It amazes me how brilliant technicians will devour tomes of administration manuals and reference guides, but might not have read a single book on business or design. Absorbing nothing but technical materials is like working out only one side of your body. You eventually are unbalanced with incredible strength that cannot overcome significant deficiencies.
My library is full of O’Reilly must haves, of course. Who
This Christmas Day I wish you all good tidings and joy. I am grateful for the many connections that I have made with numerous professionals through this blog, and I hope to bring you thought provoking articles throughout 2014 as a way to show my appreciation for your time and shared insights.
May your holidays be fun, relaxing, and memorable!
IT professionals are charged with solving complex technical problems. For this purpose our organizations send us to training and industry conferences (well, they should send us to training and conferences but not all do), so that we can expand our knowledge and skill sets. After attending these training sessions and conferences we are often deemed “experts” in that particular area of technology, because upon ou
“We have always done it this way. Why change what works?”
I hear this statement and cringe. It breaks down as follows:
“We have always done it this way.” – Then you are not taking advantage of your opportunity to innovate. Everything can be improved upon.
“Why change what works?” – Because what works now was probably an alteration upon a previous solution that used to work too (although not nearly
Like the forces of erosion that carved the Grand Canyon out of the landscape, the traditional model of a central office is crumbling away. Unlike the Grand Canyon though, this erosion will not take millions of years to see its results. This transformation is taking place right now. The central office is eroding away at such a rate that you can actually see the transformation taking place right before your eyes.
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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
This article is for non-IT people. Every organization’s IT shop seems to have that one person whom everyone within the company says knows everything. This person is the “absolute expert” that can answer any question about any technology and solve any problem. When it comes time to expand the IT staff and hire a new person the idea is that the organization will just hire another absolute expert like the one th
Designing IT infrastructures built upon virtualization technologies takes up a good amount of my time. It is important that I keep up-to-date on the latest technologies, and when friends both from within my company and outside of it started talking about Atlantis Computing’s product Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI I became curious. VDI solution’s storage needs are tough to size right, because unlike a server envir
Imagine that you are hired to inspect, categorize, and stack inventory. You are trained, then tested, and you are capable of processing up to eight items per hour under ideal conditions. You are expected to work eight hours a day, and at the end of each day you are to have processed 48 items. With the goal of processing six items per hour you begin your new occupation.
You do your job day after day and the organiza
In my role I deal with a lot of diagrams and presentations. There is an unfortunate trend amongst IT professionals, manufacturers, and resellers to fail to communicate properly using both diagrams and presentations. This miscommunication stems from the inclusion or exclusion of text. Sometimes you need to read text to explain what you are looking at, and at other times text gets in the way. It all depends on the pu
