AsiaPac

• "Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open." - J. Dewar
   
• 49 Questions to Improve Your Results - By simply holding a question in your mind and pondering potential answers, you can find unexpected paths to get from where you are now to where you want to be.
• Essential Competencies for the Modern IT Professional - As tech skills become worldwide commodities, three essential competencies--self-management, managing others, and improving outcomes--can amplify your value.
  
• The Art of the Interview - Billy Hollis reckons that now is definitely not the time to let your interview skills get rusty. Here are some tips to help you stand out from the crowd of job-hunters (and potential employers, too).
• Interview Tips (interviewtips.org) >> Job Interview Tips - Phone Interview Tips - Second Interview Tips - Employer Interview Tips - Interview Tips For Teacher - Sample résumés - Sample cover letters - Résumé cover letters
  
  
• The CIO Institute of Australia  - delivers a program of high value Continuing Professional Development, Training, Networking and Accreditation aligned to the global standards of the International CIO Institute
   
• 10 Signs Your Company Wants You Gone - You can't always save your job, but you can reduce the time you're out of work if you see it coming!
   
• The Experience Gap - When companies look for a manager, they should look for experience, right? Well, maybe not. ... “Conventional wisdom holds that as we do more things more often, we learn from experience and get better and better, and what we found in our research was that actually some of it may not be the case.”
• How to be a genius
• Funny Business
• Are You Addicted to Email? - results of AOL's third annual Email Addiction Survey (2007)
• Office Politics for Geeks
• gapingvoid - "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"
   
• In the Age of the Blog, Who Needs Analysts? - "IT pros start to wonder if analysts are worth anything these days. The real fear, our bloggers say, is that casual IT decision makers will read analyst reports, be influenced by shoddy assumptions or research, and great technology will lose over misinformation management."
• Follow the dollars to IT security jobs - While some headlines might scream about a drop in job ads they don't reflect what's happening in the IT security sector. In the next five years guardians of IT security will almost double.
• The People Who Really Run IT
• The Rules of IT - ten rules that you can't afford to break!
• Construx Software >> Project Management -- Classic Mistakes Enumerated
  
  
• The Negotiation Institute
  • 32 Reasons Why Geeks are Severely Underpaid
• The Negotiation Academy >> Articles on negotiation


• Negotiation Dynamics
  • CLICK HERE to download ...  Negotiation: The Art of Getting what You Want 
  • Articles >> Managing the Sales Negotiation Process, Value Add Negotiating for Sales Professionals, The Power of 1% Negotiating,, Using Silence in a Negotiation, Authority Limits
    
• 7 Ways to Negotiate Better (Without Affecting Your Karma)
• 15 Effective Stress Banishing Tips
   
• I Hear Ringing and There's No One There. I Wonder Why - This audio illusion — called phantom phone rings or, more whimsically, ringxiety or fauxcellarm — has emerged recently as an Internet discussion topic and has become a new reason for people to either bemoan the techno-saturation of modern life or question their sanity.
• How to respond to a telemarketer - The Seinfeld way
   
• 9 Essential Competencies for Successful C-Level Executives


• Fifty Lessons - an initiative from Gurteen Knowledge ... A free video “Lesson of the Month” ... By sharing important business lessons on film, executives communicate with you in the most compelling method of all: one-to-one storytelling. Contributions are edited into short, powerful, highly engaging lessons that can be applied to decision-making across the entire range of business challenges.

 
• Customer Service Point - "Why is good customer service becoming so important these days? It's simply because customers are turning their backs to businesses that do not deliver value. And good customer service adds value!"
   
• Helpdesks flooded with fibs from users - One in five users admit that they don’t always provide accurate information about the nature of a computer problem – the main reasons being a lack of insight (45 per cent), a lack of time (30 per cent), or a lack of appropriate vocabulary (25 per cent). 15 per cent said they felt too embarrassed!
   
• Geeks vs. Suits: The Great Boardroom Schism - Companies must get beyond the IT-business cultural discord to cure the plagues of missed deadlines, blown budgets and dissatisfied customers. Suits (business guys) and geeks (IT guys) are like oil and water--it sometimes seems like they were just not made to get along. "The geek gap is the culture clash between business and IT people in most organizations… Business and tech people don't like each other and don't trust each other. It's very basic to how they do their jobs and their roles in the business."
• 8 Reasons Why CIOs Think Their Application Developers Are Clueless
• Hackers and Suits: 10 Tips for Managers to Bridge the Gap - "Managers and software developers live in two separate worlds. An expert programmer shares his advice about how to motivate, communicate with and (maybe) understand these strange people who build the software solutions upon which you rely."
• The First Thing We Do - Let's Offshore the Managers - "It makes no sense to offshore application developers. But outsourcing management, now that's a tactic with some serious benefits!"



• Quiz: Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
• Beware the psycho boss, the new enemy within

• THE DAILY WTF - "Curious Perversions in Information Technology"
   
• Technological Darwinism: Adapt or die, says Palmisano - "Business is at a critical juncture, and the decisions that its leaders make will determine which businesses survive and which fail."



• FREE CULTURE (FREE book download) - Professor Lawrence Lessig examines the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas, and shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they’re inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.
  
  
• The Usability Paradox - How Much Progress Has There Been Since the 1950s and LEO (the world's first office computer)? ... Is the problem that IT is forever suffering from the poor return on investment that they suffered in the latter half of the last century? That it will forever be viewed as a cost center where only the minimum functionality is enough rather than a revenue-generating opportunity? Successful e-businesses understand that IT is the blood supply of their company and invest hugely in being able to deal with a world where customers exist in, travel to, and relocate around all corners of the globe and quality service must be provided 24 hours a day.
   
• Gartner's Hype Cycle archives >> What are the Gartner Hype Cycles? - "When new technologies make bold promises, how do you discern the hype from what’s commercially viable? And when will such claims pay off, if at all?"
• Gartner's Hype Cycle Special Report 2003 >> PDF version (2003)
• Gartner's Hype Cycle Special Report for 2005 >> PDF version (2005)


• Web Economy Bullshit Generator
  
  
  
• Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check - "Articles and observations about software and other complex contexts"
• BuzzWhack - a glossary of computer and business buzzwords (including corporate speak, cynical speak, tech speak)
• TechCrunch - "a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. In addition to new companies, we will profile existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space. TechCrunch is edited by Michael Arrington, who also writes a companion blog, CrunchNotes."
• ZoomInfo - an excellent way to find "People, Companies, Relationships." ... Zoominfo is a summarization search engine that "delivers comprehensive information on over 27 million business professionals and two million companies across virtually every industry."

 
• Ten signs you're tech obsessed
• Driven to distraction by technology - "The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state. ... humans just aren't that good at doing many things at once. ... there are only certain types of tasks that humans are good at doing simultaneously. Cooking and talking on the phone go together fine, as does walking and chewing gum (for most people). But try and do three math problems at once, and you are sure to have a problem. ... The paradox of modern life is that multitasking is, in most cases, counterproductive.
"
• The Joy of Tech
• List of adages named after people
• Help is at hand!

 
• TED Talks - Technology, Entertainment, Design ... Started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free.
• Peoples Archive - dedicated to filming for posterity the life stories of the great thinkers, creators, and achievers of our time. The people whose stories you watch on this site are leaders of their field, whose work has influenced and changed our world as we know it.
  
  
• How to Capitalize on the Opportunities You're Missing - for many companies, marketing success is often a result of fortuitous accidents. ... "All you have to do to get different results is ask better questions."
  
  
• IT Jungle - "The $1 trillion worldwide information technology market is a Darwinian contest of survival among server, storage, operating systems, middleware, applications, and services vendors, who fight ferociously for IT budget dollars. Inside companies large and small, there is a constant fight to cope with bewildering array of new technologies that might allow them to carve out niches in markets or otherwise differentiate themselves in their own fight for economic survival." ... IT Jungle was created "To help you figure out how to survive, adapt, and thrive in this complex IT ecosystem, whether you are an end user of information technology or a vendor of information technology products."
   
• What Makes a Successful Salesperson?
• Four Factors That Distinguish Services Marketing - What's right for your services organization? How can your company strengthen client relationships and improve its competitive position? Understanding the characteristics of services can provide a unique opportunity for services producers to improve business success by rethinking their pricing models and packaging options, improving production processes and client participation, enhancing customer focus, and building employee relationship skills.>
   
•  IT Conversations - "a network of high-end tech talk-radio interviews, discussions and presentations from major conferences delivered live and on-demand via the Internet."
  • The Software Paradigm Shift - "We're at the end of the personal-computing era. We're at the beginning of something profoundly different." (the highest rated show of the more than 400 in the IT Conversations archives). Tim O'Reilly, Founder & President, O'Reilly & Associates (they produce all those IT books with animals on their front covers), says that the operating system no longer matters -- no more than the browser or the CPU matters.


• TIME AND CHANGE ...
  • ISAC - Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change
    • Accelerating Change audiocasts
       
  • Time To  Take Action - The thing is, we still live in a world that's filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity -- we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

  • Don't let TIME catch you! (follow this link and see for yourself)
     

• A group of managers were given the assignment to measure the height of a flagpole. So they go out to the flagpole with ladders and tape measures, and they're falling off the ladders, dropping the tape measures--the whole thing is just a mess.
  An engineer comes along and sees what they're trying to do, walks over, pulls the flagpole out of the ground, lays it flat, measures it from end to end, gives the measurement to one of the managers and walks away.
  After the engineer has gone, one manager turns to another and laughs. "Isn't that just like an engineer, we're looking for the height and he gives us the length."
   

• How to Discourage People from Thinking (and be proud of it)

• IT Surgery – The guy sitting near me smells
   

• Bonjour paresse : De l'art et la nécessité d'en faire le moins possible en entreprise
  • French author urgesslacking
  • Hello Laziness - Vive la Loafing - a review of the above book in Slashdot

• Tact Filters - Most "normal people" have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. ... "Nerds," on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. ... When normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people's feelings often get hurt because the nerds don't apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.

 

• DON'T LOSE IT:
  "An old man, a boy and a donkey were going to town. The boy rode the donkey and the old man walked. As they approached town, they passed some people who remarked that it was a pity that the old man walked while the young boy rode. The man and the boy thought that perhaps the critics were right, and they exchanged positions.
  Sometime later, they passed another group of people who remarked "What a shame! He makes that little boy walk." So they decided to both walk.
  The next group of passersby chuckled that they would walk when they had such a nice donkey to ride. So they both climbed on board.
  They soon encountered a group who scorned them for their laziness and cruelty to the donkey. They agreed once more, and decided to carry the donkey.
  As they crossed the bridge into town, they lost their grip on the donkey and he fell into the river and drowned.
  The moral of this story - If you try to please everyone, you will eventually lose your ass!"
   

• The i-Technology Right Stuff - Searching for the Twenty Top Software People in the World and Sung and Unsung i-Technology Heroes and Who's Missing From the i-Technology Top Twenty?
• The “Top Ten” most inexcusable failures of technology?
• Queue - articles on new and emerging technologies, help decision-makers plan future projects by examining the challenges and problems they are most likely to face.
• How to revive the technology business - Paul Knapp, of Brainbox.com.au asks "What’s wrong with the technology business? That's the question of the moment, to which I think I have an answer."
• Hacknot
  • A Dozen Ways To Sustain Irrational Technology Selections
  • (and lots more)


• How to Salvage Your Company's Deep Smarts - The approaching exodus of retiring baby boomers will severely erode the knowledge base of many companies. >> The Importance of Cultivating and Transferring Deep Smarts
   
• Where IT could go from here - "Recently, there have been a number of commentators speculating that the IT industry is finished, or at least has matured. They argue that the industry will have to get used to growth rates similar to that in other industries like utilities or cars. This, to be frank, is a load of garbage. ... The current consensus on information technology is wrong. It's far from mature or out of steam. Certainly, there will continue to be booms and busts as we're experiencing at the moment. Despite this, over the next couple of decades IT will remain one of the most exciting and opportunity-filled industries on Earth."
• A Computer Geek's History of the Internet
   
• Now you see it, now you don't - To be truly successful, a complex technology needs to “disappear”
• IT Managers See No End to Technology Complexity - IT managers say all the evidence they have seen points to more complexity, not less.
• Will IT departments still exist in 2010? - Two-thirds of CIOs believe the corporate IT department will not exist in its current form by 2010.
   
• Flying High - At Qantas IT is all about discipline
• Got a good boss? He's no Einstein - You don't have to be smart to be a boss - in fact, it's better if you're not!
   
• Butler Group
  • Application Development for Mortals - "Some of us remember attempts in the late 80s and early 90s to bring a human face to the business of developing applications. A variety of suppliers developed fourth generation languages (4GLs) that could supposedly be used by non-programmers to build systems. The fact that very few of these products are used today is a measure of how successful they were. ... What happened after the era of the 4GL was something of a backlash. Instead of the fluffy, cuddly 4GL we saw the emergence of  C++ and Java as the dominant programming languages – indecipherable and totally unfriendly. Java has spawned the Java 2 Enterprise Edition phenomenon with dozens of protocols, standards and skills that need to be acquired – to the point that it is pretty well beyond the scope of any single individual to master the whole lot. C++ has acquired the accolade of being the world’s first write only language – because it is impossible to read. ... In most organisations the job of application development has become something of a secret esoteric art. ... The focus of the CIO is therefore turning away from the details of technology, such as server availability, network performance, and application functionality, towards more strategic issues, such as IT budgeting and investment planning, governance, service quality and availability, IT risk management, and offshore development. However, in contrast with other business functions, there has been a distinct lack of both tools and methodologies to assist in adopting this strategic view. The dichotomy for CIOs is therefore that whilst they are keen to move their IT departments up the organisational value chain, and to increase their own contribution to the business, there is still a distinct and substantial separation between the business, financial, and technology views of the IT department. ... I consider that deploying an IT investment planning and control system, and adopting a formal methodology to manage the associated processes, is the single most effective step that an organisation can take to improve the accuracy and validity of its IT investment strategy. ..."


• From fundamental to human, these are the factors that define the limits of technology ...
  • The laws of physics
  • The laws of software
  • The challenge of algorithms
  • The difficulty of distribution
  • The problems of design
  • The problems of functionality
  • The importance of organization
  • The impact of economics
  • The influence of politics
     
• The Age of Spiritual Machines - When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
  • Timeline - from the Big Bang to 1949
  • Timeline - from 1950 onwards, to the future (and when "there is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers")
   
• The Customer-Centric Worldview
  1. Business revolves around the customer.
  2. Companies that focus on creating a good customer experience will succeed far above those that do not.
  3. This is the primary determinant of business success over the next several decades.
      
• "Things I Wish I Learned in Engineering School" (book by Rick Cattell) - about "pitfalls that engineers should be aware of in their careers, e.g. to avoid spending years working on projects that don’t succeed as products." ... and the associated university talk, covering the most important rules from the book: online at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Illinois. >> The slides for the talk can be found here.
• The Things I Wish I Learned in Engineering School - a conversation with Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer Rick Cattell

• How to Run IT Like a Business
• Dealing with Darwin - Business competitiveness in the 21st century with a focus on managing innovation and inertia. (Weblog by Geoffrey Moore: author of Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game (with co-authors) and Living on the Fault Line.)
• Sand Hill (SandHill.com) - a business strategy site for enterprise software executives. Resources include videos and podcasts from the "Software 2005" conference (and earlier years).
  
• The Software Improvement Group (SIG) - SIG provides insight and analysis into the quality of software systems. ... "Organisations are completely at the mercy of their software systems. We make sure you gain and retain control of your IT landscape. We provide impartial, objective, verifiable and quantitative assessments of the structure and quality of your software systems. Our analysis software allows us to measure quality, to lay bare the underlying architecture and to assess the system. All this is done on the basis of automated source code analyses."

 
• The Key to Innovation: Overcoming Resistance - "Simply put, good ideas are cheap; good implementations aren't. Experience teaches that aspiring IT innovators don't need better ideas that make more sense. They need better implementations that make - or save - more money. If organizations can boost their "return on innovation" by investing more in good implementations than in good ideas, then that's where their capital should go."
   
• Application quality and its business impact - a view from the top
• Disaster Prevention - Don't ignore the signs of impending doom for your software project. Avert the worst by conducting a technical and management audit, followed by recovery planning for the future.

 
• The Intel IT Manager Game - tests your entire skill set - people management, resource allocation, strategic analysis and planning.
• IBM Center for CIO Leadership
   
• The First 100 Days in a New CIO Position are Crucial for Success - CIOs face several challenges when they first start. There is a narrow window of time to get an assessment of what needs to be done in the early days, and stakeholders are impatient for visible signs of action from the new IT leadership.
• CIO - How to Verify if You are Important - If the CIO does not have the authority to set and execute information management policies, information technology cannot be sufficiently important in a company or other organization. Without an empowered CIO, accountability for technology will be diffused and unfocused.
• Ten Survival Tactics for Your First Year on the Job  as CIO
• Calculator - Does Your CIO Have Clout?
• CIO Evolution ... IT's New Role - Chief Process Officer - Heretofore, processes have largely been ignored, as managers focused on narrow functional silos. But over the past 15 years, processes have begun to move front and centre in companies' programs to improve operating performance.
• Serenity Found - "how to inoculate yourself against stress and burnout (once you understand the difference). ... We all know that CIO stands for 'Career Is Over'. The wag who coined that acronym was undoubtedly referring to the burnout factor that comes with the job and the consequent short tenure of the average CIO."
• How to Identify Bad CIOs in Their Natural Habitat - Bad CIOs are a blight on the IT profession and on the organizations that employ them.

 
• Contract Sadness - "Too many CIOs cut enterprise software deals that look fabulous to the CEO and CFO but commit the people who do the real work to a nightmare of unrealistic expectations." ... [In this example] "The CIO, in cahoots with the CFO, has negotiated a contract that is all about cost savings and service-level agreements (SLAs) and completely disrespectful of what it takes - and what it means - to implement a working system enterprise-wide. The CIO has cheated and betrayed his people by committing his company to a contract that treats implementation as essentially irrelevant to how the system ultimately performs. That's unprofessional and contemptible. It's also shockingly common." ... "CIOs have an affirmative obligation to prevent IT contracts from becoming straitjackets for the people who have to implement the technology."

 
• TCO versus ROI - Whether return on investment drives more technology decisions than total cost of ownership shows how your company views IT.
  
  
• Emergent Futures
• What CIOs Need to Know About Money - "To succeed in business, you need to understand how businesspeople keep score. ... it's about understanding how to enhance the value of the company as a whole."
• Replicating the Hollywood Model - one of Australia's most successful film producers claims CIOs have a lot to learn from the successes and failures of Hollywood studios since the 1940s.
• Value Based Management.net - "a management portal specifically aimed at the information needs of senior executives with an interest in value creation, managing for value and valuation."
   
• Build an airtight business case for new IT investments - the Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) Guide can help you sell senior management on the enterprise technology projects you want to pursue
   
• DM Review - business intelligence, analytics and data warehousing ...
  • IT Myth vs. Reality: Myth 1 - CIO Must Be a Technology Whiz - how IT serves as a tech factory producing knowledge-centric tech wizards and how CIO missions require horse-trading business judgment skills that are completely unconnected from technical mastery.
  • Myth #2 - Offshoring is an Option for CIOs and IT Departments - "Beware of the abundant arrogance of ignorance when it comes to offshoring. ... The chill of IT layoffs from outsourcing to offshore operations challenges the wisdom of corporate and political leadership. ... If one turns a blind eye to the hardships of outsourcing, as the government seems to have done, financial benefits to the top brass and corporations are substantial."
  • Ten Pervasive Data Integration Myths - "the myths that drag down your business intelligence (BI) projects or keep them from ever getting off the ground in the first place"
     
• Rationale - "is like mind or concept mapping tools but goes much further. Rationale's distinct map formats clearly display and guide your critical thinking."
   
• The Pitfalls of Leadership - "Without a single plan — one path that everyone understands and believes will lead to success — leadership is irrelevant."
• Keep control of your system - Educate your employees about change management and controls.
• Ten Principles of IT Governance - from studying and working with hundreds of enterprises, MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research has distilled the lessons from many outstanding leaders into ten principles of IT governance.

 
• 10 steps to IT efficiency
• Answer that e-Mail -- IMMEDIATELY
   
• The limits of productivity - Bad management can undo the benefits of good technology. ... Technology companies have been pitching the productivity gains from their products for so long, it's unthinkable to them that productivity could rely on factors outside of technology, such as management.
• Getting from Oranges To Apples - Seven Ways to Effect Change (Reason, Research, Resonance, Representational Redescriptions, Resources and Rewards, Real-World Events, Resistances.) Harvard professor Howard Gardner says it is possible to get others to see things differently; but it takes perseverance and finesse.
• The Seed of Apple's Innovation - CEO Steve Jobs says among other practices, it's "saying no to 1,000 things" so as to concentrate on the "really important" creations.
   
• Time in Training Often Wasted - Highly paid workers most likely to benefit from learning new skills. ... "One in three workers thinks the time he spent in his last training session probably would have been better spent elsewhere, according to a survey. ... Among these workers, 12 percent think the training was a complete waste of their time." ... Read this useful article, which includes some training best practices.
   
• Planners and Doers - "There is a fundamental dichotomy in the information industry that I think is the source of the vast majority of frustrations for both general users and IT professionals. This split is often confused with the marketer/technician conflict  ... Managers who also do, or at least have a history of doing, show a substantially greater capacity for dealing with technicians."
• Lies, Damned Lies and Requirements - "Unfortunately, most CIOs today confront clients and colleagues who have allowed the perverse economics of requirements to create unrealistic expectations and dysfunctional business behaviours. Requirements should be a means to an end, not the end itself."

 
• Cross the line and IT is a winner - Has IT turned into a commodity? Should it be managed simply to minimise risk?
• IT is the Engine That Drives Success - The best companies have the best business models because they have the best IT strategies.
• The balanced IT organisation - while recent years have seen companies swing between the extremes of centralising and diffusing their IT operations, a balanced model has emerged that offers an ideal blend of cost-effectiveness and control.
• The Deciding Factor - "The business case answer place"
  • Free Tips for Creating Effective Business Cases
• Make It Clear - "Sometimes your business case stories fall on the deaf ears of executives who don’t understand IT value. Here’s how to ensure your project requests won’t be rejected. ... ways to recognise symptoms of IT value blindness, explanations of why the problem occurs and suggestions for fixing it."


• Am I listening, or am I talking? - Marketing is about listening. Sales is about talking.
• The Tactics of Strategy - "It’s hard to have a long-term strategic view when you’re up to your armpits in problem solving. But that’s the difference between a CIO and a CTO."
• "Doing an Alexander" - Lessons on Leadership by a Master Conqueror - What can a man born in 356 BC teach business leaders today? Plenty.

 
• Putting Passionate People to Work - The most devoted employees are enthralled with their work. Authentic leaders know how to manage that passion.
• Bridging the Chasm Between IT and Marketing
• A Travel Guide to Collaboration (Partnering)
   
• In the Loop - Meeting with customers on a regular basis gives CIOs fresh ideas on how to improve customer service and justify new systems.
• Marketing and IT: Two Solitudes - Marketing and IT are culturally distinct: two solitudes divided by opposing agendas. The disposition of IT is shaped by its prime directive to rule over the deployment of all technology. The job of Marketing is to generate business growth. Each group speaks a different idiom, and neither side is willing to gain familiarity with the other.
• Long Bets - "Accountable predictions"
   
• Australian Anthill - "a magazine for the fast-growth business and venture capital market. It is written for innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers, investors and anyone excited by new technologies, emerging industries and the business development process."
• Amazing Grace - "Misery loves company. You are not alone. You might feel like you are, sitting atop the corporate IT tree [as CIO] with no friends but a CEO who can’t understand technology no matter how little he tries, and a CFO with a bad case of budget-myopia."
• MeansBusiness - "the largest and fastest growing database of business ideas in the world ... aggregated more ideas from business and management books ... quoted directly from published books. ... Executives use Means Business to help them innovate, solve complex problems, and create new strategies."
• Business to Business (New Zealand)
  
  
• The High-Tech Survival Guide (book) - and an independent review of the guide
• Calculate your net worth - "Have you ever tried to figure out your net worth? This downloadable template - a net worth calculator for Microsoft Excel - makes it easy."

 

• Information Politics - "Nothing is more political than information, and so you would expect the job of the CIO to be the hottest political potato in the organisation. You will not be disappointed to learn that this is indeed the case, and the CIO that focuses primarily on technology management is only doing half the job. ... it is quite common for the CEO, CFO, and other senior executives to use IT as an excuse for all kinds of problems."
• Can a CIO Become too Strategic? - Strategic CIOs often find themselves in a catch-22. On the one hand, they need to focus their efforts upward, convincing their CEOs and other top-level executives to view IT as a strategic partner, not merely a cost center. On the other hand, they have to manage their team of IT experts, many of whom still don't understand the business value of their initiatives. But as CIOs spend more time in the boardroom, and less time in the computer room, managing both up and down the food chain becomes an increasingly difficult challenge, and too many are failing to find the right balance.



• Compliance and Governance ...
• Infonomics - "Plain Language about IT Governance for executives and directors."
• The SarbOx Conspiracy - "compliance efforts are eating up CIO time and budgets. Worse, CIOs are being relegated to a purely tactical role. ... CIOs are getting left out of Sarbanes-Oxley efforts, and it’s a travesty"
• RedMonk
  • Compliance Oriented Architecture - how Service Oriented Architectures can be applied to Compliance challenges.
• Regulatory Compliance - Peril and Promise
• Corporate Compliance Advisor Magazine - "Find out how to meet compliance regulations and best practices. You can't avoid Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, USA Patriot Act, security, privacy, GLBA, SEC, FTC, FCC, EU litigation preparedness, special systems, reliable training, failproof monitoring, accurate reporting, and plenty more..."
• Recipe for Good IT Governance - Companies with better than average IT governance earn at least a 20 percent higher return on assets than organizations with weaker governance.
• Compliance-driven development: the IBM Compliance Resource Kit - can help teams adopt a proactively prepare for an audit of their software development environment. IBMM created this Compliance Resource Kit to help project managers and testers improve the functionality, usability, reliability and scalability of their software applications.
   
• The Technology Professional Services Association (TPSA) - "the first and only organization for executives who define, deliver, manage, measure, and optimize technology services in the world’s leading corporations."
• Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) - a worldwide association of IS professionals dedicated to the audit, control, and security of information systems.
   
• The CIO as Chief Communicator - Avoid is the sin of ego ... Watch out for blank expressions and eyes glazing over!
• The Ties That Bind - strategies to help move you beyond transactional leadership.
• Hiring Horrors - routine IT hiring processes often result in bad matches and high turnover, because the techniques for hiring and processing technical personnel in corporate America are a hodgepodge of unscientific and unprofessional rituals.
• Hiring Techies and Nerds
   
  
• The Six Best Practices - What Leading CIOs Do - To be an effective CIO, you need to do six things:
  • You must be on the executive team.
  • You have to engage senior business managers in IT projects.
  • You must also include users in the same projects.
  • You need a high-level group to make IT decisions.
  • You must communicate regularly with end users.
  • You have to assign IT staff as liaisons to business units

• Marketing means solving customers’ problems profitably

 
• Bill Gates describes how Weblogs could be used a tool for business to communicate with customers
• How to Guarantee Product Failure - the top five mistakes that product managers can make to ensure their products fail.
• The Art of Making Offers That Get Accepted and Great Service - The Key to Sustainable Differentiation
   
• Role Fragmentation - Why IT Administrators Have Become All-Powerful Demi-Gods - "it looks like good management"
• ITMJ - IT Managers' Journal >> According to a highly insightful but unscientific survey, IT manager is the 3rd worst job in the U.K. - better only than phone sex operator and ferry cabin cleaner. Database builder, landfill executive, maggot farmer, and journalist also made the top (bottom?) 100.
• Technical Support Hang Ups cost dearly in Direct Productivity - 36 percent of respondents nationwide report they spend 30 minutes or more each week on the phone with their firm's technical support service. An additional 20 percent spend an hour or more, and -- a seemingly miserable -- five percent report that they are on the phone with the help desk for five hours or more each week.
• Experiencing Value - Customer satisfaction has little to do with loyalty. What they are looking for first and foremost is value—not the monetary kind of value, but value that impacts a person’s life.
   
• The true cost of IBM's outsourcing: Customer Relationships - "Somewhere, in the process of outsourcing their most vital sales function, IBM's hardware division seems to have forgotten that customers (and their technology consultants) want to speak with people who are both knowledgeable about the products that they sell and who have access to the information and internal support services to complete the sale. ... IBM makes great stuff -- I just wish they made it easier for me to give them money. Customers want to deal with people who know something about the products and who have access to the information to facilitate the sales and delivery process. ... I cannot help but wonder what the move to outsource services has "cost" IBM and other companies that have made the same choice. I know what it has cost my clients and me, and I challenge IBM and other companies to consider that the true cost of outsourcing can be best measured in terms of their customer relationships."
• A Sinner's Guide to Offshoring
• Outsourcing: Big Deals, Big Savings, Big Problems - Large-scale outsourcing deals promise big savings, but they fail half the time. Here's how to make them work for you.
• Secrets of Offshoring Success
• Outsource to Free Up Staff, Not Cut It
• Is the Party Over for Indian Outsourcers? (August 2007)
   
• The Top 10 Rules for Building the Ideal IT Organization
• The Basics of Customer Experience - "Basics sell. ... Most companies would rather have a large, general customer base than a small core of tech-happy users. It's time ... to focus on the basics."

The Beer Files

• Nicholas Carr - blog
  • Does IT Matter?
  • Digital Renderings
     
• Making IT Pay
• IT Jungle
   
• Techmeme
• 
• Your Horoscope
• Fatbrain
• ITconsultant
• Gartner
• The Radicati Group
   
• Newsbytes
• InfoWorld
• Darwin
• eWeek
• eJigsaw
• IC Planet
• First Monday
• ICE
• NetIQ
• Technology Resource
• IT Wire
• Brint.com
• ISP Planet
• ClickZ
• ITnews
• I.T. Works
• ITworld.com
  • ITwhirled.com
• Content-wire
   
• Innovation Tools
• Forbes.com
• vnunet.com
• Interbrand
• TekCentral
• Creative Ideas
• CRMGuru.com
• FindArticles.com
• Silicon Publishing
• IT-analysis.com
• TekGuide.net
• Techguide.com
   
• Intranet Journal
• EoExchange
• CNET News.com
   
• Financial Times
• BizDegree.com
• Marketing Views
   
• Asiadragons
• Upstream Asia - Gorilla Asia
• Java Industry Connection
• Cutter Consortium
• The Internationalist
   
• New Architect
• The Radicati Group
• IP Professor
• FreeTechMail.org
• LockerGnome
• Dynamic Small Business
• ServerWatch
   
• Butler Group
  • Information Economics Journal
     
• Biblio Tech Review
• Middle East Business
• Builder.com
• Envisioneering
• FastCompany
• HP World
• Forecasting Principles
• Amy Wohl's Opinions
   
• Web Tutorials ...
  • tutorialfind
  • TutorGig
  • Web Tutorial Finder
     
• Business & Safety Cartoons
• Analyst Views
• XML for managers
• IDG - Computerworld
• IT News Australia
   
• Mainframe Week
• Wired.com - Technology
• CNN.com Sci-Tech
• 101communications
• Innovation
• World Trade
• Experts Exchange
• Nucleus Research
  • ROI knowledge center
     
• VAR, ISV, Channel
  
  • Infolets
  • CRN >>  >>  >>  >>  >>  >>  ChannelWeb - VARBusiness
  • ChannelOnline
  • The VAR Guy
     
• eBusinessForum.com
• iMarketing News
• Intelligence Brief
   
• I.T. Works
  • e-Commerce Reference Site
     
• Enterprise Systems Journal
• Electronic Commerce World
• Technology Review - MIT
• Virtual Reference Collection
   
• BusinessWeek
  
  • Where are the jobs?
  • The future of work
     
• Biz ink - Silicon Valley Business Ink
• Halfbakery

 
• Alliance@IBM
• Techworld
• VIANDO (Germany)


• Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check

• Application-Servers.com (en français)


 

• Guide to Philosophy on the Internet

• Creative Commons license
   
• RentACoder
• Bootstrap Institute - "Who we are. How we think. What we do." (see also: The mouse that roared)
   
• ResearchAndMarkets
• Let There Be Light
• The Book of Mozilla
• State of the Art Papers on Computing
• Saugatuck Technology - research-based market strategy consulting
   
• Former Slacker
   

• Contracting & Freelancing ...
  Brainbox HOT SITE
  "The nerve centre of Australian IT employment"
  • Advice and Tips
  • How to become an IT consultant without really trying!
  • Don't give up on it - just bring IT on
  • Ten things to do when you have been given the push from your job
  • The hidden jobs market - Building up contacts
  • How to revive the technology business
  • Countries where contractors get a break
  • Fifteen Tips for when you are out of work
  • What makes an IT worker unsuitable for a job
  • Step-by-step for a good resume
  • FORTUNE highlights ten tech trends to bet on
  • The hidden jobs market - creating opportunities
  • A view of outsourcing from the USA
  • How the IT industry really works
  • What every graduate should know before entering the IT industry
  • How to make money from time spent unemployed
  • Half of IT professionals are useless
  • I.T. doesn't matter
  • How to work out if you're better off as a contractor or a perm
  • How to get started in contracting
  • Out of work again
  • Can we have our industry back now please?
  • 21 tips for interview success
  • Improving your résumé with keywords
  • Do's and don'ts of the dreaded interview
  • Unemployed IT Horror Story
  • Resumes and recruiters
  • Agency tricks to be careful of
  • Recruitment agencies that suck
  • Agencies that exploit
  • AGENCY RATINGS - cast your vote!
  • Inside the murky world of agency margins
  • So you think Project Management is easy?
  • Technology to change our lives again from 2006
  • Dangers to an IT jobs revival
  • American programmers work for Indian salaries
  • Secrets of successful IT projects – keep it simple
  • How to improve your chances of landing a good job
  • AND MANY MORE EXCELLENT ARTICLES
     

• Computing Sucks - Don't do it!

• itregister.com.au
   

• IT Contractor (originally: NamesFacesPlaces)

  • Elegy of the Discarded IT Professionals
  • IT Surgery – The guy sitting near me smells
  • Packing in your job? Ten steps to take
  • At what age is an IT contractor washed up?
  • Ten Do's and Dont's on your first day in a new contract
  • Are agencies good or bad for the industry?
  • Contractors are like prostitutes (a must-read)
  • Think of your CV as a sales brochure
  • Dirty Tricks that Clients get up to with contractors
  • Young man - Become an IT Contractor
  • Young man - Definitely don't become an IT contractor
  • Where the IT jobs are disappearing - "A small percentage of jobs have gone to India (mostly drudge work). Very few have been outsourced to EDS, Accenture etc. Far more have simply disappeared. ... Face it, those of us who don’t have a doctorate in computer science and are working in R&D for IBM or Microsoft or Sun are just mechanics. It isn’t a career any more – and that advice comes from someone in the trenches, not a know-nothing Gartner MBA."
  • AND MANY MORE EXCELLENT ARTICLES
    
    

• The job of finding a job

• Six Strategies to Get Paid What You're Worth - What the client wants, and what the consultant wants, and strategies to help you preserve your profit margins and your client relationships as you work through pricing discussions.


 

• Recession Realities - Make Your Career Recession Resistant

  • The Rapid Learning Process

• How to Prevent Offshoring from Taking your Job

• Networking resources
   

• 6 simple steps to becoming a top IT consultant

• Becoming an IT consultant - A veteran consultant shares tricks of the trade

• Consulting Skills
  • New Business Development Skills Assessment
     
• The Seven Perils of Entrepreneurship
• Contractors Back Office Company

• The Contract Employee's Handbook

• Set yourself apart when using a recruiter

• Contract Professionals Universe >> CP Cyberlibrary
   

• IT Contractor Magazine

• IT Contractor Warning (about the "rate rape" drug)

• Computer Contractors Benefit Association
   

• CXC - Consultants Exchange Australia

• So you want to be a consultant?

• Dispelling a few myths about the hiring process >> The TRUSTGroup

• IT Workers Alliance (Australia)

• MindLeaders (e-Learning - technical and other courses)
• Choose your next training course carefully

• Working Virtually - StartPage.com
   

• IT Professional Market Rates - Australia

• Some laid-off techies head to Recession Camp

• Contractor UK

• acontractorsworld.com
   

• Careers / Job Hunting / Résumés / Résumé Writing
  Certification / Salaries ...

  • Professional Resume Writing

  • Your Resume Is Mission Critical

  • Skills - Aim wide to hit the target

  • Diversiti’s ten IT hiring predictions for 2003

  • Jobseekers Advice.com

  • Professional Association of Resume Writers

  • 101 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Career

  • Another Nail in the IT Certification Coffin

  •  Careerjet
     

  • CERTIFICATION & TESTING ...

  • Noncertified IT Pros Earn More Than Certified Counterparts

  • uCertify - exam simulation software for IT certifications

  • Certifications aren't crucial for IT managers to move ahead

  • Been there, done that - the problem with certification testing

  • CertTalk.com

  • Tips to plan a successful certification campaign

  • Selfcert

  • IT Contractor Magazine - Certification Magazine

  • Prepare for certification exams using these zero-cost resources

  • The IT Web - free Study & Certification Resources

  • IBM Professional Certification Web site

  • Choose your next training course carefully

  • Certification  versus Industry Experience

  • Tips to plan a successful certification campaign

  • CertTutor.net

  • Choose your next training course carefully

  
   

  • Producing 'The perfect resume'

  • Aussie Résumés >> Common Résumé mistakes

  • National Resume Writers' Association

  • Mastering an IT-specific resume (on-demand webcasts)

  • IT Job seekers 5 worst mistakes

  • Turn a clueless recruiter into a job-search asset

  • How to make sure your CV gets read

  • Resume makeovers

  • Advanced Resume Concepts - Q and A

  • 7 deadly sins of résumé design
  • Give your résumé a face lift
     

  • How to get on the CIO career track

  • How to land the perfect CIO job

  • Top ten leadership qualities of successful CIOs

  • The CIO resume - Stress business acumen

  • CIO resume template

  • Sample CIO résumé
     

  • Ten traits IT managers look for in a job candidate

  • Surviving in the IT swamp

  • Prepare now to be the IT manager of the future
     

  • Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn't Know Who to Ask
     

  • Avoid the resume trap - Make your resume relevant

  • Improving your résumé with keywords

  • How to make sure your CV gets read

  • How a little fat busting can improve a resume

  • Resumés no longer fit the profile

  • List most recent responsibilities on your resume first
     

  • Ten skills that may help you land an IT manager job

  • IT career change - from Government to the Business sector

  • Business Technology Professional's Career Page

  • Follow the three Rs to get your resume noticed

  • job-hunt.org

  • How to survive organizational restructuringg
     

  • Salary Services Limited U.K.

    • Top 10 Skills - for Permanent Staff and Contractors (in the U.K.)
  • Michael Page Technology Salary Survey 2005 (Australia)
  • Survey - J2EE and .NET skills hot in demand and State of the market

  • SEE ALSO: Resume & Job Search and Staff Management & Training 

  • Tradepub.com - Network/Communications free publications
  • FreeTradeMagazines.com - free trade magazine subscriptions
     
  • Tradepub.com - Network/Communications free publications
  • FreeTradeMagazines.com - free trade magazine subscriptions
     

• The Truth About IT Consultants -- Some are great but most are not (by Robert X Cringely)
• Top-Consultant.com
• Consulting Information Services, LLCC
• Consulting - Is it time to go the free agency route?
• Consulting Wire
• SoloGig
• Flying Solo
   
• Consultant Journal
  • Why become a consultant? - Should I become a consultant? - Becoming a Consultant FAQ - Work from home scams - How to become a consultant - Who hires consultants? - Work from home jobs - Side jobs/Second jobs
     
• So you want to be a consultant
   
• ITconsultant - ITconsultant UK magazine
  • Complexities of Developing Systems Remotely and Servicing Remote clients
  • Surviving the Escrow of Your Source Code
     
• Consulting Central
  • Attracting Business in Turbulent Times
    • The Critical Role of Self-Esteem in Running a Consulting Business