Insight for Current and Future Business Leaders
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Every morning I post a new quotation on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The quotation on February 9th, 2012 was from Jerry Weinberg, one of my mentors in the IT industry. The quotation was: “It may look like a crisis, but it’s only the end of an illusion.” Many years ago, I copied this quotation to [...]
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The naive CIO believes all the articles telling you that it’s your duty as a CIO to prevent devices like iPhones, Android devices and tablets of all types from coming into your workplace. The naive CIO may actually believe that there is a workplace these days, even though more and more business is being conducted [...]
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I’ve talked a lot about human nature in my articles. I believe that human nature is the biggest challenge to most successful management, and especially the biggest challenge for IT managers. Information technology is all very logical. Software does exactly what you tell it to do. Computers — for the most part — behave the [...]
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I lived in Boston during the height of the Bobby Orr days, and I got caught up in the enthusiasm that Boston felt for their Bruins. I had never seen ice hockey before I moved to Boston, and I learned the game by watching the Bruins win the Stanley Cup. One of the intriguing tactics [...]
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Note: This article is intended for a business audience. For a technical explanation of cloud computing, see the sidebar below the business article. To the non-technical among us, “cloud computing” may sound like something vague and amorphous. After all, it’s a cloud, right? So that means it’s something that’s insubstantial, floating in the sky. If [...]
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In March of 2009 I was the speaker at a SIM Meeting in Dallas. In the Q&A at the end, a young security manager asked me a question. He said that he has succeeded in making his company’s infrastructure good enough that they have no problems with security breaches, data leaks, viruses, or any of [...]
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Suppose your IT organization is in the market for a new IT product (or service, but I’ll use the word “product” here to simplify the discussion). It could be a computer, network device or other hardware item, or it could be a software package or SaaS (software as a service). Regardless of what you’re looking [...]
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It happened a while ago – before GPS devices, and before Google Maps or Mapquest. I was trying to drive to an address in a small town and I did what reasonable people did back then: I asked someone at a gas station for directions. One detail from the directions stands out in my memory: [...]
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I recently attended an IT panel discussion where one of the attendees asked the panel what IT initiatives are strategic to the business. There was a brief debate about what “strategic” means, and I came to the conclusion that it’s impossible to tell whether or not a specific IT initiative is strategic to a particular [...]
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There are some jobs where achievement is the absence – or maybe the avoidance – of failure. Driving a bus is one of those jobs; if you make it through the day without an accident, without hurting or annoying anyone, and without falling behind your schedule, then you’re successful. There are other jobs where carrying [...]
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Disaster struck the southern United States last month as Hurricane Katrina did major damage to New Orleans and southern parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. We don’t yet understand the full impact of the storm in terms of lives lost, families disrupted, and the impact on the American and global economies. But we know that [...]
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Last month I had the unique opportunity to help a large university plan its future curricula for its undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer information systems. The university recognizes that Information Technology is changing, and wants to make sure that its students are being prepared for the real world. To this end the university has [...]
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