Russ Smariga's Weblog

Social Media

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"Social Media" is all the rage today. If you are not involved with it in some way, there is a large group of folks who would relegate you to the ranks of the uninformed, or, worse yet, the un-phat.

How true or untrue this may be, the tools and concepts being used in the social media world today have huge potential for accelerating personal and group creativity and productivity. There are many examples showing how this can be true. One example can be introduced with the question, "How long would it take you, as an individual, to find the top twenty (or more) technology news items on the web?" One answer would be "forever" because I do not have any tools by which to judge their 'popularity'. Another reasonable answer might be "several hours of dedicated browsing on the major news sites such as Yahoo, CNN, Fox, MSN, Slashdot, etc., with some followup time to correlate between all the sites."

Now, enter one site's interpretation of a social media concept embodied by digg.com. More specifically, check out: http://digg.com/view/technology

There, immediately at your fingertips (mouse pointertip), are many, many technology news items representing the vast majority of what is available, right now, on the web. How long did that take you? Couple of seconds?

But, you might say, "How many of the people participating in "digging" technology news items will I actually agree with? IMO it does not matter. What matters is that somebody, rather many somebodies are highlighting technology news that might be interesting, thereby freeing me from the drudgery of searching. And this gives me vastly more time to actually process the data into something useful, instead of wasting cycles "in the hunt."

And that is just a single social media concept. A single tool.

Imagine what might happen if two, three, or several social media concepts were leveraged. Thoughtful integration in this space is already revolutionizing our ability to review, assimilate and create. Imagine how much better it is going to be!

User Advocacy inside Sun & SunIT

I have been serving in a position with the title of "User Advocate" in SunIT for almost two years now. It was a "created" position which did not exist before I moved into it. It was created to address and help solve a number of challenges our internal end users were facing. [Most of those challenges were related to the budget reductions SunIT had faced over the past 5-6 years.]

What does a "User Advocate" do, you ask? So did I, when I first signed on! Well, a User Advocate (UA for short), primarily has two roles. The first one is to let folks, both inside and outside of Sun, know what tools are available to help get their day to day work done. Part of this role is also to make sure folks know how to use their tools and where to get more information on them. Another part of this role is explain the vision and roadmap, so that folks know, not only where we are today, but where we are heading tomorrow, and why.

The second major role for the UA is to LISTEN to end users of all types to understand both challenges and successes. Once heard, this feedback can become part of information that Sun's executive team (including both the Information Technology Mgt Grp (IMG) and the Executive Leadership Team (ELT)) is receiving "unfiltered" input on the state of the "user experience" on which to base business decisions.

When I first took on this role I was both excited and passionate about it, as well as a bit concerned as to how much the UA could really do to "make a difference." Today, as I look back over the last 18 months, I'm still excited and passionate about the role, but I have a much clearer view of how much the UA *can* accomplish, as well as what limitations there are. A good day for me includes at least one instance of an end user saying, "Thanks! It's working now," or "I didn't know I could do *that*!" Or, maybe even, "We are going to be rolling *that* out next quarter?!? Cool!" It is even a good day when someone says, "Ok, so I get it now. We can't solve this problem today, but at least I know why. Thanks for getting back to me."

One of the biggest challenges is that, while I would like to reach out to every person and work location at Sun, I am only one person. This means that I have to leverage group gatherings and web resources to "get the word out." And, there are many other people and organizations within SunIT who are responsible for connecting with Sun folks and organizations to help ensure that IT is delivering what the business needs. Those folks are doing a great job with very limited resources, and, in many cases, I hand over a user issue to those "other folks in IT" for resolution. For those who might have helped me in the past when I did hand over a problem, you have my thanks and appreciation.

I also spend some of my time with external customers, so whether you are reading this as a Sun employee or as someone who might be a customer of Sun, we might get the chance to meet someday. Until that time, let's keep on doing the best we can to be creative and enjoy the journey!

Sláinte!

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Stephen Baxter and Optimi-what? in the Data Center On an intensely sunny, crisp spring day (well, it is almost spring) here in Southlake, TX, it occurs to me that this is a pretty exciting time to involved in technology. No, this is not a marketing pitch by Sun --- remember the disclaimer: These are my words, and not the words of my employer --- even though I gave you a pointer to some official Sun information, these are just some observations by an interested participant. There have been lots of cool, new technology things popping onto the scene pretty much since the early / mid '80s when the PC first began to hit the streets. And that has all been (mostly) well and good. Those things were useful, as far as they went, or, at the least, they were entertaining. Businesses leveraged the technology to develop or extend their competitive position. Some have done this very much better than others. And, big companies that make all manner of server and client hardware, software of all descriptions, and the services to glue it all together have long been touting the 'fact' that life will now be easy with the Extra-Xeooomba Mark II. Deep down, we have all wanted to believe that this would be the case with each next new thing. And, deep down, we have probably all had the knowledge that this would not, in fact, be the case. Life in technology architecture, design, deployment and operations would continue to present lots of unpredictable challenges and stumbling blocks. This has been particularly true wrt data center operations. Outages seem to jump at us at the most inopportune, most visible, and most expensive moments. What excites me today, though, is the realization that all the myriad technologies, components, architectures, management processes and techniques are finally being looked at as part of some larger, more complete entity, which, when discovered, will be that 'new thing' which really does deliver on a significant part of the promise to make life easier. This vision, which some have had for a bit longer than others, is starting to be accepted by a larger and larger proportion of our community. In Sun's Client Solutions organization (formerly "PS"), we have been developing this vision and executing against it, in smaller or larger ways, over the past 4-6 years. And, only over the last six months have we given it a name: The Sun(TM) Serviced Optimized Data Center (SODC) program. For me, it has been very interesting watching this come about, participating in delivery to customers, and seeing the mindshare around it grow. All of us are a part of the transformation going on now, and, someday, we will look back on the first decade of the 21st century and say, "I was there when this all got started!" So, we can now begin to see a true optimized, efficient enterprise data center emerging, where before we could only see disparate, and most times costly parts. A very good friend of mine, KG, put this to me a couple of days ago. He said: "During my travels I have had this persistent thought that hits me on elevators. Stephen Baxter mentioned it in 'Manifold Origin' concerning how the primitives could not see the wrecked spacecraft because they could not comprehend it. I return to this thought whenever I am on elevators. Wondering how a human being from ancient times would describe an elevator. They would see it, but their minds would build a construct to describe it in their own language/rule set." KG finishes with this question which, on this bright, cool day, seems particularly applicable to our world of emerging, converging technology: "what is it that is there that we don't see because we cannot comprehend it?" Cheers, - RussS