New managers often fail for predictable reasons. In this month's Harvard Business Review, Carol A. Walker tells how good supervisors can help rookie managers avoid the obstacles that so often trip them up. Walker is president of Prepared to Lead (www.preparedtolead.com), a management consulting firm in Weston, Mass. She previously worked for 15 years as an executive in the insurance and technology industries. Walker told Computerworld's Kathleen Melymuka that these observations and lessons apply especially to IT, where the work of individual contributors and managers is hugely different.
The recession, time constraints and the fallout from Sept. 11 have left many IT shops searching for thrifty, quick, non-travel-intensive alternatives to traditional management and leadership education. Purveyors of Web-based classes are eager to fill the breach, but many IT managers wonder what they may be missing when they trade in their plane tickets for solo flights at their desktops.
I've always been struck by how neatly many IT women seem to fit into one of two categories that I call "Woe Is Me" and "Says Who?" When women in the first group bump against perceived gender barriers - the condescending boss, exclusion from the boys' club or the fact that no woman has ever led a big project - they whine. Those in the second group perceive those barriers as challenges and overcome them.
When CIO Tom Murphy came to Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. in April 1999, the company's IT workforce was as diverse as they come. Employees hailed from more than 40 countries, and nearly half of them were minorities or women. But IT management was foundering.
Fifty-five percent of all customer relationship management (CRM) programs fail, according to Gartner. A 2001 Bain & Co. survey of more than 400 executives found that one in five of them thought their CRM initiatives had actually damaged customer relationships. Even so, Meta Group Inc. predicts that the CRM software market will more than double, from US$20 billion last year to $46 billion by 2003.
It's been a tough year for 27-year-old Stephan Koledin. On June 7, 2001, he was laid off from his software development job at The Motley Fool Inc. in Alexandria, Va. Since then, it's been a roller-coaster ride of shotgun Web searches, sure things gone bad, freelance work and unintriguing prospects.
If your IT shop is "customer-driven," you may have to haul it in for a tuneup. That's the message from Anthony W. Ulwick, CEO at software and consulting firm Strategyn, in this month's Harvard Business Review, where he explains the dangers of developing products and services based on what customers say they want. Ulwick talked with Computerworld's Kathleen Melymuka about how to determine what customers really need.
Self-service is a pretty simple concept: Enable your customers to accomplish their goals without human intervention. You don't spend dollars on phone calls; your customers find what they need themselves for pennies and don't have to wait in a phone queue. It's a win/win situation. You make your customers happy, and everything else falls into place.
What comes to mind when you hear the word e-business? Speed? Intuition? Daring? Seat-of-the-pants? | How about metrics? Bottom line? ROI? Value? | For all the attention that's been paid to the first set of words, you don't hear much about the second. In fact, few Fortune 500 retailers and manufacturers that are steeped in the thrill of the Internet are willing to talk about measuring the real value of their e-business ventures.
On the first business day of the new millennium, Duke Energy initiated a guerrilla approach to e-business. A small band of advocates began to roam the utility, living in the business units, seeding pilot projects, assisting with implementations, coordinating resources and spreading success stories. Eighteen months later, having launched more than a dozen successful Internet initiatives that saved the company US$52 million last year alone, the "e-team" is now handing off the projects to the businesses.
At a business lunch in Korea, Irene Dec's hosts were watching, waiting for her to begin eating first, as politeness requires. The lunch was in plastic bento boxes, with numerous individual compartments holding different kinds of food. Dec, who doesn't count Asian food among the highlights of her overseas experiences, looked for something familiar. Spotting what appeared to be a pile of large shrimp tempura, she quickly picked one up and popped it into her mouth so the others could begin their meal.
Getting a grip on data privacy and IT security issues has to be accomplished through a cultural evolution within companies rather than by quick fixes, according to a panel of users, analysts and vendors that discussed the issue here yesterday.
Diallo Noel, who is black, was a certified computer technician with no degree and five months of fruitless interviews behind him when he arrived at Public Broadcasting Service last year to interview for a help desk job. After two technical interviews, he was surprised to be ushered into CIO Andre Mendes' office.
Sixty-two percent of IT women believe there is a glass ceiling in the industry, while 62 percent of IT men do not. That's one of the findings of a survey conducted by Roper Starch Worldwide for Deloitte & Touche LLP/Deloitte Consulting.
Companies interested in doing business globally must take data privacy issues very seriously because even one slip-up could be devastating to their corporate images, according to a panel of IT executives and other experts who discussed globalization issues at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference here today.