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.

Every year, EMC sponsors an IDC study about the state of the expanding digital universe. My post about last year’s study is here. The data in this year’s study is just crazy!

For example:

• Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record. It grew by 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes. A petabyte is a million gigabytes. Picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.
• This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes. (There’s a word we haven’t had to use until now.)
• 25  quintillion information containers – packets, files, images, records, signals – that the bits in the Digital Universe will be in by 2020.  (A quintillion is what comes after a quadrillion).

The press release for the study can be found here.

We have so much digital information that we are having to teach people new words just to describe the size of it! The study suggests we’ll need the things we’ll need just to deal with the quantity of data:

• Ways to add structure to unstructured data
• New storage and information management techniques
• More compliance tools
• Better security

Just who will manage all this information?

Of course that is where my interest lies. We know we’re facing such a huge increase in the amount of digital data, and we know the challenges we’ll have managing this tsunami of data. But do we have enough people with the skills that are going to be required to do manage the ginormous digital universe?

Let’s step back one step further – what are the skills required to manage and secure the information containers that make up the digital universe?

EMC Proven Professionals to the rescue!

My organization has played a role in this for a long time. The EMC Proven Professional program is designed to educate and train the folks who will be managing these information containers. Our educational program is role-based, which means our training is written with particular job duties in mind. Individuals can take a certification exam to verify what they learned in training, and become an EMC Proven Professional.

From this year’s Digital Universe study, I’d say we’re going to be busy evaluating if we need to adjust any of our training materials based on how job roles change to meet the needs to the expanding digital universe.

For my ed-tech friends, that is the E in ADDIE. I just had to say it! : )

Why should you care about this? All of the content you create – your videos, your pictures, your blog posts, the tweets that are part of #lrnchat, all of your data uploaded to a Ning network or to a Moodle instance, all of the comments your students make to message boards you set up for them to learn interactively, all of this adds to the digital universe.

If you want all that stuff to be available, affordable, and archived for the future, someone needs to be managing it. That’s what Proven Professionals do. If you are interested in getting Proven, check out this page. Or come and join us in the Proven Professional Community.

My next post will be about how the people responsible for managing all of this digital data actually feel about the Proven Professional program.

Next week EMC Education will present a free webcast about managing information in challenging economic times. So why is this something you should consider attending?

Background

For the last several years, my organization at EMC has conducted a survey of storage managers and professionals about the challenges facing people that manage the world’s information. Every year our executives present the findings from the survey at EMC World.

Findings

Storage managers marked the lack of skilled storage professionals as one of their pain points this year. Additionally, managers feel that only about 30 percent of their teams are properly skilled to carry out their responsibilities.

Here’s my question: if we have these knowledge gaps in the physical world of information and storage management, what is going to happen when we move this into the cloud? It seems to me that having a strong understanding of how the physical environments work is going to be a necessity once we start virtualizing everything.

Could lack of skilled professionals be a barrier to private cloud adoption?

I’m really proud of  my organization for measuring this gap, and putting together programs to train people to address this problem. We have an open storage curriculum, our Academic Alliance, and even a vendor neutral book on Storage and Information Management.

Sign up for the Webcast!

If you missed EMC World, this is your chance to hear more about this study. Here is how to sign up for the event:

Date: June 26, 2009

Time: 11 AM Eastern

Presenters: Alok Shrivastava, Senior Director, EMC Education Services and Joe Milardo, Director, EMC Education Services

Event Registration

]]> http://gminks.edublogs.org/2009/06/16/emc-education-webcast-managing-information-in-challenging-economic-times/feed/ 0 http://gminks.edublogs.org/2009/05/19/we-are-creating-the-digital-universe-but-who-will-manage-it/ http://gminks.edublogs.org/2009/05/19/we-are-creating-the-digital-universe-but-who-will-manage-it/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 23:10:35 +0000 gminks http://gminks.edublogs.org/?p=203

EMC World is happening this week down in Orlando. I’m helping out from sunny Franklin, Ma – facillitating video uploads into the Proven Professional Community, tweeting, and moderating a twitter chat tommorrow about my organization’s Information and Storage Management book.

That’s alot of digital content I am creating, without even being at the conference. Of course, now we have to add a blog post to that list as well. According to the 2009 IDC study these types of data creation are feuling the growth of the Digital Universe.

How much data are we creating?

The study found that last year alone, 468.522 billion gigabytes of information were created. To put that into perspective, that would be the same size as:

• 237 billion fully-loaded Amazon Kindle wireless reading devices
• 4.8 quadrillion online bank transactions
• 3 quadrillion Twitter feeds
• 162 trillion digital photos
• 30 billion fully-loaded Apple iPod Touches
• 19 billion fully-loaded Blu-ray DVDs

The estimation is that we will double the size of the digital universe every 18 months, and by 2012 it will be five times the size it is now. The expectations are that:

• Mobile users will grow by a factor of 3.0.
• Non-traditional IT devices will grow by a factor of 3.6.
• Interactions between people via email, messaging, social networks, etc.  will grow by a factor of 8.0.

We’re going to use the clouds to grow this universe

George Siemens pondered earlier this year about how cloud computing will change the way we interact with our personal learning networks. George describes cloud computing this way:

In a technological sense, cloud computing refers to a service-view of computing, where technical details are largely hidden from end users. Which means, it is driven by financial considerations, as companies can extend their infrastructure without heavy investments in personnel or technology.

If you want a more detailed technical description, read through some of Chuck Hollis’ posts on the topic. But George does a good job of describing it – the cloud provides us (as users) some services, and we don’t have to worry about the nitty gritty of how this is all working from a technology point of view.

But someone does need to worry about that – and folks will need to be trained to manage the infrastructure that can support the creation of 5 x 468.522 billion gigabytes of information.

So who is going to manage the Digital Universe?

IDC makes the following recommendations to IT departments, so they can be ready for this onslaught of information:

• Transform existing relationships with the business units. Leading-edge IT organizations are doing whatever they can to fuse their departmental DNA with that of the business units, from job rotation for employees in both camps and tying IT performance to business metrics, to sending IT staff out to meet customers and funding internal PR efforts.
• Spearhead the development of organization-wide policies for information governance, including security, information retention, data access, and compliance.
• Rush new tools and standards into the organization. For example, storage replication, deduplication, unstructured search, database analytics, ethical hacking, application virtualization, semantic web applications, and cloud computing.

All of these things will necessitate training people to handle the new job roles, procedures, policies, tools and technologies. Tomorrow at EMC World the Senior Director of EMC Ed Services’ Technical Education and Certification team will release his annual report on managing storage (Managing Storage: Trends, Challenges, and Options). It is a report on a study that is done annual with 1450 IT managers and storage professionals.

The study found  that IT managers would like to grow their staff by 17% this year to handle the increase in data that needs to be managed. The study also found that managers believe the readiness of their teams has gone down from 33+% (in last year’s study) to 30%.

This is actually a scary statistic when you think about accessing the cloud as a user. We just want to add our stuff to the digital universe, we don’t want to have to worry if that stuff will be available, if it is being backed up, if there is a plan in case something goes awry in the information infrastructure that supports the cloud.

If IT managers only think 30% of their folks are ready to support the cloud, we need to seriously look at how education can get people ready so they are 100% ready to support the digital universe.

I’ll post the link to the study once it has been officially released tomorrow. If you are at EMC World, Alok will be presenting his findings at 2:45 in a breakout session.

You may remember I invited everyone to get a sneak preview of EMC Education Service’s book about Information and Storage Management back in March. It was interesting doing a “soft launch” of the book over in the EMC Proven Professional Community on ECN.

The book is officially out now. You can go to the EMC Education Services web portal to learn more about where to order the book. The book is so important to Information and Storage professionals because it was written to be a reference book about the technologies required to store, access, manage, and protect information.

40 of my colleagues participated in writing this book. I think its a great tool if this is the sort of work you are involved in.

Check out the official press release, and also what other EMC bloggers think (here and here). And of course come discuss what you think about the need for a reference such as this over in the Proven Professional community.

Today EMC, the company I work for, launched a new addition to our core product line, the Symmetrix V-Max system. The official launch site is at overtakethefuture.com, and a very good blog round-up of the coverage is over at the Storage Anarachist’s site.

As you can probably tell from the coverage, this release is a very big deal for EMC. Until today, information about the V-Max system was tightly guarded. So you have to wonder, how do you train the folks who need to be ready for such a big, secret release?

To find the answer to that question, I sat down with Nancy Gessler, who is the Director of New Product Readiness for EMC Education Services. She gave some great insight into what it takes to design and deliver education inside a big technical corporation. Here’s what she had to say:

Nancy, tell us a little about your responsibilities

My team develops and delivers technical training for our field employees and partners who are responsible for Presales, Installation/Integration, and Support for hardware and software across EMC’s product lines. Specifically we prepare the field and partners for launch readiness before a product is able to be sold.   We produced almost 500 courses last year in support of approximately 170 launches.

Today EMC had a huge announcement about the Symmetrix V-Max.  Can you talk about your role in that release from an education perspective?

Since Symmetrix is EMC’s longstanding, flagship platform, we needed to begin analysis and strategy very early.  We knew there would be lots of folks that we would need to train.

This is considered a “complex” launch from the training perspective because it involved new hardware and software changes.  Complex launches typically involve several different learning modalities and multiple training assets:

• eLearning accompanied by remote labs so students can get hands-on on the key software features
• ILT for installation because the hardware platform was brand new and they needed to see and touch it
• The inclusion of multi-media,  whiteboard sessions, and video tutorials as an element of the eLearning assets to add additional value

A few days ago I posted about the importance of using a systems approach to instructional design. I would think  there were some real system challenges in figuring out how to enable readiness for such a huge product launch. First of all, how did you figure out who needed to be trained?

Training has to be geo based, and the forecasted number of internal EMC folks to be trained was almost 1,400.  That number includes “core” Symmetrix hardware and software resources.  Because Symmetrix is a key platform, there are many folks focused on “affinity” technologies that will also take this training but are not part of the initial forecast.  The PreGA training cycle began Feb 17 to ensure a certain percent of the population are trained and ready at the external announce date.  It will continue to run through at least the end of May to accommodate the folks who need hardware ILT training and hands-on lab activities for software.

What analysis did you do to come up with the learning objectives?

We are very experienced with job task requirements for the key field roles.  We examine the software and hardware changes that are planned and then cross reference that with the job task requirements to come up with the “draft plan of attack”.  This generally happens early on so we can assess number of resources and timelines required for development, delivery and course production.    This launch consisted of the following areas that required training (which post analysis were compiled into 13 separate development projects for our Symmetrix team):

• 1 Hardware Platform
• 1 Hardware Operating System
• 2 supporting software packages
• 8 “open systems” software packages
• 7 mainframe software packages

How many learning assets did you have to create to meet the objectives?

We produced a total of nine deliverables to support this launch – one instructor led offering and eight blended eLearning assets, along with lab workbooks for the hands-on lab activities that we will support remotely via a virtual data center.

Which internal EMC organizations had a stake in what was being taught?

As part of standard practice, our stakeholders are always involved with approving a training proposal which provides the details of the training deliverables – number of courses, modality, objectives and key topics, and projected length of the deliverable.   We are dependent on Marketing to ensure any technical positioning is in alignment and we put the right “spin” on the technical details in support of presales activities.  Since we are working with “versioning code” throughout the development lifecycle, we are dependent on Engineering for technical validation.  All of our projects go through a comprehensive content review that includes the prior mentioned organizations.

When did you first learn of the project?

I had a general awareness for quite some time – more than a year, but concrete planning started around August of 2008 with an expected training availability date of late Q1.

How long did you have to complete the development & delivery of this instruction?

Training development started approximately November of 2008, but did not kick into high gear until we had working systems and code.  Initially our folks worked with Engineering to get a sense of how a feature would work and how to get hardware and software up and running.  There is a lot of time spent getting equipment and labs functioning before actual “training development” begins.

How many developers and/or instructors worked on the project?

There were 13 technical subject matter experts (SMEs), two managers responsible for hardware and software work streams, and three instructional designers aligned to this project.

What challenges are there when creating training for products that are not fully “cooked”, and are part of a secret launch?

The key challenge is how to approach the launch.  Planning is extremely key.  The planning phase is generally about 3 or 4 weeks for a project like this one.

A complex launch requires a thorough impact analysis of feature and function – there were a couple hundred features we had to analyze.  This analysis has to be matrixed against audience job roles.  Triaging feature and function and the impact to job roles provides the focus areas for key deliverables and how content will be chunked.

The next challenge is immutable deadlines, so we need to schedule timelines for the number of anticipated deliverables and how many SMEs will be needed to work in parallel.   Then the issue of how to homogenize independently developed content so there is some amount of consistency across the deliverables.

Then the tactical phase commences – getting equipment, building an appropriate technical environment that will support development and to allow time for our SMEs to get experience with the hardware and software before actual development begins.  Initial code does not have all features/functions working as expected so there is an iterative process that takes place across several code drops.

The people are an incredibly important ingredient to addressing the challenges of a complex launch.  They need to have good technical breadth and depth and strong knowledge of the key and affinity technologies.  They also have to be able to deal with uncertainty and complexity as while we are in the development process, code and other components are evolving.

This project is evidence that proper planning and strong resources can be successful when addressing a challenging and strategic launch as the Symmetrix V-Max Series proved to be.

Well there you have it….a working example of why you have to have a systems approach when designing instruction. I know for a fact my colleagues worked very, very hard…many nights and weekends…to get our company ready to introduce the Symmetrix V-Max to the world. Thanks Nancy for the insight into the guts of corporate education.

As you may know, I work for the Education Services organization at EMC. I create technical training to support our Proven Professional certification tests (I also help write the tests).

This article explains what my organization has done to crack down on cheaters – people who purchase “test dumps” to pass the exam, and really don’t have the skills and knowledge required to pass the certification test.

Gene Radwin, who heads up our Certification exam development team, came up with a really clever way to catch people who were passing the cert tests because they bought the answers online. He developed a fingerprint that cheaters would leave behind when they answered the test questions. The article explains it this way:

Here, then, was a means to elicit a distinctive pattern for “cheaters” – add questions to an exam which were (1) easy and (2) which had the incorrect answer coded as the correct answer. Like Homer’s Trojan Horse, these mis-coded, easy questions would undermine those who tried to use them. Honest takers would be scored as answering such questions incorrectly; dishonest test takers would be scored as answering them correctly.

So basically, Gene figured out how to beat cheater at their own game! Brilliant!

This morning I went to Boston Social Media Breakfast #9. EMC sponsored this edition of SMB Boston, and Jaime Pappas (one of EMC’s Social Media Managers) was one of the featured speakers. She did a great job talking about EMC’s overall strategy. What I’d like to do is talk about the revelations I had from attending the meeting, and try to talk a little about Social Media and Education.

One person I talked to was Dan Schawbel. He looked exhausted. He’s just finished a book, he is working on his magazine, and oh yeah he works for EMC. I was feeling matronly and told him he has to slow down, take time for himself, and find time to just be still. He asked me, “is that what you do?” Unfortunately, my daughter was with me, and she immediately began snickering.  Dan turned to her and said I love it when people give you advice they don’t take. Know what? He’s right! Grad school has totally messed up my balance. I am not sure how I am going to do it, but I am going to make time to get my quiet time. Then I can harass Dan again with a clean conscience.

I also met Alicia Staley in person (aka @stales). She told me more about her Foundation, and I have to say I am so in awe of her. She is doing my dream! She’s working full-time, and working to build an organization that serves a cause she is passionate about. I hope I can be like her one day!!!

In addition to Jaime, David Alston from Raidian6 and Peter Kim spoke.

David talked about listening to the conversations that are going on “out there” in the WWW. He spoke about thinking about how a company would react if someone was in the front lobby shouting “Y’all Suck!!!” How fast would someone from PR be down there to see what was up? Well, people do that online, why aren’t companies engaging them?

Can that transfer to education? Maybe – do we have customers at smaller sites that don’t have the luxury of interacting with a huge IT team? Do they want to interact with people going through the same issues they have?

Peter Kim spoke about the importance of making Social Media about business. This is so important for my organization. Our training works because we tie it back to what the business needs. My senior management will not even consider talking about social media if it is not tied back to the business. We’ve stopped calling it “social media”, instead we call it “enterprise collaboration”. It’s the same thing, just a different term. The collaboration idea has lots of educational research and theory behind it; social media carries a negative connotation.

Social media enables some of the things educators have wanted to do for a long time: foster informal learning, make a way for the learner to create their own meanings to formal instruction. The challenge in a corporate environment becomes tying this back to the business.

My organization has some exciting things in the works. So watch this space, as soon as I’m able to report back on what we’re up to I’ll post it here first! OK, maybe 2nd, after I post it to EMC ONE – our internal social media site!

I’ve decided to come out about where I work. I develop technical training in the Education Services Department at EMC Corporation. EMC a global leader in storing, managing, and protect information intelligently and efficiently. My department has won many awards – in 2007 we ranked 2nd on Training Magazine’s Top 125 list and won an ASTD Best Award.

I am writing this blog from the point of view of an Individual Contributor – I’m just a cog in the machine so to speak. I wanted a space to apply what I am using in my graduate program to things I see at work. I also will probably talk about how the emerging Web 2.0 technologies can be applied towards education, but these thoughts are all my own and not necessarily a direction my group is pursuing.

I also have to put the standard disclaimer up – so go see it on my “About Me” page.

I think this post about EMC’s latest ON Magazine (which has several E2.0 articles) is what pushed me over the edge to “come out” as an EMC employee. One of the articles in this issue of On talks about how DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) had the first real E2.0 system – adding fuel to my argument that these tools are not new, and they are not the domain of the so-called “digital natives”.