Dear CIO/IT managers,

This CPTTM CIO newsletter is to bring useful news to you, CIO/IT managers in Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or recommend your friends to subscribe, just email me at kent@cpttm.org.mo. Old issues are available here.

Topics in this issue:

• Case study 9 on applying ITIL at CPTTM
  
• No-risk migration to ODF
• Why German schools can use open source software but Macau can't?
• Preventing IT project failures
  
• Upcoming courses for CIO/IT manager

Case study 9 on applying ITIL at CPTTM

CPTTM has started ITIL capacity management for a year (see here). Here is a lesson that I'd like to share with you: You should use different types of charts for different data. For example:

• For hard disk space monitoring, it's enough to take a sample once a day or once every several days. To display it, it is good to use a line chart spanning over at least several months or one year. This will show the speed of disk space consumption so that you know when the space will be used up.
• Memory is not the same hard disk space. It will not decrease with time (unless new applications are deployed or new users are added). Therefore, it's meaningless to show the data across several months or a year. In contrast, you can use a line chart spanning a month (the last month) to see if there is an overall trend of decreasing in  free memory.  If there is, you need to check why. Usually this is because of new applications or new users. In that case, if there is less than 10% of memory free, you may want to add more memory. Note: Windows servers usually will keep consuming memory and release it all in a cycle, making it difficult to see if they are really in need of more memory or not.
• CPU is like memory: It will not change over time. However, because CPU utilization can fluctuate in seconds, it is difficult to see its overall trend in a line chart. Therefore, we use statistics, e.g., the average utilization in the last month, percentage of time when the utilization is over 500% (meaning 5 processes are waiting for the CPU), percentage of time when the utilization is between 300% and 500%, between 100% and 300%, between 50% and 100% and less than 50%. Our experience shows that if there is 5% of more time when the utilization is over 500%, it is already very busy. Of course, this depends on the expectation of the users. If they feel that it's slow, we can make a proposal to the management (spend how much in order to bring 5% to 0%). It's up to the management to implement it or not.

No-risk migration to ODF

ODF is the ISO approved office document format. Because the format is open, it can be ensured that archived documents can still be opened in the future (Can you still open Word Star files now?). However, MS Office didn't support ODF. The good news is, Sun Microsystems has released a free MS Office plug-in, enabling MS Office to open and save files in ODF. This way, your organization can use ODF internally while you can still receive DOC files, while requiring no re-training of staff.  What if you need to send files to others? You can use PDF. If they need to modify the files, you can save the ODF file as a DOC file (99% of the time this should  be fine, but you should still check if the formatting remains unchanged) or simply send the ODF file to them and ask them to download OpenOffice or the plugin above.

Why German schools can use open source software but Macau can't?

Facing the problem of whether to upgrade to MS Office 2007 or not, 36% of all German high schools decided to upgrade, while 25% decided to switch to OpenOffice. At the same time, 40% of German college students will use Linux and related software. I can't help thinking: Why can German schools actively use open source software but Macau can't? Is it because German students are more independent, risk taking, wanting to learn new things and respecting intellectual properties, while Macau students are followers, satisfied, wanting to enjoy lifes and having no concept of intellectual properties? It's strange that in fact open source can not only save money and deliver security and reliability, but also improve the quality of the people in a community. If we hope our next generation to have more entrepreneurs, professionals, scholars instead of just casion dealers or clerks, our schools and families should really increase the use of open source software.

Preventing IT project failures

The US Wisconsin State conducted an audit on various IT projects in its various agencies to analyze the projects with signiciant failures (some projects were delayed 6 times and costs were doubled). The projects analyzed includes: vehicle registration system, sales & use tax system, unemployment insurance system, statewide IT consolidation project (sharing servers and email, accounting, human resources, budgetting, payroll and purchasing systems). This is a good reference for those working on e-government. The reasons for the failures should be quite well-known to you all: Underestimating the complexity, cost getting out of control and schedule delayed. The report makes quite some suggestions. Here are the few that I remember:

1. Identify large scaled, high risks projects and concentrate efforts to manage them.
2. If there are challenges arising in a project, there should be a mechanism to rescue it or terminate it.
3. There must be a complete specification before software development is started.

I personally agree to 1) and 2) very much, but I don't think 3) can be done. The specification should be as complete as possible, but it is just impossible to make it 100% complete. It is even more impossible to make it 100% correct. It is also impossible to make sure it won't change with time. Thinking that it is possible to have a perfect specification is just burying your head in the sand. In addition, the more detailed the specification is, the more errors it will contain (not specifying something means no mistake). The more time you take to write the specification, the more changes will have occurred. Therefore, it is not true that it should as detailed as possible. Instead, specifying those important things in details and leave the details unspecified for those unimportant things.

How to handle omissions, errors and changes? Personally I'd suggest:

1. A project should be done in phases. Each phase should be completed in half a year or 9 months (in contrast, all the above projects in Wisconsin were spanning across several years). What can be changed in half a year is limited.
2. Get the user representatives to check the running software frequently (e.g., weekly). If there are omissions or errors, they can be corrected immediately.
3. Allocate a buffer in the budget. The size of the buffer depends on the scale and risk of the project. It is common to have a buffer of 20% to 100% (coincidently, the costs of the above projects mostly increased by 100%).

If you're interested, why not take a look at that report.

Upcoming courses for CIO/IT manager

There is no course for CIO/IT managers for the moment, but there are some courses your kids may enjoy:

Feedbacks

Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 28781313 or kent@cpttm.org.mo. We also have two other newsletters: Network administrator newsletter and Software developer newsletter, your staff may like to subscribe.

Until next time, 

Kent Tong