Policies and Procedures
« Previous EntriesDeparture tales
Monday, August 23rd, 2010This is a tale of three departures and their lessons for IT leaders.
Departure #1 is Steven Slater. In case you’ve been living in a cave, Slater, a JetBlue flight attendant, experienced an intense customer relationship opportunity with a passenger who retrieved her luggage before the plane reached the gate.
That’s when Slater achieved greatness:
How business leaders use the news
Monday, July 26th, 2010Balance, it appears, is the new political incorrectness.
Unsubscribes peaked following last week’s satire that drew parallels between voter outrage and how bad bosses have treated people over the years. It was clear many would have had no problem with the subject matter had I validated their outrage instead.
Now don’t go away … this column is [...]
Unstructured data design – a modest proposal
Monday, May 24th, 2010If there’s one certainty in our business, it’s that useful, lightweight frameworks turn into bloated, productivity-destroying methodologies.
And so it was with considerable trepidation last week that I suggested we need another methodology, to do for Content Management Systems (CMSs — the technologies we use to manage unstructured information) what normalization and related techniques do for [...]
Unstructured data design – the missing methodology
Monday, May 17th, 2010Microsoft has just announced Office 2010. Surprisingly enough, it has genuinely interesting new features, most of them revolving around SharePoint and support for collaboration.
And, of course, The Cloud, where to Microsoft’s credit, alone among major software vendors its product makes serious use of the PC’s processing power instead of limiting its role to running a [...]
Enterprise technical architecture management — an old new idea
Monday, May 10th, 2010Ever meet someone who just has to have a strong opinion on every subject, whether or not they know anything about it?
Those known for expertise are particularly prone to this ailment. Some of us, having learned one subject in great depth (in my case the behavior of electric fish), use that experience to recognize our [...]
Threat management – the political plan
Monday, October 12th, 2009Imagine you’re no longer responsible for keeping your company’s computers up and running. Instead, you’re an epidemiologist. Rather than a new and very aggressive malware threat you read about a new and highly contagious virus … the statistics indicate 30% of those exposed become infected and roughly 1.25% of those infected die.
The U.S. has a [...]
Cwazy wabbits
Monday, September 14th, 2009This year’s must-read business book … and by must-read I mean you must read it because every other manager is reading it … is Steven Spear’s Chasing the Rabbit (2008).
Fortunately, it would be worth your time to read, even if it wasn’t a must-read book. Like Jim Collins’s Good to Great (2001) and Joyce, Nohria [...]
Pentagonalitil
Monday, August 3rd, 2009When you have a flat tire, do you:
A. Keep driving, complaining about how bumpy the road is?
B. Pump air into the tire and hope it won’t leak out this time?
C. Bolt on a new axle?
D. Repair or replace the tire?
In far too many companies the answer is, for some reason, “Anything but D.”
Security success
Monday, July 6th, 2009The most inadvertently funny ad on television these days brags about a brilliant new feature of the latest iPhone. Apple has just invented cut and paste, hitherto available only in PC-DOS, OS/2, Windows, every version of the Mac OS, Linux and every other Unix flavor, every Palm PDA and smartphone since 1996, Android, and the [...]
Telecommuting wrap-up
Monday, May 4th, 2009Companies built from the ground up to either include a remote workforce or to consist of nothing but remote employees … in other words, virtual enterprises … can save quite a bit compared to providing cubicles.
Saving quite a bit isn’t the same as free, though. Among the reasons: While the case law isn’t entirely settled, [...]
Bob Lewis is president of 