I know it's lean times in IT, and product / services vendors are all beating the bushes. Some interesting patterns have emerged over the last few months ... My Boss Is In Town: This is far and away the #1 meme / structure of incoming cold calls; I get a (very) brief synopsis of services/value add, the caller and pushes for some face time with "their manager". Did some newsletter or web site suggest this novel approach last summer? I…
I don't travel a significant amount in my current position, but when I do, it seems to come in chunks. I'm about half way through a round of travel this fall - mostly business, but with some personal travel mixed in. Six cities, three countries in less than four months. Some observations at the halfway point ... @ the Data Center: The Surreal Life I'm finishing this entry around 4am - just off my second night in a row on…
The volume of Twitter posts popping up in my feed reader is ticking upward, a phenomenon I find interesting because of something I noted recently on LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, a new feature appeared, enabling me to report what I'm working on - Twitter for the office crowd. Always willing to try some flair, I jumped on the bandwagon, and set up a recurring ToDo for updating my LI-net on the day's focus. That lasted less than two weeks…
We added RSS capabilities to our internal PMO systems this past month, and traffic & content is already building up to become a valuable resource. Some have [correctly] noted that this increased visibility puts a bit more pressure on project managers and team members, to keep updating project blogs with pertinent information. This "time shifting" of communication should develop into the most effective way to let the rest of IT know what is happening in all areas. There are some…
As social networking sites proliferate and mature, we're all learning how to use these interesting new resources. True, it is just a modern take on "professional networking" - purposeful connections with different special interest groups, to share ideas and lay the foundation for current or future "opportunities". I'm involved with a couple of organizations like this - I like to connect with peers, and I like to know what's going on in my city and in the industry. Recently I…
This started off as a quick response to a question on LinkedIn Answers ... but I got on a roll ... Here's a simplistic way to measure and report on IT value: Is your IT group working on the right things? Are they working on the right things well? Is your IT spend comparable to industry norms? Is your IT spend comparable to other measures of company performance? A bit more detail ... balancing quantitative and qualitative ... (Quantitative) To…
Back in January, I added the Meebo client to my blog page, and over the past few months I've learned a lot about web chat in general ... There are other clients out there, and I've tried a few - most recently the AIM Wimzi, which came close to unseating Meebo as my web chat client of choice. Wimzi and Google Talk will allow me to use Trillian as a client, solving two problems I have with Meebo - logging…
A fun week or so, watching the impact of various abstracts / memes as they manifest themselves in many interesting ways ... Collaboration: A few evenings ago, I finished up an email regarding some projects at work; Mark1 has been investigating what I called "on-line collaboration", where shared documents, drawings, etc. could be discussed and modified via a shared desktop. I was telling him about "off-line collaboration", like blogs and wikis, and capturing the collective knowledge of a group. I…