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ITの経営
ITの経営 に分類された記事が40件あります。
The Social Contract of Sales
In IT we tend to deal with more sales scenarios than most business positions will do. An accountant, for example, is rarely in a position to buy equipment, software or products for their business…
When to Consider High Availability?
“High Availability isn’t something you buy, it’s something that you do.” – John Nicholson Few things are more universally desired in IT than High Availability (HA) solutions. I mean really, say those…
Rethinking Long Term Support Releases
Traditionally Long Term Support operating system releases have been the bulwark of enterprise deployments. This is the model used by IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Suse and Red Hat and has been the…
All IT is External
In IT we often talk about internal and external IT, but this perspective is always one from that of the IT department itself rather than the one from the business and I feel that this is very…
Understanding Technical Debt
From Wikipedia: “Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is “a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the…
No One Ever Got Fired For Buying…
It was the 1980s when I first heard this phrase in IT and it was “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” The idea was that IBM was so well known, trusted and reliable that it was the safe choice as a…
Buyers and Sellers Agents in IT
When dealing with real estate purchases, we have discrete roles defined legally as to when a real estate agent represents the seller or when they represent the buyer. Each party gets clear…
The Emperor’s New Storage
We all know the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. In Hans Christian Anderson’s telling of the classic tale we have some unscrupulous cloth vendors who convince the emperor that they have clothes…
Understanding Bias
I often write about the importance of alignment in goals between IT and vendors and how critical it is to avoid getting advice from those that you are not paying for that advice, because that makes…
Business: The Context of IT
I would estimate that the vast majority of people working in the IT field come to it out of an interest in or even a passion for computers. Working in IT lets them play with many big, fast, powerful…
Types of IT Service Providers
A big challenge, both to IT Service Providers and to their customers, is in attempting to define exactly what an IT vendor is and how their customers should expect to interact with them. Many people…
Avoiding Local Service Providers
Inflammatory article titles aside, the idea of choosing a technology service provider based on the fact or partially based on the fact that they are in some way located geographically near to where…
You Are Not Special
It is not my intention for this to sound harsh, but I think that it has to be said: “You are not special.” And by “you” here, of course, I mean your business. The organization that you, as an IT…
Explaining the Lack of Large Scale Studies in IT
IT practitioners ask for these every day and yet, none exist – large scale risk and performance studies for IT hardware and software. This covers a wide array of possibilities, but common examples…
What Do I Do Now? Planning for Design Changes
Quite often I am faced with talking to people about their system designs, plans and architectures. And many times that discussion happens too late and designs are either already implemented or they…
Better IT Hiring: Contract To Hire
Information Technology workers are bombarded with “Contract to Hire” positions, often daily. There are reasons why this method of hiring and working is fundamentally wrong and while workers…
The Home Line
In many years of working with the small and medium business markets I have noticed that the majority of SMB IT shops tend to one of two extremes: massive overspend with an attempt to operate like…
Should IT Embrace Subscription Licensing
With big name, traditionally boxed products like Microsoft Office and Adobe’s Creative Suite turning to new subscription licensing models we, as IT, have to look into this model and determine if and…
IT Generalists and Specialists
IT Professionals generally fall into two broad categories based on their career focus: generalists and specialists. These two categories actually carry far more differences than they may at first…
It Worked For Me
“Well, it worked for me.” This has become a phrase that I have heard over and over again in defense of what would logically be otherwise considered a bad idea. These words are often spoken innocently…
The Desktop Revolution Is Upon Us
With the pending end of support for Windows XP looming just around the proverbial corner, it is time to take stock of the desktop landscape and make hard decisions. Windows XP has dominated the…
Contract to Hire
There are so many horrible hiring practices commonly used today one hardly knows where to begin. One of the most obviously poor is the concept of “Contract to Hire” positions. The concept is simple…
The Inverted Pyramid of Doom
The 3-2-1 model of system architecture is extremely common today and almost always exactly the opposite of what a business needs or even wants if they were to take the time to write down their…
Stick to IT, Don’t Become Another Department
I see this very regularly, it seems to be a huge temptation of IT departments to overstep IT bounds and want to take on the roles and responsibilities of other company departments. In the SMB this…
Hello, 1998 Calling….
Something magic seems to have happened in the Information Technology profession somewhere around 1998. I know, from my own memory, that the late 90s were a special time to be working in IT. Much of…
The Smallest IT Department
Working with small businesses means working with small IT shops. It is very common to find the “one man” shows and I am often in discussions about how to handle environments so small. There is no…
Keeping IT in Context
Information Technology doesn’t exist in a bubble, it exists to serve a business or organization (for profit, non-profit, government, etc.) The entity which we, as IT professionals, serve provides the…
Virtual Eggs and Baskets
In speaking with small business IT professionals, one of the key factors for hesitancy around deploying virtualization arises from what is described as “don’t put your eggs in one basket.” I can see…
You Aren’t Gonna Need It
I’m lucky that I work in IT but come from a software engineering background, this gives me a bit of a different perspective on the world of IT both in understanding much of what is happening behind…
Nearly As Good Is Not Better
As IT professionals we often have to evaluate several different approaches, products or techniques. The IT field is vast and we are faced with so many options that it can become difficult to filter…
The True Cost of Printing
Of all of the things that are handled by your technology support department, printing is likely the one that you think about the least. Printing isn’t fancy or exciting or a competitive advantage. It…
Just Because You Can…
I see this concept appear in discussions surrounding virtualization all of the time. This is a broader, more general concept but virtualization is the “hot, new technology” facing many IT…
Do You Really Need Redundancy: The Real Cost of Downtime
Downtime – now that is a word that no one wants to hear. It strikes fear into the heart of businesses, executives and especially IT staff. Downtime costs money and it causes frustration. Because…
Never Get Advice from a Reseller (or Vendor)
This is general business advice that often applies to IT but is certainly not limited to that realm alone. Outside support in IT comes from two main sources: firms who are paid (by you) to advise you…
Seven Reasons It Is Time for Windows 7
What’s your reason for not upgrading to Windows 7? Many IT managers wait for the first service pack before deploying an OS upgrade; others update the operating system as part of a hardware refresh…
Hiring IT: The Reverse Interview
Corporate interviewers often forget that interviews are a two way street: yes the company is interviewing the hopeful job candidate, but that candidate is interviewing the company as well. Unless you…
Choosing an Email Architecture: Internal or Hosted
If you talk to email specialists what you seem to find, in my small, anecdotal survey of the market, is that half of all of these professionals will tell you to simply install email locally, normally…
In House Email for Small Businesses
In small businesses the primary concern with email is cost. Email is a commodity and especially in smaller shops the biggest differentiating factor between email products and vendors is cost. In…
The SMB IT and Vendor Relationship Dilemma
When most people compare enterprise IT and the small business IT markets they generally think about size and scale. Enterprise environments are huge and small business IT often consists of just one…
The Dangers of Blade Servers in SMB – Debunking the Blade Server Myth
Blade Servers are the hottest trend in datacenters today. I am sure that you have heard the hype: lower cost and better efficiency. To be sure, blades have come a long way in the last few years and…