Customers drive e-business. Let me say that again: customers drive e-business. Not sellers - buyers. Not us - them. Yes, we're the ones doing all the work, building Web stores and wiring them to our back-end systems. But customers are the ones who control where they'll buy, how they'll buy and what they'll do on our Web sites.
Do you name your teams? Do you name the projects they work on? Do you spend time at the water cooler with the users on your teams? Do you have T-shirts or coffee mugs printed up with the project team's name and a slogan? Do you repeat your nicknames for the users on your team to their faces? Do you and your team's users all joke about management? Do you occasionally dig into your own pockets so everybody on the team - users and IT people alike - can have shirts that read, "We blew $2 million on The Project From Hell and all I got was this stupid shirt"?
Multiple choice: Microsoft.Net is Microsoft Corp.'s way of (a) reinventing the mainframe, (b) reinventing the Internet or (c) reinventing the PC. Tough call, eh? Microsoft hates the idea of PCs having to connect to a host computer to do something useful. It's not just Bill Gates - Microsoft's whole corporate culture despises the mainframe as the collapsed legacy of past technology on whose rubble the company's wealth and power have been built. Pinning Microsoft's future on Windows-reinvented-as-a-mainframe isn't just unthinkable, it's absurd.
Everything I need to know about project management, I learned on the Fourth of July. Well, OK, not everything - they didn't have Gantt charts in 1776. But it turns out that running a revolution and pushing through an IT project aren't that different. Think the universal laws of projects came from some high-priced business analyst blowing gas last week? Then maybe we should review some history - those laws were true 224 years ago, too.
What's the worst-case Microsoft scenario? Suppose Microsoft loses its appeal and faces being split up by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. What then?
Is it time to start thinking about a post-Microsoft Corp. era? Not an era without Microsoft - that's not just unthinkable, it's plain silly. IBM Corp. didn't disappear in the post-IBM era, after Big Blue stopped being the single dominant force in data processing. Microsoft won't disappear if it stops being the single dominant force in IT. Even Steve Ballmer finally acknowledged that last week, a few hours before Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft split in two. After months of describing such a split as a death sentence for Microsoft, Ballmer told Norwegian IT vendors that "we'll be fine either way. We'll move on."
What's next? What emerging companies and technologies will be hot for the next six months? Think wireless, B-to-B, B-to-C, managed services and self-healing systems.
Not very long ago, convergence meant one thing in the information technology world: the merging of television and the Internet. Interactive TV and Web multimedia would collide, the pundits predicted, resulting in a new medium combining the best of both worlds.
Why do we keep IT staffers penned up in their cubicles when they could be more valuable elsewhere?
It's not so hard to understand Microsoft's legal strategy. Microsoft Corp.'s lawyers insist they'll win big on appeal. But they're also in no hurry to get to the appeals court - they want six more months to explain why breaking up the company is a bad idea. But if they'll win on appeal anyway, why take all that time? Because you never know what might happen. An appeal is risky - you might lose. But in the meantime, a new president might tell the Justice Department to dump the case. The state attorneys general might go back to chasing Big Tobacco. A judge might drop dead. It might be an ugly victory - but a good lawyer would rather win ugly than lose pretty.
Not very long ago, convergence meant one thing in the information technology world: the merging of television and the Internet. Interactive TV and Web multimedia would collide, the pundits predicted, resulting in a new medium combining the best of both worlds.
Hoo boy! I recently suggested - among other things- cutting the human resources department out of the IT-shop hiring loop.
You can learn a lot about monopolies just by reading the news. Example: Last week, the U.S. government uncrippled the Global Positioning System for civilian use. As of Tuesday, business users with GPS devices won't get their locations just to within 100 meters; now the GPS can pinpoint it to within 10 meters. And sometimes less - Computerworld reporter Bob Brewin found some users who now get locations accurate to within 2 meters.
A CIO writes: "I used to work for a dysfunctional nonprofit organization. When the CEO finally caused the human resources manager to have a nervous breakdown, we hired a consultant to look at the process of hiring a replacement employee. The consultant's recommendation was to reduce the HR department to support personnel and let managers do direct hiring - using HR as a consultant, if needed. It required some training of the managers, but we reduced the time to hire and the costs significantly. If more HR departments acted like consultants who were trying to help hire the best employees, maybe IT people would appreciate them better."
Hoo boy! Last week I suggested - among other things - cutting the human resources department out of the IT-shop hiring loop. I might as well have wired every copy of Computerworld straight to wall current. What a hot button - I got mail from IT-shop veterans and students, career changers and consultants who'd prefer a steady gig, all of them snarling for the heads of the people in HR. Not a single programmer, network administrator or operations guy had a nice word to say about the gatekeepers who make it so hard to get an interview.