I’m a big fan of Podcasts as I have a 5 hour commute when I go to the Symantec office in Reading spent hoping on and off trains, tubes and buses which makes it hard to work.
One of my favourite interviews recently was with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, who put a lot into the development of WordPress and commercialise it through things like wordpress.com. Matt is a great thinker and comes across very well in this interview…
I’m sitting here on a Sunday thinking about work so I thought it best to get some thoughts down on “paper” as an outlet.
The thing that’s playing on my mind is a situation where we have to get a number of the different teams within our organisation all pulling together to make sure an upcoming launch works really smoothly and has maximum impact for our customers. I realised that on Monday when we have some calls on the subject I need to make sure we start from the position of agreeing that we are doing the right thing. Sounds obvious but I have the feeling that people are just doing their jobs and that their hearts are not really in it. Perhaps they don’t feel appropriately ”consulted” up until this point, or they actually have other more pressing things on their mind but we can’t go forward without support.
The tricky thing is going to be phrasing the question in a non-threatening manner that doesn’t make people defensive but instead drives an honest and productive conversation. I was pleasantly surprised the other day to be complemented by someone further up the “food chain” than me that I’d learnt to think a little longer before opening my mouth! Something I’ve been working hard on, speaking the truth without alienating those who I’ll need to work with for months and years to come (hopefully).
I’m currently in the process of applying for a job internally to become the Principle Regional Product Marketing Manager for Security and a lot of the challenges in this new role if I get it will be ensuring that situations like the one I’ve described don’t happen as often in future. Having a consistent flow of communication around current and future product and solution strategy with the various stakeholders internally and externally is critical to our success.
Listening to: Delphic – Acolyte
It struck me during a session at work the other day that sometimes “fear of saying the wrong thing” or procrastination seems to lead people to behave more like politicians than leaders. By behaving like politicians I’m not referring to the current inability to know the difference between a “work related expense” and “taking a sly one”, which was at first amusing and swifly became another nail in the “what are they good for?” coffin they were already lying in for me. I am more referring to their habit of answering a question with another question.
Let me answer that by asking you this…
I’ve seem to have a reputation at work for speaking my mind without holding back, whoever the recipient may be, peer or exec. This may get me into trouble one day (and probably already has) but I’d rather deal with occasionally clearing up a mess than sit there in a perfectly clean but static environment. I think especially at senior levels within larger organisation the feeling that the people on the ground who come and quiz you know more than you do about some areas of the business. As mentioned before the fear of saying the wrong thing and looking like an idiot leads to skirting round the question. I believe this stems from a mis-perception that great leaders have all the answers. When I ask someone in a role that has a great span of control than mine their opinion on something, I’d rather have their view based on that span of control they have as it will help me in a few ways. Firstly, it will give me an insight into areas that I don’t have (e.g. I think numbers are up and they may be 300% in my area but that is cancelled out by a 10% drop in a much larger area than mine). Secondly, they teach me about the information flow and any improvements that may need to be made to help people make more informed decisions. Thirdly, people just see things differently based on their background and career. I would rather have the benefit of hearing that and add it into my understanding and experience.
So next time I ask a tough question, don’t reflect it back to me as a question please. I’d rather …
You know what, I don’t know for sure but based on my understanding …
Pretty please.
I’ve started reviewing the presentations and messages we’ve developed internally around the security product set and talking to the people in our company with more experience than me in this area. There are a couple of things that instantly strike me:
First task has got to be simplification and a focus on three or four key areas that people actually care about. I have a meeting this afternoon to make a first pass at trying to get some thoughts together. I can’t wait for the Big Corp HQ to give this to us because we’ve got to get moving now to get back in our stride and off the back foot.
For the last year and a half at Symantec I’ve been working on what we call Information Risk Management. At its most basic level it’s four key pillars:
I love the using the word “stuff” when I’m talking to people, it always surprises them! However, it nicely sums up the fact that data or information is largely unstructured and unclassified these days and not immediately identifiable based on what system its in.
My focus has been largely the first two pillars in the context of messaging security. For Symantec that means the Brightmail family of technologies. My team mate Jaap has focused on the second two which fall under our Enterprise Vault related products.
However as you can see from the title of this post I’ve had a slight change of direction in the last few months and been pushed towards a stack of solutions in our security products that include the infamous Symantec Endpoint Protection (a.k.a. SEP). SEP is our desktop and server anti-virus product that is what most of the world probably associate with Symantec and it’s yellow boxes. If you use the twitter search site and search for the keyword “symantec” you’ll get an insight into what a vocal group think of that product. You’ll soon understand why I called it a “nettle”!
The reason I’m now working with it is my main focus, Brightmail, is now included in a bundle called Symantec Multi-tier Protection (SMP, must have acronym for everything in technology). SMP contains amongst other things, SEP for the endpoint, SMS for Exchange/Domino (anti-virus for the mail stores) and Brightmail. It’s designed to give complete coverage for end-to-end protection.
SEP has gained a bad reputation because we essentially rushed it to market and didn’t do adequate testing on all ranges of customer sizes. As a result we killed some of our smaller customers servers (who generally don’t have high-end dedicated machine per application). My challenge is that a bad reputation is quick to gain and doubly hard to shrug off. It also doesn’t help when idiots from PR companies try and replicate “comcastcares” on twitter and offer to help “fix peoples problems”. Just makes us look like we don’t have a clue.
The reason smart people though will realise from my title that “grabbing” a nettle is actually not a bad plan. Brushing up against a nettle will result in a painful rash, but grabbing it quickly results in no pain. Now you see my task: dive in, get knowledgeable as to what our customers want, speak honestly and make it work.
I’ve realised in the last few days that my mind has gotten slow through too much inward looking. I need to lift my head above the parapet more because it helps contextualise what I do. Writing for me was always part of that, even if it was never published and sat in a drafts folder. Consider today a “reboot day”.
We’ve recently been cranking out the monthly “State of Spam” reports which you can find here. They are a really strong demonstration of the kind of work that goes on behind the scene by humans in our operations centres around the world.
According to the report the volumes of spam have recently risen to peaks of 87% globally. However I’ve seen a few snapshots from dashboards that customers have sent our team recently showing 98.2% over a period of a week! I repeat … 98.2%! Just think about the volume of email the hits your inbox legitimately on a daily basis and imagine that’s less than 2% of the volume your organisation is processing for you!
One of the great things I love about the Symantec Brightmail technology that drives the anti-spam products I work with is the mix of humans and technology. It’s almost like bionic man (or woman) in someways. The reason I know that the human-machine mix works so well was the tweaks they’ve done in the last month to slow very effectively the NDR (Non Delivery Report) attacks that were happening. The volumes dropped significantly without a patch or new release of software etc. It was done through crafting rulesets that were deployed automagically to our customers. I was saying to one of our Product Managers, Jason, that it’s a shame we currently don’t have a really effective way to let our customers know what we are doing on their behalf but I think we’re we’re looking into some sort of a direct news feed to our customers in the upcoming dashboards. We could send them an email but it might get marked as spam and as far as I know we’re not hard-coded a whitelist entry of “*@symantec.com”!
I should be getting a tour of one our operations centre’s in Dublin later this month and I’ll try and write up a bit more if they let me.
My what a dull sounding post title but one of the fun things about being a specialist is developing the stories we tell to help the technology make sense. Not stories in the fictional sense, we couldn’t get it past legal! I’m privileged to work on a bunch of products that are genuinely integrated and not just thrown together by somebody in marketing looking to meet some new buzzword requirement.
The usual corporate-PowerPoint-hell exists at Symantec with 50 slide monsters containing everything you ever wanted say written on the slide itself. I apologise if you’ve ever been subjected to one of ours! Personally I try and use whiteboard wherever possible and I’ve been re-thinking the one I usually give recently in the light of our Vontu acquisition.
Vontu as a standalone entity focused on data loss prevention (DLP .. Another fab TLA) which is fundamentally about discovering where your important data exists within your organisation and keeping in the hands of only the people that need it. I think as I’ve been reviewing their messages and slides that the thing that most jumped out at me was the fact that “policy” was the core of all they do. Describe data. Describe access. Describe retention. Discover. Protect and prevent leakage. All those kinds of words and phrases revolve around policies. If you don’t know what your policy is handed down from a legal body, or an internal body, then how on earth are you going to decide how long to keep that pile of emails from your customers?
I think the biggest relief for me though as I discover more about the Vontu technology is that it’s not some toothless auditing or reporting tool but can actually impact and change user behaviour. You can run it in “Monitor/Discover” mode or “Prevent” or both. It’s not hard to build stories when you can impact the behaviour of thousands or millions of interactions of individuals using “our” information within an organisation!
Being the sad individual I am – I was so excited when we announced our acquisition of Vontu at the beginning of the month. My main responsibility at work is the Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series Appliances (rolls off the tongue doesn’t it). This product is the one which has had Vontu’s filtering engine built in for a good while now. I built a slide for a presentation a few months ago that talked about the four main technologies on the box:
These four elements are all integrated on the boxes and I joked whenever I showed it that three were Symantec technologies, though you’d be amazed how many people didn’t know, and the forth would probably be soon. I didn’t do so with any insider knowledge! Just knew that the technology was too good to stay integrated and yet outside the organisation for too long!
The team I’m in is a group of specialists called “Information Risk Management” and it will be very interesting to see if we get the European Vontu employees in with us at somepoint soon. From my experience so far of this area of business need is that it’s only getting more and more important as our organisations (and in fact our entire economies) are being built on growing stack of data. How it’s managed, for good or for bad, internally or externally, with ease or pain – all these are going to be critical. I repeat again – Woo-hoo-Vontu!
I’ve not written here for far too long. I love writing, but the only writing I seem to do these days is email! Since I joined Symantec my work day seems to never have time in it for stopping, contemplating and composing but I’m going to change that. I’ve realised that if I continue the same pace for too long I will basically run out of stored energy. For me, I am able to continue at a strong pace for a long time, but then I crash!
I’m on my way back from Barcelona right now and one of the things I have been thinking about is controlling my email inbox. The first day I was here, the in-flow was still it’s usual pace (a.k.a. far too much). The second day after people took note of the out-of-office reply they got, it slowed. The third day, it was even less. During the last 3 days I have sent very little email as I’ve been manning a stand here at TechEd. To me, that demonstrates that I’m actually generating in-flow probably by sending mail myself that requires a response (via email). I am going to make a conscious effort to send less email. Think before I send. Pick-up the phone. Do more digging before I reach for the “New mail” button.
Remind me of that in a week.