IT entropy in reverse: ITSM and integrated software

Tweet Why am I an IT professional? Here’s one major compelling reason: you simply can’t rest on your laurels. You can’t stop learning and growing and examining and improving, in all aspects, or you stagnate and die. The best IT professionals, I’m convinced, work energetically and on an ongoing basis, actively striving to push the [...]

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IT consumerization, the cloud, and the alleged death of the CIO

Tweet As with just about any area, IT is a discipline subject to fads and memes, “received truths” that seem to arise in the press or the blogosphere and then ricochet around the echo chamber until they sound plausible even to skeptics. A number of these roll across my Twitter stream every day. But one [...]

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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 [...]

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IT anti-patterns: reverse behavior lessons from Steve Jobs

Tweet 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 [...]

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A CIO’s skeptical look at the QR code phenomenon

Tweet 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 [...]

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Novels of IT, Part 2: Haunting the CEO

Tweet Last time, I introduced this series by pointing out that reading what I call “novels of IT” could serve a few very useful purposes for those of us who work in and around information technology.  In fact, I presented a number of criteria that come to mind when answering the implicit question of why [...]

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

Tweet 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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