Sh.. IT Happens #5

Another installment of Sh..IT Happens, and another trip through the blogosphers for some of my favorite picks of the week.

1. Brand You: how do you come across at work?

   Elizabeth Harrin writes a great post on her blog A Girls Guide to Project Management about personal branding in the workplace. She interviews Salma Shah who share her views on the importance and value of your personal brand, your ’emotional fingerprint’ and asks what supermarket do you liken yourself as a brand?

2. Free Agents in the workforce

   An interesting view from Jeffrey Phillips on his blog Thinking Faster . He ponders the concept of the free agent, or what we might normally call a freelancer or contractor. He argues that freelancers are great for business because they add flexibility and are lower cost, overall. Business, though, won’t be controlling their talent in an oppressive way, I suggest, that binding employees into the organization offers. I wonder: will the future organization retain highly-skilled, core team members and then buy services from lower-skilled agents, or the other way around?

3. 7 Tech Innovations That Changed The World

An interesting collection of ‘innovations’ according to Diann Daniel at CIO.COM. First listed is RFID – eh? Maybe I missed somethin, but RFID hasn’t changed the world, yet. The rest of the list I do agree with!

4. How Uncle Sam Is Already Saving Money With IT

   Marianne Kolbasuk McGee on Information Week’s Government IT blog shares with us the investment in technology related spending by Obama’s administration. It’s great to see how billions of taxpayer dollars are being saved by information technology, creating work in the IT sector. Are their jobs delivering government projects in your area? 

5. Gen X, Gen Y and Baby Boomers Fight for Same IT Jobs

Cindy Waxer at CIO.COM writes that IT managers are facing a tough predicament: a head-on collision between two vastly talented and vastly different generations, both vying for full-time employment in a fast-shrinking economy.

6. Getting & Keeping IT Top Management’s Attention

I couldn’t write an another edition of Sh..IT Happens without covering an article by Dr Jim Anderson on his blog TheBusinessofIT. This time, Dr Anderson writes about the causes of neglect in an IT organization, leading to project failure. He shares the views of Jesper Simonsen who studies have shown that when senior IT management are involved in projects, projects perform much better because of the deeper involvement in decision making and problem solving. I think this is because many IT organizations haven’t got the principle of ’empowerment’ quite right. Empowerment at lower levels gives IT workers the authority to make decisions and keep the wheels moving. In my opinion, senior IT managers need to have a strong control environment, but manage my exception. What Simonsen’s study tells us is that IT workers are not yet empowered enough and need the involvement of senior managers to progress projects. This is a conundrum. Do IT manager maintain their involvement, but restrict the empowerment of their subordinates, or do they hold back and let projects fail? These are the extremes, and the solution is in the middle. Perhaps more coaching and mentorship are the solutions… but who invests in coaching/mentorship in a recession? Well, the enlightened of course.