cannot live without your iPhone.

Don’t tell my wife – but my iPhone and I are going out to dinner tonight. ;)

100 Days - A Secret Guide

This week President Obama reached 100 days since he took office. While many political pundits consider this milestone antiquated it is an important metric which all executives especially IT executives should use to gauge their performance.

What should a new IT executive have done in his/her first 100 days?

1. Listen to what the business is telling you. Spend time with business leaders and just listen to them. It is important to understand the business process and the players involved. Yes, politics will be important.

2. Meet with your staff and business leaders regularly. Get to know them. Their strengths and weaknesses.

3. Repair broken relationships quickly especially if they are business relationships.

4. Speak in business terms and stay away from the latest tech buzz words.

5. Assess IT’s capabilities. Are they in line with business goals? If not, what needs to be done to get it in line?

6. Freeze projects when appropriate until you can get up-to-speed. Put together a hit list of projects that have gone off track with a cost/benefit analysis.

7. Stabilize operations and get your processes to a minimum level that is acceptable and manageable.

8. Articulate IT’s goals and objectives. Develop a mission statement and business plan.

Secrets of Enterprise Security

Securing an environment, any environment, is daunting to most. When dealing with corporate networks a layered approach is the most effective means of deterring threats.



The following is a list of technologies that you should have in your environment:

1.Intrusion detection
2.Network access control
3.Spyware detection and preventions
4.Security and event log management
5.Antivirus
6.Data loss
7.Software patching

How one goes about dealing with each bullet above depends on manpower and available budgets. I have seen some firms spend millions to secure their environment but still remained vulnerable. I have also seen some try a total umbrella approach. Again, this was a failure. There is no magic bullet to enterprise security.

The best approach is to understand your environment then talk to your peers on how they are securing their environments and then formulate a plan that best fits you.

Securing any environment should be organic in nature. I strongly believe that enterprises are constantly growing and changing. Solutions you implement should also grow and change with your environment.

Here is quick list to get started:
1. Inventory your whole environment. Know what hardware and software you have.
2. Have a base image for your desktop PCs and servers. This image should be secured.
3. Lock down your core/edge network. Lock all open/unused ports.
4. Conduct penetration tests. Conduct these tests frequently and when possible, have outside vendors conduct them for you.
5. Monitor and review your logs – all your logs frequently.

Family Video Conferencing – Continued

This weekend I visited some family that had recently flown in from Dubai. The topic came up of video conferencing and how it has brought the family closer together.

As technologists, we sometimes forget how much technology impacts people. It is one of the reasons why I pursued a profession in information technology. By helping my family keep in contact over long distances it shows the power of technology to bring people together.

If your PC does not have a camera and you are not using an iMac with a built in camera then the product I recommend is Logitech’s Quickcam Pro 9000 (retail USD 99.99). I have used Logitech’s products in the past and they are solid products that are well thought-out and function as advertised.

I recommended the Quickcam Pro because of its ease to install and set up. My mother-in-law was more then able to install on her 6 year old computer. She was up and running within 5 minutes. Quickcam has true plug-and-play. No drivers required to get started.

Quickcam has a few nice features that I found nice:

1. It has a small foot-print but is not cheap in construction.

2. It has rubber grips that prevent it from sliding and the ability to raise or lower the camera manually.

3. It has auto focus and lighting features which improves video quality and a built in microphone.

4. Last, the Quickcam software has numerous functions that truly enhance the overall video experience.

5. The video quality is great and surpasses the quality that other webcam products offer.

If your family is not video conferencing then you are missing out. Get started today!

A New York Chief Information Officer’s Search

Over the last several months I have started growing my “brand” to increase my exposure to the world. In my search for a new job, there are a few processes that one needs to have in place.

First, you have to network. It sounds hard and it could be depending on how you go about it. Never forget the people you worked with or went to school with. That guy in the mailroom might be working at a better position at another firm. Your college professor might be working as a consultant now and remembers what a good student you were. Always keep a rolodex of contacts and try to stay in touch with them periodically. Never burn your bridges unless you really have to and even then do not do it. And always enlist your friends and family. They are a good source to network for you.

Second, get on social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. I have recently gotten on Facebook and I am still trying to find my way around as a tool. LinkedIn is a must for any professional. I have grown my network ten-fold without leaving my house. As a tool you can target individuals and groups that meet your interests. Your profile should always be up-to-date and you should have recommendations and connections to people.

Third, if you are an executive you should be writing. Whether in print or online you should do so. This gets your name out and grows your reputation and brand. It also keeps you thinking and your mind active. Starting a blog is free and easy to get started. In this day and age there is no reason not to be publishing something.

Fourth, join professional groups. I belong to TENG and as a group I think they are fabulous. Groups bring together people with similar backgrounds and interests. Do a search on Yahoo groups to find those relevant to you. Also Meetup.com is also another site that has groups that might be of interest. It is not necessary to join only professional groups but join those that are fun like golf or photography. Who knows, your golf club group might have people that can help you.

Fifth, subscription sites like The Ladders or Bluesteps should be approached cautiously. I have had some success with sites like this but overall I do not recommend them. Also free sites like Dice and Monster are a total waste for anyone with a lot of experience.

Sixth, have a handful of recruiters ready. Most senior level jobs, when available, are usually sent through a recruiting agency. So it is best to have a few that know you on your call list. Always remember, recruiters do not work for you but for their clients.

Last, it is important to give back. If you do land a position, remember that are many more out there without work. If you can help someone then you should. You will sleep better at night.

Family Video Conferencing - Seeing Is Believing

After I got married, my family size increased and became more geographically diverse. Keeping in touch via telephone was okay but too be honest I am not much of a phone person. Video conferencing was a tool a tinkered with from time to time. Having an iMac, I had iChat to play with. It was great if the other person on the other end had an Apple. But let’s face it; it is not a true Apple world yet and most of my relatives use PCs.

I have worked with Citrix, WebEx, and more sophisticated VC systems at work and all were great for the business community with support personnel onsite to support it. However, at home and for personal use required a more unsophisticated way of conferencing. Let’s face it, would your great aunt in Iowa be able to troubleshoot communication link problems or understand video compression algorithms.

So I did an Internet search and came across Skype. Yes that Skype http://skype.com/ . Skype has a function for video conferencing. It worked great for international video calling. The drawback was it was only a one-to-one solution. We could not do group video calls which was vastly more appealing to my family.

I discovered Oovoo http://oovoo.com/. It was easy to install and worked with both Windows and OSX. It allowed 6 way video calls. There were a few drawbacks.
A. International calling did not work well. Due to bandwidth limitations the video and audio became unintelligent. This was not an Oovoo issue but a local bandwidth issue.
B. If more than 3 people got on, an echo appeared. It forced us to mute our microphones when not in use. It made having free flow conversations a little difficult.
C. After the first month, Oovoo limits your subscription to 3 users at once and reduces your video quality to standard instead of high definition. 3+ users required a paid subscription. Free is still the best plan for any service. Having only 3 people on at once was not a bad thing it actually cut down the echo problem and made the session more manageable. The video quality, at least in my opinion also did not adversely affect my usage. Standard or high def seems to have very little difference.

So if you are looking for a universal piece of software that works with PCs and Macs, easy to install, easy to use then I highly recommend Oovoo.

Are Financial IT Executives Being Blacklisted?

Interesting phenomena I am seeing more of these days on job postings – requirements state very clearly that no one with financial services experience will be considered. Why is that? I felt compelled to ask the poster as to why would IT executives with financial experience be excluded from applying to that position?

If anything, I would think that a recruiter would want someone with that level of experience. We have been charged with protecting massive amounts of financial data, supported demanding executives, kept trading floors online, built robust data centers with N+1 redundancy, figured out how to set up market data architecture, prepared for disaster recovery and business continuity, dealt with armies of auditors and ever changing regulations, supported front and backoffice systems, and designed architecture with redundancy to prevent outages.

Our experience and knowledge is universal and should be sought after purely from the high demand/high pressure environments we worked in. Firms should strive to have people like us supporting their environments.

Today Was Not A Good Day - But It Is Friday

I am not sure if this is good or bad. But I do feel a bit disappointed today.

I got three phone calls from three different recruiters for three different positions.

The first was for a director of infrastructure. The position came to me through an IT organization I belong to. I was a little suspect of the recruiter but decided to send my resume in. To my surprise I got a phone call immediately there after. He wanted me to “tweak” my resume, send back to him and follow up. I did and the next day I followed up. I called and emailed but no response. I was able to get him on the phone. He did not remember me or the position. I spent a few minutes explaining everything again. He said he will send my resume in a follow up with me in a fee days. It has been a few days, I called and left messages and email but no response.

I got another call from a recruiter that I had linked with this week. He said he got a position that was right for me and sent me the job description. It was great. Everything I was looking for: good location, good salary, good description that fit my background. The recruiter will follow up with me the next day. I was a little weary based on my previous experience but I wanted to not come across desperate. So I waited and to my surprise I got a phone call the next day. The message was short but I felt something was wrong. So I called back. The firm wants a “hands on” person--very hands on; Cisco engineer, windows admin, dba, dmz, CIO experience -- literally a jack of all trades. The job description and my research on the firm hinted that this was a large firm. Not a good idea to have one guy doing everything. I told the recruiter that I was hands on but with the sophistication of enterprise architecture, my skill set is not at that level anymore. I am more management with an understanding of how things work in an enterprise environment. The recruiter apologized for not having all the facts about the position. He will keep me in mind for other positions.

Last, I got another call for a VP of technology. The recruiter called me and asked how me how many people did I support in my last or any position. I told him the amount and said this position required someone who had supported 500+ users. It would have been easy for me to lie but my professionalism took over. Yet another position which I was not right for. I don’t understand if you support 50 or 5000 people it is the not quantity but the quality of the support you provide.

So I did not get an interview this week but I was called 3 times from recruiters. Are things picking up? If so great, I can wait for the right position to come along.

IT Audits - Don’t Be Afraid

In this economy there will be more emphasis placed on audits. If you are working for a financial firm then you probably have an internal audit group. You are also audit by an external audit firm, maybe the Fed, and if you are an international firm-foreign regulatory agencies. In some firms, this leads to an environment of constant audits.

If you are a large IT shop then it makes sense to form an audit team comprised of your various department heads to work with and answer questions from the auditors. Keep it small. It is important to speak with one voice. This team should consist of one or two business leaders. During an audit, there will be times when some type of risk will be discovered that will lead to process or management change that has the potential to affect business operations.

If you are a smaller shop, then this process will fall upon the senior IT person. Again, some representation from the business should be included.

It is important for IT to document everything: every process, every procedure, and every diagram. If you have not already done so, do it now. If is just good due diligence. Auditors love documentation. The more you give the more they love it. It also keeps them occupied. Most audits only last for a specific period of time. How can anyone come and look at every aspect of your network? And discover everything. If you are a good administrator then you know were your risks are and you have taken steps to mitigate or removed them from your environment. In these environments, auditors will find very little if anything. And when they do it will be minor and easily correctable.

Business and IT - We Need To Talk

I have been privileged in my career to work with seasoned executives who understood technology and knew how to use it to grow their business. These were not techies but people that saw the power of the computer as a tool.

The fundamental problem that leads to a break down between business and IT is the lack of communication from both sides. The questions that should be asked and answered are the following:
· What are the expectations that need to be met?
· Are there clear goals that can be achieved?
· What information should IT be reporting on a regular basis and in what format?
· What metrics are helpfulful?
· Are the goals of IT aligned with those of the business?

I have seen in many organizations where IT has no clear direction. This is usually a failure of the CIO to articulate a vision. More so it is a lack of communication which leads to the breakdown of communications and the resulting disconnect and dysfunction between business and IT.

It is important to establish an effective relationship between your business leaders and your information technology group.

From Architect To CIO

I was born on March 31, 1972 in Brooklyn, New York. My father was an avionics engineer in the U.S. Army and my mother was a nurse. I grew up in a middle class family. Both parents were born in Trinidad. My grandparents were born in India. Where exactly has been lost. We were indentured servants brought to the Caribbean to harvest sugar cane and have been there since. We have no ties to India.

My father served in Vietnam; one of a handful of Hindus that served. He is American through and through. My mother was trained in England and is also an American. So I am first generation American along with my younger brother.

We moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York when I was 4. My father’s unit was transferred, so the whole moved for a better life. I started school and was one of a few minorities in elementary school.

In high school I discovered industrial drafting and fell in love with it. From there I started taking architectural drafting classes. When my senior year rolled around and the time came to figure out where and what I was going to study I knew I wanted to study architecture.

Architecture like any other sophisticated practice has many sub disciplines i.e. medicine or law. I decided I wanted to be a designer and focused my efforts on understanding the concepts of solid and void and circulation-all concepts which are important to a successful building. Along with this understanding, any design student must learn how to present, project management, engineering, interior design, and history. I graduated and started working immediately as a draftsman/designer.

Like any graduate, I had big dreams to one day design the next famous building. However, I quickly learned that one has to pay bills. I learned that architects do not make huge salaries and work on smaller scale projects. When I graduated there were very projects where there was mass building. Most of the buildings being built were going up in Asia.

I joined a small firm that was specializing in network implementations in architectural, engineering, and construction firms. They needed someone with an architectural background to help transition these firms to CAD and computer networks. This is how I got involved in computers, networks, and data management. It was great. I learned how to repair computers and printers, how to set up networks, how to transition a firm from paper base processing to electronic processing. I was able to leverage my education and training and make money doing it.

Then in 1997 I joined a financial firm on Park Avenue. Not knowing anything about banking or financial services. This firm was a subsidiary that specialized in middle/large ticket leasing and offered specialized finance to corporate customers. They wanted someone to come onboard and help manage and grow their technology and help move from a paper base process to electronic. So I joined. I was a one man show. I did it all: building servers, racking them, backups, antivirus, email, etc. I was all hands on. I had designed and built a stable network with capacity to grow as business grew. Management loved it. They had a stable infrastructure that allowed them do conduct business. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week I worked and I loved it.

Business started growing and there was a demand for more sophisticated systems: general ledger, accounting, market data, firewalls, disaster recovery sites. So I had to hire more staff to meet demand. Eleven plus years later, I had managed a successful IT operation that had weathered: Y2K, 9-11, blackouts, datacenter outages, upsizing and downsizing, a merger, branch office build out in London, increased regulatory process, and all the intricacies that come along with managing and IT department in a global organization.

So this is my story about how I went from building buildings to building networks.

324000 Minutes and Counting

I was laid off on September 1, 2008. I spent the first month sleeping and catching up on my thoughts. It felt great not having to worry about getting up a 5am, riding the train, managing an IT department, worrying about network outages, politics, staff issues, etc., etc. My wife loved having me home. She enjoyed my cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry. All the things that I enjoyed doing.

I began looking for a job in mid September. I followed the usual process that all executives follow: updated my resume, updated my contacts lists, write cover letters and elevator pitches. I contacted the recruiters that I remained in contact with that had a good reputation. I was getting a lot of inquires about my background and my prospects of finding a new position looked good.

Then things fell apart in October when the economy began unraveling. My phone stopped ringing and my inbox was empty. No one was returning my phone calls or emails. Positions that I had interviewed for and felt that I was going to get had vanished. I started to worry and wonder.

It is now April 2009. I spend 2 hours every morning, seven days a week, scouring websites, email, LinkedIn, working my connections - my network. Keeping my hopes up that the economy will improve and jobs will return. Since October I have met many executives that have been laid off.

With the encouragement of my wife, I have decided to write this blog to offer advice, guidance, and some humor to other executives who have been charged with managing information technology - for those that are still employed and for those who are unemployed like me.