Demonstration of what could be done with information sharing, a path to lower costs and less waste

Data Centers almost never share information on its operations.  This is what hospitals used to be like.  But, more and more hospitals are sharing information so they gain insight into best practices.

Seattletimes has an AP article that discusses a discovery on better procedures for knee surgery.

The hospital is part of a national collaborative that's analyzing a range of high-volume, high-cost medical procedures and conditions to see which approaches result in the best outcomes and the lowest costs. Its findings on knee replacements were published last week, but several of the health systems already have made changes based on the results.

For example, Dartmouth-Hitchcock is considering having a dedicated team of anesthesiologists, nurses and technicians assigned to knee replacements after seeing that another hospital with such a team had the shortest average operating time, which is associated with fewer complications.

Wouldn't it be great if data centers could share its procedures and results.  Why is it so secret to discuss maintenance operations on power and cooling equipment?

The Past Retail Giant, Sears, lessons to learn

Amazon.com and Costco are considered some of the most innovative retailers.

75 + years ago, the retailer innovator was Sears.  You can make various arguments why Sears isn't the retail giant.  Amazon has Jeff Bezos.  Costco had Jim Sinegal who just retired.  Sears had General Robert E. Wood.

Aren't data centers part of the retailing of bits?

Who is Robert Wood.  Here is paper on what he did at Sears.

Sears Roebuck: General Robert E. Wood's Retail Strategy
James C. Worthy
Northwestern University
This paper presents an account of the manner in which a well-
established-mail order enterprise serving exclusively a rural and
small-town market was brought into the mainstream of rapidly ur-
banizing America to serve a broad national market concentrated in
but not restricted to the great metropolitan centers. This far-
reaching transformation, which resulted in creation of the world's
largest merchandising organization, was conceived and largely ac-
complished by one man, General Robert E. Wood, a brash newcomer to
the company with no proper grounding in the accepted ways of how
things ought to be done.

Robert was driven by data.

In his drive to expand the retail system, General Wood gave
special attention to the South, the Southwest, and the West where
the census figures with which he was so familiar told him the
principal increases in population were occurring. He was well
aware that growth had levelled off or was actually declining in
New England, the Middle Atlantic states, and the upper Midwest,
and took this phenomenon into account in selecting the cities in
which he placed his stores.

The following totally sounds like inside amazon.com offices and Costco.

Falling back on his Canal and wartime experiences, General
Wood wanted stores without frills. He conceived of Sears serving
as the commissary (his term) of the nation, supplying merchandise
of such values that fancy and expensive surroundings would not
be necessary to bring people into his stores. In keeping with
this spirit, the early Sears stores were austere. Fixtures
bought for the stores during the first few years were as inexpen-
sive as could be found, many picked up locally at second hand.
There was no such thing as merchandise displays in the modern
sense of the term; goods were simply stacked on wooden tables
and customers rummaged to find what they wanted. Because men
were expected to be a large part of store clientele and men were
presumed to be not as finicky as women, housekeeping suffered
and the stores were often less than neat and orderly. The
early Sears stores were functional but drab; they resembled
warehouses, which in fact they were: warehouses open to the
public.

And, here is another part that sounds like Jeff Bezon and Jim Sinegal.

There was much to learn. A salient characteristic of the
Sears organization at this stage of internal evolution was an
openness to learning in the light of experience unhampered by
too many preconceptions of how things "ought" to be done.

General Wood himself did much to set this learning mode.
He did not leave the learning to subordinates. Much of the most
7O useful learning was his own, acquired in direct contact with the
men and women at the scene of action.

During the early retail years, a large part of Wood's time
was spent in the stores working with store managers, department
heads, salespeople, unit control clerks -- anyone in a position
to tell him how things were actually working and what needed to
be done to make them work better. 

Doesn't this sound like a description of Costco and Amazon.

By 1935, the Sears retail system was solidly established.
Its mission was clear, its leadership confident, and its machinery
running smoothly. It had taken 10 years to reach this state.
They had been 10 hard years, but they were years of achievement
in which Wood and the men around him forged a new and highly
effective means for serving the changing needs of a changing
America.

Solving the tough problems, Develop the Passion in your Team

Mike Manos wrote a post on DevOps.

This is just lost on so many companies / organizations…

April 6, 2012 by mmanos

Having experienced nearly all of the pain and desire one could have in trying to scale out applications, operations, and infrastructure, I have become a huge proponent of blending efforts between Development with Operations.   Additionally I think the blend should include lower level stuff like facilities as well.  The entire online paradigm fundamentally changes how the problem space should be viewed.

With Concepts like NoOps, DevOps, and the like becoming fashionable in the Development community its probably no surprise that these issues are being addressed from people’s own comfort spaces.  To a development engineer – those Ops folks are crusty and cranky.   To an Operations engineer those darn developers don’t really code for long term operations.   Its always the ‘throw the code over the wall’ and the Ops folks will make it work mentality.   In reality both sides are right.

One other part I would like to add to the problem of DevOps is whether you have a team who is passionate to work on the problems.  The tough problems.

It is so easy to have really smart people who think they know the right thing.  Designing the system, picking the hardware and software, the team that will deploy it, then hand the operations over to people who inherit the smart decisions made.  DevOps changes this approach as the people who make the design decisions operate the system.  This is not the standard practice as there is typically a heirarchy where the higher people make the design decisions and the lower people operate based on the decisions. This system can work, but it can be more expensive than a DevOps model.

DevOps is getting more popular, but what I don't hear many talk about is focusing on finding the people who have a passion for DevOps.  Here is a post that discusses finding top talent, and the role of passion.

As a manager, you can leverage the link between passion and creativity by following two guidelines:

First, hire for passion as much as for talent.If you don’t look for passion in the people you hire, you could end up with employees who never engage deeply enough to dazzle you with their creative productivity. As Conant advises, get to know potential hires for important positions as thoroughly as possible, long before you might have an opening for them. When you talk to them, ask why they do what they do, what disappointments they’ve had, what their dream job would be. Look for fire in their eyes as they talk about the work itself, and a listen for a deep desire to do something that hasn’t been done before. When you talk to their references, watch for mentions of passion.

Second, nourish that passion.Unfortunately, standard management approaches often (unwittingly) end up dousing passion and killing creativity. But keeping it alive isn’t rocket science. We have found that the single most important thing you can do to fuel intrinsic motivation is to support people’s progress in the work that they are so passionate about. This isthe progress principle, and it applies even to the seemingly minor small winsthat can lead to great breakthroughs. You can use the progress principle by understanding what progress and setbacks your people are experiencing day by day, getting at the root causes, and doing whatever you can to remove the inhibitors and enhance the catalysts to progress.

Two of my good friends I talk to almost every day have a passion for DevOps, and I regularly look for people who have a passion for Operations.

I knew looking at Mike Manos's post on the DevOps there is a missing part.  Passion.  Actually, for any of you know Mike there is no lack of passion in Mike.  He just didn't happen to write about it in this post.

Here is a post where Mike discussions Passion in relation to our dear departed friend Olivier Sanche.

As we sat in a room full of  ‘experts’  to discuss the future of our industry, the conversation quickly turned controversial.  Passions were raised and I found myself standing side by side with this enigmatic French giant on numerous topics.  His passion for the space coupled with his cool logic were items that endeared me greatly to the man.  We were comrades in ideas, and soon became fast friends.

Olivier was the type of person who could light up a room with his mere presence.   It was as if he embraced the entire room in one giant hug even if they were strangers.  He could sit quietly mulling a topic, pensively going through his calculations and explode into the conversation and rigorously debate everyone.  That passion never belied his ability to learn, to adapt, to incorporate new thinking into his persona either.  Through the years we knew each other I saw him forge his ideas through debate, always evolving.

Hope this gets you thinking of how some of the best people have passion for their jobs.