Your Custom Text Here
It's Aug 2, 2013 and the kids are in ski camp at Mt Hood Oregon. The ski area is the center of picture.
Here are kids coming off the mountain.
It's pretty warm (people wearing shorts) and dry where the parents pick up the kids.
Some of the kids are in a week long camp and trekking up every day.
It is so much easier to get nice pictures of the kids in this weather compared to the winter.
What do the parents do? Go for a hike.
And relax with a Bloody Mary in the sun.
I get to take the pictures.
I've been staring at this post on Forbes on career truths.
I’ve also come to learn that in business sometimes it’s strategically (and monetarily) beneficial to remain under the radar.
As I sat down to write, I began looking over interviewing and career articles that I’ve written in the past as well as some content that was written by others.
Both fail to mention some very pertinent career truths or distort reality. Here are 7 that pieces of career truths that you don’t normally read about.
The one truth that resonated as the most important is the choice of who you surround yourself with.
3. You are who you surround yourself with – Be careful whom you associate with. Choose colleagues and friends carefully.
Surround yourself with sincere, honest, optimistic, kind, resilient and hard working people. Your potential will far exceed that of someone who associates themselves with highly controlling, jealous and pessimistic individuals.
DCIM is a topic almost all data center executives have heard and many have evaluated.
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is an emerging (2012) form of data center management which extends the more traditional systems and network management approaches to now include the physical and asset-level components. DCIM leverages the integration of information technology (IT) and facility management disciplines to centralize monitoring, management and intelligent capacity planning of a data center's critical systems. Essentially it provides a significantly more comprehensive view of ALL of the resources within the data center.
DCIM has not taken over the industry. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft build their own solutions. Here is a question. Does the data center need Infrastructure Management or Operations Management? Operations Management is a mature concept.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, operations management is the field concerned with managing and directing the physical and/or technical functions of afirm or organization, particularly those relating to development, production, and manufacturing. Operations management programs typically include instruction in principles of general management, manufacturing and production systems, plant management, equipment maintenance management, production control, industrial labor relations and skilled trades supervision, strategic manufacturing policy, systems analysis, productivity analysis and cost control, and materials planning.[1][2]Management, including operations management, is like engineering in that it blends art with applied science. People skills, creativity, rational analysis, and knowledge of technology are all required for success.
MIT and other universities target Operations Management. The below could easily be applied to data centers.
What is Operations Management?
Operations Management deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains. It considers the acquisition, development, and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their clients want.
The purvey of OM ranges from strategic to tactical and operational levels. Representative strategic issues include determining the size and location of manufacturing plants, deciding the structure of service or telecommunications networks, and designing technology supply chains.
Tactical issues include plant layout and structure, project management methods, and equipment selection and replacement. Operational issues include production scheduling and control, inventory management, quality control and inspection, traffic and materials handling, and equipment maintenance policies.
I would bet if more people were building Operations Management systems for the data center, then there would be a higher chance of DCOM being used than DCIM.
There may be some who say their DCIM solution does DCOM. But, my question is where is the Operations Management expert in your company?
Here is a Google data point to prove Operations Management is a valued skill - their Director of Operations and Strategy for the data center group.
Experience
Director, Operations Strategy & Decision Support
Lead a team of quantitative analysts to provide model-based decision support for Google's cloud infrastructure planning. Scope includes datacenter capacity planning, fleet planning, compute and storage resource optimization, network planning, and supply chain planning.
And what degree does he have? PhD Management Science & Engineering.
Education
Stanford University
PhD, Management Science & Engineering
1996 – 2001• Expertise: applications of advanced analytics to business and public policy problems.
• Dissertation: dynamic pricing of capacity in relationship-based supply chains.
• Advanced analytics coursework: decision analysis, probability and statistics, systems modeling and optimization, simulation, economic analysis, mathematical finance, advanced supply chain models.
We all want to go to the best hospitals. I read the Consumer Reports ranking on Hospitals. What I didn't know is the ranking is based on billing information from Medicare. What does billing information from Medicare have to do with the quality of your hospital? The ability for a hospital to format the data according to Medicare standards could be what gives a hospital a higher ranking. Some hospitals weren't ranked because their data did not meet medicare standards.
Hope this gets you thinking about your big data projects.
NBCnews reports on this situation.
Dr. Peter Pronovost, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins and one of the leaders in the fight to improve hospital quality, applauds the idea but says the data the report is based on is flawed. “I really applaud the Consumer Report effort to get information to consumers about complications,” he said.
“The overall concept is spot-on,” Pronovost told NBC News. “One of the concerns is they measured these complications using administrative data, which is completely understandable, but we know it’s not completely accurate.”
...
Many of the biggest and most famous hospitals aren’t listed. Consumer Reports used Medicare reporting data for its report and could only include hospitals that reported data in a certain way.
The article points out an accuracy of 25% correlation of infections base on billing information filed.
Unfortunately, he said, there’s not much better data out there yet. One of the measures – infections among patients fitted with a catheter – is only right 25 percent of the time when calculated using billing information filed to Medicare, Pronovost says.
BBC has a post on the 5 Golden Rules of Plane Design.
Classic aircraft: Five golden rules for enduring design
ByStephen Dowling
HIDE CAPTION
- Best of British
- The Supermarine Spitfire was designed to protect Britain from aerial attack; it later served from aircraft carriers and nearly broke the sound barrier. (Copyright: Getty Images)
When I read the 5 rules, 4 rules looked like good ones for data centers.
Rule one: Be adaptable and flexible
Rule two: Be easy to fly (operate and use)
Rule three: Be resilient
Rule four – Be easy to maintain (YES!!!!!)
Rule five – Be easy on the eye
The fifth rule "Be easy on the eye" may seem like it doesn't fit, but some of the best data centers are good looking in the details. Some of the worse are kind of ugly and causes discomfort looking at.
