By Karen Lopez on Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:29:04 GMT

CIO magazine has interesting article on how to better recruit females for enterprise IT jobs.

 

Business technology needs broad-thinking candidates from a broad range of undergraduate and graduate curricula who want to learn how companies—not computers—work; who can work with a global project team, rather than with programming languages; and who can see business process linkages, rather than map out electronic connections.

Meanwhile, the collection of jobs that saddled business technology with its geeky image—network and data center administration, code maintenance, programming and help desk—may soon be centralized, automated or offloaded to outsourcers. The stereotypically inarticulate men with pocket protectors who hold these jobs—and who defined the image of the profession way back in the '70s—will soon retire en masse (taking with them their pocket protectors).

Now you need business analysts, program managers, vendor managers, relationship managers, information architects or process analysts. These jobs (any of which can lead to CIO) demand employees with excellent communication skills that many of the women you know have: the ability to speak, negotiate, influence others, write, analyze, manage projects or programs, and lead cultural change. These jobs are not about writing operating systems or learning programming languages. They are about helping companies change the way they work. "Driving changes that help the business generate more revenue, lower cost or improve customer service—cracking these business problems—that's fun!" says June Drewry, CIO of the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies.

 

Some good points in that article.  Having spent a few years as the Canadian Information Processing Society's national spokes person on this gender issue, I agree with a few points and disagree with others.  Let's start with the agreement part:

IT does a terrible job recruiting for IT careers. 

I'm not sure whether this is due to the fact that the marketers are mostly men and therefore us marketing messages that they'd want to hear or that all of IT is terrible at all marketing.  These recruiting errors start early, in the marketing literature of computing-related educational programs at colleges and universities.  If you visit some of the most prestigious computing programs you'll see bland descriptions of computing science and information systems programs -- all focused on things like "learn C++", "algorithms", and "good careers as programmers".   If the website is maintained by the computer science department you might even be wowed with some nifty flashing HTML or scrolling techniques from The Information Super Highway(tm). 

Visit a website of other professional-preparation programs like law or engineering and you'll see photographs of people actually talking to other people, smiles on their faces as the solve some intriguing societal problem.  At worst, you may find a link describing finite element analysis or even algorithms, but it won't be the focus of their recruiting pages.

You'll find the same scenario on the careers page of your local newspaper.  IT jobs will display some long list of foreign sounding terms  about computers (PeopleSoft, Microsoft, etc.) or even worse, a set of acronyms that sound as if the successful candidate will also suffer from food poisoning (SAP, ERP, CRUD, C#, CRM, etc.) .  Postings for IT jobs rarely focus to any degree on solving people problems.  In fact, they tend to describe jobs that require one to sit alone in a basement, staring at a monitor everyday.

We need to stop trying to drag techies up the Zachman Framework, against their will

I cringe every time I read a recruitment add for an enterprise architect or other strategic position that demands several years of hands on technical skills in very specific areas.  Sure, enterprise architects, data architects, and process architects need to have a thorough understanding of the technologies that help run the business, but they don't have to have done that job in order to understand the architectural role.  We don't demand that lawyers be police officers for 5 years before they can be legal experts.  We don't require that professional engineers be construction trades people or draftspeople before they can be engineers.  Why must all IT jobs start with 5-10 years of programming?  The reason why that may have been true10-20 years ago was that there used to be only a couple of routes to get into IT at all.  This was due to the fact that people didn't have 6 mainframes in their basement to get hands on experience with technology.  That left formal education and training as the primary route to a career in computers.  But those days are gone. 

Most DBAs I know are excellent technical professionals.  I think they'd do a wonderful job of data modeling or data architecture.  For many though, I think they'd hate it.   These guys (and most of them are men) love understanding, working with, and managing detailed technical nuances of their jobs.  They think I'm crazy for wanting to spend days and days with business users, working on process or data models.  As for me, I'd go crazy spending much time on indexing strategies or tuning someone else's SQL code day in and day out.   Whether it is differing Meyers Brigg profiles, DNA, or brain make up, people tend to be drawn to certain jobs.   When I see those job postings that are looking for the ideal candidate who will spend an equal time working in Row One and Row Five of the Data Column, I know that most likely the organization will spend a great deal of time talking to people who are very experienced at one end of column over the other end.  And with all the inherent risks associated with gender stereotyping, I'd say that women tend to be drawn to jobs that have more interaction with the business.  Not all women, just most.

If you are recruiting candidates for multiple roles (and who isn't), I'd recommend you recruit along the same rows but perhaps multiple columns.  Think Business and Data Analyst, not DBA Modeler.  Look for Programmer DBAs, not Programmer BPM architects.   Let people who are "good at what they do" do what they are good at.

 

 

By Karen Lopez on Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:06:01 GMT

From a recent Embarcadero Press Release:

Embarcadero Announces New Versions of DBArtisan and Rapid SQL

Rapid SQL 7.5 and DBArtisan 8.5 Provide Enhanced Productivity and Support for the Latest RDBMS Features

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Embarcadero Technologies announced today the general availability of DBArtisan 8.5 and Rapid SQL 7.5, the newest releases of its market-leading, cross-platform database tools. Both tools feature a redesigned user interface, a new query engine, and deeper support for Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and Sybase.

A key feature of DBArtisan 8.5, a cross-platform database administration tool, is a new highly scalable engine that helps DBAs better manage large, complex datasets and produce faster queries. DBArtisan 8.5 also enables DBAs to exploit more features available in Oracle 11g, Sybase 15, SQL Server 2005 and DB2 v9. Also new to DBArtisan 8.5 is a set of user interfaces designed to increase user productivity by simplifying the standardized workflow across platforms. The interfaces enable the product to dramatically decrease the time to market for updates required to support features of existing or future RDBMSs.

If you'd like help evaluating DBArtisan or Rapid SQL For your projects, please contact us.

 

By Karen Lopez on Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:04:49 GMT

We've all dealt with the risks associated with the proliferation of user-developed spreadsheets and desktop databases.  I've even heard that more business functions are run from data copied out of corporate databases than in the databases themselves...and I don't doubt that one bit.

I know why users want to copy and control locally their own copy of data (and I don't blame them for wanting to do this), but the problems I come across when gleaning requirements from users is often related to the whole "I'll just do it in a spreadsheet or MS Access" attitude.  Sure, it's a get-er-done attitude, but it often suffers from quality assurance and peer review steps that we typically see in enterprise-class application development projects.  At least we give the appearance of testing, right?

The staff at ITBusiness.ca have pulled together a very scary list of examples of spreadsheet errors, gaffs, and flaws that cost companies billions of dollars:

• Kodak spokesman Gerard Meuchner said the hefty $11 million severance error was traced to a faulty spreadsheet.
  
• Details of the $2.818 billion record profit result for the 12 months to September 30...were embedded in a template of last year's results and were accessible with minor manipulation of the spreadsheet. (Some news reports indicated an employee had thought that a black cell background fill would hide black text.)
  
• Fannie Mae, which finances home mortgages, stated in a news release of third-quarter financials that it had discovered a $1.136 billion error in total shareholder equity
  
• Shares of RedEnvelope Inc. lost more than a quarter of their value Tuesday after the company warned of a fourth-quarter loss due to weak Valentine's Day sales and a budgeting error that resulted in an overestimation of gross margins.
  
• A simple spreadsheet error cost a firm a whopping $24 million. The mistake led to TransAlta, a big Canadian power generator, buying more US power transmission hedging contracts in May at higher prices than it should have.

 

Think there are enough scary stories in the article to help you on your next quest to get enterprise data under enterprise quality control?  There's a website by the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (EuSpRIG) that collects media stories of spreadsheet errors that have put companies at risk.  They currently have almost 100 stories.

I wonder what we'd find with a similar effort to track MS Access errors?

 

By Karen Lopez on Thu, 22 Nov 2007 13:52:45 GMT

As a reminder, we won't be approving messages today or tomorrow as this is a major US holiday weekend.

We do this to stem the flow of "out of office" messages the moderators have to deal with.

Here in Toronto it's not a holiday (our Thanksgiving was in October), but it is snowing and it sure feels like a holiday.

Speaking of Moderators and Thanksgiving, I'd like to thank each of our community moderators. These individuals donate time to keep our community active and the messages on topic. Every message posted to our groups is cleared prior to releasing it to your inbox.

Gracious thanks go to:

• Rick Davis
• Scot Fearnside
• Garry Gramm
• Jeremey Janzen
• Carol Lehn
• Ray McGlew
• Brett Medalen
• Frank Palmeri
• Karel Vetrovsky

I'd also like to thank each of you who has taken the time to respond to questions, gripes, and tips posted to our boards. The DM profession is a "small world" type community of like-minded individuals each with different needs but often common goals. These communities allow us to get our jobs done faster and easier with your help.

Happy Tofurky Day to all of you in the US.

Karen

By Karen Lopez on Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:20:35 GMT

We've added a new discussion group board for users of ISybase PowerDesigner  As with our other boards, this group is moderated.  You can participate via the Web, Mailing Lists, RSS, or Newsgroups.

Join the PowerDesigner User Discussion Group

If you currently have a discussion group account for one of our other boards, that same account will work with the new PowerDesigner group.

As this is a brand new group, any assistance you can give us in letting PowerDesigner users that a new community has been established would be greatly appreciated.  We also invite Sybase staff who work with PowerDesigner to join our group.

If you are helping to recruite members, you probably want to share with them that:

1. All posts are moderated, so there's no spam or junk
2. We allow you to choose your participation format -- Web, E-mail, RSS, IM, Chat or Newsgroup
3. We welcome vendor paricipation
4. We have been hosting these boards for more than a decade, so our communities are experienced and helpful
5. All levels of users are welcome
6. It's Free!

As a reminder, group policies and a group FAQ are available.