Learn about the industry that you are in

It often amazes me and don't be too surprised about this statement though since I'm often amazed, about the lack of interest some Information Technology professionals have about the sector that their company is in. It shouldn't make a difference right? I.T. is I.T. right? Wrong! It makes all the difference.
One size does not fit all
Competitive advantage varies wildly between different sectors
The situation typically dictates the approach i.e. What does your company do? What is it's business model, how does it get its products to market.

How can you prioritise when you do not know these things? It's like asking for a gold fish to prioritise what happens in an Emergency Room, a gold fish knows what's happening at this particular moment in time but a Professional can assess what has happened before, is currently occurring and what should be done next, past, present future, experience, triage and pro-action.

My OS is better than your OS!

I work in an multi-operating system shop, we use Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X and we almost always get into the which OS is the best debate.

I admit I'm a bit of an anomaly though since I'm a Linux guy who does everything from the command line via a Windows desktop because I can use my PuTTY (secure connection software) with my X-StarWin x windows client (it lets me Unix open graphical software on my Windows machine) while putting my Powerpoint presentations together, while all the time craving for an iPhone.

I work with guys who don't know what a command line is, Apple Mac die-hards and others who only need a VT220 terminal (now I'm showing my age!) and curse graphical interfaces.

Funnily enough this turf war has also moved on to mobile phones! Symbian, Apple, Palm, Blackberry and Microsoft mobiles.

I often get asked to choose one and create a policy to enforce it and my choice is typically as instead "what are you most productive using?"

Hmm, what is going to get you up and running with the least amount of support? Now this might sound really satisficing (which it is!) but there is reason to it, people who use what they are happy with typically have a lower support overhead in my experience.

Whenever you force someone to use what they are not happy with you will get problems, they are used to manual/stick and give them automatic, they are used to chocolate and you give them vanilla, it will initially seem great for you but in the long run everyone loses, they are less productive and you have a higher support and training burden.

Sometimes you need to do a quick analysis of the situation and remember that you are there to provide a service and sometimes that service may mean compromise and compromising isn't so bad in my honest opinion.

In a world of constant change and multiple paths...

In a world of constant change and multiple paths. sometimes it's great to have certain decisions fixed.

Sometimes too many options are a bad thing and limits to the ability to totally customise your processes or software may be a blessing in disguise because it may force you to adopt standard processes that are common across all business units and typically be corporate best practice, it also eases your upgrade path.

Adoption of a core technology and choice of the leading services that plug directly into it, limits your options sure, but as long as you have a solid core and while you may not have the best of the best of solution for the problem at hand, you may however be way "up there" in the best of class solution for your business.

So before you grab the best solution for X problem, look at the big picture and see how it integrates with "Y", the overall business needs & "Z", the core systems that it will need to interfaces with.

Sometimes you'll find that point solution that you thought was the silver bullet will become an albatross around your neck.

Kai-zen! The Clash between Judo and IT!

I do Judo (the Gentle Path is it's English translation from Japanese but my back is telling me something a little different today!) , I love it! It's been good to me even when I left it for 20 years and came back, then and only then in a moment of great epiphany did I finally realise that... from the moment I initially stepped onto that tatami and did my first throw to when I came back to the mat years later, what it had taught me...

The Japanese have a word that embodies the search to perfect oneself and one's skills to become better, stronger and faster at what you are and what you do, to strive for continuous improvement and that word is Kai-zen.

Kai-zen means "Change - Good" every change should make you better, it's slow, but it's cumulative, by rejecting what doesn't work and accepting that which does, by taking every failure as a lesson in what should not be done and an opportunity to search for that which will, by not succumbing to the insanity of trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

It's a lesson in seeking what is good and what works in life and in business, it teaches you to never accept what is not optimal, what will hurt you over and over again and instead create a collection of experiences and knowledge of that which works and is good.

Now before I get too spiritual it has some real practical purposes as well:

• When something goes wrong take it as an opportunity to change things so that it won't go wrong the same way again!
• Don't limit yourself or your processes to what is, think of how it should be and make it so;
• Believe that things don't always have to be this way and you can make it right.

You can make things better and sometimes with just this belief you can set yourself on the right path.

In Outer SaaS no one can hear you scream

In my current IT strategy if an Enterprise Software Vendor doesn't have a "Software as a Service" story then I'm not really interested in what they have to say.

Sometimes you need to be free to make mistakes but traditional monolithic software is not quite the suitable playground in which to make them, mistakes in the enterprise software world are costly.

I once worked for a company that invested in a new Supply Chain Management system only to watch it spectacularly fail and take the jobs of the CIO and IT Director with it, unfortunate for them but fortunately for me, I learnt some exceptionally good lessons at their expense, however they didn't make any particularly bad decisions since they:

• Selected two of the top players in the market place i.e. in the top 5 and to be really specific one of the top 3 hardware vendors and top 5 SCM at that time;
• They were cost conscious and negotiated one of those once in a life time deals;
• They consulted and involved their people, they may not have followed the overall consensus but they involved everyone.

With all this going behind them how could it all have gone so horribly wrong? Well there were a number of reasons but the primary one was "risk", too much risk was involved and it was not suitably mitigated or transferred, and risk is a clear and present danger in the implementation of today's enterprise systems.

There are way too many variables to account for in such complex systems and typically there is too much skin in the game for people to easily pull out when something goes awry.

"The problem with momentum is that it can either take you up a hill or over a cliff, it's agility and responsiveness that can make all the difference in the path that you take"

This is why I like SaaS, you can commit to a monthly fee and use the service tactically until you have a strategic solution and either stick or switch depending on how it works out.

• The implementation risk has been transferred to a 3rd party whose core business and competencies depend upon on them getting it right first time.
• My company gains the ability to do their jobs from anywhere from any internet capable device.
• I have lower requirement for internal systems in terms of lower data, licensing, backup and administrative overhead.
• I have a lower skill requirement internally, I no longer need the all singing, all dancing support person who can roller skate backwards with a kitchen sink tied to his back.

And last but by no means least "Just keeping the lights on" is someone else's job, I get to do the real cool stuff of making it all happen.