It’s that time of year again – time for EMC Education’s annual survey of storage and IT managers and individual contributors. Cutting to the chase - this is the link to the survey.

Every year we reach out to information and storage professionals, excluding any EMC employees, and ask them to give us feedback on the challenges they are seeing in their environments, as well as trends (what technologies is everyone using, what are the new technologies that are actually being adopted, what things do people no longer use).

Each year we publish the results at EMC World. Last year’s survey results can be downloaded here. One place the results were discussed last year was in the Proven Professional Community. Last year’s survey had questions that specifically addressed how the downturn in the economy in 2009 had impacted storage professionals, and those results were pretty telling.

This year, the survey will attempt to measure the impact of virtualization and cloud computing on our industry. Understanding this impact is important from an education perspective – do we have enough skilled workers to meet the demands of virtualization and cloud computing? What skills do they need to know? Is expanding and building on their current set of knowledge skills enough to bridge any gaps identified?

Its also important from a planning perspective. If  I manage a data center, info on emerging trends can help me identify hiring and training needs for the next year.

The survey is not for EMC employees – we are looking for participants who are in the trenches in data centers every day, either building, managing and maintaining these systems, and also the people responsible for managing these sorts of teams. Of course we’ll reach out to the folks who manage EMC storage, but the intent is to create a comprehensive industry survey. So please consider participating even if you don’t have any EMC arrays in your shop.

Once again here’s the link to the survey. We have a discussion started in the Proven Professional Community – if you have any questions about the survey logistics please let us know! We’ll also be previewing some of the findings in the community, so keep an eye out for that!

Please help us spread the word!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a forum or read a blog that talks about all the trust issues with the cloud – no security, lack privacy, doesn’t stand up to regulations, etc. Everyone seems to think of the cloud still as the wild-wild-west and yet I think by this time that we have a pretty good handle on what the problems are – now we need to really focus our efforts on how to solve those problems.

In October of this year a friend of mine – Dr. Jeffrey Voas, a computer scientist at NIST, co-authored a paper called “In Trust we Trust”in IEEE Computer Magazine.  In the article they made the statement:

Trust isn’t a static property and must be evaluated continuously

Cloud embodies one of the most dynamic computing environments so how do we engender an atmosphere of trust?

If you want to build a house that will stand the test of time (and the elements) you find a good contractor, one you can trust will do a great job.  And that contractor will  employ (or contract) trusted partners for materials and specialty functions like foundation teams, masons, and most important the architects who are going to specify how the structure is built and what the materials have to be to make the structure safe and pass the regulations.

It’s the same with technology. Have you ever walked into a technology Value Added Resellers (VAR) lobby? I have had the privilege of visiting many of EMC’s partners (VARs), and the first thing you always see is in their lobby are the plaques and awards from the vendors they resell for.  The execs at these partners will lead you down the hallway of their greatest assets – their technical people. They will talk about the years of experience on their technical staff and how they have built the best all-star team. Many of these technical people will have plaques, awards, and most importantly certifications showing their deep expertise in multiple related technical disciplines – security, networking, virtualization, or specific applications. The partner execs make sure you see this as part of their trust campaign – so that you see that they are serious and committed to making the investment in the technologies that they want to help you purchase and implement successfully.

There are many things we do at EMC to help our customers with their journey to the cloud. EMC Ed Services is no different with a great curriculum already in place designed to prepare technical people and turn them into EMC Proven Professionals. Our mission is now extended to help our customers, our partners, and our own internal technical talent become better trusted technical resources specifically in cloud and virtual data center certifications - so that all of us can build better trusted clouds.

I’m looking forward to learning even more about the cloud through more research and through the process of teaching. I know I’m going to meet a lot of really smart people, hear their stories and challenges, hopefully see a few light bulbs go off, and  then watch them take what they learned to new and more trusted heights.

/wayne

Today I was invited to talk to the interns of EMC’s Education Services organization. They wanted to know how I started, and what it means to do social media for a job. So I told them all that good stuff.
Of course, I couldn’t resist asking these digital natives a few questions.

• How many of you are on Twitter?
  Only one had an account, and he doesn’t use it.
• How many of you are on Facebook?
  Everyone is on Facebook, but two of them are not friends with their mothers! And one of the two IS friends with his grandma! I thought that was mean
• How many of the you would work at a company that had no social media presence?
  This was interesting – the interns who were accounting or finance majors would not work at a company that wasn’t doing social media. The engineering interns didn’t care. Guess which group is my audience? The engineers! I’m finding they are very much like the people already in the field…..this audience uses social media differently.
• Do you think you are a customer of Facebook?
  All of them said yes. When I said …no, you are Facebook’s product. After this, they asked me questions.

They asked me:

• I heard if you delete a picture from Facebook you can never really delete it. Is that true?
  yes, that is true. If you put something in digital format, you should always have an expectation that you wont be able to control who sees it, or what happens to it.
• What would you look at on someone’s Facebook page if you were interviewing them?
  I wouldn’t look at Facebook, I’d Google you. If you are just out of college, I’m not going to look for much. Maybe a club or some activity. Since I’m technical, I’m looking for technical posts, or geeky posts. So if all you talk about is comics, I know you’ll at least be a good cultural fit. I can always quiz you about the tech stuff in an interview. And as long as there is nothing weird, I’m happy.
• What if you Google yourself and see something you want to hide?
  I told my story, about how I blogged about my daughter’s disability on my name domain blog. When she Googled herself she was very mad at me. But she started her blog, and worked to push my posts lower in the searches.

I really enjoyed my lunch with the interns. I hope they didn’t see me as another old lady. At least they didn’t give me the same looks my kids normally give me.

I hope I gave them some good advice.

And I hope they all friend their mamas on Facebook.

This post is cross-posted from a post in the EMC Proven Professional Community on ECN.

EMC Announcements

There were many announcements, but probably one of the biggest was the VPLEX announcement. Bas Raayman has a great wrap-up of that specific announcement, and Christopher Kusek has a nice wrap-up of many of the other announcements.

World Wide Proven Professional Day

I was excited to see all the ways people were spending Proven Professional Day. In case you missed it, go check out the Flickr pictures that everyone uploaded! It was also great to hear what people were doing on this thread. We had over 30 entries from 10 countries – it was a truly global event! We heard from people from Australia, India, the US, Italy, Egypt – all over the place!

We even gave away raffle prizes to 2 remote participants during the event in Boston.

On this day in Boston, everyone was wearing a red shirt – every where you looked. As people filed in to the room for the Knowledge Sharing Ceremony, we were displaying a Twitter stream using TweetChat. I was amazed at the people tweeting that I didn’t know!

One of my favorite moments was during this TwitterChat, someone made fun of the shirts, reminding us all what happens to the people who wore red shirts in Star Trek. What did the community do? Rallied behind the shirts, creating the hashtag #redshirts. I just love geeks!!

Read about the winners of the Knowledge Sharing Awards in this thread. Check out the pictures on Flickr: [Set 1] [Set 2] We also have videos from EMC World on YouTube.

Securing Storage in the Cloud

Community member Charlie Brooks gave a great Birds of a Feather session: Securing Storage in  the face of V12n and The Cloud. He has posted his slides, go check them out and join the discussion.

Managing Storage: Trends, Challenges and Options 2010 – 2011

Alok Shrivistava gave his annual presentation about the results of our survey of storage managers and storage professionals. My notes from the presentation are here. The study is available from this page.

Wrap-ups

You can check out our wrap ups from EMC World as well: [Day 1] [Day 2] [Day 3]

What about you?

What did you see at EMC World? Did you like having the chance to participate remotely if you couldn’t make it to Boston? Should we do that again?

Does anyone have links, pictures or videos I missed?

EMC World is next week in Boston. It will be the first time I’ll be attending, and I’m very excited. You see, every year at EMC World they have Proven Professional Day. Everyone who is at EMC World who has a Proven Professional Certification gets to wear their Proven Professional shirt (a different color each year), and get together for the Knowledge Sharing Awards Ceremony. We have a contest every year for Proven Professionals to write up a technical paper, the best one wins some cash and serious bragging rights.

What used to really bum me out is that even though I am a Proven Professional (SAN IS Specialist!), and even though I wrote the training that supports our certifications, and I even wrote some of the certification exams, I never got to be part of Proven Day, or get a shirt. I don’t know why that is so important, but it was. Those shirts are important!

This year, we’ve figured out a way that all Proven Professionals can participate, whether or not they are at EMC World. We’re calling it World Wide Proven Professional Day. We’re time shifting it, so it will start on Monday and go through Tuesday, so we can have global participation. If Proven Professionals change their avatar to a Proven Professional avatar in one social media space and comment on a discussion we’ll post on the Proven Professional Community, they are eligible to win raffle prizes we’ll be giving away at EMC World.

All the details are in this post in the Proven Community. If you are a Proven Professional, make sure to follow the instructions so you are eligible! And if you are not Proven, change your avatar anyway. Show your appreciation for the men and women who support the systems that your data lives on!

I thought I’d start blogging about what I’m doing at work in my new role as a Program Manager for Social Media for EMC’s Education team.

The new role starts…

I was so excited when I first got this role. Then I started thinking about how to scope out my role – I’m only one person, and we could use social media to help us with EVERYTHING. Literally – it is applicable to most of the business processes we have. Right away, it made sense to limit it to keeping the home fires burning in the Proven Professional Community as I scoped out what else I could do to help my organization.

I started to get very nervous when I started going to meetings with my new team. I derailed every meeting because people are so interested in learning how we can use social media, but people really don’t know HOW we can do that at work. Right away I decided I needed to start educating people. Not just on the tools, but how people could starting thinking of using social media when they are planning business initiatives.

Seeing is Believing

So in the interest of stopping the meeting derailments, I have embarked on what we’re calling the “Seeing is Believing” world tour. I’m scheduling time to meet leaders in our organization, explaining the basics of what social media is, and what it can do for them. I am trying to run the meetings in a very consultative manner, asking people to tell me what they see as problems, what they think of social media, etc. before diving in to the good stuff. I use what they tell me to explain how they need to do the pre-work of thinking of business processes and initiatives they would like to enhance with social media, define their audience, and then Find, Follow, Listen, and Engage.

Social Media Best Practices

Before I go into the meeting, I also open a browser to all the social media sites we use. I usually have several tabs open with searches that are potential targets of the stakeholders who will  be at the meeting.

I show them how the team has been managing the Proven Professional community has used not only our community on ECN but Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Orkut. Then I just sit back and let them take over the meeting.

For our teams who work with pre-release training, I’ve focused on listening. I’ve explained how teams can be active on social media without everyone else knowing that you are active. That helps alleviate some fears these teams have – how do you using social media when you are dealing with products that have not been released.

We’re starting our social media initiatives with  communincating about our training and education programs. People feel safer about enhancing existing communication procedures, and making them feel safe enough to consider social media is important. I’ve found folks are so overwhelmed about the idea of using social media that they just completely shut down. Or, they think doing social media at work will mean they have to be very visible online, and they are unwilling to do that. (They actually say: no I’m not doing that).

Its working…

When you act consultatively, and you change the way someone thinks about social media for business, that is such a huge rush! I know this stuff is going to help our team, not just for communicating but for educating as well. But people in our team have to understand how to incorporate social media into our processes, that is the only way we’ll ever be able to use it for education. So the Seeing is Believing tour will continue at least through the summer of 2010!

Advice

If I were giving advice about getting people on board with using social media, here is what I’d say:

• Don’t think that people understand what social media is, or how to use the tools. You are going to have to teach most of them.
• Write up how-tos and organizational expectations, socialize and revise as necessary
• Don’t forget people are busy. Do a little homework, ask them to tell you pain points, ask them to identify audiences.
• Remember – seeing is believing. Having a standard slide deck is important for explaining principles, but use those questions you asked about their needs, and then open a browser and SHOW them how social media could be used to close those gaps. Let them see it, they’ll become believers
• Don’t bite off more than you can chew. I am living this one every day.
• There are going to be people who are totally opposed to doing this. Ask them questions. Let them talk. They have some pain point you can help them with, you just have to figure out what that is and then speak THEIR language to help them become believers too

I have more to share – esp my wedding slide and my bar story I always tell. But that is for next time!

I’ve been in my new role as a Senior Program Manager for Social Media for about a month. So what am I doing?

Right now I’m in learning mode. I’m keeping the lights on at the Proven Professional Community, which is our go-to Social Media site. I’m teaching everyone about social media, so they start thinking about how it can be use to better serve our audiences. I’m working on workflow, I’m working on a listening strategy.

We’ve had  a couple of social media models we used for the community from the beginning:

Model 1: Official Messaging on the Education Website, Casual fun relationship building on the Community

From the beginning, we’ve looked at our Education Website as the place to go to get the official, polished, vetted message about our programs. Since we run a certification program for technologists (and since I hold some of those certifications), I think this is important. We need a place for the rules, the real line-in-the-sand communications. Its the place to go when you are looking for WHAT our education programs can do for you.

The community is the place to go when you want to know the WHYS of our education offerings. Why did we change a certification path? Why shouldn’t you pay for study aids for the certification exams if you need to come up to speed quickly? Why can’t I find what I am looking for?

Here’s how I explain it: The Education website is business attire. The community is polo shirts and flip-flops. Every place we reach out on the web (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, this blog) links back to the Proven Community, the community links back to the Education website. We’ve started linking the Education website to the community. You want the official answer? We got ya covered. You want to ask us some questions about it? Got ya covered there too.

We’ve got a way to go, especially on the engagement side. We could do better at engaging with our audiences and certification holders, and do better at trying to elicit feedback to improve our programs. That’s a goal.

Model 2: Everyone does Social Media (not just Gina)

This has also been a model from the beginning. This is the first year we’ve had a full-time resource on Social Media. Last year, we had 3 part-time resources. That actually meant that all of us did 100% of our “day jobs” and an extra percentage of social media.

Because of that, we had to influence stakeholders to become active in social media. One of our primary stakeholders last year was the Proven Professional Program team. This year, that team is active on Twitter and in the community. They understand the power of social media to influence their program. Their 2010 goals included social media.  We taught them how to use the tools, how to see it as a conversation with our Proven members, and they started thinking of social media when they planned new projects for the program. We work with them to refine workflow so that social media is something they do naturally, as a matter of course.

The goal for me this year is to get everyone else to do the same thing. I’m only one person. I can’t do all the social media, and it wouldn’t work even if I tried. We’re lucky because I am so technical. I am a Proven Professional (EMCIE in SAN technologies).I have worked in a data center. I speak “that” geek language.

But, if you put me outside SAN technologies or EMC/web/compliance software, my skills are a bit rusty. And the more I stay in this role, sadly the more my data center technical skills will probably get outdated (this is actually pretty sad for me and the only downside to this new position). So if we start getting questions about our our VMax curriculum, or how if you can come to EMC Education to get VMware training, I need the guys that speak that language to feel comfortable about engaging because they are the ones who understand our audiences the best.

Yeah, we are starting with the marketing end of education, but baby steps you know? I’ve found I am very disruptive to meetings, because everyone wants to understand how we can use social media to make our audiences happy. But right now, no one understands a darn thing I am saying. So one of the first things I’m doing is a “Seeing is Believing” tour – short hands-on training sessions where our teams will learn things like how to search using tags, how to set up an RSS reader, and how to use Twitter. Good thing I have ID and trainer skills huh?

Right now I feel like I have a few balls of yarn all spread out on the floor. Every time I think I get the threads straightened out, I learn something new and its all a jumble again. I try to think back to my studies in the FSU IS program, and all the things I’ve learned from the #lrnchat gurus,and that gives me the patience to ask the questions that help me start untangling things again.

So far I LOVE the new role. There is so much work its dizzying. Combining the new role with my last semester at FSU and my wedding planning is a bit crazy at times, but hey whats another couple of balls of yarn? Plus my new team and my new boss are just awesome.

I’d love to hear from anyone else who is in this sort of role…..we can compare notes!

I’ll keep posting updates as I can, it should be a very interesting year!

Have you heard anyone talk about cloud computing? Do you have any clue what they are talking about? Do you wish you understood the fundamentals about cloud computing?

If so, head over to this link and sign up for the new eLearning module from EMC Education entitled Cloud Computing Foundations. Its FREE until the end of March, you just need a Powerlink Account.

Here’s what you should know after taking the module:

• What is cloud computing
• What are the physical components required for cloud computing
• What sorts of applications are good to put in “the cloud”
• What are the challenges of cloud computing?
• Practical examples of cloud computing solutions

If you have a Powerlink account already, go to this page to get the module. (EMC employees please use this link).

If you need help setting up a Powerlink Lite account, go this discussion on the Proven Professional Community. We’d love to hear your comments about the module in the community as well.

You read that correctly – I’m no longer writing training for my beloved NCM.

Don’t worry – I’m still with EMC’s Education Services organization. Now I’m a Sr. Program Manager for Social Media.

More details soon…… I just had to post this – I’m finally allowed to talk about it!!

For the past four years, my organization at EMC (Education Services) has sponsored a survey for the  people who manage storage, and the people who manage the people who manage storage. The reason is to try and figure out what gaps exist between what these people need to successfully to their job of managing the world’s information and how things really are for these folks.

So if your job is to manage information and storage, or to manage the professionals who do this sort of work, please consider participating in our survey. Please note that the survey is not for anyone who works at EMC. We want a real-world view from people down in the trenches using our products. And not just our products – if you know someone who meets this description – no matter what  sort of storage array they are using – please send them the survey.

Here’s a link to the Proven Professional Community that will tell you more about it. Stop by and tell us what you see as gaps from achieving optimal performance as a information and storage professional.