Leveraging Your Ecosystem for Better Peripheral Vision

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In an IT organization, peripheral vision is needed. The technology field is moving too quickly and has too much business impact to be ignored. At the same time, the amount and degree of activity which is squarely in front of IT leaders demands a very large amount of attention. What is needed is a mechanism to give the IT leadership peripheral vision - understanding what is coming up on them external to what is capturing their immediate attention.

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Why Do People Work For You?

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As a leader of your organization, you can shape your ecosystem. One of the hard parts of building out your ecosystem is determining your set of value propositions to your employees - or "why would people want to work for you?". Recruiting for new people may cause you to think through your value proposition to fill a role. This is different however, than value proposition to your workforce as the focus is smaller and typically less lasting.

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How Healthy is Your IT Ecosystem?

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As we have all learned, in nature a healthy ecosystem benefits all involved. When any part of the ecosystem is in ill health, in time all other aspects of the ecosystem will suffer. An IT organization operates in a similar manner. When all aspects of the IT ecosystem operate in harmony it operates much more effectively and efficiently.

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Where Are All the Tribes?

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Over the last few weeks there has been no end to the drama which has been unfolding in the health care debates. Debates of course being a very generous term. What we are seeing is pent up outrage over what people believe they are going to lose, or not going to gain. If there is one thing we can all count on, as much as death and taxes, is that the more a group of people has to gain or lose, the more they will fight to capitalize or preserve their situation. In the case of the US health care reform / health insurance reform there are plenty of groups to "go to work."

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30x: Personal Effort vs Corporate Effort

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""...And a weekend-scale implementation on a personal site usually translates roughly into a 90-day implementation cycle in a business context, which is a reasonably approachable project size. (In tech, three days in personal effort often translates to three months of corporate effort.)"" I've always intuitively believed that there is a significant productivity improvement which can be found when sufficiently motivated and talented individuals work on their own projects compared to when they work on corporate projects. But this statement implies a 30x productivity gain. Can this be true? Maybe so...

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Physics of IT - Force of Headwinds

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We never really begin any of our endeavors in an organization from a point of total calm. There are many forces at play, internal and external, which cause us fight headwinds in all that we do. In physics, we can calculate the net force in effect through vector arithmetic. From this set of calculations we learn that forces compound in both direction and magnitude resulting in the net force in play.

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Physics of IT - Acceleration

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Acceleration is defined as the change in velocity (velocity is equivalent to rate of change). In practical terms an object which is moving at a given velocity can increase it's velocity with an external force being applied (pressing an accelerator). The velocity can also be reduced with an external force being applied (pressing a brake). In our swimming pool example, if we were to increase the temperature to heat in the water in the pool, or move more water to heating elements (external forces) we can accelerate the rate of change

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