I am now working as a consultant for a non-profit that, if successful, will change the way programmers and other tech types will get hired in our industry. It is an exciting time and I wanted to share with you who they are, what they are doing, and how you can help the effort.

The organization is called LaunchCode, and I have written about them here. The idea is to improve the way job candidates get screened for open positions, and to improve the supply chain of candidates, at the same time lowering the risk of a new hire for an organization.

Finding coders is hard, especially in those parts of the country outside the traditional tech hubs. It is hard to recruit them because hiring managers are busy, or they delegate the task to recruiters who don’t understand who is needed or the skills that are required. Some of the best programmers are people from non-traditional backgrounds, making them hard to evaluate. Many positions often go unfilled for months.

Enter LaunchCode. Last year they got started here in St. Louis by finding opportunities for people who had programming skills but hadn’t been hired because of a lack of typical credentials. They later expanded their reach by helping people take the introductory Harvard computer science class, CS50.In the year or so that they have been around, they have managed to get more than 160 people hired in dozens of companies in town, ranging from the largest IT shops to brand new startups. It is an impressive track record.

But that isn’t enough and they aren’t satisfied. They are trying to do several things at once to expand their reach:

• First, create a large ecosystem of educational providers that offer coding instruction, to help people who need to brush up on their skills get better. While they started with Harvard and have a great partnership there, they have since expanded into more than 20 different providers that are teaching coding classes.
• Second, develop a better way to vet people who are ready to enter the workforce by testing practice coding knowledge and how well a candidate will work in a team. That is their real secret sauce: if you can have something akin to a SAT but to predict coding prowess rather than just college performance, hiring managers are going to take notice. Years ago I remember a friend of mine had his own coding test that worked well for him when he was looking for programmers. LaunchCode is trying to do this on a broader scale.
• Finally, expand to other cities that have programming jobs aplenty but have had trouble hiring coders. So far they have opened an office in Miami and one is planned for Kansas City and a few other places.

That last point is where I come in. LaunchCode wants to go nationwide, and to do so they need to first find the companies that are willing to support their effort and receive coding applicants for their open positions. I am helping them with this expansion drive, and trying to enlist as many companies as I can, based on my contacts in our industry. Here is where you help. If your company is in a position to hire coders, or if you know of someone in your circle that is in this position, email or call me and let’s chat.  I think we can help them succeed and really change the way tech hiring is done.

We are in love with our mobile devices – especially those of us who rely on them at work.  They keep us connected, informed, and with a smart mobile strategy in place, they enable us to work efficiently at the highest possible productivity level.

Companies, in turn, are aware of the demands created by mobilizing employees. Gone are the days where IT controlled the endpoint computing device. Today’s users expect IT to support their device choices and to help them thrive in a rapidly changing mobile environment.  But with freedom of choice comes consequences. IT must prepare for better mobile management and security measures, building custom apps, deploying and supporting a range of devices, and transitioning from the task of selecting hardware to becoming a mobile systems integrator.

Momentum around mobile in the enterprise plays out in the numbers. 81% of companies surveyed by IDG have mapped out a mobile strategy, 47% have deployed mobile apps beyond email, but for most, security lags behind – only 7% say they are secured across all areas.  (See chart for survey details).  Links TK

While the mobile end game is different for every company, the ultimate destination for some businesses is to convert aging desktops into a 100% mobile-only population, where users can approach a level of productivity that they previously had with their Windows and Mac desktop applications. Some have already made that transition. For others, it can be years away.

Part of the challenge is how mission-critical enterprise applications translate to devices. Do they offer a viable mobile experience? Some corporations are making sure they do.  The percentage of companies that wrote internal apps for mobile devices first is up: 14% in 2014 versus 5% in 2013, according to a recent survey.  (Source: Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise survey, 2014, 1,155 respondents) [Link TK]

Pain points

There are many different fronts to address, seemingly at once, that enabling a mobile team is very complex. It isn’t as easy as replacing a desktop with another device: almost everything will need replacement, including applications, the network infrastructure, security models and potentially Internet bandwidth may need adjustments.

Organizations that invested heavily in wired networks for many years may find that they need to rework these networks to handle wireless connections for mobile devices. And while the vast majority (76%) of firms said they are expanding their Wi-fi networks in Network World’s 2015 State of Network survey [Link TK], than means more than just deliver more ubiquitous wireless signals.

Applications built with new agile tool sets and development environments will be required, but businesses are lagging behind in this area. According to this data [Linke TK: Source: Mobility Management, IDG Enterprise/IGS, 2014], organizations do not have a set model when developing custom mobile applications:  38% said mobile apps are most commonly developed on an “as needed” basis, while 21% said they conduct internal audits of existing internal applications and then develop the most relevant mobile version.

Finally, IT departments will have to carefully understand how to secure their mobile devices and the content that resides on them.

How are companies addressing the challenges?  IT leaders from four large enterprises share their mobile deployment strategies:

American Red Cross

What they did: Kept existing mainframe apps in place, built web-based front-ends to access those apps from mobile devices

Devices: Various

Traditional organizations with deep roots in a mainframe culture have an interesting journey to mobility.  The American Red Cross, for example, was one of the more conservative IT shops around a few years ago. Most applications ran on its own mainframes or were installed on specially provisioned PCs that were under the thumb of the central IT organization based in Washington, D.C.

This changed when disaster response teams started to bring their personal devices to the field. The IT group attempted to standardize the devices initially, but eventually allowed employees to use their own, instead changing how applications were delivered – making them accessible from the Internet, and more browser-friendly. Translated, this means that instead of having a terminal connection to its mainframe, running an old fashioned application, they designed a new mobile app or a web interface that talks to the mainframe piece to make the experience easier. The American Red Cross still has its mainframe apps, just a different way to get to them. Throughout the process, setting user expectations was critical.  “We worked with our HR department to put a few ground rules in place on using personal mobile devices, such as it is your responsibility to get good connectivity, not ours,” said John Crary, CIO for the American Red Cross.  [CUT: “You have to be able to adapt to the changing mobile environment. It is moving rapidly. Businesses are going towards being more mobile-centric, and we need to be much quicker and much more adaptable.” ]

Wessex Water

What they did: Created a secure environment to access and share documents including video footage from mobile devices.  The project replaced aging file transfer servers, provided tighter centralized control around who can share content and generated a full audit trail for that content.

Devices: Various

Wessex Water is a regional water and sewer utility in the UK.  Its goal was to create a secure environment to access and share documents from a wide range of mobile devices including iPads, Windows tablets and smartphones.  It deployed a SaaS-based secure file transfer solution, and was able to put it to multiple uses across the organization – one being to collect video footage from remote locations. Contractors hired by the utility use robotic video cameras to capture imagery inside its pipeline generating several videos each week around its water network.  Prior to the SaaS solution, videos were recorded to DVDs, mailed to Wessex Water, and were manually uploaded to their servers. Now, using the vendor’s APIs, Wessex Water built automated apps that transferred these videos into its SharePoint content management system. The apps support other business workflows as well, helping the utility company “quickly meet compliance obligations while saving hundreds of work hours per week,” said John Willis, Enterprise Architect at Wessex Water.

Needham Bank

What they did: Made document workflow part of an overall mobile workspace experience; transitioned to a 100% mobile organization. 

Devices: iPads and iPhones

Needham Bank, a New England financial institution, was one of the first banks to go all mobile. In 2007, they began buying iPhones. In 2010, they equipped executives with iPads when they first came on the market. “We don’t have any laptops at the bank, anyone who is out in the field has an iPad or an iPhone,” said James Gordon, the CIO at the bank. He uses a combination of apps to enable these mobile devices, including remote desktop, file transfer and mobile device management tools. “Our biggest problem is that we do more than just email on our mobile devices, and email was never designed to be a true document management tool or a file revision system. People need to have the right tools for the job, and we have built a whole suite of services both for our customers and our employees to make them more productive,” he said.

Gordon is also a big fan of reducing the number of app choices for his users and feels this is an important role for his IT department to play. You might think that a major bank would have issues with using all mobile devices, but Gordon says he did not have any push back from his auditors. Through the various security tools he uses, “we can revoke a user and they no longer have access rights. We also have extensive logs to tell who did what with which file. This can come in very handy. We had a senior executive who thought he had been hacked because one of his staffers had gotten a file. Turns out he had forgotten when he sent it. We examined our logs and found the file transfer, and pinpointed which office he was in at the time. When you can prove stuff like that, you have pretty good controls on your information, more controls than you can put on paper files that are placed in a copier.”

Organization: Revera Home Health

What they did: Used mobile devices to integrate scheduling and reporting for its field caregiver force.

Devices: BlackBerries

Mobile devices can also come into play in that time-honored tradition of automating tasks that involve massive amounts of paperwork and manual processes. This is what Halifax-based Revera Home Health faced with its field force of more than 4,000 home healthcare workers. Until a few years ago, they relied on manual methods to schedule and track which workers visited their clients’ homes and less than a tenth of them used any smartphones. “We found that a single worker calling in sick would result in more than 60 different transactions to fill that person’s shift,” said Jo-Anne Stone-Burke, a National Director at Revera Home Health.

Revera implemented a mobile-based management application based on BlackBerry smartphones that has helped improve its field communication and reporting of various home care visits.  They were able to reduce missed appointments and cut down on travel time with automated GPS-based directions too. “Now we can reschedule sick calls with a touch of a button, and we have eliminated two thirds of our missed appointments, saving the company $25,000 [Canadian dollars] a month too.”

Chances are if you have read commentary and reviews of products and services online, you are reading lots of fakes. Various estimates put this at a third or more, either outright fakes or paid-to-post by organizations looking to game the system. In other words, buyer beware.

“There is a reason comments are put on the bottom half of the Internet,” says one post from the once active Twitter account AvoidComments. The account also includes this one: “The problem with internet comments is that you can never really know who’s saying them.” — Winston Churchill. Yeah, I bet he really did say that, and probably to Al Gore just after the Internet was created.

But enough snarky anecdotes. A communications professor has attempted a semi-scholarly work entitled Reading the Comments, and it is actually an interesting book despite this description. Joseph Reagle knows his subject and sprinkles enough curse words throughout his book to make it almost NSFW if you were going to read it aloud — which mirrors some of the online comments that he quotes from as you might suspect.

I guess I was pretty much naive when I began reading his book. I didn’t think much about the various reviews that I read about restaurants, hotels, or particular products. But I can see how things have gotten out of control in the past decade especially. Now you can pay someone a buck or so to write a review and have it look like it is coming from someone that actually used the product or service. Yelp is apparently infested with this sort of thing, and just recently a restaurant in the bay area rebutted a negative review with video footage of the reviewer and how he spent literally seconds inside the restaurant, mostly standing around.

Reagle states that “Online discussion of sexism or misogyny quickly results in disproportionate displays of sexism and misogyny.” He cites several now well-known cases of where women were buried in negative comments just because they were female.

He describes an entire universe of fakers, haters, and takers and how they have flourished online. That was both eye-opening and depressing. Then there is a whole sub genre of intentionally funny reviews. Computer scientists are using them to train natural language processing to detect irony. Think of them as Sheldon’s answer to the Turing test.

As someone who still writes product reviews for a living (mostly now for Network World, where you can read my collection here), this pains me. Most of the pubs that I once wrote reviews for have folded their tents, and it is getting harder to recruit vendors to support these reviews as of late.

Yes, I have posted some comments on Amazon, TripAdvisor and AirBnB, but only out of some loyalty to the books I read or places I stayed or ate at. AirBnB has this interesting log-rolling ethos built-in to their site. Once you stay at a place, you rate your host and your host rates you. That takes some of the snark out of your comments, but it also helps to improve the descriptions of each place and the expectations you have when you are choosing where to stay. And help to make sure that you are on your best behavior too.

Still, comments can tell us much about the human condition, and the social fabric of our lives. Perhaps too much, as many Gen X’ers are prone to oversharing. But that is for another column and another day. In the mean time, you can pre-order Reagle’s book, which will be available in May, here. And remember, as our Twitter friends have posted: Nobody on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time reading Internet comments.”

I wrote a series of posts for this corporate blog in 2014-5. The site has been taken down but here are links to my stories. Note that some of this information is outdated or been eclipsed by events.

• Is the Hybrid Cloud Right for Your Business?
• What you need to know about creating your own apps
• How Big Data is changing the way we hire
• How Apple Pay Will Change Mobile Payments  
• 3 Reasons Why Outsourcing Is No Longer a Dirty Word
• Is your slow website costing you business?
• 3 Lessons Learned From Target’s Data Breach
• Is Directory as a Service Right for Your Business?