Making IT Work

What happens on the heels of Apple stealing the headlines with its iPad launch? Well, in comes Super Bowl 44 and Google's first-ever Super Bowl ad beamed into the living rooms of millions of Americans. It was an ad called "Parisian Love," timed a week before Valentine's day, and likely many a smart male out there took some notes as Google showed the world how to wield their search engine to sweep your soul mate off their feet. ...

I promised I wouldn't write "yet another" of these 2000-2009 retrospective blog posts - and I'm sticking to that resolution. I'm not going to mention the usual suspects of Google, the IPhone, Apple or Microsoft. I'm going to talk about simply one thing. What really matters.The death of the geek, rise of the nerd, when mom got a cell phone, dad went gaga for the internet and the world went digital. This is how I would characterize the last 9 years . Let me tell you why. ...

As a technology blogger and pundit, I (thankfully) have no need to risk my life to "churn out a story". If I need a first hand account of breaking news, a trip to Las Vegas for the CES show is about as risky as it gets. Today's news from Kandahar impacted me in a way that I did not expect. I did not know 34 year old Michelle Lang, and honestly had not heard her name until the news broke that she, along with four Canadian soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday, by yet another roadside explosive. ...

This is where "the rubber hits the road" in change management or project team efforts. Kotter describes this step as Empowering Others to Act on the Vision and HBR (Harvard Business Review) breaks this step down into 3 key streams of activity: - Getting rid of obstacles to change - Changing systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision - Encouraging risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions ...

The 3rd step in the Kotter Change Model is all about crafting a Vision and Strategy. The lack of vision, or the inability to articulate the Vision in a way that connects with people, teams or the broad organization is a great way to almost guarantee your change effort or project to fail - everyone needs to buy in to the vision. This is key and it requires leadership, regardless of how small you think your project/scope might be. ...

You read about it all the time, and articles like this one, provide excellent perspective on many of the blind spots project leaders, managers and executives often have which generate friction and counter productive behaviour to the ultimate project goal of success. The good news is that there are frameworks out there which, if you follow will increase the success rates of your projects ...

After all these years of head scratching I think I've finally figured out why time and time again Microsoft proves that they can be a brilliant innovator and provider of technology solutions on one day, and then turn around and do something completely stupid and unexplainable. Gather around one and all, for this holiday season things are no different and the truth is out. Microsoft only has ONE brain, and it cannot multi-task -- Rather, it is carried around, from division to division, floor to floor and lucky is the one who gets to keep it for the day.......

I feel bad for writing an anti-Lance Ulanoff post. I follow Lance over on PCMag.com, but I couldn't stop myself from flat out disagreeing with almost everything he said in this post. (Sorry Lance!). So here's my top 7 reasons why you should stay away from eReaders this 2009 Christmas! ...