“Creativity is today’s competitive weapon,” as an article at Peter Stark correctly states. The IT workplace is becoming more and more competitive and innovation can keep companies in the game. The constraints of time, the mounting projects, and many other obstacles can be overcome through creativity.

Gary Vikesland’s site has an article on employee creativity. He makes some excellent points which I list below, looking at the good news and bad news for managers. Check out the page for his complete list. Here I have modified them to highlight some of the key concepts:
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Google’s commitment towards offering faster services has ensured that the +1 button is not left out. Since its launch in June 2010 Google claims that they have been working extremely hard to enhance it’s load time.
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I read a great article on four bad habits: losing focus, jumping to conclusions, fighting fires 24/7, and poor time management. Previously, we have written about four enemies of IT management: the speed of business, tech pursuits, laissez-faire project management, and communication. Let’s look at three good habits to avoid the bad ones and conquer the enemies of IT.
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The quality of a company’s life depends on effective communication. Establishing good communication begins and ends with a company’s leaders, from the CEO to the IT managers, and should be one of their core objectives. Bad communication, or the lack of it, can cripple a company’s ability to move forward in achieving objectives and to keep pace with competition. IT managers need to build an environment where the truth is heard.

Establishing Upward Communication is the Focus

The reason upward communication needs to be focused on is because by virtue of the top establishing communication from the bottom up, they are establishing communication from the top down. And it can’t happen in the reverse. Staff are not in position to establish downward communication because that sort of management is not their role in the company. That said, let’s look at a few ways to build good upward communication.

1. Keep the Juices Flowing – Reverse the Gravity of Introversion

IT departments tend to attract introverted which inherently impedes communication, so to reverse that momentum there needs to be initiative taken to keep the communication juices flowing. If the juices are flowing then people develop trust, they learn how each other like to communicate, and it will make important or difficult communication significantly easier. Building relationships among staff can open people up to communicate more, and this can come in the form of making a point to talk to staff often, bringing in breakfast on Mondays, all staff going out to eat on Fridays, IRC–be creative.

2. Keep the Juices Flowing – Keep it Simple

Instead of having elaborate meetings and fancy reports, use email or instant messaging. More can be communicated and in a faster and more effective manner. Instead of using databases and spreadsheets, look into creating an in-house wiki page where how-to’s, reports, and other information can be posted. It will build a sense of identity, transparency, and camaraderie among staff, and is a very effective way to store and retrieve data. Using simple means of communication is a chief way to keep juices flowing and establish that level of communication managers need.
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We previously have covered several IT enemies: requirements creep, speed of business, and tech purists. One enemy that has not been addressed is the laissez-faire approach to project management. Any great project needs leadership, management, and lots and lots of work. These three roles must be wound tightly together to produce an unbreakable whole. The laissez-faire approach to these tasks often becomes the unwinding of IT projects, and even the departments themselves.
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A recurring idea in IT management discussions is that we need to lose the “IT” (“Information Technology”) in “IT Service Management.” Or maybe just the “T” or just the “I” — I’ve heard all variations. The argument goes something like this:

“The IT label is killing us! They think we’re a bunch of geeks that don’t understand The Business! They are outsourcing us! They don’t understand us! We’re just a cost center! We have to kill the IT label and then they will think we are a Strategic Partner!”

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One of the major appeals of the Mac computer environment is the security that comes with them. For years, the common refrain for Mac computers was they were more secure because more people used the Windows operating system, so malware creators normally targeted the Microsoft environment. Fast forward to 2011 and we find that Mac/Apple is considered the world’s most valuable brand, as more and more users want to be involved with Mac’s dominance of the mobile device world.

While the home computing market may be falling behind the mobile device industry, that doesn’t mean it’s not a viable target for malicious program writers. Furthermore, the idea that Mac home computers are inherently more secure may be coming to an end, which is something to consider if your IT department has plans of conducting a switchover to the Apple environment.

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Passwords are the first line of defense. Some would consider this secondary to firewalls and other road blocks. However, many attacks are from inside the network, and once outside attacks have gotten inside, passwords still remain a defense. The recent breach at Sony as well as other reports show that IT departments should take a second look at their password policy.

First, let’s look at why password policies need to be revisited. When RockYou was attacked in 2009, the list of 32 million passwords were posted online. Imperva took the data and published a report titled “Consumer Password Worst Practices” which revealed that at least 50% of users had chosen trivial passwords. The fact is, most people do not choose good passwords.

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The concept of cloud computing — the process of allocating resources of a group of networked computers — has been growing in popularity at an accelerated rate So much so, in fact, the concept can be obfuscated to the point where the concept does not fit the type of computing being done, all in hopes of sounding current.

Simply put, the idea of “cloud computing” has become a buzz word, and because of that, it’s used to describe systems that don’t necessarily offer true cloud computing. However, thanks to a definitive guide published by CloudAve.com, there are now some standards to consider before companies start throwing the “could computing” label around.

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The Chinese philosophy of yin yang represents how any given item only exists because of and in harmony with its opposite. Although not polar opposites, I like to consider agile and traditional project management methods as yin and yang, respectively. If you get a person from each side on this subject matter in the same room, and there will definitely be some opposing forces, hopefully intellectually, but usually physical, pushing against each other. As a practitioner of agile development methodologies, I recently found myself in yet another conversation with the yang. As the typical debate ensued, Mr. Yang, in an attempt to negate the effectiveness of the core concepts of agile development, proposed an interesting hypothesis: agile development methods only increase productivity because of the Hawthorne effect. Blasphemy! But is he right?

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