Personal Technology Trumps Work IT
The pendulum has definitely swung—our personal and home technology is now often better than what we are using in the office. It wasn’t always that way. Early on, technology was mysterious to those not professionally engaged as system engineers or IT professionals. Technology was expensive and made sense for business purposes, but not for home use. IT was a professional enabler to get the job done, but consumer applications were scarce and not intuitive for anything but the office. The world has turned upside down. Now as consumer we are using the

Learning from Steve Jobs, CEO of the Decade
Fortune Magazine (23 November 2009) named Steve Jobs of Apple, the CEO of the decade. Steve Jobs’ unveiled his “digital lifestyle” strategy in 2000 when Apple was worth about $5 billion. Now almost a decade later, Apple is worth about $170 billion—slightly more than Google. Apple has revolutionized the markets for music, movies, mobile telephones, as well as computing. Steve Jobs embodies User-centric leadership in every way: Customer is #1—Apple’s products satisfy customers.

Delivering Obsolete and Broken IT Projects, No More
NextGov reported on 9 Nov 2009, that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that “forecasts $3 billion in cost overruns on 16 major projects.” What’s so of baffling is that these overruns occurred despite the agency’s use of earned value management. According to Dave Powner, director of IT management issues at GAO, “Every one of the agencies had major problems in determining earned value management…as a result the agencies were unable to accurately identify the progress contractors had made on IT projects.

Breaking the Organization Free of Dysfunction
Recently, I read this amazing poem called "Autobiography in Five Short Chapters" by Portia Nelson (see below).It's about the learning and healing process. It can apply to individuals as well as organizations. It's about learning from our mistakes, growing from them and changing accordingly. This is one of the purposes of life.All too often, we get stuck in a misguided way of thinking, a "bad" behavior, or in the case of an organization--a dysfunctional stat

Building High Performance Teams
At work, there is almost no greater feeling than being part of a high-performing team, and no worse than being part of a dysfunctional one. Teams are not, by definition, destined to succeed. In fact more often then not, they will fail unless they have the right mix of people, purpose, process, commitment, training, and of course, leadership—along with the time for it all to jell. I remember being on a team in one special law enforcement agency that had the “right mix.” The project was both very successful an