Category: Opinion
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State of the Blog 2020
For the fifth year in a row, I return with a summer retrospective article for the summer. These are meant to be the summer counterpart to my end-of-year roundup series, which means that some information will be duplicated across the two series of posts. Blogging in 2020 has been marked by spurts of writing, combined with…
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Information management: Need To Know -v- Free Access
In security thinking, there are two basic concepts of access. One is Need To Know, the other is Free Access. Under Need To Know, access is only granted to those who have a specific need to access the information, regardless of what the information is. This should be familiar from all too many movies and TV…
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Work in the time of Corona
I am sure I am not alone in working from home these days. For veteran telecommuters, this is nothing new. To the rest of us, however, it can be a little challenging. Drawing on my experiences of the past week or so, here are some things that have worked well for me: Report your status…
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The importance of Service Level Agreements
Most IT operations shops establish some sort of service level agreement (SLA) with their users and customers. To my mind, these are equal parts commitment and expectation management. To a commercial vendor, the former is usually the focus, whereas the latter is typically the focus for an in-house vendor. Let’s use onsite support as an…
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Ask open-ended questions to better understand your context
When coming to a new position, whether in a position of leadership or not, one of your first priorities should be to gain an understanding of your context. You need to learn who your colleagues are, what they value, where they see threats, and where they see opportunities. Most importantly, and particularly in the first…
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Reviewed: the Unicorn project
A much-anticipated sequel to the Phoenix project, the Unicorn project was launched late last year. Here are my thoughts: Author: Gene KimPublisher: IT Revolution PressYear: 2019ISBN: 9781942788768Length: 352 pages Arriving at work after a vacation, Maxine Chambers finds herself punished for a payroll outage by being exiled to work with documentation on the Phoenix project, Parts Unlimited prestige…
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(Re-)Reviewed: the Phoenix project
With the launch of the Unicorn project, I revisited the Phoenix project. Seeing as my previous review was a mite lackluster, I decided to revisit that, too. Author: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George SpaffordPublisher: IT Revolution PressYear: 2013ISBN: 9780988262591Length: 345 pages With the firing of the CIO and VP of IT Operations, Bill Palmer is persuaded to take the latter job…
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Evolution – a critical part of technical support
Improvise, adapt, overcome has for a long time been a mantra within armed forces around the world who, when faced with gruelling challenges and little or no epuipment, have improvised to face the challenge, adapted to the challenge and lastly overcome the challenge. The same attitude is necessary in IT support. Support departments around the…
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2019 roundup
As has become my tradition, I would like to invite you to take a look at the year which is about to end with me, as it pertains to me, my life, and the blog. 2019 has been a year of change and development. I applied for a number of positions, ultimately getting none of…
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Favorite things in 2019
For the fourth year running, I am writing a favorite things post. This time around, I’ll highlight things that have made my life better in some way. The red thread here is information management, and each and every one of these has been featured at some point through the year. OneNote As I noted in…
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reMarkable: What I would change
Last week’s post was my review of the reMarkable. As I noted, though a very good device, it is not perfect. Specifically, there are a few things I would like to see change on the hardware level: The single most important change I would want to see is to add back-lighting to the display. This…