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.

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.

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.

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.

In case you have not noticed in the navigation, I started writing a column called "The Savvy Manager" for Systems Management News. The magazine is targeted at system administrators, data center managers, and similar people. It is a new magazine being published by the same company that does SD Times, one of the more reputable trade mags in the industry. My column focuses on the management side of the audience and will cover subjects like business-IT alignment, personal professional development, staff professional development, relationship management, and similar subjects.

Technical people are not usually known for their people skills which means we often need some extra help in that area. Being eager learners though, it is a skill that we can learn in order to overcome the obstacles we face. For this entry, I want to examine one particular relationship situation. What can we do to build relationships when we are new to an organization? All groups go through a four-stage process called Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing. A group can move both up and down the scale which is usually triggered when new people join or when new issues or opportunities present themselves. An organization is going to exist in one of these phases before you join, and your addition could cause it to change.

One of the things that comes up in tech transfer and in IT all the time is whether something is a good idea or whether it is truly innovative. A podcast I listen to is called "Killer Innovations" from Phil McKinney, and his podcast focuses on an innovation process he has developed over the years. One of the steps in the process he uses involves asking a lot of tough questions about the idea on the table. He has created a set of questions that he uses at HP, and I think the same thing can be done for IT. If an idea does not seem to hold up under the questions, then obviously it needs more work. With a little brainstorming, I came up with these questions.

1. What user complaint or obstacle does this idea address?
2. What are the obvious benefits to users who adopt this idea?
3. What pain that users don't know about will this idea address?
4. What benefits does this option offer over other solutions?
5. What changes will this solution require in user behavior to be considered successful?
6. What impact does this solution have on other systems?
7. How will this solution increase revenue or decrease costs?
8. What organizational goal is this solution going to help accomplish?

These are just a few when you are trying to examine innovative ideas for internal IT services. Thinking about your ideas with these questions will help you understand the real benefits and issues that may face your solution. If you think about these things before you start talking to others in your organization about the idea, you will have the answers to questions that they are likely to ask.

If you haven't heard of Drupal, you probably don't deal much with web development. Drupal is the rising star in the open source field with an ever-growing installed base as a very powerful content management system (CMS). Drupal is a website content management system that really allows you to rapidly create a prototype for your innovative web idea. How does it do that? A very active community with hundreds of modules for about every functionality you can imagine.

A couple years ago, my wife and I had an idea for a website community centered around women who play games - computer games, board games, card games, role-playing games, etc. We kind of had an idea for what we wanted the site to do, but we were not really certain of all the details. In the course of investigating the CMS options out there, I came across a product I had not encountered before in Drupal.

After installing Drupal, we would often have conversations like this:

"What do you think about having users vote on whether content appears on the home page?"
"Sounds great. Let me check the Drupal site for a module."
"Hey, there's a module for that, and I just spent five minutes downloading and installing it."
"Wow, I just took a bit of time to play with it a bit, and that does exactly what we want."

The same conversation happened for a user points system, for personal messaging, for blog support, and on and on. The bulk of the work ended up being in design with configuration tweaking somewhat less time. In other words, we were able to focus on the capabilities we wanted and quickly try out existing modules to see if they met our needs.

Out of the box, Drupal supports a lot of different things, and it really lets you build a website quickly and easily. If your website is primarily static content, you can spend your time working on the content. If your website is primarily functionality, you can spend your time searching the community for modules or writing your own. Being written in PHP with a MySQL or PostgreSQL database (though the latter might have some issues in some modules), it is a pretty standard open source development environment. Unlike a lot of commercial products out there, that means Drupal can get you up and running really quickly while providing limitless capabilities to customize the functionality your site provides. As a tool, Drupal both enables rapid prototype development for innovative ideas without forcing you to start over when you decide to take the next step.

Just in case you aren't sold yet on at least looking into Drupal for developing your new site, maybe you'll be sold by the fact that some very busy and popular sites use it for their content management system.

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