A Technical Manager's Perspective

Personal Time Management

Over the years I have developed my own strategy for Time Management and I thought that I would share my strategy with you.

My strategy is based on making a daily list of tasks and prioritizing the list. I like to make my lists in the morning before my day really gets started and what I usually do is have one or two big lists per week. What I like to do is put down everything from projects and milestones to follow-up phone calls and emails. My big list includes everything from my deliverables to my staff's deliverables, and occasionally includes non-work related tasks that need to be done that day.

After compiling the list I put a dot next to all the tasks that I feel are a high priority and require some action that day. I usually focus on the priority tasks with a dot, and every morning I review my list, cross off all completed items and create a new list

One the second day, my list is much smaller and includes the 5 to 10 tasks that I would like to complete that day. This is another way of prioritizing my daily tasks and often helps me to stay focused.

During the week, as new tasks and projects come in, I usually add them to my small daily list, and then by the end of the week, I review what has been accomplished and create a new master list with the new tasks and any remaining tasks that need to be carried forward.

I am also a firm believer in Meeting Agenda's, especially for staff meetings and one-on-one meetings. I like to put accomplishments at the top of the weekly agenda and then use older agendas as another way of tracking monthly and quarterly status.

I know that there are other Time Management Strategies, and I am a firm believer in the fact that there is more than one way to get the job done, so here is a link to a nice list that includes 33 other time management strategies.

IT Roadmap - Boston

I was at the NetworkWorld IT Roadmap conference in Boston this week and came away with a couple of take away's that I would like to outline. The conference is a nice quick one-day conference that is free to most IT folks who are willing to complete a survey. They have a number of different Technology tracks that allow folks to learn about new products and strategies and it provides a decent opportunity to find out what others in your field are doing. I attended the Vitalization track in the morning and the Web 2.0 track in the afternoon.

I really enjoyed the first speaker David Escalante, Director of Computer Security at Boston College. His keynote was named "Securing and Open Environment" and his talk was something that I could relate to. His main points were ....

• Protect your data
• Don't trust the network
• Monitor and analyze everything
• Create a layered defense applying more protection the closer you get to your data.

The virtualization track was moderated by Andreas M Antonopoulos who is a founding partner at Nemertes Research. Andreas did a nice job defining and outlining virtualization for the new folks in the room, however the point that I took away from his talk was this ....

• Do not incorporate a virtualization strategy just for the sake of server consolidation, instead make sure that your virtual infrastructure is dynamic enough to provide redundancy and scalability.

While at PHCS, we deployed Virtualization and I justified it by making the Server Consolidation point, however with the current set of VMOTION tools in VMWARE, there is a great justification surrounding reliability and scalability of your virtualization strategy.

The Web 2.0 track was moderated by Irwin Lazar who is a Principal Research Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration and Convergence at Nemertes Research.  Irwin did a nice job delivering a lot of content about web 2.0, and enterprise 2.0 trends and strategies, and ended by outlining key challenges and strategies for enterprise adoption.

Irwin's recommendations for those considering deploying these technologies are to define your architecture and support plans and really understand your business process and demands before adopting these technologies in the Enterprise.

Last Day at E2.0 Conference

This is my last day at the Enterprise 2.0 conference and I wanted to share my thoughts.

The first round of discussions were around cloud computing and the pros, cons and hype associated with cloud computing, however as the conference progressed it was clear that the real folks delivering Enterprise 2.0 type solutions were not talking about cloud computing but instead were using blogs, wiki’s, search, rss and tagging in some sort of integrated fashion. 

Before attending the conference, I clearly saw the benefits of wiki’s, rss, search and in some cases blogs within Business, however I was not convinced about the need to start adopting social features in our applications as the cost required to re-architect our applications would not justify the value add from aggregating all this social data. However, my opinion has changed. I am still concerned with the cost, but see the benefit in increased collaboration between teams, groups and organizations.

This is the direction that Businesses need to focus on. When you see Vendors Sun, Oracle, IBM Microsoft all coming out with Social products, you know that they see the value proposition and therefore I think it makes sense to start investigating social products and how they can fit in Business. If you are lucky enough to map these products to a business process, then the investigation and adoption is justified.

Finally, many people have asked me why I attended and what am I looking to get out of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. My answer has been to identify strategies that I can bring back and deploy in my organization, however I realize another benefit that I have gained for the conference. 

Attending this conference helped me to cement my idea of Enterprise 2.0, which is to deliver collaborative web services solutions to Business.

Web 2.0 is Not Enterprise 2.0

In the past I have certainly referred to Enterprise 2.0 as Web 2.0 in the Enterprise, however I have really changed my view on this description. Enterprise 2.0 certainly incorporates a number of Web 2.0 properties, however I think the focus of each is different.

Web 2.0 sites, applications and widgets are geared to drive eyeballs and traffic to their sites while most Enterprise Applications do not have this requirement, instead most Enterprise applications have a finite number of users, and most users do not have a choice to use other applications. 

I met Bill Ives who is a regular contributor to the Fastforward Blog at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference  and I referenced a recent post of his called  Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron where he makes this point. 

Enterprise 2.0 is about the Business and is about providing solutions for Business. When I think of Enterprise 2.0 solutions now, I think of tools and solutions usually delivered via Web Services, with much more collaboration built into the tools and solutions. This is similar to many Web 2.0 solutions, however most Enterprise 2.0 solutions require security and authentication which is another complication to deal with.

So what does it mean to deliver Web Services like solutions with more collaboration? I think it is different for every application. Some applications like blogs and wiki's already have collaboration built in, however most do not, so we need to analyze were collaboration and social computing could be beneficial to the solution that we are trying to solve.

And now that I better understand the subtle differences between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, I do not want to get caught up in the differences, instead I want to focus on the technologies used in both, and determine were I can incorporate these technologies into my environment.

An Evening in the Cloud

I sat in on the "An Evening in the Cloud" discussion at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and was very pleased. They had a great panel and there was a good discussion which was was filmed and there is a good in depth summary on the Enterprise2 Blog.

It started out with a great premise that made everyone stand up and take notice. The premise was "We should move ALL of our Enterprise IT resources into the Cloud" , and the discussion was between the three big Cloud vendors Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com and a group of CXO type executives.

I heard each vendor talking about the positive benefits for using their solutions but each vendor stopped short of recommending that we move ALL Enterprise IT Resources into the Cloud.  This is not a new opinion, in fact it is an option shared by many in the IT community.

Overall, I agree with this opinion. What I struggle with is the term "Cloud Computing" because it has received so much hype, and every new solution on the Internet is now referred to as Cloud Computing, much the same way that Web 2.0 grew in popularity.

As time goes on we will learn more and more about Cloud Computing and the subtle differences will emerge, for now, if you have an interest in cloud computing, you should start by identifying your needs and make sure that your Cloud vendor of choice can meet your requirements.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference

I am attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week and I am looking forward to meeting a number of folks that I have already shared thoughts and conversations with. In particular, I am interested in hearing about real strategies that will help large organizations.

As our industry has morphed from a static Web 1.0 to a dynamic Web 2.0 culture, these dynamic strategies are slowly finding there way into Business. Wiki's have gained a lot of traction in the business community as they are a good fit for many organizations, and the rise in adoption of Social Networks outside of the Enterprise has sparked demand for Social Networking Applications and Solutions within the Enterprise. Along with the demand for Social Networking, there has been a lot of talk and hype surrounding Cloud Computing, which I is an area that I am very interested in.

Is Cloud Computing something new or just a new way of looking at the old Application Service Provider model?