drjim

It Turns Out That Personal Skills ARE Important For IT Leaders

by

Why Does Hacking Still Work So Well? So here’s an interesting question for you: in this day and age, why is it still so easy to hack into a corporate computer system? I mean we’ve had years to invest in sophisticated encryption systems and multi-step identity verification systems. The answer is surprisingly simple – the … Read more

How To Keep Your Team From Leaving As The Economy Improves

by

I don’t want to say that it’s been easy to be an IT Leader during the recent global economic crisis. However, as the world economy tanked and countless people in all industries lost their jobs, the one thing that IT Leaders really didn’t have to worry about was having members of their team jump ship … Read more

Google’s Lessons For Managing Tech-Savvy Teams

by

Sigh, if only we all could work for Google, right? If there is one company out there that seems to “get” IT, it would have to be Google. The stories that float around about how nice the Google campus is and all the free food and other perks sure make it seem like a Shangri-La. … Read more

Doing More With What You Already Have

by

As an IT Leader, you’ve got a bit of a challenge on your hands right now. There is probably no way that you’re going to be getting more funding or headcount in the immediate future (or at least not enough to make a difference). Yet at the same time your senior management keeps talking about … Read more

Cheap & Easy IT Management: How To Use Social-Network Analysis To Boost Team Performance

by

No budget, no special training, and yet you are expected to do more with less. How can you go about fixing what’s wrong with your IT team during tight economic times? It turns out that there is a simple way for you to identify where you are having issues and how you can fix them. … Read more

Why “I Don’t Care How You Feel” Is Bad IT Management

by

Life is hard for IT Leaders and it’s not going to be getting any easier anytime soon. With everything that you need to be doing, it sure seems like having to put up with team members who have personal issues that take away from their ability to do their jobs can only hurt performance. For … Read more

After The Vista Disaster, What Did Microsoft Do Differently To Create Windows 7?

by

Isn’t it every IT Leader’s nightmare: you work long hours, pull of miraculous feats of IT project accomplishment in order to create one of the most complicated pieces of software ever, only to have all of your customers hate it? That’s what it must have felt like to be working at Microsoft when Vista was … Read more

How Come You Don’t Know What Your IT Dream Job Is?

by

Stop. I know that your normal day-to-day is crazy, you are overworked, underpaid and nobody really appreciates all of the fine things that you do. I get all that. My question for you is do you have any idea why you are doing what you are doing? What are you really working towards? If you … Read more

IT Leaders Deal With The Three D’s: Death, Divorce, and Disease

by

Bad things happen. Sometimes they are not all that bad – key employees leaving for example is bad, but not really all that “bad”. However, sometimes things really are bad: staff die or become seriously ill for long periods of time. What’s your plan for when this happens? What’s that, you don’t have a plan? … Read more

The Answer Is 9, But Do You Know What The Question Is?

by

What is it going to take for you to get promoted? What set of skills as an IT Leader do you need to develop in order to have any chance at moving up to the next level? If you don’t know what you need to know, then how is that promotion going to happen? It … Read more