Pillars of Purview

“No IT projects”? A practical take

Tweet If you follow the news, it’s quite clear that we’re in the “silly season” of politics, that time when people eagerly grab hold of any questionable statement of their opponent and use it to extrapolate rank incompetence or dastardly intentions (or worse). Language is frequently quoted out of context, definitions become blurred, things get [...]

10 comments Read the full article →

Valuable vs. fun: learning to love IT Asset Management

Tweet My attitude is that if you push me towards something that you think is a weakness, then I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength. – Michael Jordan As with so much in life, so it goes with IT: the parts that are fun aren’t always valuable, and the parts that are valuable aren’t [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

Novels of IT, Part 3: Adventures of an IT Leader

Tweet My long quest for an insightful, broad, and practically applicable “novel of IT” finally met with resounding success, once I got my hands on the outstanding book that is the subject of this post: Adventures of an IT Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O’Donnell. To recap: I was looking [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

Three IT behavior patterns seen in the wild

Tweet Assumed Omniscience, Chooser’s Remorse, and Fixation With all due respect to the many fine folks I’ve worked with in the career I’ve spent decades pursuing: we IT types can be an idiosyncratic, even odd, bunch.  That’s actually well known to us all, and it generally makes great fodder for this blog. I find the [...]

7 comments Read the full article →

Mending Wall: Matches and mismatches in IT stakeholder expectations

Tweet Oil and water? Some days, the disconnect between stakeholder expectations and IT capabilities (and sensibilities) seems staggering. Case in point: I was shown an astounding list of generic stakeholder expectations a while back, drawn up by an obviously frustrated group and titled “USER REQUIREMENTS FOR IT”.  The list is most interesting in what the [...]

7 comments Read the full article →

Business impact and transparency: expressing system availability

Tweet “System availability was 99.83% last month!  That’s up from 99.75% the previous month!” Sounds kind of good, no? I mean, that’s a high number, right? Right? Actually, no.  It’s not a very useful number, in and of itself. In fact, I regard the publication of uptime metrics like that as a regrettable symptom of [...]

8 comments Read the full article →

One CIO’s “lessons learned” in managing others

Tweet Here’s a shocker: none of us has failed to fail at times. We’ve all screwed things up on occasion, and I’m no exception. And that’s especially true when it comes to managing others, which I believe is very much a learned skill.  In that spirit, there are a number of things about people management [...]

7 comments Read the full article →

“ASAP” considered harmful

Tweet When do you want it?  “As soon as possible”, comes the ready answer. Everyone says it. Everyone knows what they mean by it, in essence, and it seems fairly harmless.  But more often than not, I’ve seen it overused as a substitute for real thought and real leadership. Especially in this new era of [...]

5 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries