Thesis progress and upcoming presentations
Since finishing up my summer course on data warehousing and data mining, I have been working on my thesis proposal. If things keep progressing, I will be done with the literature review in the next few...
View ArticlebMighty.com
Since there have now been two of my columns published, I realized people visiting my site might like to know the news. About a month ago, I was contacted by CMP Media to write a bi-weekly column for...
View ArticleCarr's "IT Doesn't Matter"
This was a critique I wrote of Carr's "IT Doesn't Matter" that was published in Harvard Business Review.1. SynopsisNicholas Carr has created a lot discussion in the IT scholarly field with nearly 400...
View ArticleTwo more columns on bMighty.com
There are two more columns by me on bMighty.com.Managing Relationships With End Users This was based on a previous blog entry with some more details and some things more fleshed out. 3 Ways to Treat IT...
View ArticleWe don't need no stinkin' filters!
Sam Zell, CEO and largest shareholder of the company over the Chicago Tribune among other things, recently sent out the following memo:Memo to Tribune employees from Sam ZellFrom: Talk to Sam Sent: Tue...
View ArticleIT projects for the organization with operational IT
In my critique of Nicholas Carr's "IT Doesn't Matter," I made mention of choosing whether or not IT is strategic for an organization. In a sense, this choice is between strategic IT and operational IT....
View ArticleWow. Just wow.
This week I attended the EDUCAUSE Management Institute, and it was just amazing. It was four days of management and leadership sessions for IT managers in higher education. It was one of those things...
View ArticleEDUCAUSE Management Institute
Now that I am back from the AUTM annual meeting, I have some time to reflect on the last couple weeks. The first event I attended was the EDUCAUSE Institute Management Program which was a week long...
View ArticlePutting IT management in its place
I originally wrote this for my column at bMighty.com, and so I am reposting it here because it is an important issue for IT management.Who do you think holds more sway over a business's strategy and...
View ArticleBusiness-IT alignment sanity check
Jason Hiner has posted a blog entry talking about business-IT alignment as being a concept behind the times. He argues that if a company is working on business-IT alignment they have already lost the...
View Article10 ways IT workers can enable better business-IT alignment
Aligning and integrating IT with the business takes the work of people both outside of IT and inside of IT. While it requires coordination and teamwork, there are things that we as IT workers can do to...
View ArticleInnovation budget
For the last few weeks, I have been working on my FY09 budget that runs from July of this year through June of next year. It can be quite the challenge to predict the needs of the future year...
View ArticleIs there critical mass for a Microsoft shop?
Working in a Microsoft shop has been a lot better than I originally expected it to be five years ago. Obviously there are still the drawbacks with things like licensing costs and the operating system...
View ArticleInnovation lessons from Blizzard
Colin Stewart at the Orange County Register has compiled eleven lessons that Blizzard has learned by being innovative with its products. In case you have not heard of them, Blizzard is the company that...
View ArticleGood to Great: Technology accelerators
I am reading Good to Great at the moment, and it was really exciting to read about the role of technology in a company going from good to great. Every company that really went from good to great had...
View ArticleTalking to the Other Side
No, I don't mean talking to ghosts here like a character from an M. Night Shyamalan movie. I mean talking to the other side of the organization, the non-IT side. As technical people, we can easily fall...
View ArticleBehavioral interviewing
We're in the process of interviewing candidates for a few technology licensing manager positions, and the method of interviewing always comes up. After this year's Super Bowl, one of the first things I...
View ArticleMonkey business
William Oncken, Jr. and Donald Wass wrote an article several years ago for Harvard Business Review about time management called "Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey." As you can imagine, Oncken and...
View ArticleEvaluating ideas
One of the things that comes up in tech transfer and in IT all the time is whether something is a good idea or whether it is truly innovative. A podcast I listen to is called "Killer Innovations" from...
View ArticleSystems Management News
In case you have not noticed in the navigation, I started writing a column called "The Savvy Manager" for Systems Management News. The magazine is targeted at system administrators, data center...
View ArticleThoughts on Technology Accelerators
One of my blog's visitors asked me some questions about technology accelerators as described in Good to Great, and she said it would be ok if I posted the response here as well.If technology cannot...
View ArticleAdd Value to your Business by Understanding the Business
The new issue of Systems Management News is out with my latest column. In this month's column, I talk about adding value to your organization by building better understanding of your organization and...
View ArticleThe Savvy Manager
This is a column I wrote for Systems Management News that I am reposting here.Being a manager in IT is an challenging and often thankless job, but there are steps that we can take to make things...
View ArticleCompetitive advantage from IT
Andrew McAfee is a professor at the Harvard Business School, and he writes some interesting things in his blog about his research and thoughts on the new dynamics of the enterprise. In his latest blog...
View ArticleIT@Illinois kicks off
Yesterday was the kick-off of the IT@Illinois project to envision the future of IT at the Urbana-Champaign campus of University of Illinois. Going into the day, we knew a little of what Sally Jackson,...
View ArticleCentral IT, governance, and shifting the stack
This post is going to be somewhat of an open response to Ingbert's comment to my post on the IT@Illinois launch, and it will segue a bit into talking a bit about some aspects of a concept I've been...
View ArticleState of the IT@Illinois
Last Friday was an interesting point in the IT@Illinois discussion. Together with Craig Jackson, Chuck Thompson, Dan Jacobsohn, and Kelly Bridgewater, we organized the Friday morning caffeine break to...
View ArticleAnyone can be replaced, but how do you make yourself less so?
You need to make yourself as valuable as possible to your employer in any job market, but especially a market like the current one where there are lots of people eager to have a job. Being good...
View ArticleRationally diffuse: Centralization doesn't matter
In a recent discussion of the progress of IT@Illinois and comparing it to "rationalization" efforts at some of our CIC peers, the group felt that we have found the way to do IT "right" for a large...
View ArticleRationally diffuse: Aggregating from the right perspective
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how centralization (or decentralization) doesn't matter, about doing the right things at the right places. With some further discussions and feedback, I wanted to...
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