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NEWS&ANALYSIS Peter Coffee: Port Scans The case for rest As i looped around the east edge of phoenix, heading home from the GigaWorld IT Forum, I heard NPR’s salute to National Night Shift Workers Day conclude with a poem by Karen Jane Glenn. “Let us now praise the night shift,” she began. “Those on the 8-to-4, the 10-to-6 ... the sleepdeprived ... the wired.” I could relate. It seems as if every week brings me more e-mail messages that are timestamped during the interval that Navy men call the midwatch, from midnight to four in the morning. And I have to admit that I’m also sending more of those midwatch messages myself. As it happened, the theme of the conference I’d just attended was “Deliver more with less.” I don’t remember seeing “less sleep” as a formal part of the agenda—but as I listened to Glenn’s poem, it seemed as if that topic should have been addressed. After all, National Science Foundation statistics estimate U.S. adults averaging less than 7 hours’ sleep at night; other studies point to sleep-deprivation effects that include difficulty following discussions; poor judgment in complex situations; difficulty in devising a new approach to a stubborn problem; and failure to notice changes in situations. In practical terms, this means that people aren’t functioning as well as they should in everyday situations such as planning a project, responding to a cyber-attack, debugging an application or monitoring network operations. Spread thin by staff reductions, and losing formerly productive time to diversions such as extra security delays in airports, people are putting in 10-hour and even 20-hour days for what used to be considered 8 hours’ pay. That may not be as good a deal for the employer as it first seems, if the extra hours represent neutral or even negative contributions. Yes, it’s great that people can work at any time, from anywhere, but sleepdeprived zombies aren’t the shock troops 40 eWEEK n MAY 26, 2003 of enterprise success—whether they’re “the wired” of Glenn’s poem or not. International operations can approach the 24-hour day as a relay race, rather than a marathon. IBM, for example, has adopted a two-shift approach to some of its software development efforts, with teams in Seattle setting daily work specifications for offshore teams in India, China, Latvia and Belarus. Overnight offshore development returns product to Seattle the next day for review, and the cycle continues. The company says this process reduces development cycles by 35 percent, yielding time-to-market benefits that are worth even more than the reductions in development cost. Note well that this is not about stretching a given number of people across a greater number of hours: It’s about taking advantage of the 24-hour day in operations that circle the globe. The problem with success stories like this is that smaller companies may feel that they must do likewise. I’m reminded of former Avis CEO Robert Townsend’s warning that some corporate behaviors don’t scale well from large to small organizations. The smaller company that decides to open an office in Bangalore, or outsource some of its operations to a contractor in Tel Aviv, may find that it has blunted its competitive edge of being able to get close to its customers and thoroughly understand their needs. Being just like IBM, only a hundred times smaller, is like being a miniature elephant in an ecological niche that’s better suited to a fox. In organizations of every size, managers need to avoid letting IT push their people across the line that separates anytime/anywhere flexibility from all-thetime/everywhere expectation. When intermediate deadlines start being regarded as purely pro forma, and everyone knows that the real schedule squeezes three days on the timetable into a 24-hour all-nighter at the end of every product cycle, that’s a cultural problem that has to be solved by cultural forces. When managers treat crash-and-burn schedules as a sign of commitment and not as a problem to be fixed, that’s a cultural force that PETER_ COFFEE@ZIFFDAVIS.COM Sleep-deprived zombies aren’t the shock troops of enterprise success—whether they’re wired or not. pushes in the wrong direction. C. Northcote Parkinson was right: Work does expand to fill the time available. IT can make that available time appear to be “all the time.” I’m not saying that our e-mail systems need a curfew. I am saying that the human side of management includes making it clear that you want good hours, not just more of them. ´
NEWS&ANALYSIS SPARC workstation is going mobile By Jeffrey Burt Tadpole computer inc. is making good on its promise to extend beyond its high-end Unixbased desktops with a line of less expensive mobile computers. The Cupertino, Calif., company, whose primary customer base has been government agencies, is shipping the first of these products, a 64-bit Unix mobile workstation called the Spar- cle. The new notebook is binarycompatible with Sun Microsys- The Sparcle notebook has a fast chip and low price. tems Inc.’s SPARC chip technology and Solaris operating system. A high-end version offers a 650MHz SPARC IIi chip, 2GB of memory and an 80GB hard drive. It weighs in at 6.5 pounds, offers up to 3 hours of battery life and comes with StarOffice productivity applications installed, said Tadpole officials. They said the Sparcle should not be viewed as just a notebook but more as a server with notebook capabilities that can run Java applications. In addition, a CPU-sharing technology lets users run tasks in a background mode via a wireless 802.11b Wi-Fi network. The new laptop will be available in several models that range in price from about $3,000 to $6,000—about half that of Tadpole’s earlier least expensive notebook, the SPARCbook 5000. The average price of a Tadpole product until now was $25,000 to $30,000, officials said. “The opportunity here is to leverage the technical piece and get a product out there to the market, and a big step in that is the price,” said Mark Johnston, president and CEO of Tadpole. Though Tadpole traditionally works in the Unix space, officials said the company will keep an eye on how Intel Corp.’s 64-bit Itanium chip and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s 64-bit Opteron processor develop and will consider them in the future. The Sparcle’s support for 64-bit processing is a first for a mobile workstation, said Kate Sullivan, an analyst with International Data Corp., of Framingham, Mass. Others, including Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM, offer only 32-bit systems. As a result, Tadpole will find its customers among companies such as oil and gas firms that run 64bit Unix workstations and haven’t yet ported their work onto Linux or Windows, Sullivan said. Tadpole “will be trying for different customers,” Sullivan said. “Sixty-four-bit is a very special requirement.” ´ eWEEK � MAY 26, 2003 41
Page 1 and 2: VOLUME 20, NUMBER 21 n $6 NEWSPAPER
Page 3 and 4: MAY 26, 2003 CONTENTS NEWS&ANALYSIS
Page 5 and 6: NEWS&ANALYSIS LATE NEWS Microsoft t
Page 7 and 8: NEWS&ANALYSIS FRONT OFFICE Oracle e
Page 9 and 10: NEWS&ANALYSIS Network analysis: Fas
Page 11 and 12: NEWS&ANALYSIS SERVERS StarView remo
Page 13 and 14: NEWS&ANALYSIS Face to Face: Clark M
Page 15 and 16: Security: Government DHS revamp on
Page 17 and 18: Software links backup, SRM CA, VERI
Page 19: Storage: OS upgrade Bigger, better

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