OWL: Risk Taking Panel

Oracle Women's Leadership group, OWL, brought us Risk Taking panel yesterday here on our Santa Clara campus with three esteemed panelists, Meg Bear, VP Oracle Cloud Social Platforms; Rodrigo Liang, VP SPARC Platforms; and Nandini Ramani, VP Java Client Development with Pamela Parish moderating.

Mr. Liang and Ms. Ramini both started out with a reflection of things that were happening during the Oracle merger and the risks they needed to take to get the best output for their teams and their own careers. With so much going on at those time, quick action was required.  From the continued momentum of Java and SPARC platform, I'd have to say some of their risks definitely paid off.

They all addressed a recent study that showed women regretted taking risks and what we could all do to be more comfortable about taking a risk. Ms. Bear noted that she didn't think women were weighing the downsides of the risks properly. Women seem to view the same potential of failure with more dread than a man would, and the panelists seem to agree: you don't know until you try it!

Ms. Ramini shared a lesson she learned while learning to ride a horse that her instructor gave her: if you've never fallen off a horse, how do you know what it feels like? Or that it will ever happen?

Ms. Bear noted the best opportunities she's had for professional development seems to have been when she was thrown into a situation she knew nothing about. It can be terrifying at the time, but she found those were the times she learned the most.  We shouldn't be afraid of making mistakes.  Ms. Bear recommended we all check out Seth Godin's blog, particularly his latest entry on mistakes.

Ms Ramini noted that for almost all women she knows would not consider it "risk taking" to make a brand new recipe for a large dinner, but somehow similar risks in the workplace that would have the same severity of consequences, have made her nervous in the past.  Fortunately, a manager years ago chided her for not speaking her mind in a meeting when someone was doing the wrong thing and she knew it, but was afraid to speak up and risk being embarrassed - said she hasn't shut up since. :-)

Ms. Ramini noted that when you do take a risk, you have to be willing to take "no" as an answer. When that happens, don't let that "no" be a forever no - just for that one thing.  Continue to take risks!

As a manager, the panel recommends helping to guide your team in taking risk. You can't constantly challenge the status quo and try to change directions of your team, that becomes tiring for all involved. They all agree to keep an open door for their teams and let them approach you with any idea, be a sounding board. Also, as a manager, you need to keep an open mind to these suggestions and be willing to change.

Remember to take risks when things are going well. While stated before, you don't want to change the status quo simply because you have nothing better to do - though staying still can be a risk, too.  Sometimes a little change is all that's needed to keep things on track or to even greatly improve the outcome of a project.

Ms. Ramini encourages people to work with others outside of your direct group, brainstorm, and keep your eyes on what others are doing - that's where innovation comes from.  You wouldn't want to be caught still using tcl/tk because you failed to notice the world had moved on ;-)

Mr. Liang noted that part of being the leader is about moving the group. It doesn't matter if you have great ideas if you can't get anyone to come along. It needs to be civil, of course. You can't force people to follow you - not in the long haul, anyways.

Ms. Bear mentioned that even being a risk taker, there are still times she's neglected to take the risk as soon as she should have. For example, she recently changed her role - something she's needed to do for a long time. While she was waiting for the right opportunity to come along, she could've perhaps pursued it in a different manner and made the change sooner.

Someone in the audience asked about making the jump into management. Ms. Ramini noted to make sure it's really something you want to do, as it's not for everyone. Talk to people who are managers, talk to people that know you and make an informed decision.

For career/role change in general, Ms. Bear said you need to convince yourself first that you're the right person for this new role, before you ask for it.  Find others that can help you ease into a new role, if that's a possibility.

Ms. Bear says she has seen women preventing others from making career growth, unfortunately, and pleads with all women to not do this.  Ms. Ramini hasn't seen this nasty behavior herself, but still noted that she tries to make sure that men and women on her team are given the same opportunities.

A great panel, followed by a great talk from Patty Azzarello - blog coming Monday. :)

Have you regretted not taking a risk?  What risk taking behaviour really paid off for you in the past?

Resolutions: Email and writing more

I haven't really done resolutions in a few years, besides little fun thing, like ... well, do more fun things! For example, in 2011 it was take a trip to the Grand Canyon, and we did!

I wasn't going to do any this year, either. But, after reading Meg Bear's post on email management, which was in line with earlier email advice I'd gotten from Rich Burridge, I realize I really have to get my email under control.

I've been notoriously bad about this for years. Since the new year rang in, I have deleted half of the emails from my personal account, which only has a web interface so it's a tedious process to find irrelevant and unwanted emails.  My personal email box is now down to 1000 messages (66% of my quota). That's good - it's a start.

But, my work email... boy. It's bad.

It was a mess when I worked at Sun. I tried many mail readers to see if it would help, finally settling on pine - which is, at least, quick and dirty and easy to delete things.  Alas, my Sun.Com inbox still swelled up to 4-5000 emails.

Determined to not let it happen again, I declared "email bankruptcy" in February 2010 when we became Oracle employees.  My Sun.com INBOX is still there, and I've occasionally gone and dug something out of it, but it's mostly ignored.

Things started off really well at Oracle. I switched to Thunderbird, which had better folder support and integration with Oracle's Beehive infrastructure. I kept my inbox down to just "to-do" type items, under 100 messages, for many months. Then I went on vacation. So, then I was keeping it around 300 messages. Still, totally manageable.

Then, I got busy on some projects. Then, more travel. Then, I became a manager. Then, I was involved in a very intense project to migrate our Sun defects from the Sun priority bug tracking system to the Oracle Classic system. That involved many subteams and hundreds of emails coming into my inbox every day, along with my normal workload.  In the middle of all of that, I got my appendix out.

Now my inbox is hovering around 6000 messages.

I am missing things. People send me emails with weird subjects that I delete without reading, only to later find out that the message contained a specific question for me. Things I really want to respond to are quickly buried, never to be seen again.

Filtering doesn't work, as I never open the folders those things go into (though, it was useful for me to then go and unsubscribe from some aliases when I realized I could live without those updates).

Now, how do I get out?

Even trying to keep to the "zero-inbox" going forward isn't going well. I routinely have 8-10 emails left at the end of the day that require too much time to reply to (like review a large document) or require action very soon.

So, those of you that do zero-inbox, did you ever have such a hole? How do you escape?

For 2013 I'd like to practice better email hygiene.

Once I get my email under control, I hope I'll have more time to write here.  For example, I've been tasting many outstanding beers lately, but no time to write them up.


Help! :-)

Three Day Adventure from Midwest to California

Appendix no more!

Last week I was supposed to fly down to San Diego to do some training on our migration from Sun's defect tracking system to Oracle's - you know, to get folks up to speed on the changes and a basic down and dirty training on how to use the new tools.

Well, that didn't happen - I got my appendix out instead!

What started as "gas" on Saturday night (painful bloating feeling), got more and more severe as time went on, including nausea and loss of appetite. Sunday, October 28, I had my husband take me to the ER.

I was convinced it was an ovarian cyst, as the last time I had this same pain (not too long ago), that's what it was diagnosed as by the ER doctors, so I nearly didn't bother to go in again, not wanting to spend the night in the ER before flying to San Diego on Monday morning.

I did have a small cyst (perfectly normal for a woman of reproductive age), but the cyst was on my left and the pain was on the right. So, the doctor's still refused my request for food/water, gave me a giant bottle of contrast to drink and left me to sleep, with my dear husband uncomfortably curled up in a "recliner" at my side.  Once the contrast settled in, I was taken to get a CT scan, moments later, my ER doctor (my 3rd since arriving) told me I was getting my appendix out.

A couple of quick visits from the surgeons, I was talking to the very kind anesthesiologist, Margie, about my health history and previous times I've been under general anesthetic. Then it was time.

I checked into the ER at about 8PM, had my CT scan about 4:15AM, was in the OR prep room at 6:10 AM (last time I remember looking at the clock) and *home* before 8AM feeling a thousand times better.  As painful as surgery can be, it beats appendicitis any day!

I encountered so many friendly nurses and doctors in the hospital, all very patient, caring and kind.

Now, just more than a week later, I'm just a bit sore and still a tad tired, but overall feeling good.

Put quite a damper on my week's plans, but I'm happy the surgeons got to it before it burst!

GHC12: Cybersecurity: Are we there now and where do we need to be in 5 years?

Moderator: Minerva Rodriguez (Raytheon) Panelists: Meg Layton (Symantec), Carrie Gates (CA Labs), Michele Guel (Cisco),  Perri Nejib (Lockheed Martin)

Michele Guel has, amazingly, been in the industry for more than 30 years, starting out as sysadmin - but then, November 2, 1988 happened... The Morris Worm! Suddenly her department saw the need for a security expert!

Meg Layton started out with a Political Science degree... only to find out later, there weren't any jobs for that degree. Her first computer she used was the lighting board at her local theater and eventually found her way into IT. Eventually her career took her to Africa and realized that you haven't seen a security problem like security problems they have in a country that's just gone through a civil war.  She switched into security on September 18, 2001 after the Nimda worm was launched.

Dr. Carrie Gates found computers by following music - their department had a nice stereo.  While working as a sysadmin, she started working on a part time PhD.  The other sysadmins bragged about how much security knowledge they had, and wanting to have more, she focused her PhD in security :-)

Perri Nejib originally wanted to be a dentist! But, turns out she wasn't a fan of biology, so she changed her focus to engineering - much more fun! Her first internship was with the government, so she was able to get security clearance before she graduated - which led to her first job in the Army, working on circuits for nuclear projectiles. Security was important back then, and more important now.

Dr. Gates is not fond of the word "cyber" - but, says it's good for getting funding! (ah, buzzwords) Most of the panelists agree - they just work on security. Some of the panelists are big focus folks, while others are working on research. Ms Guel laments on the great shortage of cyber security talent, encouraging everyone to go and learn more and come apply for security jobs.

Ms. Layton said we're still not "there" - too many teams are not keeping security in mind from the early design process. This is not something we can bolt on later (preaching to the choir, here :-)

Dr. Gates notes that as long as we adversaries, our work will never be done

Ms. Guel told us to go look at the Mitnick vs Shimamoura attack. That was 20 years ago. Machines are still vulnerable to that attack!  Until everyone understands that information on the Internet is forever and that machines are long lived - we won't be there.

Ms. Guel recently started security classes at her office for non-security people, getting people to be responsible and understand the repercussions. Seems that Ms. Layton's teams she's encountered suffer from lack of training in security as well. General goals over the next 5 years - just get people informed!

Ms. Layton encourages us to keep young women (and men) informed about computer security, but keep the message simple: Keep safe, keep telling.

All of these women love their jobs and have such passion, it's clear that there's a lot of work that needs to be done and lots of opportunities in this industry.  I know I love working in computer security

Unfortunately, some of the speakers were not good about staying on mic (they were very animated, so head kept turning away), so I couldn't hear all of them very well, but overall very interesting.

This post syndicated from Thoughts on security, beer, theater and biking!

GHC12: Securing Our Borders - Are we there yet?

Pamela K. Arya, A-T Solutions, has been actively involved with securing our borders. Some of their biggest concerns are IEDs, which are very cheap to make and deploy but very difficult to detect. These were first seen regularly in Northern Ireland, much less sophisticated than what we're seeing today in Iraq. Old IEDs were triggered with pressure so were often buried in the ground - easier to detect and monitor for. Newer ones can be set on the ground in a busy area and easily remotely detonated. Blocking signals doesn't work, as cell phones will also stop working!
Unfortunately, IEDs have become a part of the war on drugs in Mexico, often in the form of vehicle born IEDs. A-T Solutions will analyze post blast areas to help to determine what type of device was used and also will train local law enforcement about these devices. One of the best defenses against these attacks is still a dog - very difficult to trick a dog that's been well trained.

These types of devices also turn up in booby trapped homes, so there is special training for that as well. On the ground in Iraq, they've found that former farmers or other rural people can be better trained to find these IED devices. The theory is that by having a rural up bringing, these people are not used to tuning out noise or details that city dwellers need to do.

Her slides included images of post blast scenes and task forces that really bring home how real this problem is.

Laura McLay, Virginia Commonwealth University, has been working on aviation security and optimization, particularly focused on protecting nuclear material. Looking at aviation security, the first obvious thing we think of: hijackings! These have been a problem since the 1940s, with domestic hijackings peaking in the 1970s.   In response to a possible terrorist related plane crash (ended up just being an accident), Al Gore sponsored a bill creating CAPPS: Computer-Aided Passenger Prescreening System. 1998-2001, only selectee baggage was scanned. This worked well.

These machines that scan checked luggage weigh tons, take years to make and were only made by two companies, so after September 11, 2001 when all bags needed to be scanned - airport lobby floors had to be reinforced and two companies were very busy for awhile.

When a new device is being tested, it typically starts out in just four airports - and it's difficult (if not impossible) to keep those four airports a secret, so other methods need to be deployed.

Random screening doesn't seem to be an effective way to deter actual threats and thoroughly screening all passengers is not feasible, so more research needs to be done in this area to optimize this.

Susan Wilson, Cyber and DHS Solutions Operating Unit/Northrop Grumman Information Systems, Border Patrol Goals and Challenges. The Mexican border threats is well understood, but now we're having to watch the Canadian border more and the old  methods won't work with the layout of the land we have in the north.

If you're trying to protect with something obvious, like a wall, it's easier for people to come up with ways to work around it. The more hidden and subtle your border control is, the more effective it can be - but only combined with rapid response.  More agile solutions that can stay one step ahead are optimal.

One threat they actually see: balloons! So, watching the ground alone is not sufficient.

They would like to leverage open standards based components to integrate field-proven detection and assessment devices with a good user interface!

Questions for this panel ranged from how are environmental impacts considered (separate consulting firms all come together on the final solutions for border control), speed of screening at airports (focusing on doing this but maintaining security - not there, yet), agencies working together (there is just not enough funding for everyone to have all of this amazing equipment), to serving your country by protecting the borders.


Seniha EsenYuksel, University of Florida, was unable to present today due to a family emergency, but her slides will be included on the Grace Hopper Wiki.

This panel was moderated by Wendy Rannenberg.


This post syndicated from Thoughts on security, beer, theater and biking!

GHC12: Anita Borg Social Impact Award Winner: Cathi Rodgveller

This year's winner of the Anita Borg Social Impact is Cathi Rodgveller, founder of IGNITE (Inspiring Girls Now in Technology Evolution) Worldwide , she has impacted the lives of more than 18,000 women - and inspired many of us here today!

We had a wonderfully intimate session  - a great way to spend some time with an amazing woman! Her presentation was short and sweet, giving us enough background to fuel the fire for questions - and I discovered that this entire room was full of interesting women doing great work to inspire and mentor young women in technology careers.

Ms. Rodgveller started IGNITE on a Sex Equity grant 14 years ago in Seattle. She makes sure that the group stays lively and accessible by holding an event at least once a week. There are over 30 active chapters in Washington alone - and more across the globe! Ghana opened a chapter 5 years ago, and Legos, Nigeria has over 20 chapters - some of them the first programs in the area for girls.

She is tired of hearing schools saying that this outreach is not a priority, so if anyone can help set up this program for middle school or high school near you, she knows that the teachers would appreciate it. Ms. Rodgveller has been running this program herself for 14 years, and is willing to mentor anyone who can help start a chapter.  As a woman in industry, you can volunteer as little as 90 minutes for one event once a year.

We were fortunate to have one of the very first girls that went through the program at Nathan Hill High School in Seattle.  This girl, now a woman, said she originally wanted to be a veterinarian and considered herself totally technically unskilled. This long ago workshop inspired her to learn more and take a few computer science classes in college, and now she's about to finish her PhD at USC! It's amazing what an impact a few events could have on a young woman's life. Truly inspiring!

She encourages these events to be about stories, not lectures. Her book covers how to do this for each age and is geared towards teachers, using teaching models they are already familiar with. The program can be very inexpensive - merely the cost of a bus and a substitute teacher. It's designed to be cheap and easy.

If you're a woman in industry who wants to help? You can meet with a representative from the school to help get them started up and get them connected with IGNITE.

Ms. Rodgveller needs you - can you helps start up a local branch? You can learn how to do this yourself with the IGNITE Toolkit.

This post syndicated from Thoughts on security, beer, theater and biking!