As we slowly climb out of a global recession the idea of being a corporate drone is becoming less appealing. The truth is that somewhere between 7.2 to 8 million people lost their corporate-level job, most which were from large companies.
Archive for the ‘Resources’ Category
Have IT Professionals Started To Move Away From Corporate Positions?
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010Enemies of IT: Tech Purists
Thursday, September 30th, 2010In a previous article, I discussed how the Speed of Business can often impede the management and execution of IT strategies. In this article, I’ll discuss something that often slows down your processes, which in effect pushes your processes up against your already tight timelines: Tech Purists. There are varying types of Purists, and they all can create a bottleneck in your IT processes. However, they do bring a lot of value to the table, so the best solution is to properly identify them and channel their purist zeal into additional efficiency and productivity.
Enemies of IT: The Speed of Business
Thursday, September 16th, 2010The right implementation of information technology and systems can drastically and immediately improve a workplace. It is this quick turnaround from implementation to tangible benefits that causes many business executives to push for an equally quick implementation of these technologies. However, IT managers need to keep executives’ over zealous timelines in check.
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Building The TPS House For IT Management
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010So, I am need of a recognizable icon representing Lean for my book rewrite, and of course I thought of the famous Toyota Production System “house.” (Some are now calling it the “Thinking Person’s System.) As far as I know the concept is not copyrighted, if I build my own representation from scratch.
This led to the question, has anyone ever attempted a mapping of IT onto that house? Google isn’t showing me anything.
Know Thy Audience, End-User
Thursday, August 12th, 2010In IT, technology decisions and policies can ultimately affect and involve end-users. The CIO of NASA, Linda Cureton, argues on herblog that IT professionals live life in an IT “Flatland” where we do not always have the end user’s needs in mind. Flatland is an allusion to “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.” The 19th century story, about characters being flat triangles, lines, and other polygons, is often used to illustrate the inability to infer dimensions outside our realm of sense.
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Enemies of IT: Requirements Creep
Thursday, July 29th, 2010Information Technology can be loosely defined as implementing technology to improve upon a business process. Many businesses fail to properly document the full procedure and scope of a business process, as many processes are generally handed down from one worker with the responsibility to others that replace them and/or others that get hired to assist with that particular process. For this reason, when IT is called in to alleviate some sort of burden or otherwise improve upon one of these business processes, requirements creep is a byproduct of the lack of an existing, well-defined, and/or documented business process. Here’s a few things IT management should do to combat requirements creep:
Useful Open Source Project Management Tools
Thursday, July 15th, 2010SOS Open Source has been used to find and select open source web-based project management with issue-tracking and time-tracking tools to manage multiple IT projects, possibly localized in Italian (or at least open for internazionalization and localization).
Showing The Value Of IT To Your Business
Thursday, June 10th, 2010Here are several excerpts from an article by Dan Woods, CTO and Editor of Evolved Technologist, The Over-Commited CTO:
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What Is A Configuration Management Database?
Thursday, May 13th, 2010The concept of the Configuration Management Database extends back at least 15 years, to the first version of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). It has proven a provocative concept for the management of enterprise information technology, attracting enthusiastic support, vendor investment and marketing, and fierce criticism.
Start Your Process With Future State
Thursday, May 6th, 2010As I have mentioned in numerous posts over the last several months, I am finding that things like process, governance, architecture, SOA, cloud computing, and others are much easier in my new startup world than in my old corporate world that I battled in since the 80’s. Even though I never intend to return to the corporate world I feel obligated to share with my colleagues in the corporate world because I know how hard it can be innovate and promote change in established cultures. In part one on process, I recommended creating a startup atmosphere by building a small team free from the constraints of the corporate setting.