User's blog

Category: Me

  • Summit Talk Part 1: My CIO Doesn’t Do Enough Cloud

    Summit Talk Part 1: My CIO Doesn’t Do Enough Cloud

    I got the chance to present at AWS Summit in NYC on 7/12! I’ve had several people ask me what the speech was about so I thought I’d throw together a few blog posts that walk through the talk. I’m going to break it up in to three posts:

    • Part 1: My CIO Doesn’t Do Enough Cloud
    • Part 2: A Cloud Transformation Program That Gives Confidence
    • Part 3: Fit-For-Purpose Platforms
    Wondering what all of the comments all over this are about?
    That’s my team and AWS’ team trying to agree on pictures, stats, and context that made my point about reasonable cloud fears without offending AWS… who apparently would prefer we make cloud sound so easy that workloads practically fall in to it.

    The scariest part of this whole ordeal was that the presentation was intended to be targeted at Architects! I barely get to touch a keyboard anymore and the place is going to be swarming with hands on folks that actually know how to make AWS do all kinds of amazing things. I decided I would help them all out by telling them WHY the CIO in their lives is always so afraid to let them use AWS for more and more interesting things.

    Quick Aside: Pretty much everything have to say is just as true of any cloud… don’t tell AWS, but I regularly have the same conversation about Azure.

    The slide above is actually my second slide. In the first one, I explained that there are millions in opportunities in the cloud; places where companies could be spending less or growing more by leveraging cloud. This slide is geared at explaining what CIOs are reading in their industry rags that’s making them scared to move to cloud more aggressively. Mostly these come in three categories mapped to the stats above:

    1. There’s no way to go to the cloud without transformation… and transformations often fail. The culture and people changes are hard. If your IT team is doing well today (or your CIO is just a couple years from retirement), it may not be worth the risk of trying to undergo this transformation.
    2. Most CIOs that I talk to have their favorite story about how expensive the cloud can be. There’s a state government that after their first of twelve weekend application migrations took one look at their bill, migrated everything back and cancelled the program. I mean, AWS is only 13% of Amazon’s revenue, but 56% of its profit! If you don’t plan for it and don’t do cloud well, it will get costly.
    3. Security is also an issue. I hate people who say the cloud is inherently more secure, the CIA is on the cloud! It is different in how it’s secured though. You either need transformed workloads that leverage zero trust or you need to reproduce all of your on-premise perimeter security in the cloud. Either way, there’s a fair bit of work in front of you and any mistakes could make something more vulnerable than it was on premise.

    Those are ALL good fears. Many cloud programs will fall victim to them. The important thing is that we structure our cloud programs to avoid them.

  • Book Review: Mindset by Carol Dweck

    Book Review: Mindset by Carol Dweck

    I can usually tell by 15 pages in to a self-help book whether it’s going to resonate with me; usually, it’s not going to. I can’t stand being told about how much I can get done in the morning if I start at 3am or that if I work 10x harder than everyone else it will pay off. These are obvious, hard work usually pays off (although if you think it automatically does, you should read Peak by Anders Ericson).

    Dweck’s book is entirely different. It suggests that if you want to find fulfilling success, you should look at the world a little differently. You should stop asking yourself if you are successful and start asking what you can do to grow. I have to admit that 15 pages in to this book, I thought the idea was too simple to be useful. The more I read though, the more I liked the way it challenged me to think about life.

    I’ve always been one to enjoy my successes with a little pat on the back (or more likely a celebration scotch). What I considered a success though was often what the rest of the world would view that way. For example, if my team at work won a new big project I would celebrate. If we had a month where we didn’t get a new project, I’d feel bad. It always felt a little cheap celebrating when the project win was just lucky and it was always tough to feel too bad when we made a great pitch to a customer that I knew would help them in the long-run, but that got scuttled when a key stakeholder retired. This book gave me a better way to look at these projects than pure outcome based success or failure.

    Dweck would have us focus on “growing”. In the above example, the team clearly grew in our capability to identify and sell key projects by making that presentation (maybe we also learned how to identify clients we shouldn’t bother with). Dweck points out that it’s not that luck doesn’t exist; it’s just that you don’t want to let let your luckiest moments be the way you define yourself. This construct has given me a more consistent way to approach my days. Even on a bad luck day I start thinking about what I can learn from the situation and the best possible way I can move from here. If I’ve done my best and learned, I feel content and even more ready to take on the next day.

  • 2021 New Years Resolutions

    2021 New Years Resolutions

    2020 was a year where I expected to just entrench and work on establishing myself at IBM. It was a really good year for that, and (thanks to a lack of travel and a bit of a COVID slow period) also allowed me to set some pretty ambitious fitness goals. That leaves me feeling pretty good about what I was able to accomplish, making it possible for 2021 to be more about refining and doubling those successes.

    Specifically, I have set three goals:

    1. I want to really focus on working with CIOs/CTOs to make their “Infrastructure and Operations” teams in to a value add part of IT. As I spend more time with more companies I see them consistently able to articulate how a better customer experience or using AI can bring value to their bottom line, but then they are unable to understand why they can’t securely and efficiently create the platforms necessary for those innovations to occur on top of. I am intending to spend 2021 moving beyond the containerization, cloud, and automation discussions I’m leading customers on now and pull that together in to a more strategic view of the organization. You’ll see this in more frequent observations on Twitter, some blog posts, and (if you’re lucky enough to be a client) in a new model we’ve been working on for how to change your culture and tooling.
    2. I am planning to be much better about keeping up with my professional contacts. I realized yesterday that I haven’t done an inventory of my contacts since very early 2020. My plan will be to do better at connecting with people I’ve worked with on LinkedIn and reaching out to folks I worked with a few years ago to see how they’re doing.
    3. I managed to finish 2020 in reasonable shape. I have not traditionally been good at staying in good shape once I reach it. I tend to yo-yo back and forth between in shape and out of it. My goal this year is to stay around my current level of fitness for the whole year.

  • My Next Move: IBM “Journey to the Cloud”

    My Next Move: IBM “Journey to the Cloud”

    I’m really excited to announce that I’ve taken a job with IBM, in their advisory cloud consulting service. The team I’ll be leading will be looking at how organizations can architect internal and external cloud solutions on both IBM/RedHat products/clouds as well as on other external providers like AWS/Azure/GCP. I will be based out of New York City, but have responsibility across all of North America. I’m excited about this opportunity both because I think IBM is well positioned to be successful and because I think this job is a great fit for me personally. I’ll use the balance of this post to give you two reasons for each.

    I am excited that IBM has a chance to be the preferred provider for people who care deeply about their internal/hybrid cloud. With the acquisition of RedHat and its suite of tools for containers/kubernetes and devops, IBM has more capability than the leading external cloud providers to help you build your internal cloud and then reach out. I believe this will be important to companies that have legacy applications that are not cloud native (and therefore run inefficiently in a cloud pricing model), have large investments in their datacenters and enough demand to cost-effectively use them, and/or have applications that for compliance/security reasons they’re not comfortable running from the public cloud.

    I am also excited that IBM can be a trusted advisor to the “second wave” of companies moving to the cloud. The first wave of cloud computing was dominated by the Netflix, Facebook/Instagram, Uber, Twitter, etc… unicorns. They still represent a huge portion of the current public cloud resource consumption. These first-wave companies are, primarily, software engineering companies with no legacy software. They have been able to capitalize on cloud models because they could invest in the engineering to do so with only a few applications that serve billions of people. For companies in this second wave (I’m mostly familiar with Financial Services… but much of the Fortune 500 is with them), the cloud is more challenging. It requires deciding when to re-platform an application that only has 2 developers supporting it. It requires retraining/retooling a development staff (or hiring one and teaching it the intricacies of a business that’s more sophisticated than a tweet). It requires replacing legacy infrastructure services/products with what the new cloud-based applications require. These second-wave companies have relied on IBM for decades for their infrastructure, middleware, etc… and I am happy to be part of the group that will let them rely on us for cloud too.

    Personally, this gives me a chance to stay in New York City! I have started to fall in love with this city and the friends I have met here. If you’ve known me for a while you know that I’ve moved a lot for jobs in my career; in fact, this will be the first time that I have taken a job in the same city as the previous one. I’m looking forward to putting down some roots and really enjoying all that the Big Apple has to offer (all while getting to travel a lot!).

    Finally, I’m also excited to be back in consulting. It gives me a chance to do what I do best, identifying opportunities. While I think my last two jobs (standing up Kubernetes at RBC and completing a large scale software development project at Fannie Mae) have shown I can excel at implementing/operationalizing; I am excited to get back to what I think I do best, helping people identify opportunities and proving out their value. I’m sure in a few months when I hear that a client has dropped the ball on a project I proposed, I will remember the brown grass on the other side of this hill. For now though, I am really excited to get to know lots of clients and see what they’re doing with the cloud!

    If you’ve made it this far, I thank you for taking an interest in what’s going on with me. Hopefully it’s because you think we can collaborate in the new position? My group will be working with all of the major external cloud providers and we’re going to be agressively hiring engineers, developers, architects, and consultants who can help IBM’s clients with their “Journey to the Cloud”. If you’re interested in seeing how we can partner, reach out to me on LinkedIn.

  • New Year’s Resolutions 2019

    New Year’s Resolutions 2019

    2019 is starting off in a great place; I’m very happy with the friendships/relationships that I’ve formed in New York over the last couple years (and the ones I’ve maintained via distance), I have a chance to work on a really interesting project at work, and I’m in reasonably good physical shape.  The past few years there have often been “low hanging fruits” in my life that desperately needed attention and where I could quickly get very rewarding progress (e.g. having let my weight go). This year I feel the need to carefully select what I want to improve because it will take a lot of work to get significantly better than where I am.

    I ended up with three distinct goals for 2019 that can help take me to an even better place:

    1. Enhance My Just For Fun Project – For the last 4 years I have run a website where my friends can pick NFL Football games (sort of like Fantasy Football). I usually use it as a way to learn the technologies that my team at work has been using at a hands-on level even though I don’t have time to keep up with all of their progress on a line-by-line basis. This year my team is working with such cool technologies that I’ve really learned a lot and built a product that’s pretty good. I’d like to spend the off-season making it robust enough that I can open it up to users who aren’t just my friends. This will require some functional enhancements; a new user interface, the ability to create and administer leagues without messing with the database, a few other odds and ends. Most of the changes though will be creating better DevOps/Testing/Monitoring/Logging so that there are less disruptions. My friends are pretty forgiving with outages and dumb mistakes… but I wouldn’t expect everyone to be.
    2. Get a Sampling of More Cloud Technologies – My current project has me very focused on Kubernetes on premise. I think I would benefit from a more well-rounded technical background so I can help influence other decisions. With that in mind, I’m going to be working on getting a few AWS certifications and probably a GCP one.
    3. Get Back in to Non-Technical Reading – My career has gotten a lot more technical in the last 2 years than it was before. My focus on DevOps has only required some of the highest level knowledge of what’s going on in banking, best practices in development/agile, and management techniques. I’ll be looking to modify my regular reading, get through a couple of books that talk about the industry at a much higher level, maybe even get certified in SAFe so that I still feel as at home in the developer’s scrum as I do in the devops scrum.

    In addition to those 3, I want to make sure I don’t regress on a few areas of my life that are going well. Most notably continuing to nurture my relationships with people and stay in reasonably good shape. I have a few ways to measure those, but the goals are not remarkable.

  • The Blog of Burgher Jon Returns!

    The Blog of Burgher Jon Returns!

    I’m sure the nearly no one who almost never read it will rejoice.  It’s not a cgrand re-entry; I’m as ambivelant as ever about how many people read or enjoy it.  It’s back online because I have missed having a place for long form expression. I enjoy thinking through something long enough to have a coherent thought on it and I have found the best way to be sure those thoughts are coherent is to put them somewhere where someone might read them.

    If you’re curious… the old blog posts, all 1050 or so of them, are gone forever.  Around this time last year I was cleaning up my AWS account and inadvertently deleted the instance that had my blog on it.  Any of you that have worked with me professionally will appreciate the humor in the fact that I, for a brief moment, was forced to recognize the importance of segregation of duties!