Recruit Millennials by Meeting Expectations

It’s official: The U.S. Census Bureau announced this summer that millennials — people born between 1982 and 2000 — now represent more than one-quarter of the nation’s population, exceeding the baby-boom generation in size. As those young people come to dominate our workforce, it’s critical to understand how their expectations differ from those of earlier generations.

Those include expectations about work environments, company cultures and technologies that are unfamiliar for many companies. These evolving expectations must be met if your organization wants to attract and retain the best new talent.

Putting a kegerator in your break room or allowing employees to work from home on Fridays might not be for every company, but getting the right technology in millennials’ hands is something all companies should do.  Read this article in it's entirety at Sacramento Business Journal >>>

Balance Fosters Project Success

Implementing and adopting new technology is difficult for any size organization. A 2012 McKinsey & Co. report concluded that “On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted.”

We certainly have seen high-profile information technology failures here in the Sacramento region. Most of us have likely seen an IT project fail at some level.

The problem is not finding a solution; it is finding a solution that balances investment and return. Easier said than done.

Read this article in it's entirety at Sacramento Business Journal >>>

How to staff small business IT departments

I consistently see small organizations struggling to staff their IT departments. The struggle often is rooted in budget constraints resulting in only one or two full-time positions within the department. That means squeezing a multitude of roles and skillsets into the positions and then attempting to fill the highly diverse yet specialized roles from a limited pool of applicants who can meet the demands.

Doing more with less is a necessary mantra of most small businesses. So what strategies should small businesses use to properly staff their IT departments?

Read this article in it's entirety at Sacramento Business Journal>>>

Six signs of trouble in your IT department

Regardless of the type of consulting engagement, the company size or sector, executives ask me the same question: How does my information technology department compare to those in other companies?

It is easy to compare IT spending with companies of similar size or type. Every company captures this data at some level, so it's easy to share and compare this data through market-research firms.

The difficult part is determining performance and comparing it against other organizations. One reason is these metrics aren't as standardized within IT as more evolved functions of the business. Also, most companies don't do a good job at capturing these metrics. Even if they do, few share their data.

Read this article in it's entirety at Sacramento Business Journal>>>

Improve communication with IT, even if you don’t speak geek

How do you communicate with IT if you don’t speak geek?

Anyone who’s called technical support knows that communicating with computer technicians can be intimidating and frustrating. I got a taste of this on my first day as team lead of an outsourced IT department. After I took the staff to lunch to get acquainted, the conversation quickly steered to “Star Wars.”

Now I enjoy “Star Wars” as much as the next guy, but the conversation wasn’t a simple debate on the superior trilogy (original or prequel). The topic was on light-sabers, and specifically the origin of each light-saber’s color.

Read this article in it's entirety at the Sacramento Business Journal Read More >>.

Your IT Department's Dirty Little Secret

When you access your organization's applications such as email or financials, or use a service such as the Internet or printing, there is a lot of technology you don't see underneath. This technology is a complex stack of hardware and software working together to establish the infrastructure and platform layers, which are required to run your organization's applications and services. The infrastructure and platform layers are rapidly moving towards commoditization, and you've probably heard the terms describing this movement, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

For many small and midsized organizations this commoditization movement is your IT department's dirty little secret.

Why does IT miss getting IT right?

Sally Sue has put in five requests (3 emails, 1 phone call and 1 request passing the IT Manager in the hall) over a 3 week period to fix her desktop that crashes each time she opens her accounting application. Her issue is not a lack of response or attention from IT. Each time she has submitted a request the help desk has responded and fixed her desktop using a variety of methods such as a reinstall of the application or a reboot of her machine. Her issue is the reoccurrence of the incidents, because no one has fixed the problem.

Overview

 IT misses getting it right because they focus heavily on technical support, that is responding to the incident and addressing the incident, but fail to fix the problem. So how does IT get IT right? Through the implementation of programs that help achieve operational excellence. Operational excellence can only be achieved when the IT department executes across all three pillars of an IT environment, People, Process & Technology. Let's examine how IT typically misses within each of these 3 pillars.