IT Leadership
My little brother is in the news again with an article in The Times. It seemed the most unlikely of joint-billings – the Star Warsdirector George Lucas and a modest Scots initiative to improve e-communication within schools. In what must rank as one of the most heady compliments ever given to an education system, the film [...]
I have been catching up on press releases that have come in since I have been on holiday and picked up one from Secerno. Perimeter application firewall requirement leaves customer data vulnerable to growing insider threat, claims database security expert Secerno’s products are designed to protect the database by implementing a set of perimeter controls [...]
When I read the headline for this press release from The IT Job Board, I just about fell off my chair laughing. After reading through some of the finding though some things started to hit home. Research conducted by online recruitment specialist www.theitjobboard.co.uk revealed that of 500 IT workers surveyed for a report on working hours, nearly [...]
The Daily Mail reports that a UK Government investigation was launched after the personally identifiable information (PII) of more than a million bank customers was found on a computer sold on eBay. Highly sensitive information on American Express, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland customers was found on the disk array sold for £35.88 (about [...]
I bet that you came up with a big number? Some people I ask sit down and scratch their head and then start listing all of the products and services their companies offer. After a while most folks just give up, overwhelmed by the scale of the simple question I have asked. Try it for [...]
My colleague Christian Dalle Nogare lent me a book (embarrassingly many) months ago, The Toyota Way by Professor Jeffrey K. Liker and it has taken the extreme of lying by a pool in the Dominican Republic to get me to the point of reading it. Like many educated and experienced business managers, I had thought that [...]
Nearly three quarters of polled The Hot Aisle readers plan to purchase colocation data center capacity in the next six months.
When I saw the most inspirational leader of modern times on the cover page of Time Magazine (July 2008) sharing his Secrets of Leadership, even though Nelson Mandela is 90 years old and retired last century in 1999, I had to pick it up and spend the €4.20. I bought Time, not because I expected a great [...]
So we have a sub prime credit crisis that looks like it might turn into a global recession. IT is expensive and highly visible as well as often seen as non core. If you don’t get your budgets cut this year then you are very lucky and very unusual. I thought that you might like [...]
Fellow blogger Steve Duplessie at Steve’s IT Rants has picked up on the fact that Diane Green has left VMWare after a bad set of financial results. Steve writes a good article and it’s worth a read. Diane is a victim of heroism via unexpected consequences. Pretty much single handed VMWare has raised the CPE – Compute [...]
I first heard this phrase from my good friend and sometime mentor, Danny McNulty, when we worked together at Cable & Wireless. You may have heard of the book What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School by Mark H McCormack, well, just like McCormack, Danny is full of tried and tested management techniques and [...]
Jon Pyke of Cordys has the boundless enthusiasm of a man in his twenties combined with over 30 years of experience at the sharp end of Business Process Management and software development. A rare blend and one I am sure is fueled by his appetite for double expresso, “extra strong please, don’t tell the wife, I am [...]
According to a new online study from Reuters, evaluating the characteristics of 25,000 American adults, avid technology consumers tended to score highly in personality traits such as leadership, dynamism and assertiveness — but low in modesty. Perhaps this helps to explain why technologists seem to think that every business (and world politics) problem has a technology [...]
The way that most organizations run and manage their IT Operations is unscientific and somewhat random. This leads to overstaffing, poor performance, uncertain customer experience and unpredictability of delivery. It is worth comparing the way that IT Operations is organized with the older, more scientific and mature manufacturing industry. The Industrial Revolution started in England in earnest around 1780 or so with machine [...]
You may be very surprised to see that McKinsey believe that Data Center costs are 25% of all IT costs. Many CIOs will find it difficult to reconcile this view with their own budgets. There are a two key reasons why this is a difficult and badly understood process. Within many organizations many of the [...]
Large Corporations innovate badly if left to their own devices. The attributes that make large corporates able to operate at scale effectively, mitigate against innovation. Too much bureaucracy, too many rules, and a culture of fitting in with the team make innovative action a rare event in a typical corporate. So how do companies like Cisco, [...]
I have just been exchanging emails with my good friend and colleague, Will Forest. Will runs the Data Center Consulting Practice for top drawer strategy consultants, McKinsey & Company. I engaged Will, and we worked together on delivering BT’s Data Center Strategy. Will and his team brought a great deal of experience and clarity of [...]
I clearly remember as a wet-behind-the-ears youth complaining bitterly to my old boss, David Williams, that I was too busy and could never manage to complete everything that needed to be done. He laughed, collected a piece of that old fashioned green line-printer paper and sat down. He said: “This is the most important lesson that you [...]
I got around to reading a back copy of the Harvard Business Review and an article caught my eye again. Innovation Killers – How financial tools destroy your capacity to do new things. I skim read it back in January this year and made a mental note to spend a little time giving it more [...]
Simultaneously the most powerful aspect of and the biggest problem with IT Systems are that they are flexible by design. They are so flexible that that many of our people want to show how smart they are by being helpful and adding value. Unfortunately, being helpful is one of these things that inevitably leads to unintended [...]
Practicing the art of Management By Wandering Around (MBWA), has been my habit ever since reading In Search of Excellence in the early 80’s, when two McKinsey Consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr. publicized this highly effective management technique they uncovered at Hewlett-Packard. The basic principle is that command and control management is ineffective. Managers who rely [...]
Electricity is a traded commodity with a Futures Market, exactly like oil, tea and pork bellies. The wholesale electricity price is driven by analysts’ perceptions of the relationship between supply (how much is readily available and at what cost) and demand (how much is required now and in the future). The wholesale electricity price is one of [...]
During my time at BT I set the Data Centre team the challenge of getting Asset Management right, the team thought I was just being stupid and unreasonable but buckled down and with a bit of hard work got it close to 100% right with processes to keep it right. As a direct result of this [...]
My little brother Laurie O’Donnell who is a top man in the Education world, (winner of the George Lucas Education Foundation Global Six) was asked to speak to a group recently on the subject of leadership and identify some top tips for aspiring leaders. Here is what he came up with: Be a lifelong learner - as soon [...]
I have been working in the Data Centre business for many years and every time I take on a new role I get a surprise. A surprise that the basics are not done, that the lessons I learned all those years ago still haven’t reached this far! I guess that I should have stopped being [...]
