Unexpected Lessons Learned From A Champion

Today I saw a champion share his passion with the world. Not just a champion, but the 2004 Toastmasters International World Champion for Public Speaking – Dr. Randy J. Harvey. Randy shared his methodology and tactics for crafting amazing speeches as the keynote speaker for a Toastmasters Learning Institute event that I attended today, and he shared a wonderful line-by-line analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysbu

Quality Cannot Be Rushed

I recently attended NetApp Insight in Las Vegas, and I was hoping to write a daily blog article while at the event. That plan was quickly replaced by the reality that I was going to be working each night from my hotel room. Despite my attempts to have all projects in a stable state before leaving for the conference unexpected needs arose and my agenda had to be put aside to deal with these new workloads. The result

Cheap Heart Surgery

How long could you survive if your heart stopped? A minute? Two minutes? Probably not much longer than seven minutes at the most. Can your business survive a day without your IT infrastructure? Can it survive for a week without email? Can it go for a month without Internet access? Maybe your business can survive for that day, but not if it is a regular occurrence. Perhaps you can go for a week without email, but yo

Forget Price When Designing Solutions

Imagine that the top executive of your organization came to you with a top priority project and a small budget. Okay, some of you do not have to imagine that… You are given an objective. There is a measurable and defined result that must be achieved. You know what the goal is and now you must solve the problem. At this point you can take one of two paths. The first path is to look at the budget and to start shopp

Old Technology Is Not Bad Technology

Following my last article on how innovation should not be the goal of a good IT shop but rather a consequence of pursuing excellent service I wanted to address another misconception regarding technology: That somehow a technology’s age determines its usefulness. This is a ridiculous misconception. A technology’s usefulness is determined solely by how well it solves a problem. For example, recently I wro