This is kind of a taboo topic in my industry, especially considering that I’m a consultant… freelance at that. But… here we go!

I ask my clients this all the time, but not with regards to my work, but to that of other consulting companies that I have to work with. When it comes to the circle of trust between clients and consultants, it’s never the same. Night and day differences for different clients and different consultants.

The answer to this question should always be, never. You should always have checks in place to verify your consultants work. This can either be employees, a third party consultant, logging software, or even documentation reviews.

Now, I’m not saying that all your consultants are lying to you, generally they’re trustworthy people, but most people forget that this is business, and there’s a lot of time and money on the line. I like taking someone at their word as much as the next guy, but when all hell breaks loose, all you’ll have is a, “But you said…” And that’s not something you can take to your board with.

If your consultants are on the up-and-up then they will have no problem with one of your own sitting with them, or asking them for documentation outlining all the steps taken for you to verify in a separate environment. Checks and balances exist for a reason.

Very rarely do I take anyones word on anything completely. Nine times out of ten, when I learn something new, I verify it through a second source. It doesn’t mean that I don’t believe the person or piece of information that I’m reading, but it’s a cold hard fact that people lie, forget parts, or exaggerate all the time. It’s nothing personal, but it happens.

I worked with one client where they had outsourced a huge chunk of development to a very large consulting company. They hired me to check their work. Think of it like an ongoing development assessment. It wasn’t that they had no faith in the large consulting company, it’s just that they knew that they had no clue what was technically going on and they wanted someone on their side to verify this multi-million dollar project instead of just taking their word that “it works”. By me being there, and my reputation of being a no bullshit kind of guy that only cares about my client and will easily chew out a third party when they’re caught lying to my client, their work improved greatly while I was there, and it even tightened up. No more sloppy code that’ll get the code working… barely. No more crappy documentation that’s virtually unreadable and definitely not useable. No more useless meetings that were wasting tens of thousands of dollars. And most importantly, the consulting company was being held to their word with a paper trail. All of this happened just because I sat in on a few meetings and reviewed their environments. As they say, “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”  And I’ve seen it all, so I was the companies ace in the hole that wound up saving them a ton of cash, and even better, getting the project in on time.

At another client in a similar situation, the consulting company kept telling them that “no changes were made”, and they didn’t have a large IT staff knowledgeable to check into this. After some checking some history loggers I had setup on the servers, I was able to send them a transcript of all the commands issued, files updated, and in some cases differences in code (I had the previous versions saved elsewhere). This was especially important as it was relevant to a milestone that required payment.

Again, a lot of this comes down to standard business practices, but a lot of the time, in the niche field of Identity Management, most companies don’t have anyone on staff that knows this type of work well enough to do these checks properly.

I know that most people won’t read this and agree, but do nothing about it. I hope that it gets at least one person to follow through and save them a ton of headache down the road.

.: Adam

I’ve seen this question a lot on client sites…

When trying to install the design console for oracle identity manager, all the text  in the prompt windows is missing. You can see the radio buttons and text boxes, but the descriptions are all empty.

This is most likely because you’ve copied only the setup_client.exe file to do the install.

To fix this, you need to also copy over the folder: installServer/com/oracle/xl/installer

This folder contains the text files needed =)

.: Adam

Here’s a quick SQL script that’ll list out all the open tasks with their login, date, and details:

select oti.sch_actual_start,oti.sch_data,usr.usr_login from oti inner join orc on oti.orc_key=orc.orc_key inner join usr on orc.usr_key=usr.usr_key where oti.sch_actual_start>’15-AUG-10′

The filter in this script (where oti.sch_actual_start>’15-AUG-10′) is just to list all tasks that have occurred after the 15th.

.: Adam

This is probably a first! Ex-employee for EMS Consulting / Intelligent Chaos (aka: The company that uses my resume without my permission) got busted for MURDER! This is crazy! Jeffrey Mundt and his partner Joseph Banis were arrested in June for killing a third guy in their love triangle, sealing him up in a rubber container, and then burying him beneath the basement of Jeffrey’s home in Louisville, KY.

A few months prior to that, they were busted for drugs, counterfeiting, fake ID’s, and guns too!

You can read more about it here!

The most ironic part about this is that the “lead on the project” that accused me of taking meth (see this article) and asked me to leave  was Jeffery! Woah! I can hardly believe it! I’m glad I got the hell out of there… Now I really don’t trust that company and there personnel choices.

.: Adam

While working with the PeopleSoft Integration Broker plugin for Oracle Identity Manager, I’ve come across this error when doing some bulk reconciliations: java.net.SocketException: Too many open files

The default limit for Linux is 1024 (you can check yours by running: ulimit -a)

By bumping this up to 2048, the issue seemed to have cleared up. I expect that there’s some faulty socket handling code that’s actually causing this. But, it all seems ok now =)

You can increase the size by running this: ulimit -n2048

cheers!

.: Adam

Go get it! I’m downloading it right now =)

Follow this link for the download:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/downloads/oid-11g-161194.html

Scroll down and select Oracle Identity and Access Management (11.1.1.3.0).

This download will include:

• Access Manager
• Adaptive Access Manager
• Identity Navigator
• Identity Manager
• Platform Security Services
• Authorization Policy Manager

You can get all the 11g connectors here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/id-mgmt/downloads/connectors-101674.html

Cheers!

.: Adam

• updating IDMJobs.com again =) http://IDMJobs.com #

Every once in a while, I get the urge to update a small site http://www.IDMJobs.com

I receive a few emails and calls every day about different gigs relating to Identity Management. Most of them I’m not interested in, so I make them public so that everyone else can take advantage of them if they like =)

.: Adam

How many times have you asked a contractor, “Do you know the software package X?”

This isn’t the right question to be asking. They may know it, but that’s not as important as their ability to learn it on the fly.

Anyone telling you that they know everything is lying to you. A company may say that they know everything, but what really matters is the specific resource that’s implementing the technology in your environment.

Even if they’ve worked on a specific piece of software in the past, keeping up to date is a whole task in itself that no one has time for. An engineers greatest asset that you need to look for is their ability to adapt, learn, and augment the technology into what’s in front of them.

I know a ton of different pieces of software. I could easily go into the hundreds, and probably reach well over a thousand (I’m not talking enterprise-only). But when someone approaches me about what I know, I get ready for the explanation. It generally goes something like this:

Company – “Have you every integrated SoftwareX into this IdM Suite before?”

Me – “Nope.”

Company – “Oh, well, we really want someone that’s done it before.”

Me – “That’s not actually what you want. What you want is someone that knows the IdM suite inside and out, has worked with many different types of connected resources, and has lots of hands-on experience in solving integration issues rapidly, efficiently, and correctly. You’ll never find anyone that has implemented your exact requirements before, and no one has ever deployed a vanilla ‘out-of-the-box’ installation. It just never happens. To maximize the benefits of an IdM suite, the installation needs to be custom tailored to your specific business processes. That’s why this IdM suite is so powerful, and why it will help organize your entire corporate backend infrastructure. If you implement it wrong, you’ve just wasted a million bucks. So, do you want someone that’s going to copy / paste an implementation from another client and hope for the best? Or, would you prefer someone that has a proven track record of being able to integrate anything you throw at them, no matter how custom it is, and be successful the first time?

Generally, I hear silence for a while, while I wait for their minds to finish exploding. =)

Identity Management isn’t burger flipping. It’s a Top Chef challenge.

A burger flipper will take a runbook they built from another client (or a coworker gave them) and try to use it to build out your environment as quickly as possible because you both agreed that a fix-bid contract is acceptable (they’ll both loose).

A Top Chef will take all his culinary skills that he’s honed over the years from proven successes and cater a couture solution that will maximize your return on your investment in the most reasonable time possible. You’ll pay more, but it will be right, and delicious!

Sorry… I’m hungry and took my analogy a little too far, but I think you get the point.

So the next time you want to know if a client knows a certain software package, make sure you follow it up with something like, “… and what were some of the biggest integration challenges that you’ve faced in the past and how did you overcome them while keeping the client happy and staying within budget?”

A burger flipper won’t even know where to begin. A Top Chef will smile, rub his hands together, and get ready to amaze you.

.: Adam

Most likely this week. I’m not sure of all the details, but it’s a point release update and there’s heavy BEPL integration. More details will follow once we get the docs.

So, if you’re running OIM 9.1.x, get your dev environments ready to start your upgrades!

.: Adam