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.

Working in a Microsoft shop has been a lot better than I originally expected it to be five years ago. Obviously there are still the drawbacks with things like licensing costs and the operating system upgrades that seem to come with no significant advantage. However, we have just enough people that the costs are slightly lower than for a smaller operation, and we are able to take advantage of the features of products like Office, SharePoint, and SQL Server right out of the box without major undertakings.

While I try to imagine what it would be like in a bigger organization, I think it would be difficult to roll out services like we do currently. To me, it feels like there's a sweet spot in the size and culture of an organization where going all-Microsoft offers multiple advantages. I see something of a bell curve to represent a relationship between costs - both real and otherwise - and the fit of an organization for being a Microsoft shop.

In a small organization with 10 to 20 people, going significantly into the Microsoft product world is going to be prohibitively expensive unless the organization is trying to create some sort of competitive advantage focused based on the fact that they are a Microsoft shop. In a large organization with more than one hundred users, planning and implementation get a bigger role than in a smaller one. The idea here is not a new one in that smaller organizations are typically more agile than large ones. It seems like the organization where everybody knows everybody is going to be more able to quickly adopt and take advantage of the out-of-the-box integration Microsoft products make available. Since everyone knows everyone, news of good features or capabilities with a new product travel fast through the organization. In the size of organization where I currently work, I get the best of both these worlds - slightly bigger budgets but still an agile organization.

While I do enjoy the integrated Microsoft shop that we currently have, working in a business with less than 20 employees would be exciting if the culture fit it right. Could an organization like that really run well using platforms like thin clients and web-based services? Could Google Apps be a sufficient office productivity suite? Would using Facebook for collaboration enable teams to get work done? Perhaps I'll get a chance someday to test out these ideas.

While we do not sell products or services in a traditional sense, my departments still need to be able to manage contacts and lead information to go from marketing a technology to licensing it. While having a customer relationship management (CRM) tool gives a broad sense of a solution, figuring out the details of what to implement is a challenge. A lot of our data is very simple in a sense that records have a number of fields specific to them and then a number of relationships to other objects within the database. Technologies relate to patents. Patents relate to agreements. Agreement relate to companies. You get the idea. When I add in the idea of managing the licensing process, it becomes clear that seeing these relationships in a broader sense could be useful.

There is a lot of research going on at the University of Illinois in the computer science field, and so I started to do some research into relational data visualization tools that might help us with at least this aspect of the project. The Automated Learning Group (ALG) at NCSA has at least a couple different tools for business intelligence. The Text to Knowledge (T2K) toolset is probably the most interesting and may be able to do exactly one of the things I am thinking.

In my critique of Nicholas Carr's "IT Doesn't Matter," I made mention of choosing whether or not IT is strategic for an organization. In a sense, this choice is between strategic IT and operational IT. Strategic IT is the use of information technology to play a vital role in an organization's business plan by creating opportunities, interacting with customers and vendors, and improving efficiency. Operational IT is the use of information technology to support the functioning of the business with such things as accounting software, email systems, and electronic file storage. In a small organization that uses IT as an operational tool, there will be times that new IT capabilities need to be implemented to stay in the game. For example, just about every business has at least a basic website with information about the company, how to contact them, and the products or services they offer. For some of those organizations with an operational IT approach, they talked to people they know are IT savvy to find out what they needed to do and how to get it done as quickly and cheaply as possible. What about the others who use IT in an operational capacity but know they want to have a website that is more than just an electronic brochure? How do they go about a project like that where that type of IT expertise is needed but is not in-house?

Since there have now been two of my columns published, I realized people visiting my site might like to know the news. About a month ago, I was contacted by CMP Media to write a bi-weekly column for their new site focused on IT in small and medium businesses. The site is called bMighty.com, and you can find my articles in the Columns section. My column is focused on IT management and leadership.

The first two columns are already up, so here are some links.

Alignment Assignment: Get Smarter About Business
Put technology in the backseat. Good business-IT alignment centers on IT managers developing 1) a keen understanding of business needs and 2) strong relationships with executives and lower-level managers

Putting IT Management in Its Place
If IT plays a role in enabling the competitive advantages of your small or midsize business, then IT management needs to be at the same level as the CFO, COO, and other CxO titles

Microsoft SharePoint is not a new technology. It has been a part of the Windows server family in some form or another for several years now. Past versions have had many of the same core functionalities of the latest version, SharePoint Server 2007. The differences include the addition of Web 2.0 features like wikis and blogs. The biggest change to me though is the tighter integration with the latest version of Office.

Building a SharePoint site for collaboration and sharing work is still pretty simple. You can quickly set up lists, columns, views, and document libraries, and it doesn't take someone with a lot of experience. It's a rapid development platform for some things including a proof of concept prototype I did for marketing management that took about an hour to construct. The biggest thing I enjoy so far is how well it integrates with Outlook 2007. For example, if I make a list of Contacts in SharePoint, there is a button on that list to link it to my Outlook. Once linked in Outlook, that list is always available for me from within Outlook. If I make changes to a contact in Outlook, it appears in SharePoint, too.

This kind of integration was possible in past versions, but it usually required someone experienced in extending Office applications or third-party plug-ins. Instead of working on my own integration or finding an application out there to better link Outlook and SharePoint, I was able to link Contact lists and even Task lists from SharePoint into my Outlook.

The next step in my evaluation is to determine whether the features that are only available in the non-free version of SharePoint are worthwhile for the scale we want to adopt SharePoint. Based on the reception I got from the staff for my proof-of-concept, I have a feeling that we're going to want to get the full MOSS - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. One of the components of that product that catches my eye is the inclusion of Forms Server. With Forms Server, it becomes easy to deploy InfoPath-designed forms to a website. Since we collect a lot of information from outside entities, this could be an easy and fast way to build interfaces for the collection of information that can than easily go into a workflow.

When you think of good IT services, what do you think of? As an IT manager, you probably think of different things than a business manager. So what does IT have to make sure it does right to keep the business side happy and enable IT to spend time innovating rather than fixing sub par services? It comes down to a funnel-type shape hierarchy of systems within an organization. At the top of the funnel are user machines and networking. Once those two things are running correctly, the next piece of the puzzle is file serving followed closely by email.

User Machines
If a hard drive dies or a monitor goes on the fritz, IT support needs to get the user back to work as fast as possible. In my organization, we keep spare laptops in the event of a machine needing to be taken down for repair. If a user has a performance issue with their computer or needs assistance with getting an issue fixed, that takes first priority assuming there aren't other organization-wide emergencies going on at the same time.

Networking
Unless your organization is still in the days of SneakerNet (Wikipedia), a user's machine is just about useless if networking is non-functional, unstable, or otherwise underperforming. The network performance is only at the same level as user machines because it is somewhat of a chicken and egg scenario. If a user's computer is working but the network isn't, they aren't going to be effective. If the networking is non-functional, the user's not going to be very productive because they cannot reach the organization's server-based applications. Since networking usually impacts a whole group of users, it gets a bit higher precedence than user machines. Security including virus protection, intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention also plays a role here.

File Serving
While large organizations may not use traditional file serving via network shares on servers, they definitely have some sort of document management system that users need in order to access important files. Even if other services are offline, users can usually get work done if they still have access to their primary file server. The CEO can work on his PowerPoint presentation for his next meeting. The paralegal can keep working on the licensing agreement that is in the works. The accountant can still work on the layout for his quarterly report.

ERP, CRM, and other systems
Depending on the organization, there are going to be other IT services that need to be running in order for people to perform the basic functions of their jobs. Depending on the organization, these might be added to the funnel of items that absolutely must meet at least some minimum service level. Determining the hierarchy of priorities for systems can be determined by examining the processes that drive the business. In an organization that is focused around manufacturing, raw materials, and delivering orders, keeping the ERP system operational is going to be vital. In highly automated environments, a shutdown of the ERP system could mean a halt in the manufacturing process. Not every organization is going to have anything below file serving in the funnel, but some might have several.

Once IT has these services running in a stable environment with the day-to-day functioning largely taking care of itself, it becomes possible to spend time doing innovative and creative work. If IT is spending all its time keeping the network from going down or cleaning up user's systems, they are not going to be able to spend time directly impacting the products and services that the organization offers.

In the previous entry, I talked about information being the food that IT serves to the rest of the organization. One way to present information in a more timely and useful manner is through what I have dubbed contextual enterprise search. Enterprise searching is using search engine technology within an organization's documents, databases, and e-mail. For example, if an individual is working on a licensing agreement with Acme Corporation, that person can find all information within the organization that discusses Acme Corporation in a manner that is similar to searching for Acme Corporation on Google.

As you can imagine, in the traditional web searching sense of using enterprise search, the user has to make an active effort to find information. The user is forced to open a browser window or start an application and then must perform the search based on whatever keywords they want to use. In contextual search, the search results are presented to the user based on whatever document or information they are editing or viewing.