Well Scribefire has been useful to creating posts for this blog, but now I have a problem. Scribefire and Feedburner wont play. I get and XML error about the feedburner namespace .

Its a bt of a shame as I was starting to like ScribeFire but since I added Feedburner to my blog it wont work, When a solution is found I will let you know. Maybe its a problem with Blogger

See ya round

Peter

Computerworld today have an article on IBM research that is about controlling atoms to be data stores, interesting stuff and the headline yells at me a big problem. If the storage has the capability to store the amounts of data then every IPod like device can pretty much take an entire inventory of a lot of businesses information, documents, databases, you name it compressed it will take some serious amount of data. Sure its going to take a while to load it on the device but that device could conceivably take a compressed copy of a 100GB database along with a lot of supporting material.

These future devices are going to want some great security as they potentially will have a lot of information on them

On the flip side this will deliver some amazing new multimedia to portable systems, video sales catalogues, like that which has never been seen before. Web 2.0 will look very old hat when this stuff is around.

IBM’s two discoveries may yield 30,000 movies on an iPod

See ya round

Peter

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In March this year the Australian and New Zealand Best Employer Report was produced in the AFR BOSS magazine. This year Fedex( New Zealand) was a joint winner with Salesforce. All the companies on the list of best employers are successful businesses and admired or regarded jealously by their competitors. Hewitt Associates are the creators of the report and in the highlights report there is a couple of things that are mentioned as to the success of the companies that make the list.

• Identifies and acts on the basis that their people are their primary source of performance, competitive advantage and longer–term sustainability and focus;
• Insists upon a customer focus; and
• Maintains and evolves alignment between the organisation’s goals and strategy and its structure, culture, systems and people practices. Such alignment delivers higher performance.

Funny thing about this is, it is what is taught in management school, doesn’t anyone listen in class, its not rocket science. You were taught it in class and if you have a higher management degree and your company is not making the list what are you doing. To the companies that are not on the list or have never made the list do you have any management graduates, if not why not? maybe you are missing out on something.This is widely written about in text books, other publications abound with either the same information or wider information on the issues of people management and the effects that they have on bottom line success. As an employee of different organizations I have tried a few different styles out and the places where people were more productive behaved closer to these objectives.I often wonder why Australian business does not excel in the word to the same extent our sports people do and I think that the fact that a lot more successful companies are not on this list shows how far short of the success that they could have the really are when you take into account the fact they don’t maximise the return on a major asset.Funny thing is if the business spent as much on other equipment without the returns they would be mad as hell and doing something to fix it and funny the first thing they do is try and fix it, tune it conduct repairs and anything else before scrapping it. Yet many businesses will churn employees simply because they cant do these things and peoples interest wanes there and they leave. No one tries to tune and repair the problems with their employees. The simply scrap them by letting them walk out the door.

See ya round

Peter

I often hear a lot in different articles either blogs or news that companies are not getting a lot out of their IT dollars spent. My question is why not? Why is IT spending your precious money and not providing you the return you expect? Is your IT a cost centre and how do you view that cost centre? Is it facilities support or is it something greater? If your IT is facilities support why do you have all those people working there, get rid of them they are doing your business no favours. I dont mean though that your IT department necessarily has to go but maybe some people.IT can be an innovative driver of your business, but first Mr CEO you need to make IT part of your strategic investment. You need to engage your people to deliver against that strategic direction. If you don’t have a clue about IT then you need to find a right hand man to run for you under your strategic guidance, and since we have had them driving parts of our business for 20 – 50 years then you really need to learn something, you don’t do your shareholders any favours with your current behaviour.

Much has been said and done to deliver ERP and other systems to some best practice. If you have one of these built to best practise, ask your self whose best practise, I am sure it wasn’t yours. For some of these systems the lead time and delivery time to implement means that your new ERP complete with “Best Practise” is now three years out of date, it may be more.Do you innovate daily, or do you wait until you have little choice to change to move and then only begrudgingly do it. If it’s the latter you need to change or move on, retire and go fishing.If you are interested in maximising your shareholders values and building a great company then you need to start doing the following with your technology.

• Start to understand at least a modicum of what technology you currently have, what technology is being touted around in the industry and find out if any new stuff might have suitable uses in your business. Some may be too new, or even realistically “pie in the sky” for your business.
• Get involved with your IT department, make it a regular habit to have a chat to your IT staff, some of them might actually have a passion for their job not unlike the one that started your company, these are valuable people.
• Encourage your people to network around your business and to use their professional organisations to network around the industry.
• Speak to people about the capabilities of software you currently have
• Get some rules in place about isolated pockets of data, you can’t have them, Its ok to prototype ina product like Access, but when its been accepted your data needs to be in a suitable database that can be backed up and safely recovered if need by by your IT department. Depending on your organisation that might be SQL Server or Oracle or an open source database like Postgress.
• Talk to your key users in your departments about what impedes their ability to get the job done
• Get your IT people to talk to the business users about these issues to find solutions, together they might surprise you
• Get your IT people to learn your business, they don’t have to know details of invoice creation but having an understanding of some of the workflows will assist them to find technology that will enhance your business

Any company can be innovative with IT but unless Mr CEO you are driving it by providing suitable direction to allow your team to develop understanding of the technology and getting small pilots into place where they could be a value add for your business. Small pilots could be a few thousand dollars a server some basic software and see if they can get a something to fly.It is okay to develop software that is custom built, but to do so successfully is a project in successful management as this means you understand your business and technology. As CEO you don’t have to know how to program in a language but you do need to know some IT skills.Google has grown to one of the largest, most successful and possibly influential companies through the innovative application of technology. Whilst the founders were technologists and understood what the technology they were using they didn’t necessarily have any idea about business. In your company you might know a lot about your industry( I hope you do) but not so much about the technology. Find a CIO/ IT manager who can do that for you to apply has technology know how to your business through your discussions. You probably currently use some innivative marketing programs, why not have some innovative IT

So today is time to change, quit complaining about the cost of IT and start getting IT to add to your bottom line by providing quality products well implemented to support your business.

See ya round

Peter

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An article found recently on Wall Street Journal about a series of ways to circumvent IT to get stuff done, or bypass IT controls, seems at first as a real problem for IT departments, the way the artical is written is clearly an attack on the IT teams authority.We to that I say boo hoo, to all the CIO’s out there if this is a problem you haven’t been doing your job, you clearly failed in a major part of your job description and that is education, and understanding of your user(client) requirements.Firstly let me remind you you are in a service industry, with a requirement for providing service to your clients and if this is now suddenly the worst thing in the world then you are clearly lacking in part of your job. You haven’t been providing service. Why are you users so excited about this revelation that there are ways to get your job done, because you have tried to close everything up because that just made your job easier, not theirs.If this article is a problem to you then I would be having a very defined meeting with this article as the agenda and the intention that no one is leaving until you have some sort of plan to deal with it. If you keep hiding with your head in the sand about this your users are going to be your greatest nightmare.If SOX or HIPAA or any other similar compliance program is going to have to be dealt with you clearly need an education program and maybe fast.

A simple plan might be:

• Take each one and define why user might want to use that element
• determine if legislation affecting your organisation is a related to that element
• educate your users about the risks or why legislation disallows their usage
• work to implement things that will improve, cant have people donloading any software, but we might be able to run some evaluation program via the corporate wiki to determine the needs and requirements and find a solution.
• implement slowly the allowable things and implement those education plans

I think for quality IT operations this is a not a problem as their users are aware of the issues and have qualiy solutions in place for remote work etc.

To the rest its time to get your act together

See ya round

Peter

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