Department
IT Management
16 articles filed under IT Management.
IT’s Most Needed Skills
IT does not exist in a bubble. IT is a business enabler, a way of taking an existing business and making it more efficient, cost effective, nimble and capable. Except for home hobbyist, and even…
Understanding Bias
I often write about the importance of alignment in goals between IT and vendors and how critical it is to avoid getting advice from those that you are not paying for that advice, because that makes…
Types of IT Service Providers
A big challenge, both to IT Service Providers and to their customers, is in attempting to define exactly what an IT vendor is and how their customers should expect to interact with them. Many people…
You Are Not Special
It is not my intention for this to sound harsh, but I think that it has to be said: “You are not special.” And by “you” here, of course, I mean your business. The organization that you, as an IT…
Explaining the Lack of Large Scale Studies in IT
IT practitioners ask for these every day and yet, none exist – large scale risk and performance studies for IT hardware and software. This covers a wide array of possibilities, but common examples…
It’s a Field, Not a Road
Over the years I have become aware of a tendency in the Information Technology arena to find strong expectations of exactly how much someone should know about certain technologies based on their job…
IT Generalists and Specialists
IT Professionals generally fall into two broad categories based on their career focus: generalists and specialists. These two categories actually carry far more differences than they may at first…
Hello, 1998 Calling….
Something magic seems to have happened in the Information Technology profession somewhere around 1998. I know, from my own memory, that the late 90s were a special time to be working in IT. Much of…
The Smallest IT Department
Working with small businesses means working with small IT shops. It is very common to find the “one man” shows and I am often in discussions about how to handle environments so small. There is no…
Keeping IT in Context
Information Technology doesn’t exist in a bubble, it exists to serve a business or organization (for profit, non-profit, government, etc.) The entity which we, as IT professionals, serve provides the…
Solution Elegance
It is very easy, when working in IT, to become focused on big, complex solutions. It seems that this is where the good solutions must lie – big solutions, lots of software, all the latest gadgets…
You Aren’t Gonna Need It
I’m lucky that I work in IT but come from a software engineering background, this gives me a bit of a different perspective on the world of IT both in understanding much of what is happening behind…
Just Because You Can…
I see this concept appear in discussions surrounding virtualization all of the time. This is a broader, more general concept but virtualization is the “hot, new technology” facing many IT…
IT Managers and the Value of Decision Making
When I was new to IT I can remember people using the phrase “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” At the time I was young and didn’t think too much about what this phrase implies. Recently, I heard…
The SMB IT and Vendor Relationship Dilemma
When most people compare enterprise IT and the small business IT markets they generally think about size and scale. Enterprise environments are huge and small business IT often consists of just one…
Buying Printers for Small Business
While some small businesses today have managed to ween themselves from the world of paper, the vast majority of small and medium businesses are still tied, to some degree, to their printers and faxes…