Category: The IT Director
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Silly AI Mistakes
We all love to hear about stupid AI mistakes. Whether it is bad output from some chatbot or someone using AI in a careless way. For example, a yearbook where someone had left some of the chatbot verbiage in place. Or images obviously created by AI that someone tried to pass off as a real…
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Focus & Finish: Multi-Tasking is a Myth
I stared at the list of requests the team was working on. Seven people, ninety-three active requests. Over ten active requests for each person. The team was working hard, but it felt like we weren’t making progress. Requests were not getting completed, and it felt like we were the bottleneck. The IT department’s to-do list…
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Ask the IT Director: Finding Time To Improve IT Processes
Dear IT Director, Help! We are running around with our hair on fire, working on too many business projects. Our IT processes need help, but we don’t have any time to improve them. Overwhelmed in Omaha Dear Overwhelmed, I feel your pain. The list of changes the business needs is long and you need to…
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Exception Processes Make Your Company Better
The processes in our companies are the activities that must take place to satisfy the Customer. Regular processes are those that provide value to the products and services our company provides. We need to be good at these. Exception processes are those that deal with problems when they come up. These are the processes that,…
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Business Processes: Setting Up For Success
All organizations use business processes to get work done. Most business processes in larger organizations rely on computers and software. IT’s role is to make sure the business process, as implemented in technology, changes as the organization changes. This requires that IT understands the business processes well enough to do our job correctly. Each process…
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The I.T. Leaders’ Handbook
I wrote this book as I was finishing my career in IT. It was the first book I wrote as I started on my writing journey. The results turned out pretty well. IT is a complicated business. The job of an IT Leader isn’t just about technology. The organization you operate in and the people…
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Spiders & Conductors
There are many books and articles about leadership; I hope you read some of them. There is no absolutely right model of leadership, so read widely and make up your own mind on what makes a good leader. This section covers something I noticed long ago about leadership styles which I haven’t seen it in…
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Solarwinds Articles
Here are a couple of articles about the Solarwinds hack that messed up a lot of companies. The first is relatively soon after the event and the second is later. Putting them here for future reference. https://www.wired.com/story/solarwinds-hack-supply-chain-threats-improvements (Dec 2021) https://www.wired.com/story/the-untold-story-of-solarwinds-the-boldest-supply-chain-hack-ever (May 2023)
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The Customer is our only customer
Ever since there have been internal departments like IT (and HR and Finance) there has been a drive for those groups to call the rest of the business “customers.” I believe this is a bad idea and hurts the organization. This sentiment shows up like this: Seems straightforward, right? To be clear, IT departments must…
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Stephen Fry on AI
Stephen Fry is a very funny man. Except when he is serious. Although, even then, he can be funny. This is the transcription of a lecture he gave at King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute in September 2024. Please note: Posting this doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says or disagree with everything he…
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Ask The IT Director: Why is fast new employee setup so important?
Dear IT Director, I’m getting pressure for my team to turn around new employee requests faster. Our service level says five days, but often requests come inside that window. How can I get them respect the window?Hopeful in Hoboken Dear Hopeful,Sorry, I don’t have good news for you. I’m afraid that your 5 day window is…
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Who should be fast?
We are all familiar with the saying that speed matters in business. Similarly, if everything else is the same, faster is better in business. What we don’t talk about often enough is who needs to be faster. Does an individual need to be fast? Does a department need to be fast? Does a company need…
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xkcd: Unreachable State
As a developer, I was always tempted to put messages like this in the parts of the code that should never execute. I did a couple of times, although never this clever. I have not kept up on the latest programming languages, but I imagine that it is still possible to have these places of despair. These…
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Search is getting worse
Ted Gioia is a highly recommended follow. His posts on music, arts, and culture (and much more) are thoughtful and enlightening. His latest post addresses a subject that I have noticed myself. Search engines specifically, and technology in general, are getting worse. The link to the article is at the end of this post. My…
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“They do it because of the mistaken belief that it lets them off the hook.”
https://seths.blog/2023/12/rewrite-for-humans/ Another Seth Godin post worth thinking about. When organizations write to employees or customers, the writing is often unnecessarily complicated. He gives a great example. I think part of the tradeoff is the level of detail. The organization wants to be seen as providing lots of information, often to answer questions that may come…