Industry trends

IT anti-patterns: reverse behavior lessons from Steve Jobs

I’ve written before about how I value Twitter’s ability to fine-tune one’s personal information gathering, selecting people to follow who, over time, prove to be the most useful, interesting, and stimulating. I commonly refer to the people I follow as my “personal Algonquin Round Table,” in homage to the well-known literary group of the 1920s. [...]

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A CIO’s skeptical look at the QR code phenomenon

I had the good fortune last month to be invited to participate as a guest CIO on ITSM Weekly, a great IT-related podcast with the amusing ongoing tagline, “What happens when a CIO, a Service Desk Manager and an industry junkie chat weekly?!” Amidst the discussion and banter, Chris Dancy of ITSM Weekly gave me [...]

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Novels of IT, Part 1: Turtles All The Way Down

Novels are harder than most technology-oriented people typically realize. The backbone of a good novel is character development, meaning that the character learns and grows — which makes it easy for especially amateur novelists to start off with a character who is, frankly, little more than a one-dimensional dolt. This is an even more dangerous [...]

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Countering a disturbing bandwagon: rich vs. poor IT organizations

It’s time for me to speak up.  Not that I haven’t before, here and here. But sometimes I just have to shake my head. I read certain IT-related articles on the web, or tweets by some colleagues, and they’re so out of sync with IT reality that I feel like it’s Opposite Day. Here’s what [...]

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No silver bullets. Really!

Fred Brooks wrote a seminal essay in 1986, “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering“, a model of clear and cogent thinking that I consider to be required regular reading for anyone involved in information technology.  Despite the essay’s brilliance, and despite its wide promulgation and deserved fame, the phenomenon it describes [...]

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Cloud computing: misunderstood, but really not that complicated a concept

Consider these statements: Baseball is a game where the pitcher throws to the catcher. An iPhone is a device that lets you call anywhere in the world. The Grand Canyon is a tourist attraction in Arizona You’ll have noticed that these statements aren’t wrong, per se. But they still take you aback, don’t they? They [...]

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On Twitter, if you follow back reflexively, the spammers win

Are you among those who believe that if you don’t follow someone back on Twitter, you’re being snobby and arrogant?  Then this post is meant for you. My purpose here, quite candidly, is to persuade you that reflexively following someone back is not only a habit which encourages spam, but is in fact a major [...]

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“Getting” Twitter, from the technology executive’s perspective

I don’t want this to be just another post about Twitter, the current hot trend of the Internet.  Rather, I’d like to relate this new Twitter fad to a long-planned important topic here. Specifically, what can we in technology do to keep current and stay up-to-speed on our various areas of interest and expertise? There’s [...]

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