Tech Manager HomeTech Manager Homehttp://techmgr.net/home/2011-12-29T21:03:03ZSquarespaceUniversity of Phoenixhttp://techmgr.net/home/2011/12/29/university-of-phoenix.htmlKevin2011-12-29T21:03:03Z2011-12-29T21:03:03ZUniversity-of-Phoenix-Online-School-DCA6E53DI am at the half way point of required classes for completion of my MBA at the University of Phoenix. I just completed a busy 18 weeks of classes and now I am taking another break. My plan is to complete three courses each year which will allow me to receive tuition reimbursement for each course. The duration of each course is six weeks and there is a lot of work associated with each course.The most demanding class to this point has been accounting which required a good understanding of all financial statements along with knowledge of the formulas and methodologies required to determine each component of the financial statement. My struggle was not with the math in accounting, but instead with learning each formula and understanding when and where to apply each formula and methodology.

Now that I am at the half way point and know that I can do the work, I wish I had started this process sooner. The three issues stood in my way were the cost of a graduate degree, taking the GMAT’s, and my age. What really turned me around was the fact that many of my peers were going back to school and a few of them were older than me. I figured if they can do it, I can do it, and started looking at schools that did not require the GMAT’s. I knew someone who was taking online classes at Northeaster University, and they really liked the format and the program. Northeastern required the GMAT’s, but I started to consider online programs and that lead me to the University of Phoenix which did not require the GMAT’s. From a financial perspective, MIT would reimburse me for 2.5 courses University of Phoenix courses each year, where the cost of Northeaster's online program allowed for reimbursement of 1.5 courses per year. The choice was simple.

My biggest struggle has been managing both work and school. Similar to any higher level class, you need to do the work if you want to pass, however the struggle with a six week class is the amount of work a such a short period. Each week requires about four to five hours a week of reading along with about ten to fifteen hours a week of writing and responding to others. With the exception of Accounting, the work has not been hard, instead the struggle has been finding the time to complete my assignments. This is a process that you need to commit to because you cannot afford to take a day or two off each week and maintain a good grade. 

over the last 20 years, I have seen many individuals with no advanced education, move up quickly on persistence and good skill sets, however they often plateau on the technical side and cannot make the transition to manager or above because they do not have an advanced degree. When appropriate, I often share my experiences with these individuals and explain how you can take the long slow road to an undergraduate degree and still graduate. If there is one point to be made from this post, it is to consider going back to school. Whether it is undergrad program or a graduate program, you can start now, take your time and in two to four years earn a degree that will help you in the future. Online courses are not for everyone however they do offer flexibility and provide more options than the colleges and universities in your local community.

]]>Velocity–Web Operationshttp://techmgr.net/home/2011/6/19/velocityndashweb-operations.htmlKevin2011-06-19T16:17:06Z2011-06-19T16:17:06Zvelocity2011_125x125I was really impressed with the Velocity conference, the organization, the content and the participants. The conference was a perfect size, not too big while at the same time not too small. Velocity had two main themes, Web Performance & Optimization and Web Operations. Common topic of discussion were performance, operations, change management, configuration management, monitoring, optimization, metrics, mobile, devops, webops, agility, JavaScript, node.js, and dirty-apps (data intensive real time apps).

I gravitated to the web operations talks but also sat in on some of the mobile and web optimization discussions. I heard multiple times was how web performance and optimization has grown and really delivered value over the past five years, whereas the web operations sector has not grown at the same rate. From a web optimization perspective, browsers are faster, JavaScript has been optimized and delivers 6 times the performance as 5 years ago, node.js has become a framework for JavaScript on both the client and server side, and an entire market has evolved around web optimization.

From and operations perspective, Amazon, Facebook and Google all have efforts focusing on changing their data center and application delivery strategies, moving away from an older style of enterprise capacity planning which focused on scaling vertically at the application level to a newer web level of capacity planning and optimization that delivers a flexible infrastructure across all applications. Both Facebook and Google have created standards around server configurations, builds, deployments and decommissions, and Facebook has custom built their datacenter, squeezing cost out of server builds and power delivery. Amazon focuses on capacity planning and has recently moved all Amazon online store applications off of physical servers onto a ec2 infrastructure, putting all their apps into the cloud, even if it’s their cloud.

Other areas where web operations is adding value is in the continuous deployment and configuration management space. Common configuration management and deployment tools identified at Velocity were cfengine, puppet, chef and the cast-project. There was a lot of talk about devops which is basically introducing a operations strategy into the development process while at the same time introducing a development strategy into the operations process. Examples of this would be using a code repository for all applications builds and deployments, and from a development perspective, introducing the developers to the monitoring and performance stats before they release their code. I agree and fully support this strategy, however I do feel that there is a too much hype surrounding the “devops” term, and prefer the “web operations” term as a replacement for the devops term.

There was not a lot of discussion around gathering metrics however a number of folks did talk about monitoring, looking at your data and understanding your logs and data. John Allspaw gave an interesting talk on “Advanced PostMortem” where he spoke of Time to Detect TTD an incident, Time to Recover TTR from an incident and the overall impact time which is TTR-TTD. John made the point that the severity of all outages are not the same and each organization should define different levels of severity, and track TTD, TTR, Impact Time along with the severity level.

I was also looking for some help with deployments, and chef and the new cast-project look interesting, I am going to hold off on a configuration management systems at work and focus on building out our continuous deployment process. We have started this process in development using Bamboo, however our organization needs to commit to this strategy, and then scale out the current Bamboo infrastructure to accommodate building all of our apps. There was more talk about application servers in the cloud as opposed to application servers on premise so my application server question did not get answered. A couple of vendors offered sophisticated java monitoring products however both came with a steep pricetag. The one java monitoring product that I thought was interesting was dynaTrace which I will probably investigate.


A challenge that I have and I am sure that many other enterprise level organizations have is that our infrastructures are carved out and deployed on an application by application basis, which means that we have to pay for and build redundancy into every new application as opposed to the market leaders like Google, Amazon and Facebook who have redundant infrastructures and add applications onto their redundant infrastructures. The market leaders have had a lot of success with this infrastructure strategy, it is surprising that more large enterprises has not started down this same path.

I thought this was a valuable conference and next year I am going to recommend that we have two or more folks attend velocity. More information on Speaker Slides and Video can be found here.

]]>Velocity Conferencehttp://techmgr.net/home/2011/6/12/velocity-conference.htmlKevin2011-06-12T15:55:10Z2011-06-12T15:55:10Zvelocity_logo2_111I will be at the O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference next week looking for strategies to help my Application Admin team in the long run. My team is not your typical system administration team, instead we are the Application Administrators or App-Admin Team and we fall between the development team and the system administrators. We build, deploy and support applications on a Middleware level of java application servers that host a majority of MIT’s internal applications. The majority of our applications are Java based running on Oracle Application Server or Tomcat, however we also have a bunch of PHP applications, a few older html/cgi applications and we also support multiple instances of Confluence.

My goal for the conference is to identify tools or strategies to help us improve our metrics gathering and analysis, along with help in the deployment and automation space, and if possible, I am working on a long term application server strategy that would provide a nice transition from our larger Oracle Application Server instances to a product that will support both small light weight applications as well as multiple large enterprise level applications.

From a deployment perspective, Velocity covers a number of DevOps solutions, however the majority of these solutions are wrapped around Chef or Puppet which are based on Ruby. My challenge to to find a  non-ruby based alternative to Chef or Puppet as my organization is not supporting Ruby and does not want to introduce a Ruby based solution.

If you are attending Velocity, please feel free to say hello.

]]>Building Relationshipshttp://techmgr.net/home/2011/4/17/building-relationships.htmlKevin2011-04-17T15:42:40Z2011-04-17T15:42:40ZThe MIT Human Resources group sponsor multiple Professional Development courses and one course that many of the MIT Manager take is Essentials of Managing. Although the course is geared toward new managers, it reviews MIT policies and relevant laws and also applies to experienced managers. Many of my peers at MIT have taken this course so when an opening presented itself, I decided to enroll. 

Over the span of the last few years, I have not thought to deeply about management or management strategies and techniques, however in this course, I found that I am sharing opinions about managing and the characteristics of effective managers which is a topic that I wrote about back in 2007  with a post called “Characteristics of an Effective Manager”. In that post I outlined six characteristic that I feel are important qualities for all managers:

  1. Be a Leader and Lead by Example
  2. Effective Communications
  3. Provide Feedback
  4. Be Fair
  5. Be positive, Negativity Kills
  6. Promote Teamwork

I still like this list however, I would like to add another characteristic to my list which is to “Build Relationships”.

The Value of Building Relationships

Enterprises and organizations are formed to provide goods, and services, and most organizations are formed to make a profit. While each organization is different, they all have goals and tasks required to deliver their goods and services, and the organization’s management team is responsible for planning and delivering the resources necessary to meet those goals. Managers need help from direct reports, peers, senior management and vendors to get their job done, and often rely on others to meet their goals. It’s advantageous for a manager to invest time and effort into building a relationship with everyone that will help them accomplish their goals.

Building a positive relationship with all individuals increases your influence and trust in an organization. As you learn more about your team, your peers and vendors, they also learn more about you. Communication improves, sharing of information increases and that is how influence and trust grows.

As a manager, if you work from a position of control where your circle of control is related to the position that you hold, as opposed to the influence and trust that you have earned, then I believe that you will have less control because your circle of control will only include your direct reports. Without the extra level of influence and trust, your direct reports may do what you say, however they will not be motivated to put  in the extra effort that is often needed to complete critical projects. Managers who make decisions that best suite themselves, and not the team, are recognized quickly, and often loose influence and trust.

If you are looking to improve your circle of influence you can start by building a relationship with all of your direct reports. My strategy is bi-weekly one-on-ones and a weekly staff meeting where everyone is open to bring their challenges to the table. If you are managing a remote employee, then the frequency should increase and you may need to speak with the remote employee every day. From a peer perspective, let your peers know that you are always approachable and willing to help and do the same with your vendors. Good vendor relationships are key in many managerial jobs.

As managers we all have different communication and management styles, however by building a network of relationships throughout your organization, you reduce the risk of a miscommunication or misinterpretation and increase the chance that everyone will be working together toward similar goals.

Other Resources

I have really enjoyed the discussions in the Essentials of Managing course and would like to offer another resource for folks looking to improve their managerial skills. I have been listening to Technology and Management Podcasts for many years and would recommend www.manager-tools.com for anyone who is managing people. Manager-tools.com is a great resource for both the new manager and the experienced manager. It is a free service, with forums, podcasts and premium content, where they discuss different managerial scenarios and outline the strategies and techniques necessary to deal with each situation.

]]>The Open Social Webhttp://techmgr.net/home/2010/12/17/the-open-social-web.htmlKevin2010-12-17T03:56:51Z2010-12-17T03:56:51ZI have been talking and writing about web 2.0, the open web, social networking, and social computing for a while now and now like to refer to all of this as The Open Social Web. In my version of the Open Social Web, all applications and content are built on open web standards that provide users with interoperability and control of their own data. While that may not be the case with many of the larger social networking sites, I like to think of it as a good goal to work towards. Adoption of social tools and applications have moved the digital conversation from blogs to social sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Buzz and Identi.ca, and the adoption of free mobile tools has helped to fuel this migration. While many people lose site of the Open aspect of these tools and social adoption is still growing and that is good for everyone. Social tools are changing how, when and where we communicate and that benefits everyone.  Openness leads to innovation, and innovation leads to better tools, applications and communication both within and outside of the social networking space. Location tools like Foursquare and Gowalla are great examples of innovation in the Social space and the wide adoption of desktop tools  like Seesmic and TweetDeck prove that users want to pull all of their social data and communications into one tool or application and companies are innovating to make that happen. I use Seesmic more than TweetDeck and both are great social aggregators, however I am still waiting for the tool that produces one open stream with all my social data. 

An Open Social Web built on top of the same open infrastructure components will lead to an increase in discovery and sharing across all social sites. A good starting point for learning about open infrastructure technologies is the W3C Incubator Group Report on “A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web”.  The W3C Incubator Group Report on Social Web Standards makes a case for Open Social Web Standards and focuses on identity, profiles, social media, privacy, activity streams, accessibility, open social networking projects and business considerations.

Adoption of these tools and standards is growing however there is still a lot of user friction sharing data between the large social networking sites and when it comes time to move to or at least try a new social networking site. This is too bad because discovery of new social tools and friends is a big part of the social web, and there are many groups working to reduce this friction and find tools and let users take their credentials from site to site. OpenID, OAuth and XAuth are the prominent tools for logging  into new social tools and services with your current credentials. Many of us have seen the Twitter, Facebook, Google and OpenID buttons presented when logging into new services and the advantage of using these buttons for authentication is access to your current friends at Twitter, Facebook or Goggle on the new service. This enables a pass through service back to your authentication point of choice which enables the user to easily identify current friends on the new service. This functionality helps with discovery and as I said, discovery is a big part of exploring the social web. Joseph Smarr and Jon Panzer outlined many of these tools in their Google I/O 2010 talk on Building fluid social experiences across websites:

Chris Messina also spoke at the Google I/O 2010 conference on many of the same topics however Chris’s talk was a little more conceptual than John and Josephs talk. Chris touched on  OpenID and digital identity, WebFinger, Activity Streams, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and the Hammer Stack and how these components can be used to build an Open Social Infrastructure that will easy friction, encourage discovery and open the door to innovation of these technologies. Here is Chris’s talk on the Open and Social Web:

 

While Google is a big player dedicating many resources to the Open Social Web, there are many other organizations and people creating open tools and applications on the Open Social Web. Status.net  is one and MindTouch.com is another.

Here is a list of additional links, slideshows and video that touch on the Open Social Web:

]]>Thoughts on Facebookhttp://techmgr.net/home/2010/11/21/thoughts-on-facebook.htmlKevin2010-11-21T05:41:55Z2010-11-21T05:41:55ZIn November of 2009, I read The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich which was a story the Founding of Facebook and my impression based on the book was that Facebook’s founder Marc Zuckerberg screwed everyone on his way to building Facebook. I have recently just finished reading  The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick and I have a different opinion of Marc Zuckerberg. Now I think he showed a lot of maturity and poise as he and the Facebook team met the challenges of growing and scaling Facebook into a network of over 500 million users, and I do not think that he screwed anyone.

I do not think that the lawsuit filed against Marc Zuckerberg by Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra held much merit as Zuckerberg did not sign a contract with them and in 2004, there were many examples of Social Networking companies like Live Journal, Friendster and Linkedin. I think it is a stretch to say that the Harvard Students came up with the Social idea and Zuckerberg stole it, as there were many other colleges doing the same thing, and you have to give Zuckerberg credit for executing on his idea, and then growing it past the college market.

I do think that Mark forced Eduardo out but Eduardo also shares some responsibility as Facebook was growing and Eduardo and Mark were fighting over money and control. Both Mark and Eduardo could have handled that situation better, however Eduardo eventually signed a shareholder agreement that allotted him 3 million shares of common stock for which he agreed to hand over all relevant intellectual property along with his voting rights to Mark Zuckerberg. Since that time Mark has reissued more stock diluting Eduardo's shares, however Eduardo is still a very rich man with about 5% of Facebook stock.

What really changed my mind was reading about Zuckerberg’s passion to grow the business and to put growth before making money. According to David Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg turn down many chances to sell Facebook but instead wanted to grow the service and make it into a utility. If Marc was just out to make a quick buck, he would have taken the money and run, however he did not. However Marc does come across as being obsessed with control of his company but who could really blame him.

I have not seen the movie the Social Network but now I will view it from a different perspective. I recently watched Zuckerberg’s interview at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010 and like what I heard from Zuckerberg. Two points that I heard more than once in Marc’s talk were:

  • “over the next five years almost every major product vertical is going to get rethought to be social”
  • “designed around people”

Other thoughts from Marc were:

  • “Facebook’s value system errors on the side of openness and portability”
  • feedback that we hear a lot is “we want control of the information that we put on the site” and a lot of people are asking for user control.
  • “Our default is to build an open platform, the stuff that we work on like groups location messages are like really core parts and are either distribution channels or we view are the foundational building blocks of the social graph.” 

Here is the video. It is long but gives you a good glimpse where Facebook is going:

Here are my thoughts on Facebook:

  • I would recommend that everyone signup and get a Facebook account
  • I would also recommend that every Facebook user go into Account –> Privacy Settings and change all of your sharing settings from Everyone to Friends Only.
  • I would also recommend that everyone stick to the friends that they know and trust and if you do not know someone then they should not be your friend on Facebook.

 

Photo Credit nextweb.com

]]>Here Comes the Bandwidthhttp://techmgr.net/home/2010/11/7/here-comes-the-bandwidth.htmlKevin2010-11-07T16:54:00Z2010-11-07T16:54:00ZThink about how computing has evolved through the use of improved technologies and increased bandwidth speeds. Smaller and faster chip and circuitry have made a big difference along with  increased bandwidth to both the desktop and the mobile devices. Bandwidth to the desktop is steadily increasing and has increased 33% in the last 5 years from 1.5Mbps to 50Mbps. Given this rate of growth, I would expect to see another increase of 33% from 50Mbps to 1.666.5 Gigabit per second (Gbps) over the next 5 years.

Mobile connectivity has grown at a much slower pace. Second Generation Wireless Technologies or 2G has been around since the early 1990’s and has evolved from 56 kilobits per second to 236.8 kilobits per second. The Edge network that is on many phones today can reach speeds of 236.8 kbits. Adoption of 3G or 3rd Generation Network has introduced an increase in standards, devices and data rates. Depending on your carrier and location, you can reach speeds from 2 Megabits per Second (Mbs) to 56Mbs on the 3G network. 3G has been around since the early 2000’s and is included on many of the smartphones in use today, however many carriers are in the process of rolling out a 4G or Fourth generation network of cellular wireless standards that will reach data rates of 1 Gbps.

Think about the mobile possibilities of having access to a 1Gbps network on your device. Look at how the explosion of social tools, games, and networks are feeding off our current 3G networks and consider what will happen when bandwidth is not a limiting factor. Smartphones give us the tools and games that keep us connected and amused, but what is next? Better applications, extensions into enterprise applications, improved video and video conferencing or maybe video email. Now we also have the iPad and the flood of new Android tablets entering the market. Manufactures led by Apple are developing powerful lightweight alternatives to laptops in the form of these new tablets. These tablets are medium sized devices designed for portability and consumption that fall into the category of bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a laptop. The iPhone has demonstrated that many users want lightweight portable computing with the same functionality as their desktops and the iPad and devices like it fill this need nicely. Once the combination of increased bandwidth and improved hardware are available, demand for these portable tables will really skyrocket.

Consider how many iPod’s you have purchased in the last 5 years and how many devices you will be purchasing in the next 5 years. It is not inconceivable to think that most power users will have a smartphone, a tablet and a desktop and that most non-power users will have at least two of the three.

Photo Credit to the1709blog

]]>Virtualization and the path to the Cloudhttp://techmgr.net/home/2010/10/30/virtualization-and-the-path-to-the-cloud.htmlKevin2010-10-30T14:23:53Z2010-10-30T14:23:53Zcloud Have you noticed the shift in hype within computing news away from cloud computing? I have and I think this is great because the hype tends to distort the facts. Also, while the hype is fading, adoption of cloud computing continues to grow and is predicted to grow. Ryan Nichols published a story in Computerworld in August 2010 called “Cloud computing by the numbers: What do all the statistics mean?” where he outlined statistics from IDC, Gartner and Merrill Lynch all estimating dramatic increases in cloud computing adoption. Also in August of 2010, Andre R Hickey from ChannelWeb outlined a story on Small and Medium Business (SMB) spending on Cloud Computing sighting research from AMI partners that where they predict cloud computing adoption by SMB’s to exceed $95 billion by 2014. These are great predictions, however how are organizations going to make the switch from a dedicated server and network infrastructure to a scalable, on-demand model for delivering services?

Virtualization

Virtualization will be the key for many organizations as many large enterprises have already deployed virtualization and are learning what it takes to maintain and support a large virtualized infrastructure. Many think, and I agree that virtualization is the first phase toward cloud computing, while others already consider their virtual environments a cloud, which I do not want to dispute. Now, organizations need to master the support and scale of virtualization and then consider some sort of private or hybrid internal cloud before moving applications to the public cloud. Jon Oltsik is a Principal Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group and recently wrote how “Many firms still struggle with performance issues when trying to align physical networks, storage devices, and servers with virtualization technology” and outlines how many organizations are not using the full features of virtualization like VMWare’s vmotion and vcloud to improve reliability and service delivery. I agree with Jon’s assessment and want to emphasize the importance of mastering your virtual infrastructure and providing a high level of support to your virtualized resources. Cloud computing offers improved elasticity and scaling which is also found in many virtual infrastructures, but having these capabilities are one thing, whereas actually taking advantage of these features is another thing.

For many organizations this is a change in mindset as they move their critical processing off of dedicated servers onto shared virtual resources, because the management of that shared virtualized infrastructure is now key to the delivery of all services. Organizations that grow accustom to the shifting and deploying of virtual resources will be one step closer to cloud and will make a easier transition to the use of external resources in the cloud.

Photo credit to thelittlechimpsociety.com

 

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]]>Where’s Kevinhttp://techmgr.net/home/2010/7/11/wherersquos-kevin.htmlKevin2010-07-11T03:54:08Z2010-07-11T03:54:08ZIt has been a while since my last post so I wanted to bring everyone up to speed and share my thoughts with you.

Back in May I started an online MBA program at the University of Phoenix and that has kept me extremely busy. I was looking at different programs and also considered the online program at Northeastern University however the combination of cost, tuition reimbursement, timing and the ability to flexibly schedule classes led me to the University of Phoenix. Each class is six weeks long and they cram a lot of reading and writing into each week. I have been averaging at least two hours a day and maybe taking one day off a week. That said, I am really glad that I started this and feel great about it. I am already half way thru my second class and will be taking 6 weeks off in starting in August.

The second bit of news is the fact that we had a layoff and reorganization at work. My job title has changed from a Team Leader of Infrastructure Services to Team Leader of Enterprise Application Administrators. Along with the title change I lost responsibility for the three DBA’s that were in my group but two additional  administrators where added to my group. That was a sad day as we had a great group. Luckly, no one in my group was laid off instead the dba’s were reassigned to a larger group of database administrators. The good news is that my focus is much broader than before as I was focused on delivery of applications to the Student Services group, however now my focus is much broader and includes all departments supported by the largest IT group at MIT called IS&T. My struggle up to this point has been with time and priorities as I was given responsibility for five new projects that I new nothing about, but we are coming up to speed quickly and overall it has been a positive experience consuming all of my time and energy during the day.

During this time I have had little input to Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, Identi.ca and blogging but at the same time I have shifted my viewpoints on a couple of technology related topics. I have moved away from the term Enterprise 2.0 and question the value of the term but not the E2.0 tooling. With my recent exposure to management theories and strategies, I like to idea of Empowerment and taking the collaborative tools identified in the E2.0 movement and using these tools to empower employees with better data and flexible tools to improve communication, collaboration and decision making.

In the limited time that I have to stay current and read blogs, twitter, buzz and facebook I have found a new passion in two different areas. The first is the semantic web or moving data in machine readable form onto the web for use by others. This is the theory behind Tim Berners-Lee’s premise of Linked Data but it is a theory that I buy into. We are shifting from a web of browsing pictures, email and video to a web of data, and having the ability to pull in real time non-confidential data programmatically will power the next phase of the web.

My second shift in passion has been around the area know as devops or webops, where you take the automated processes associated with building and delivering applications and you introduce the same process methodologies into the operations function. Basically you introduce  automation and configuration management into your monitoring infrastructure to streamline the build and deploy process. But this is not restricted to just applications instead it also includes the management and deployment of infrastructure to meet the needs of the organization. To learn more about the devops process, follow John M Willis and Damon Edwards blog and podcast at dev2ops.org.

 

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]]>Develop a Strategy for Improved Collaborationhttp://techmgr.net/home/2010/3/28/develop-a-strategy-for-improved-collaboration.htmlKevin2010-03-28T00:01:42Z2010-03-28T00:01:42ZI recently participated in a planning process designed to gather information from all levels of the organization with the intent of identifying what is working and what is not working. There was a lot of positive feedback but also a lot of negative feedback. Improving communications and collaboration were common themes across all organizational units, and improving collaboration is a frequent request from our business units. But improving communications and collaboration were just two of many areas which need improvement, and with our strict budget requirements and the struggling economy we need to take a look at all issues, prioritize our most urgent needs and identify a strategy to deal with everything else. Unfortunately, improving collaboration falls into that second category, so I thought I would share my thoughts around how we all could improve collaboration.

I see collaboration as the overlooked component of everyone's job. It is often in everyone’s job description however because it is a component of our job and usually not the end result of our job it can be easily overlooked, especially if we manage to deliver on our requirements without sharing or collaborating along the way. Some people are good at this and go out of their way to avoid sharing and collaboration, however I disagree with this strategy, call it out when I see it, and try to set an example by being open and transparent to all. I believe that improved collaboration leads to increased productivity and innovation, and by sharing what you do with others, helps others in the long run.

As a manager you should be encouraging your team to share and discuss projects, tasks and assignments and you need to make sure that every business process has multiple support resources and ensure that no one person is an island. Also, managers  are not the only ones responsible for collaboration, everyone is. If you are looking for a way to improve what you do, or if you are looking for a strategy to help you stand out from your peers, consider sharing and collaborating more than you do now.

There are many ways of improving collaboration like actively maintain a wiki presence and always looking for ways of sharing your efforts with others. There are many Enterprise Social Computing tools available today that claim to improve collaboration, however we need more than just tools. If the promise of improved collaboration is improved productivity, then we should look at the areas in our organization that could use improvement and develop a strategy to integrate these new tools into our business processes and require that everyone associated with that business process use these tools.

But, that is a tall order as most business processes could be improved however making a change to the business process requires time, effort and acceptance from the business community. Also, changing a business process could impact your bottom line, therefore many organizations prefer to stick with the current business process in spite of it’s deficiencies as opposed to taking a risk on a new business process.

That is why it is beneficial for large organizations to develop a strategy surrounding collaborative tools and Enterprise Social Computing strategies. Developing an Enterprise Social Computing strategy will help you to identify the tools that will work best in your organization and will help you to better outline productivity gains and cost savings.

Improving collaboration and productivity has been in our job descriptions for many years, however now we have some tools to help us along the way. Our challenge is identifying the tools that best fit our organization and justifying the use of these tools to fit our business cases.

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