Category: The IT Director
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Prevention is unsatisfying
We’ve all heard it: “Prevention is better than cure.” But let’s face it, prevention is unsatisfying. We’ll never know for sure if it was worth it. But hey, we still gotta do it.
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Agile for Database Projects
This Thursday, I will be presenting a session at the Minnesota Agile Community. The title is “Using a Low-Overhead Agile Process for a new Data Warehouse Buildout”. In the session, I will tell the story of a long-term Agile project that built out a data warehouse, including data imports, models, and multiple reporting technologies. Take…
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Technical Limits
I was researching a vendor today and came across a limit of “200 pages”*. What likely happened was some technical person in their organization figured that telling customers that 200 is a limit will avoid problems. Was there formal research on the 200 number? Probably not. Would 150 or 250 been better? That probably wasn’t…
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Sunk Cost Fallacy
A company I’m working with was implementing a major software change. The decision to do so was made several executives ago. The current executive felt the decision was wrong for the organization, and made the right call to switch. The company had invested heavily in that decision and would lose that money. Others might have…
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ERP Upgrade Swag
This handy little piece of 3D printing was created for an ERP upgrade that our team did a few years ago. Justin, a Business Analyst on the team had a side interest in 3D…
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Shooting myself in the foot
So this morning was a bit too exciting. About 15 minutes into a WordPress session, I deleted the…
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“I’m not techy” and other IT failures
A few months ago, my sister-in-law made the claim that she is not “techy”. This was after she opened up one of those digital photoframes, got it working and got several of her siblings all hooked up so they could send their 94-year old aunt photos. She did a nice job, but when one piece…
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Starting Requires Continuing
It is easier to start something than to maintain, or continue, that something.
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Open Source Concerns
https://future.com/securing-the-software-supply-chain/ Open Source is a great way to quickly develop applications and services for IT departments. The software supply chain refers to the process of writing and building software, including all of the open source that goes into it. Open source isn’t without risks. The risks around using software you don’t know is not hard…
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The IT Leaders’ Handbook is available!
Folks, I did a thing and it is now available for sale from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine bookstores. The I.T. Leader’s Handbook is a book for current and aspiring IT leaders. From the back cover: Is your IT department working harder than ever and still falling behind? Does the organization have unreasonable…
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The Unsinkable Maddie Stone, Google’s Bug-Hunting Badass | WIRED
“There was such a clear, direct impact,” Stone says of her Android-focused work. “I find these potentially harmful apps, I flag the malware, and the defense we develop propagates to 2.8 billion devices. It was just such a massive, tangible impact that most people don’t get in their jobs.” The Unsinkable Maddie Stone, Google’s Bug-Hunting…
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IT: Application Logging
If your IT shop does software development, Application Logging is useful for several things:
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People! Vibrate!
From the always brilliant xkcd: Folks, unless you have a compelling reason otherwise, set your phone to vibrate. Especially those of you with watches that vibrate when something happens.
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Square Root Of Change
Back in the early 1990s, I was working in IT at a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company. Ours was a small part of IT, separate from the mother ship. Responsible for about 2000 employees in our area, we had implemented several large projects over a two-year span; all bringing changes to the employees. I was a…
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The dark side of electronic waste recycling – The Verge
Electronics can be hazardous when disposed of improperly, and the Basel Action Network, or BAN, investigates the underground world of the e-waste trade. The nonprofit group secretly embeds trackers in discarded devices, then hands them to recyclers to see where they end up, exposing bad practices in the process. After dropping bugged LCD monitors in…