Business

I am a loyal reader of Andrew McAfee's articles which he posts on his Harvard Business School blog, The Impact of IT on Business and their Leaders.  Andrew McAfee is an associate professor at Harvard and spends a great deal of time on his blog discussing and defining Enterprise 2.0.

Michael Silverman has a great article on The Content Wrangler regarding content management. The full title of the article is "Making The Business Case for Web Content Management: First, Admit You Have A Problem".  The article is a one-stop place for explaining content management, why a business or organization should implement a content management system (CMS), and tips for choosing and implementing a CMS.

"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes.  Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."

-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.

Interesting observation by Karl Rove as well as good commentary by Charles Cooper.

In an illuminating interview published in the June 4 issue of The New Yorker, White House political aide Karl Rove suggested that a nexus exists between the spread of technology and a centrist-conservative outlook on the world.

"There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture," Rove told the magazine. "One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people's principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand."

Did you hear the reports about all that money to be made from online advertisements?  In 2006 alone, Internet ad revenue was estimated at $16.8 billion USD.  You have also likely heard of bloggers making thousands of dollars in just a short amount of time through online ads. If you believe this is another post about making money from online ads or how to optimize your site for the search engines, you are going to be disappointed.  I'm not here to tell you how to make money online but when you shouldn't be making money from advertisement on your site.

This kind of stuff is just plain wrong.

In late 2006 and early 2007, a resurgence of articles began focused on the generation of workers entering the workforce after Generation X. This generation, born after 1980, has also been called other names including Generation Y, the Millennials, and Generation Next. As it has always been, organizations must continue to learn and adapt when generational changes take place in the work force. The next generation of workers now entering the organization promises to "rewrite" the rules for those of us in information technology.

"In today’s global economy, a company’s success or failure may hinge on the ability to implement technology to remain competitive. The business managers of tomorrow must be able to see the big picture while also understanding the nuts and bolts that keep everything running. The type of thinking that was once left to technologists is now essential for business managers."

C.J. Kelly, "Can a Manager Be a Techie and Survive?", Computerworld, November 20, 2006

C.J. Kelly is the alias for a security manager that wishes to hide her real name and employer in her articles for Computerworld.

Those in IT with any ambition to move up the ranks need to understand their organization's business better, obviously. What isn't acknowledged so readily by management is the need for managers to know IT better.