Careers

Your company’s gateway to the Internet is replacing your Shop Window and your Telephone Switchboard. Outage can be measured in lost dollars and reputation.If you pick up the phone to make a call and don’t here the dial-tone, what do you do? You might swear and bang the receiver repeatedly in disgust. If you go to a retail outlet and

The IT Industry has come along way since its professionals were consigned to the basement floors in the domain of flashing lights and large reel-to-reel tapes. IT is Business. IT is the core of commerce. IT has a seat at the Executive table . So what’s to like about the industry recently emerged from a

The Industrialization of IT and ITIL demands IT Leaders to make processes robust and repeatable, and an essential part of this transformation is ensuring that information is exchanged consistently in the right way using the right forms and templates. But so many IT organizations I meet reinvent the wheel – they make their own forms

I surveyed a number of Technical Professionals on the subject of going around their boss. The results were surprising.Going around your boss is generally frowned upon – it’s ethics are questionable. Ethics and business don’t always go together, even if you think they should. The truth is, an organization is comprised of humans with their

Is your IT Ops team productive and always on top of their game? No? Then maybe it’s their morale that needs a boost. There are some simple, low-cost and very effective things that can be done to improve this, and you’ll see that morale and productivity is boosted: Invest in information boards:Using the traditional dot-matrix

To continue the theme (see Are you a Technical Professional? and Are you a Geek?), you can find out if you’re a IT Leader in the making by asking yourself if you exhibit three or more of the behaviors below: You find yourself thinking with pragmatism and not with perfectionism You wish COBOL.NET was THE language of choice,

For a bit of fun I posted some behaviors exhibited by people who classify themselves as geeks, and invited you to see how you compared. So this time it’s a list of behaviors exhibited by Technical Professionals – techies who take themselves a bit more seriously.If you say Yes to more than 3 of these

If you’re an aspiring CIO or CTO then you have to keep on your game CONSTANTLY . But it isn’t always about being clever. It’s about doing a number of simple things well, and continuously. I post a number of articles about career progression from the shop floor to the board room table, and below

Are you a Geek? If you do three or more of the following, then the answer is Yes!You spend more time automating something than you ever would performing the task manuallyYou buy t-shirts for their comedy valueYou store binaries on your iPodYou have more categories on your iPod than you do tracksYou hack your iPodYou

Do you sometimes get blank stares when discussing IT matters with the business? Or maybe you get push-back on changes you want made, but the push-back is non-specific or seems irrational? Well maybe the reason is because you’ve lost your audience in your use of language. I come across situations very frequently where this is the

Many of you might know about Software as a Service (SaaS). It is a growing industry within IT, and based around (what might be to some) a simple concept. That is, software isn’t owned, but rented; not installed, but accessed; it’s not paid for upfront, but pay-as-you-go. You could liken it to watching TV rather