Graduate School

The Last Semester

If all goes according to plan, this will be my last semester for my Master's. I only have my thesis to finish plus one class in telecommunications and networking. The thesis proposal is in its hopefully final draft and being reviewed by committee with the hopes of doing the proposal defense in the next few weeks. From there, I'll be starting the final research phase, and it's looking like it'll be a lot of fun.

The telecommunications course could either have lots of new things for me to learn, but it's largely a review of old hat things like networking basics. I'm hoping we get into more of the telecommunications side at some point since it's one area I haven't had to learn in my career.

It's hard to believe that I am so close to being finished, and I'm looking forward to it!

Thesis progress and upcoming presentations

Since finishing up my summer course on data warehousing and data mining, I have been working on my thesis proposal. If things keep progressing, I will be done with the literature review in the next few days and can begin working on the parts that are more my own ideas as opposed to just describing the ideas and concepts of other people. In the course of my research into IT leadership, I have been working on some other activites that tie in neatly with it.

Fall 2007 CCSP Conference
I am on the program committee for the CCSP semiannual conference at the University of Illinois. CCSP is the Computer Consultant Support Program which is the group of IT workers and managers on campus, and the conferences have always had good sessions on the technical work but have often been somewhat short on the "soft" side of IT. There have been requests for sessions focused on IT leadership issues. After meeting with the program committee last week, I was put in charge of organizing a session on IT leadership, communicating with organizational leaders, and dealing with the non-technical aspects of IT management.

2008 AUTM Annual Meeting
In addition, I will be moderating a panel at the 2008 meeting of AUTM, the Association of University Technology Managers, in San Diego next February. In the panel, I plan to give a few different perspectives and approaches on how to manage and implement IT in technology transfer organizations. This panel is a follow-up to the mailing list I formed in the spring for IT professionals to share ideas and issues in their tech transfer organizations.

IT management in higher education

With about a year to go on my Master's in MIS degree, I have started to plan my thesis. While I was thinking one morning about Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory for human resource management, I began to think about whether there were things that IT managers can do to impact their relationship with organizational leaders in terms of satisfaction and innovation. For example, if the email system is consistently off-line or is buggy, management is likely to be dissatisfied with how their IT services are operating and are unlikely to give funding and support for projects that do not directly address that issue. For my thesis, I have decided to take this concept and build a set of guidelines for IT leaders and organizational leaders. To narrow the research, I decided to focus my thesis on higher education.

While doing a literature search for coverage of the topic, I came across an study from EDUCAUSE, an organization focused on IT in higher education. The study was a snapshot of IT leadership in higher education published in 2004, so it is pretty current as far as academic research is concerned. Some of the significant parts of the study covered innovation and IT effectiveness within higher education, and so it has several insights useful for my thesis and for my career. Perhaps the most interesting is that IT leaders feel that the components necessary for innovation, such as transformational leadership, are in place, but they feel that there is little innovation that receives support.

I can see where there might be a possible explanation for this disconnect between having an innovative environment and being able to be innovative with higher education IT management. The reason might be from a difference of opinion of what innovation actually means. To most IT workers who are interested in innovation such as myself, innovation is the "fun" side of IT management where we come up with ideas and systems using new technologies that impact the operations of the organization we support. However in an organization that is far behind on the scale of adopter categories, basic services such as share calendaring for staff or high capacity data storage for researchers could potentially be innovative. Adopter categories are part of the Diffusion of Innovations theory by Everett Rogers. For an organization that is not at the front of the adopter category curve, improving basic teaching support systems may be the type of innovation they need rather than implementing a high-end SAN to support the terabytes of data generated from research.

So while it is possible to elicit the responses that determine whether an organization is conducive to innovation, the services that IT workers see as innovative may not be getting support and hence make them believe their organization does not support innovation. The organization is simply continuing with its normal pace of adopting innovations while IT workers feel like the environment is stagnant. This disconnect between the meaning of innovation might be the cause for the EDUCAUSE study's innovation issue, and perhaps I will find additional data to support my belief in my research.

Prototyping in expert systems development

There are a lot of different methods for information systems development. The System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is one traditional information systems development method. It is sometimes referred to as a waterfall development method because the whole process is planned out from the beginning, and the project is then developed one stage at a time going down the steps of the plan. Common main steps of the SDLC method are concepting the system, requirements analysis, system design, programming, testing, implementation, and maintenance. In the SDLC method, the process almost never goes backwards to a previous stage though the results of previous stages may be modified. This inability to go backwards is why SDLC is often also called a waterfall development method because much like it is impossible to go up a waterfall there is no going back to the previous steps in SDLC. The prototyping development method offers many advantages for information sytems while also having some weaknesses (Alavi 1984). Decision support system (DSS) development usually has the greatest opportunity to utilize prototyping's advantages while minimizing its disadvantages.

Impact of web interfaces on e-commerce

I. Introduction
There are many factors that can contribute to the effectiveness of an e-commerce system as well as the rate of adoption among site visitors. A web site is most often successful when it does a good job in each of five factors: download speed, navigation, content, interactivity, and responsiveness (Palmer 2002). All of these can be affected by an efficient and effective interface, and it for this reason that I am going to examine some of the major interface technologies available and their impact on these five factors. The specific technologies that I will examine are basic HTML, Java, Flash, and Ajax. My experience with web interfaces began in 1995 when the first popular web site that was not available on an edu domain was by a small company called Yahoo. During the last eleven years, I have worked with a variety of web technologies on both the client side and the server side. Throughout this paper, I have included personal professional experience in relation to web application development as well as their impact on web users in addition to supporting the major points with separate research resources.

Motivation in the workplace

Motivating yourself and the people who work with you can provide interesting challenges. There are a variety of ways that one thinks will motivate a person, but there are some concepts that seem to be against common sense. Motivation for purposes of this discussion is what drives people to go above and beyond the basics of the day-to-day. Motivation is what gets people excited about their work and strive to do things better.

When you think of how you might try to motivate someone, you probably think first about higher pay, a nice office, or extra time off. If you ask someone what they want from their job or a new career direction, these things are often mentioned as being part of what they want or hope to gain. The problem with these though is that they are not long-term motivating factors.

A study by Frederick Herzberg released in 1959 interviewed hundreds of accountants and engineers to find out when they felt exceptionally good about their jobs and when they felt exceptionally bad about their jobs. From the research, Herzberg put forth the Motivation-Hygiene theory of job satisfaction. Motivation and Hygiene are the two sides of motivating people to do their jobs well and to be happy.

Hygiene factors are things that do not motivate people by their presence but usually significantly decrease their motivation when lacking. These factors include pay, job security, supervision quality, and work space. A person who is paid well is not going to be motivated to perform at a high level for an extended period. An initial improvement in performance might occur, but the new pay level quickly becomes the new standard and no longer provides motivation. However, if a person believes they are underpaid, their level of motivation will definitely decrease. In this way a Hygiene factor that is lacking will cause a decrease in motivation.

The factors that actually increase motivation are appropriately called Motivation factors. The things that can increase an employee's motivation include a sense of achievement, recognition from supervisors and peers, opportunities for advancement, and possibilities for personal growth. Imagine you just completed a 6-month long project that is going to save your organization a lot of time and money, and the CEO, director, or whoever is in charge thanks you publicly or privately (this can depend on whether you are High I or High S) for the work you did and really appreciates the impact it will have. That would be a great moment, wouldn't it? What if you never were recognized for the effort you put forth or were always told that someone else had been given a promotion you were striving to gain? That would definitely impact your desire to put worth a better than "adequate" effort.

So as a manager and leader, what do you need to remember to motivate your people? First, you need to make sure all the basics are taken care of: good compensation, good work spaces, flexible company policies, and being connected with your people. If you fail at fulfilling these needs, you are going to decrease your group's motivation. Second, to increase their motivation, you want to make sure people are recognized for their work, to make sure they have opportunities to grow their skills and to grow their knowledge and experience while you make sure that you are providing stimulating work.

To read more about Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene theory, you can start at Wikipedia or NetMBA.

Another semester begins with some self-assessment

Since about two years ago, I had been considering working on my a Master's degree. At the time, I had 8 years of IT experience including web development, desktop hardware and software, programming, server hardware and software, strategic management, project management, and on and on and on. With eight years of experience, I knew that I wanted to move my career in the direction of overall IT management - the strategy, the project management, the relationship management. Working with my wonderful supervisor who is an Assistant Vice President for Business and Finance, we grew my position into having a lot more management possibilities. I went from being an Information Management Specialist to being Manager of Information Systems.

So if I was on the IT management career path, why work on a Master's degree? My experience in the field is strong since I have worked in a variety of organizations and gained a variety of experiences with the help of some good team members and business-side supervisors. A Master's degree adds one a level of credit to my resume that experience can not do alone while also giving me an opportunity to fill in some gaps in my IT management knowledge.

Afterall this is what an IT manager does, or at least what I believe my style is - find the weaknesses or opportunities and work on them. Every year, CIO magazine does a State of the CIO survery of its readers to gauge the current trends of IT management in organizations that have a CIO-type position. In this year's survey, there is a discussion of four archetypes of CIO - turnaround, operational, business leader, and innovative. Reading through the article and taking their self-assessment quiz, I found that I am of the innovative CIO mold. My preferred method of running IT is to look at the business and find ways in which IT can improve how the organization operates and what services it offers its customers. The survey came out after I wrote my earlier blog post about Innovation vs. Optimization, so I certainly think labelling myself as an innovative IT manager and future-CIO is accurate. In that post I talked more about what makes an IT manager "innovative." As I continue my studies this semester, I am excited to find new ways to innovate in my current position.

Introduction to Ajax

This was a paper I wrote about Ajax for one of my Master's classes. While it is not necessarily timely for most web developers, it may be of interest to IT managers and others not as closely connected to the web development field.

For the last couple years, the view of the web has been undergoing a change. Web applications that involve filling out forms, clicking submit, and getting a result are changing to behave more like desktop applications. Many active users of the web have experienced web sites like Google's maps and photo-sharing web site Flickr to see something newer, more dynamic, and more responsive. These web sites use a new web programming paradigm called AJAX.