You have a project status report due in a week. You don’t love writing reports. It’s not what you went into IT to do. But you have to do it and part of your report requires a comparison to similar systems. So, you go online to check some statistics that you want to cite in […]
How we refer to things makes a big difference. We shape our own world—and others’ perception of us—via the words we use to describe our reality. Much of what we do in IT requires communicating subtle and complex issues to others. When we use precise language to describe a situation or relationship, we honor precision […]
This week’s CIO Insight article “IT Spends Too Much Time on ‘Firehouse Duty’” paints IT professionals as nearly comically ineffective. Well, they’re not. The piece starts with: It sounds somewhat like a bad IT joke that you’d hear in the office: “How many tech professionals does it take to fix an issue?” The answer is […]
Are we sabotaging ourselves with our problem-solving mentality? Every day I talk with dedicated and highly effective IT professionals whose worried looks makes you think they just suffered a major demotion. It hardly seems to fit, given the new systems created and the important problems they have helped solve for their stakeholders. Yet, instead of […]
Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer is burdened with the honor of being the youngest Fortune 500 CEO, one of only 20 women in those ranks, and with having been hired in the third trimester of her first pregnancy. Understandably, a lot of people want her to carry their banner. However, it is not her job to […]
