Writing
Small data is the stuff you keep in Excel or Access, or heaven forbid… a Word table. It’s on your desktop or a shared file that a few people use. It’s less than a million records. (A million sounds like a lot huh? It’s not really. There are 1.5 million items for sale on eBay […]
In 1985, my parents spent a lot of money on a full system Commodore 128 (CPU, Monitor, printer, desk and chair, and a fair amount of software). While I’m sure they knew it was a good buy for their kids, I don’t think they could have imagined the kind of impact it made for me. […]
When social media first came to the office, IT departments we tasked by management to make sure it was blocked from the work computers. Spending time on any social media website certainly wasn’t being productive. If it was viewed a website was used for entertainment, then it was blocked. You shouldn’t be watching YouTube at […]
I’m sure the last few years have had IT Leadership heralding the call to Mobile. “We must be mobile!”, “Our Company needs an App!” can be heard in leadership meetings far and wide. So what are the options? What are the pros and cons to each? Here is your guide: Native App: This is an […]
Inappropriate titles If someone is responsible for IT, they must have an IT background (education too). Where do you draw the line? Title. A Chief Executive officer doesn’t need a background in IT, but a Chief Information Officer should. Don’t have a CIO? The rule applies down the line, if your top IT employee reports […]
We have become inundated with software. This was likely to happen as we have previously become inundated with hardware. The vast majority of us own smartphones, laptops and tablets, each we use for purposes that are constantly merging together like the colors of a rainbow. If you thought for a moment that the ‘software’ (I […]
In an episode of Master Chef, Gordon Ramsay said during the usual berating of a contestant: “When you’re good at something, it creates confidence. When you’re insecure about something it creates an arrogance.” And there lays the gist, summed up by a yelling chef. He went on: “Arrogant chefs are like blondes in Hollywood.” It […]
In the past few days, I have two poor customer experiences that should have been better ‘if only’. If only these companies had unified systems. Even for something as simple as a Point-Of-Sale system. Here were my experiences with disparate systems: Last Friday I received a phone call from an automated system that my flight […]
I feel like I could write a book on this subject. Early in my career, and for many years, the software I had a part in developing focused on innovative functionality. We created software that replaced mundane tasks, accomplished search and match functions super-fast (and early project was an Automatic General Ledger Reconciliation software for […]
Recently I was hired to take a look at a problem someone was having with their iPad app. It was crashing in a couple spots when connected to HDMI out. The app developer wanted the crash logs, but the owner of the app didn’t register the iPad with his own computer (even if he had, […]