August, 2007
by Denise P. Kalm, Secretary, NCCMG
Denise Kalm has 30 years experience in IT including application programming, enterprise systems management and performance management/capacity planning at Pacific Telephone and Bank of America. She moved to vendor land in 2000, spending 5 ½ years with BMC on the EPA product line, then recently became the senior product marketing manager for enterprise job scheduling products at CA, Inc., formerly Cybermation. She is a regional officer of CMG, has held many volunteer positions within that organization and is a frequent contributing author. Prior to entering the IT profession, she was a biochemical geneticist. Her hobbies include flying, Jazzercise, writing and scuba diving. Her book, Lifestorm, on the Oakland Hills fire, is available on Amazon. She is an executive and personal coach as well, offering phone and in-person coaching.
About the Author
Denise P. Kalm, CA, Inc. formerly Cybermation
A surprisingly cool day greeted NCCMG members as we made our way north to the Wells Fargo Cassie Hill Center for our 3rd meeting of the year. Wells Fargo generously sponsored this meeting again, providing a wonderful continental breakfast, a terrific Chinese buffet and a great room in which to hold our meeting.
Thomas E. Bell, Rivendel Consultants, and L. Joseph Delano, A. G. Edwards, presented an overview on "Planning Our Retirements" based on Delano's expertise in counseling clients and Bell's personal experience in planning his own retirement. They offered us a timeline for planning which actually needs to start as early as possible in terms of savings. Savings vehicles were clarified along with the tax and inheritance implications of the various options. Delano recommended that each of us consult our planners for a Monte Carlo simulation of future needs and likely sources of income to ensure we are planning with the right assumptions. Bell recommended a good balance of equity (stocks) and bonds to manage up and down markets. He also offered a checklist of things you need to plan for such as where you will live when you retire, how you will manage health insurance, and planning if social security is no longer available. The main message was start thinking about this now. Late planning can cost you money, delay your retirement, or make the whole experience of retirement much less pleasant. This thought-provoking topic inspired a lively discussion and many questions.
We had our usual expedited business meeting which focused primarily on the upcoming national conference and our upcoming elections in November. We are doing some retirement/succession planning of our own encouraging our members to consider "giving back" by running for a board position. Then we adjourned to enjoy our lunch and networking.
Claire Cates, SAS, spoke to us about "Where's Waldo: Uncovering Hard-to-Find Application Killers" which highlighted how you can use various profilers to find a 7 key problems in your distributed systems applications. She walked us through a number of problems she identified (and ensured were fixed) in SAS using Rational's Quantify, though she noted that there are many tools out there and each has strengths and weaknesses for identifying problems. The problems noted were:
She showed how the problems show up in the profiler, the likely causes, and how she worked out what was happening. A key capability to look for in a profiler is the ability to drill down into the actual source code.
We were pleased to welcome Frank Bereznay, 2006 Mullen Award Winner, Kaiser Permanente, and to hear "Did Something Change? Using Statistical Techniques to Interpret Service and Resource Metrics." He had previously offered an early version of this paper to us in 2005, so it was interesting to see how the paper had evolved. A key point to this paper is that the techniques he offers are really invaluable in helping you understand which problems are worth the time and effort to really study and which are acceptable anomalies that really are of limited impact to the end user. He spoke about populations versus samples, hypothesis testing, and using the t statistic, then provided examples of how that would work with IT metrics. He then introduced statistical process control (SPC) and how this technique can be used to assess things that have physical properties, such as numbers of lines of output from a printer or business metrics. Next, he reintroduced MASF - multivariate adaptive statistical filtering and showed the value in quickly identifying anomalies worthy of study. Finally, he introduced analysis of variance (ANOVA) as a way of looking at data to see if it is safe to say that all data points represent the same population. This technique can also help you figure out which days are unique and which are more like each other for use with MASF. These tools can be a real time-saver making each root cause analysis a more valuable exercise as well as helping you better understand your data.
James Smith, TeamQuest, gave a talk about "Virtualization," in which he talked about the pros and cons of virtualization, a little history, and a comparison of the main vendor offerings in this area. A lively discussion ensued, especially from the mainframe contingent who felt that the mainframe deserved much more credit in this vision. A key area was the meaning of CPU utilization in a virtualized world. We all should be careful which CPU number we use, given the proliferation of CPU metrics, all meaning very different things. TeamQuest raffled off a number of items bringing our day to a wonderful close.
The last meeting of 2007 will be on Tuesday, November 6th, most likely in the Pleasanton area. For more information, please contact Cathy Nolan ( or ).