August, 2007
by Denise P. Kalm
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
Frank Bereznay won the Mullen Award for his paper, "Did Something Change? Using Statistical Techniques to Interpret Service and Resource Metrics." Measure IT got a chance to catch up with him and get some great back story.
MeasureIT: Tell us something about your work for CMG and how you got started.
Frank Bereznay: I'm a long time member of CMG who is active at the regional and national levels. I've worked on many conference committees as a volunteer at all levels and positions, presented papers at 12 national conferences and have been the regional chair for the Southern California Region on and off for close to 20 years. I've served two terms on the National Board, one as Treasurer and one as a Director.
Back in 1984, one of the other employees from Santa Fe went to the conference in San Francisco. He brought the proceedings to the office and once I started to read it, I became hooked on the organization. I've been reading them ever since. I've always felt the peer reviewed and edited papers are the hallmark of this organization.
MI: What is your day job?
FB: I'm part of the Kaiser Permanente IT Business unit. I'm one of a group of managers who have responsibility for the Capacity Management process. Kaiser is a very large organization and we tend to specialize in particular sub processes. My current role is to develop forecasts for new equipment demand and to monitor the pipeline as the assets are acquired and implemented. We are also monitoring the data center facilities to ensure the needed infrastructure is in place.
MI: How did you get inspired to write your award-winning paper?
FB: My primary goal was to create a tutorial type paper about how to use the statistical methods that have already been documented in other papers. The real challenge for us is not the statistical methods, but how to characterize the workloads. In particular, I wanted to provide some clear examples on how to use the MASF framework to characterize workloads to enable the development of control limits for a process (aka workload).
I also noticed that the number of papers in this area seemed to be declining since the mid to late 1990s. There were a number of papers leading up to Jeff Buzen and Annie Shum's MASF (multivariate adaptive statistical filtering) paper in 1995, and since then the trend seemed to decline with the exception of Igor Trubin's work, so I wanted to give the statistical methods some additional visibility.
MI: What were some of your biggest challenges in putting it together?
FB: My biggest concern was making sure that I had properly understood and described the MASF framework. I sent an early copy to Annie Shum to make sure I got this part correct. The rest of the sections are standard statistical topics which I know pretty well, with some real world examples.
MI: What was the greatest satisfaction to you about getting this paper accepted and recognized?
FB: Needless to say, it is very humbling to be chosen by ones' peers for an award like this. I think of the people who previously won the Mullen award and I'm very flattered to even be considered in the same company. The opportunity to visit some of our regions and present this paper has been a real treat and sense of satisfaction.
I've always been impressed by the MASF paper that Annie and Jeff wrote. The visibility that this paper is getting is also providing their work much deserved recognition. So that is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment too.
MI: How did you get into this business in the first place?
FB: I attended graduate school at UCLA majoring in Econometrics. While I was there I took a number of programming classes and worked as a programmer analyst for some of the professors, both at the university and at RAND in Santa Monica. That pretty much got me started with a career as a programmer.
Shana and I were married in 1977 (30 years ago this July!) and I figured I better get a real 40 hour a week job. We both loved the San Francisco Bay area, so I looked for entry level programming jobs there and joined Brandon Applied Systems as a programmer analyst. We moved to Walnut Creek and I spent three years at Brandon as a programmer and eventually a project manager. Brandon was a software house that specialized in migrating large applications from second generation languages (7070, 1401, etc.) to COBOL. An interesting place to work and I learned a lot, but not mainstream DP, even back then.
I left Brandon in 1981 and joined Santa Fe International (oil well drilling engineers, not the railroad) and led a large migration from Honeywell to IBM. While I was at Santa Fe, I moved from applications programming to Data Center management and first learned of CMG. I've been in Data Center management positions ever since.
MI: Tell us something about your writing history, both for CMG and for other sources?
FB: Writing papers has always been a way to document and study the problems I'm facing at work. If I'm trying to better understand something, I always start with a search of the CMG proceedings to look at what has already been published in that area. Typically I try to build on that work in anything that I write. This is true for CMG, XPLOR, AFCOM and SHARE papers / presentations. I also need to give my wife, Shana, credit for being my editor. Her grammar and editing skills are much better than mine and all the papers I have written have been reviewed and improved by her.
There are a set of papers that Tom Bell and I wrote that were a break from this pattern. Tom and I became interested in high volume transactional document production issues (a fancy term for printing insurance policies and other stuff that gets mailed to customers) while I was at the Auto Club. We did a very thorough TCO analysis of the print room and learned that the most expensive item in the building was a postage stamp, not the multi-million dollar printers that everybody was focusing on. What we learned really helped me improve the operation of the print room and lead to the writing of Computer Printing Economics, a paper that Tom and I presented at CMG and many other venues. We published about four or five other papers on topics related to this area. Very interesting and a great learning opportunity for both of us. XEROX actually sponsored us at a couple of their events so we could present the findings.
MI: What are you working on for this year?
FB: I'm not working on a paper for this year's conference. My time has been spent participating in as many regional meetings and conferences as possible. In the first half of this year I've presented the paper at eight meetings / conferences (Boston, Connecticut, CMG Canada, Philadelphia, CECMG, New York, National Capital Area and UKCMG). I'm hoping to add five or six more meetings in the last half of the year. So, if any of the regions have meetings scheduled in the last half of the year and are interested, let me know.
MI: Over the years, what has CMG meant to you? How has it affected your career?
FB: CMG has instilled a sense of professionalism into our field that is missing from most of the other IT technical careers. It provides a much needed body of best practices in the proceedings and a networking opportunity that really made a difference in our careers. The network and friendships that develop have helped my career and introduced me to many wonderful people.
MI: Where would you like to see CMG go in the future?
FB: That is a very difficult question to answer. To me, CMG is a user group or peer networking organization and we all know the industry dynamics, the number of people employed full time in the Capacity Management discipline is declining. So, if we stay true to our roots, we will decline as an organization as the membership base declines.
I believe expanding into other aspects of the Service Delivery framework is a natural for us. I would try to align with those areas. However, we can't expect IT professionals who are Service Delivery experts to be interested in a performance management organization, so this type of expansion would have to start with us rethinking our vision to explicitly making these fields part of our charter.
MI: You and your wife are so fully involved in CMG - what else can we know about your family and personal life? (hobbies, kids, etc)
FB: We have a daughter, Catie, who has grown up with our CMG involvement and knows many of our CMG friends. She was a regular at many of the national conferences while she was growing up. For her, December meant a chance to fly to someplace interesting, stay in a fancy hotel and visit with her CMG friends. The Orlando conferences were especially fun, because it meant some extra days at Disney World. Her involvement with CMG and our friends has made her very technology savvy, but she wants nothing to do with it as a career. Her interests are in the Health Care field, both as a physician and as a public health care policy maker. Like all parents, she is our number one priority even though she is now 21 years old and an adult.
We have talked about retirement and for us, it will probably mean moving somewhere where we can get a little bit of land and maybe raise Lakeland Terriers. We are both big fans of that breed and would love to raise them. I've also thought it would be rewarding to teach part time, so, if that opportunity presents itself, I would take it up.
MI: What is the most interesting thing about you that most of us don't know
FB: A couple of things, I guess. I was a semi-professional bowler as a teenager. I averaged over 200 back in the mid 1960s when scores were much lower than they are now and bowled in many local tournaments, making a very good income. While I was in the Navy I served in the submarine service. I was peripherally involved in some of the spy stuff you are now hearing about from books like Blind Mans Bluff. Barry Merrill was also a submarine sailor and was involved in some pretty spooky stuff, too.
MI: Who inspired you?
FB: There are a couple of people who I would like to specifically mention.
First is Joe Major. I've always been impressed by the content of the papers he has published. I used his start I/O methodology for over ten years to plan for and configure mainframe environments. He also published one of the first papers I could find that compared workloads across shops. Joe is one of many, many very talented people who have written papers that impressed and inspired me. If I tried to list everybody we would never finish the interview.
The other person is John Pilch. He knows the mechanics of the CMG conference better than anybody else I know. When I first started working on the conference committee in the late 1980's, I spent many weekends with John and Mark Sorkin proofing preliminary agendas (before the days of electronic publishing) and discussing the logistical issues of running a large conference like CMG. The little that I do know about the operation of the CMG conference is all due to their mentoring.
MI: What is your favorite CMG memory?
FB: I've got so many fond memories of the organization it's hard to pick just a few. At the national level, seeing the 1998 conference come together and be successful was a real feeling of accomplishment (I was the general chair). I had a similar sense of accomplishment in 1994 when I was the program chairman.
At the regional level, I remember one particular meeting when I was able to get Joe Major, Tom Beretvas, Pat Artis and Alexander Brandwajn as speakers. Needless to say it was a standing room only crowd.
MI: What does the future look like to you? What platforms will survive till 2020? What old stuff will stick around? What jobs will matter? What about the mainframe?
FB: Boy, if I could answer those questions, I'd be rich.
When many of us started our careers in this field, we had one computing environment available to build and deliver business applications, the mainframe. As the saying goes, if your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. No matter what the business requirement was, we developed or purchased an automation solution for the one environment available to us. Today, we have many hosting options for our business solutions and, most of the time, we chose the environment that best matches the requirements of the business solution. There will always be a subset of the business process we support that will only operate on a mainframe type of hosting platform. I'm sure it will be around for many decades to come to handle these workloads.
The key issue for a business is not the attributes of a particular technology or hosting environment - most of the time you can make any of them a viable with the right architecture and design. The real challenge for a business is (and always has been) how can I quickly develop and bring to market a new automation solution or a new line of business based on some capabilities.
We need to look at what programming techniques are being taught in the schools, here and abroad. That is going to define the programming capabilities for the future and what kind of technical environments we will need to create and maintain to support them. While there is an effort to teach mainframe skills, it is dwarfed by the other technologies when it comes to classroom education time.
So, I suspect more and more of us (and the next generation that follows) will be managing large farms of commodity technology based servers. The shift will move away from maximizing the use of a scarce resource to making sure that we are delivering a service based on formal agreements. This is right in line with what I think is a future opportunity for CMG. This Service Management domain is not easy. The distributed and dynamic nature of this type of computing environment creates enormous demands for automated configuration management capabilities, image provisioning and monitoring because those attributes are not part of the basic design of the environment. Exactly the kind of challenges our analytical and management skills are suited for.
One thing for sure, the only constant in our profession is change. And change means opportunity.