we can help IT

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.

So with the arrival of Drupal 6 a while ago and some projects both in my personal endeavors and at work involving Drupal, I decided it was time to move this site over to Drupal. There are still some kinks I am working out, but all of the content from my "blog" has been moved here. The options for Drupal 6 themes are smaller, but I think I have a good start here.

One of my blog's visitors asked me some questions about technology accelerators as described in Good to Great, and she said it would be ok if I posted the response here as well.

If technology cannot make or break a company's level of greatness, but only serves as an accelerator of greatness or demise already in progress, then why did everyone fall in love with technology for technology's sake during the 1990s?

There are three main reasons in my opinion, and some companies might have more than one of them.

We are painting the house this week which means I probably will not have time to make a full entry. However I do want to offer you one piece of content to perhaps inspire you and your creativity. In case you don't know what TED is, imagine a place for lots of smart people get together and share their ideas. These ideas are not just the obvious but offer new perspectives on a lot of different subjects. They have started releasing presentations made for TED online, and many of them are quite powerful.