May 08, 2008 | TrackBacks: (0)

Bloggers beware

As we are now all a part of the brave new world of blogging, I am personally discovering some of the unintended outcomes of a CTO blog. At my previous company, I started blogging well after I became CTO, and some of my team read it out of curiosity. But now at my new company, the new technology team got the chance to read my blog before I arrived, as did other department members. An experience on my first day in the office was someone stopping me in the hallway, and saying "you must be Jon Williams, I read your... more

TAGS: Management

April 17, 2008 | TrackBacks: (0)

The last 21 days

Many things have a beginning and ending. Projects, computers, vacations, games, school, friends, businesses (sometimes), life, and jobs. Some things have planned endings (vacation, school) and others are random by chance. While there is no shortage of management literature on starting new jobs or the "first 90 days" there seems to be little written about the process of leaving a company, we’ll call this “the last 21 days”. I am now in the midst of both an ending and a new beginning. After 4 years at Kaplan, I am leaving to join iVillage, a division of NBC Universal. I have... more

TAGS: Management

April 15, 2008 | TrackBacks: (0)

Work and play?

It used to be that work and play had clear delineations, but not anymore, at least not for me, and I believe not for gen-Yers. For example, while on a recent Seattle vacation, I (1) had lunch with a couple of CTO buddies (play), (2) visited my company's Seattle location (work) (3) afternoon visit with some in-laws (play). But interestingly the 2 play examples are somewhat work-related as we talked tech (my brother-in-law has a tech startup and I was a beta tester). Add to this the daily stream of emails, of which I responded to the all the simple... more

TAGS: Management

April 03, 2008 | TrackBacks: (0)

Open source is good for IT

I gave a presentation at OSBC (open source business conference) last week. I don't often speak at conferences, but I have been working on an open source strategy for 4 years and believed that presenting that plan might help other CTOs/CIOs in their open source plans. Two bloggers (Matt Asay and Zack Urlocker) reviewed my presentation at http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9903582-16.html?tag=head and http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2008/03/kaplan_guiding.html?source=rss . First, Kaplan was not the only company describing their use of open source. Other included CBS interactive, Paypal, Weather Channel interactive, NY times, Electronic Arts, LA times, Christian Science Monitor. In addition, a full 40% of attendees were IT... more

TAGS: Management

March 27, 2008 | TrackBacks: (0)

The wisdom of herds

In evaluating technologies, it can often be a struggle to compare competing products. When done diligently, you will probably use a product comparison matrix with weighted scoring. By the way, allow yourself many weeks to collect and evaluate all of the data. And if other people are involved, then also expect lots of meeting to argue pros and cons. And if you also want to do a test drive, there's more time gone. And you haven't built a darned thing yet! There is another way, but unfortunately it is not always available to us. This other way is:- "What do... more

TAGS: Management

March 13, 2008 | TrackBacks: (0)

Search as a utility

We were discussing search at a recent NY CTO club meeting, and a thought occurred to me (as it frequently does in these meetings):- Is search a utility? Meaning, is search a plug-in function and not something to be developed by the tech team. Every system we build has a search function built into it, usually hand-crafted (proprietary). Why? When I programmed years ago, every system had a screen-writer, which updated the characters and pixels on the screen. But no more, this is now a utility provided by the operating system. It would be crazy to do otherwise. I have... more

TAGS: Management