February 26th, 2010

Six failures from poor application quality

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:32 am

Categories: Availability and reliability, CIO issues, IT issues

Tags: Application Quality, Performance Problem, Software Development, Help Desk, Performance Management, Investment, Software/Web Development, It Operations, Finance, Michael Krigsman

The endless catalog of IT failure rests on a foundation of poor judgment, inadequate communication across business groups and information silos, and conflicting agendas. Most of my blogging discusses what happens when these human failings intersect IT projects.

Although human issues are critical, downtime and other problems also arise from highly technical causes of failure. Interestingly, there is often a human dimension even when problems are rooted in technology.

To explore this topic, I asked Dr. Bill Curtis, SVP & Chief Scientist of CAST Software, to write a guest post linking common causes of failure to business outcomes.

Bill is one of the world’s foremost authorities on software development process and improvement. He is best known for leading development of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), a global standard for evaluating the capability of software development organizations. You may not recognize his name, but almost certainly, you’ve interacted with applications developed using processes he pioneered.

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Most organizations wait until an embarrassing disaster strikes before even considering the link between application quality and business benefit. Although these same companies can quantify the costs of failure, they still struggle to build a business case justifying proactive investment in application quality, which can prevent these embarrassments.

To help stimulate a discussion about risk and reward in preventing failure, this post presents the top six ways that poor application quality affects business.

Read the rest of this entry »

April 28th, 2009

Chuck Norris Syndrome and IT failure

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:57 am

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, IT issues, Uncategorized

Tags: Information Technology, Twitter, Chuck Norris, Brian D. Foy, Team Management, Internet, Strategy, Management, Michael Krigsman

During a Twitter discussion last night, I mentioned that some organizations want to improve business operations without change or cost. This ridiculous perspective implies that meaningful improvements arise effortlessly of their own accord, as if through magical or divine intervention. Amazingly, such attitudes are common and underlie many project failures.

A blog post from perlmonks.org directly addresses this point. Technical consultant, brian d foy (no caps), says some of his clients seem to want a super-human, such as actor Chuck Norris, to save them:

Chuck Norris is the man who can do anything, and the universe is afraid of him. Not just the people in the universe, the actual universe itself. [His] abilities are collected in Chuck Norris Facts, which include:

• Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.
• Chuck Norris’ hand is the only hand that can beat a Royal Flush.
• Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink.
• Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch, HE decides what time it is.

Brian groups his clients into three categories; the first only needs a gentle nudge to get their project moving:

Read the rest of this entry »

January 19th, 2009

Salesforce.com Service Cloud integrates enterprise social media

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:28 am

Categories: CIO issues, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Social Media, Sales Force Management, Sales, Michael Krigsman

Cloud computing vendor, Salesforce.com, has extended its service and support product line with Service Cloud, a set of technologies integrating community-generated knowledge with traditional call center data.

With this announcement, Salesforce establishes an important strategic push for the company, which Chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff, called a billion-dollar opportunity. Importantly, Service Cloud also demonstrates that social media can offer measurable ROI in the enterprise, which is a big deal.

Key components include:

• Customer communities for interaction not just posting. Salesforce.com wants to host corporate communities.
• Social networking connections. Salesforce.com said its Service Cloud will connect to Facebook, forums and blogs. The goal: Absorb information into a corporate knowledge base.
• Search ranking. Salesforce.com promises that Service Cloud results will be ranked near the top of Google results.
• Partner information sharing via the cloud.
• Multi-channel–phone, email and chat–support hosted in the cloud.

The most significant innovation is how Service Cloud parses social networking conversations to integrate that dispersed, user-generated data into existing call center knowledge bases and workflows. The other components are infrastructure and glue that enable Salesforce customers to collect, share, and work with community-generated data.

This diagram summarizes the components:

Read the rest of this entry »

June 30th, 2008

Has Google demoted FeedBurner?

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:25 am

Categories: Availability and reliability, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA

Tags: Google Inc., Feedburner, Blog, Blogging, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Internet, Michael Krigsman

Update 6/30/08 6:00pm: FeedBurner is working correctly.

FeedBurner blog site statistics have been down for over two days with no word from Google despite numerous complaints from users. Does Google’s lack of response suggest something we don’t know?

One unhappy user sent me the following screen capture, showing zero visitors on a well-trafficked blog:

FeedBurner’s user forum reports numerous instances of this problem:

Google has ignored all of these complaints. The last entry on their known issues list is June 28:

28-JUN 2008 From the it’s-not-you-it’s-us dept.: If you use our Site Stats for website traffic statistics, you may notice unusually low numbers for 28-Jun so far. We are restoring tracking services that have temporarily been suspended and expect to be reporting more recent site stats again shortly. Apologies for the temporary inconvenience!

In my view, Google’s cavalier attitude toward FeedBurner suggests that perhaps the service has been demoted to second-tier status despite the fact some FeedBurner services remain working. If so, that’s bad news for users. Google, any comment on this?

June 20th, 2008

Google explains why App Engine failed

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:04 am

Categories: Availability and reliability, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, IT issues, Project failures, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Salesforce.com

Tags: Google Inc., Customer Service, Dashboard, Amazon.com Inc., Outage, Cloud Computing, Manufacturing, Product Marketing, Marketing, Michael Krigsman

Google explained why its App Engine cloud service failed earlier this week. Following a similar failure at Amazon, the outage raises questions about whether cloud computing is ready for mission critical application deployment.

A company representative described the solution in a discussion forum:

We’ve identified the root cause of the issue and implemented a fix. Specifically, we’ve instituted a set of controls to ensure 1) that datastore queries no longer trigger this particular bug and 2) that bugs like this in the future don’t affect the stability of the system as a whole.

Google’s outage gives a black eye to cloud computing that may erode user confidence, causing the development community to delay adopting the service. When Amazon’s S3 cloud service went down last February, developers experienced real pain.

Google’s message acknowledged the company’s immaturity in being responsive to users:

We’re also trying to make sure that we build effective ways to communicate with developers about the hiccups that occasionally occur with large and complex systems like this, and we’d welcome your feedback and ideas

While the admission is welcome, it reflects a more basic set of customer service problems at Google.

• See also: Google needs to rethink its customer service strategy

ZDNet blogger, Garett Rogers, wrote about this topic:

One beef I’ve had for quite a while now is Google’s noticeable lack of commitment to personal support for people using their products and services.

Of course, the overall cloud computing issue remains a question that won’t be solved today. At the very least, however, Google should immediately implement real-time, service level dashboards to increase transparency.

Amazon implemented service reporting after its failure and Salesforce.com offers a best in class example of dashboard openness.

April 20th, 2008

Gmail is down

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:52 pm

Categories: Availability and reliability, Failure 2.0, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA

Tags: Google Gmail, E-mail Providers, Internet, Michael Krigsman

Update 4/21/08. 5:00 pm EDT: Seems it was an isolated outage. Google’s press office never responded to a request for comment made this morning.

Update 4/21/08. 9:00 am EDT: Gmail seems to be working fine for some people. I tried the Windows hosts file fix suggested in this thread, and now Gmail works for me. I suspect there is a DNS issue affecting some ISPs but not others.

Gmail has been down for hours now. For those of us who use Gmail for business-related activities, it really sucks. Google apps for domains also seems down. There’s a special discussion group, called Gmail down, specifically to allow users to share information about such outages.

Here’s a screen capture showing the current state of Gmail:

July 11th, 2007

Netflix Web Failure

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 12:39 pm

Categories: Availability and reliability, Enterprise 2.0, Project failures

Tags: NetFlix Inc., Google Inc., Web, Software-as-a-service, Michael Krigsman

Even the most hardened infrastructure sometimes fails. Recently, Google groups was down, as you can see here. This time, it was Netflix:

If infrastructure failures can happen to Google and Netflix, they can happen to you. If you are considering software as a service vendors (SaaS), be prepared for occasional downtime, as it will happen eventually.

June 23rd, 2007

Google Groups Down

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:20 pm

Categories: Availability and reliability, Enterprise 2.0, Project failures

Tags: Google Inc., Michael Krigsman

Google Groups was down for a short while today, as you can see from the image below. Even the most robust infrastructure sometimes fails.