Happy Thanksgiving — Take The Week Off!

November 24th, 2011
Image Credit Here's Hoping That This Week Is Special For Everyone

Here's Hoping That This Week Is Special For Everyone

Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming week is a great week for you — I’m taking it off! Blogging will resume next week…

For my readers in the U.S., you know that this week is all about family, turkey, and of course football. I’m not sure what it is about turkey that always seems to make everyone fall asleep, but I’m hoping that when I wake up this year the global recession will be but a distant memory, gas will be under $3.00 / gallon, and just maybe the world will have settled down for awhile.

For my international readers, pretty much all of the United States will be taking time off this week to celebrate the arrival of Europeans into the New World. For better or for worse, it’s what has gotten us to where we are today and we think that that’s a good thing.

Have a happy and safe week no matter where you are and we’ll talk next week.

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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Cloud Computing 101: Just Exactly What Is A Cloud?

November 17th, 2011
Image Credit IT Managers need to understand just exactly what a cloud is

IT Managers need to understand just exactly what a cloud is

So there I was the other day talking with one of my IT manager customers and I was going on and on about how her team needed to start adapting their design process to include cloud computing. She knows me very well so she felt comfortable in stopping me in mid-sentence. She said “Jim, I’ve been hearing a lot about this cloud computing stuff and I sorta know what is it, but I’m not sure that I fully understand it. ” Oops, I hadn’t realized that there were still folks out there that hadn’t “drunk the cloud Kool-Aid”. Ok, so now we’re going to take care of this.

Say Hello To Cloud Services

So why are IT managers (and everyone else) struggling to get their hands around just exactly what cloud computing is? I believe that the cause of the confusion is simply that there are a bunch of different things that have been lumped together and are now being called “cloud computing”.

Let’s start with the most basic form: subscription services. In the old days, when an IT department purchased some software disks would arrive in the mail, your team would install them on servers, and you’d be up and running. That’s not the way that it works when you are using the cloud.

When you are using cloud computing, instead of having to physically touch hardware and software in order use an application, now all you have to do is to subscribe to it and you can access it over the Internet. No disks, no servers. Great examples of these types of subscription services include Google’s Gmail email service and Salesforce.com’s CRM application.

This is where things can start to get confusing. There’s more to cloud computing than just subscribing to someone else’s application. The company applications that are currently running on servers located in your data center can be moved “into the cloud”. What this means is that you can use servers and storage systems that are remotely located in a cloud provider’s data center to run your company’s applications. You would access your applications and data via your Internet connection.

How Much Is All Of This Going To Cost Me?

The fact that cloud computing is even an option is pretty cool. However, just being a shiny new technology is not enough – there has to be a solid business reason for moving your IT operations into the cloud.

Let’s take a look at costs. First, if you choose to not take advantage of cloud computing then you are still going to have IT costs. In order to stand up new IT applications (and expand what you already have in order to meet growing user demand) you are going to have to buy and install more servers. As long as you are getting more servers, you’ll also have to get more storage. All of these new boxes will need to be maintained and so you’ll need to hire more staff to administer them.

In order to avoid these upfront IT costs, IT managers can make use of the cloud. If you are going to make use of cloud computing’s application subscription services, you need to be ready to pay per user, per month. Salesforce.com charges between $5-$25 per user per month. Google’s office suite of applications costs $50/user per year.

If you choose to run your existing IT applications in the cloud, then you’ll end up paying for how much computing horsepower and storage you use. One cloud computing firm charges six cents per processor per hour of usage.

Oh, and one more item. The way that you’ll connect to your applications in the cloud will be via your Internet connection. Given the importance of information technology, this connection that used to be important will have just become vital. This means that you’ll need to get a larger bandwidth connection in order to deliver the application management functions that your company will expect from your team. This means that you’ll also probably need to invest in a redundant connection in case your primary connection goes down.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing seems to have shown up almost overnight. IT managers might have initially thought that it was another one of the seemingly countless IT fads that have come along in the past few years and shrugged it off. However, for some compelling financial reasons, it’s starting to look like it has taken hold and is here to stay. It’s time for IT managers to show some thought leadership when it comes to clouds.

Some of the reasons that cloud computing has caused so much confusion among IT managers is because it is so many different things. In its simplest form, cloud computing is a subscription service where software is delivered over the web. One step beyond this is using remotely located computing power (the dream team of both servers and storage) to execute company IT applications which are then accessed via the web.

All of this functionality comes at a cost, of course. IT managers can avoid the upfront costs of having to purchase IT hardware in order to launch a new application by using the same resources located in a cloud. However, they need to do some investigations in order to make sure that they’ll be comfortable with having their data and applications being stored someplace else.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that IT Managers should insist on knowing where in the cloud their applications and data will be stored?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how an IT manager can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

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Great IT Managers Aren’t Afraid To Stumble On The Way To The Top

November 10th, 2011
Image CreditGreat IT managers always slip up before they become great

Great IT managers always slip up before they become great

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to take on responsibility for leading an IT team that might not be a success? I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – our company’s IT managers who are perfect are rewarded while IT managers who fail are kicked to the curb. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

How To Kill Your IT Management Career

In your job right now, what would happen to you if you failed? That end-of-year review is going to be a tough one to sit through, right? Let’s face it, failure is not something that is rewarded in our workplace and in fact it’s something that we all actively avoid if we possibly can.

However, maybe we’re just setting ourselves up for a much bigger career disaster. Can we all admit that the world as we know it is changing? Can you remember watching old-time movies where the hero would get a job at a company and then spend his or her entire career working there? We all know that those days are long gone.

Something else is changing also: our jobs. The job that you had when you started working may already be gone. The one that you’re doing right now probably won’t exist in what, 2, maybe 3 years from now. This all means that you are going to have to change and change involves risk and along with risk comes the very real possibility that you are going to fail.

How To Become A Success By Failing

Well, that failing stuff doesn’t sound like it’s going to be any fun. But wait, has anyone else ever failed? Turns out that yes, in fact most successful people who are now in leadership positions can look at their past and point to failures that helped them to get to where they are now.

The poster child for this kind of “good failure” would be Howard Schultz – the guy who founded the Starbucks chain of coffee shops. We all know and love the Starbucks store today, but when Howard first started it he really blew it. There were no chairs, he played lots of opera music, and his menu was in Italian. Clearly he realized that he had failed, quickly adjusted, and went on to become a big success.

You can do the same. You need to learn to make lots of small bets. Some of these bets will pay off, and some won’t. It’s through what you learn from the failures that you’ll be able to make tiny changes to your approach and try, try again.

If we keep doing things the same way that we’ve always been doing them, then we will eventually stagnate and then we’ll go into decline. However, if you have the courage to start to fail and to learn from those failures, then the future contains limitless possibilities for both you and your career.

What All Of This Means For You

IT managers who are afraid to fail will never become a true success. Oh sure, they may do ok for a few years, but when things get really rough, they’ll wash out.

If you are willing to adjust how you view failure, your career can take off. If you can start to look at failures as being simply being learning experiences that are not be feared, but they are to be used to become a better IT manager then you’ll be able to grow and become better at what you do.

No, you can’t be an idiot about this and do silly things that cause your IT team to fail, but if you try your hardest and your dream team still fails than you will have learned what doesn’t work. The big deal is that it takes courage for you to be able to do this.

IT managers who are a success have to had failures in their past. It’s from the forge of failure that the steel of success is formed. Learn how to make small bets so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. Do this well and you’ll become a successful IT manager.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What’s the best way to get your management to become comfortable with failures as a sign of success?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So there I was the other day talking with one of my IT manager customers and I was going on and on about how her team needed to start adapting their design process to include cloud computing. She knows me very well so she felt comfortable in stopping me in mid-sentence. She said “Jim, I’ve been hearing a lot about this cloud computing stuff and I sorta know what is it, but I’m not sure that I fully understand it. ” Oops, I hadn’t realized that there were still folks out there that hadn’t “drunk the cloud Kool-Aid”. Ok, so now we’re going to take care of this.

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IT Managers Know That Strategies Never Last

November 3rd, 2011
Image CreditEvery IT team's strategy eventually is used up

Every IT team's strategy eventually is used up

As an IT manager, one of the biggest management challenges that you’ll ever face is setting an effective strategy that your entire team can rally behind. As though this wasn’t difficult enough, there’s a little secret about IT strategies that nobody probably ever took the time to tell you about. They don’t last.

A Little Thing Called Change

So why is it that our most carefully crafted IT strategies don’t last? Well the answer to that question is actually pretty easy: change happens. That’s right, no matter how much of your world you think that you control, the reality is that you don’t control the changes that happen in it.

What this means for your team’s IT strategy is that although when you created it, it was probably a good fit for the team and what you wanted to accomplish, it soon isn’t. Because of changes in your team’s environment, even if you are managing a dream team you’re going to need a new IT strategy.

Change can sneak in using a whole bunch of different disguises. Sometimes it’s quite obvious: the CEO announces that the company is changing direction and the project that your team was working on is most defiantly part of the old way of doing business. Other times it’s a bit more subtle: a product that your team was developing IT systems to support goes out of favor with customers and so the company decides to sell it off to another company.

No matter the reasons for the change, it will happen. When it does, you need to first be aware that your current IT strategy is no longer going to do the trick and then you need to have the IT manager skills that will be required to allow you to take action.

Why Strategy Is An Ongoing Process

Effective IT managers make a fundamental realization early on in their careers. They come to understand that developing a strategy for their IT teams to follow is not a one-shot deal. Rather it is simply one part of an ongoing process.

This understanding allows them to always be taking action in support of the ongoing process that is IT strategy development. They know that they need to keep their eyes open and constantly be examining both the external customer environment and the internal work environment for changes that will tell them that it’s time to chuck their current IT strategy and start to develop the next one.

If you feel that this is a task that you simply don’t have the time to do or to do well, then you need to take action. You need to find a member of your team who does have the required time and tell them that you are entrusting them with a new assignment: detect change when it occurs and tell you about it. This will fill them with pride and will give you a chance to practice your delegating skills.

What All Of This Means For You

Setting an IT strategy for your team to execute is a demanding task. Once done, it’s very easy for an IT manager to sit back and assume that his or her primary task going forward will simply be to make sure that the team is executing the strategy.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that IT strategies don’t last. Due to a little thing called change, the conditions that the strategy was designed to deal with will go away. They will be replaced with a completely different set of conditions and this means that it will once again become your responsibility to develop a new strategy to deal with them.

Realizing that developing an IT strategy for your team is an ongoing process is a key part of being an effective IT manager and demonstrating leadership. Understanding that it is a constant process is what it takes to be a great IT manager.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: How often do you think that you should re-evaluate your team’s IT strategy to see if it needs to be changed?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to take on responsibility for leading an IT team that might not be a success? I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – our company’s IT managers who are perfect are rewarded while IT managers who fail are kicked to the curb. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

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Do You Have Enough Personal Energy To Be An IT Manager?

October 27th, 2011
Image Credit
Do You Know How To Manage Your IT Manager Energy?

Do You Know How To Manage Your IT Manager Energy?

So what’s it going to take to make you a successful IT manager? Is it going to be your understanding of a wide variety of emerging technologies? Is it your ability to understand where the company stands in the marketplace and where it wants to go? Or is it your business skills that allow you to seamlessly network with the rest of the company in order to lead your IT team?

Turns out that these are all good to have; however, what it’s going to take to get you to the finish line is something much more valuable: personal energy.

Why You Are Doing A Poor Job Of Being An IT Manager

How would you be able to tell if you were doing a poor job of being IT manager? I guess one way would be to determine that you were not getting things done – more and more tasks were just sitting around waiting for you to get to them. Is this happening? Maybe we should take a look at your email inbox – is it getting rather full?

So what’s going on here? You’ve probably read that “Getting Things Done” book, you’ve studied the 7 habits of effective people, how much more time can you spend managing your time? Tony Schwartz has looked into what is going on here and he believes that we are all experiencing what he calls a “personal energy crisis”.

Look, for years and years we have all been finding ways to do more in a fixed amount of time – thank you smart phones and laptops. However, we’ve just about used up all of our available time no matter how hard we try to free up more time to do stuff. We are out of time. Going forward it’s not going to be so much about finding more time to get things done, rather it’s all going to be about finding the personal energy to get things done.

How To Find Your Personal Power

The concept of having enough personal power to get the important work done seems straightforward enough. But how does one actually go about doing this? Here’s what we are all missing: we are human beings and that means that at a biological level we are programmed to work for a while and then to take a rest. We are not computers sitting in some data center somewhere that can be plugged in and run for months or years without stopping.

Ooops, did I say rest? Doesn’t that go against just about everything that you are currently doing? Didn’t you get to the position of being an IT manager by working harder than everyone else? Getting in early, staying late, working weekends is what it takes to succeed, right?

Bad / Good news – turns out that we’ve got it all wrong. Because we are human beings, we do need rest. But the good thing about rest is that after we get some, we have the ability to do more work than before. Studies of pilots have shown this to be true: a short half-hour nap boosted their reaction times by 16% while pilots who didn’t nap had their reaction times drop by 34%. I suspect that most of us are in the 34% crowd.

A sleep researcher names Nathaniel Kleitman came up with the concept of the “basic rest activity cycle”. What this means is that during the day we all cycle through a 90-minute cycle where we go from high alertness to low alertness. Clearly your body wants you to stop and take a break every 90 minutes or so.

To become a more effective IT manager you need to make some changes in how you run your day. You need to schedule your work so that you are running at a higher focus for a shorter period of time. After this period is over, you need to take the time to rest and allow your body to renew itself. By doing this you will find that you really can get more work done in less time!

What All Of This Means For You

In order to be an effective IT manager you are going to have to be able to get an awful lot of work done. The question that should be smacking you in the face right about now is just exactly how are you going to get all of that work done? It turns out that time management is only going to get you so far. You are eventually going to run out of time.

This means that you need to become a strong leader, not one that runs out of steam. You are going to have to switch from managing your time to managing your personal energy. We humans are designed to work in 90 minute cycles. What this means that is that we’ll go from being very alert to being not so alert every hour and a half. Understanding that you have this cycle and designing your work schedule around it will be the key to becoming and remaining effective.

p>You can become the IT manager that everyone turns to because they know that you can get it done. However, the only way that you’re going to be able to do this is to make sure that your personal energy is up to powering you through day after day of charting your company’s technological future. Start living your work days 90 minutes at a time and you’ll be the IT manager that everyone looks up to.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What’s the best way to make sure that you can divide your day up into 90 minute blocks?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT manager, one of the biggest management challenges that you’ll ever face is setting an effective strategy that your entire team can rally behind. As though this wasn’t difficult enough, there’s a little secret about IT strategies that nobody probably ever took the time to tell you about. They don’t last.

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Posted in career | No Comments »

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