we can help IT

I spent part of the day updating the core and additional modules for the Drupal testing site that I run. I use the site to test out ideas and modules before I promote them to sites I run or advise. For a while I was toying with the idea of running a hosting site for small businesses that want to build up a community around their business. This functionality would typically be especially useful for hobbyist businesses like sewing supply stores, gaming businesses, and collector businesses. Drupal offers a lot of community building tools out of the box, and with some modules it becomes a full-featured site.

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 be an open dialog of the IT@Illinois project. It turned out to be really valuable. These are some thoughts I had coming out of the discussion.

The top priority for everyone is getting the mission actors what they need and not taking away the people they have locally positioned. All the concept authors want to give the faculty, staff, and students the tools they need to do their work. This core value translates into a needed agility at the mission actor level in order to be able to provide them what they need as quickly as possible.

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 working on with an amazing group of IT people from around campus.

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, CIO of the campus, had in mind, but we did not know a significant amount of detail of what the Provost was thinking. We knew that the project of transforming IT on the Urbana-Champaign campus was going to be launched, but we did not know what that meant. What did we learn on the day of presentations?

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 entry, he talked about some of the research behind a new paper he co-authored about how IT is a driver of competition among companies in the same industry. That blog entry and that paper are what got my thoughts going.

It has been almost a week since I picked up my iPhone, and I wanted to give my personal perspective on the experience so far. Before getting into the review though, I think it is important to know why I bought an iPhone. Previously I carried a person cell phone, a Treo 700wx for work, and occasionally an iPod. Except in winter, I usually had one in my pocket and just carried the rest in my hand or my laptop bag. The two things that I was looking for out of the iPhone were to combine these devices into one and to do it at a reasonable price. The ability to have ActiveSync for work e-mail push to my phone and a purchase price of $199 for 8GB made it an easy choice when my old Motorola Razor started experiencing a slow death.

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 better. Making things better though involves keeping multiple things in mind - the company, our team, and ourselves. To get things going in "The Savvy Manager," let's look at these components and some of the issues we should have in our thoughts.

While there are a couple parts of this game that can be challenging, it has a solid end that you can get to quickly. You are a pirate ship captain racing against other pirate ships to get to the treasure first. You use the arrow keys to row and steer your ship. The space bar fires your canons. After you win a race, you get some booty (what's a pirate game without booty?) to upgrade your ship with better canons, speed, or hull. You can also improve your whole ship to a new model.

With the new version of Firefox coming right around the corner and enabling web-based applications to run locally, the new enterprise might be on the verge of coming into being. This article at Systems Management News talks about the growing struggle between IT and computing in the cloud, and Andrew McAfee at Harvard Business School has been teaching and writing about the next generation enterprise for a little while now.

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 its industry. As a leader and manager in IT, we cannot sit in front of our computer screens focused on our technical work. We need to get out into the organization in order to gain knowledge and build relationships.