The business definition of the term is fully defined and explained in the book IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain by Peter Weill and Jeanne W. Ross. As Weill and Ross explain in the book, being “IT Savvy refers to the planned, ongoing use of a set of interlocking business practices and competencies that  collectively derive superior value from IT investments”.

For most hard core technologists this definition will seem a little too vague and consultant-ese to really apply to the day to day wok in IT but Weill and Ross go into much more detail on their definition and provide a practical framework in which to think about IT and its support of a business.

Weill and Ross go on to further highlight five characteristics of an “IT Savvy” company:

1. IT for Internal and External Communication – Intensity of electronic communications media such as e-mail, intranets, and wireless devices for internal and external communications and work practices.
2. Internet Use - Internet based architectures (i.e. open) for key functions like sales force management, employee performance measurements, training and post-sales customer support.
3. Digital Transactions – High percentage of digitized transaction executed with both suppliers and customers.
4. Company-wide IT Skills - Technical and business skills of IT people, IT skills of business people and ability to hire skilled IT people.
5. Management Involvement – The degree of senior management commitment to IT projects and the degree of business unit involvement in IT decisions.

Weill and Ross also layout some well defined categories of IT investments and conclude that the most IT Savvy companies are investing more in the Strategic and Informational areas of IT than their competition.

1. Strategic - used to gain competitive advantage by supporting entry into new markets or by helping to develop new products services or business processes.
2. Informational - provide information for purposes such as accounting, reporting, compliance, communication, or analysis
3. Transactional – investments that are primarily used to cut costs or increase the throughput for the same cost.
4. Infrastructure - shared IT service s used by multiple applications (servers, networks, laptops, customer databases,)

Considering these high-level attributes would you consider your organization IT savvy?

We just published a major white paper – “Avoiding the Product Selection Quagmire” – that details what can go wrong with IT product selection efforts. It also describes what should be done to overcome risks and run a top-notch RFP or competitive bidding project.

In small to mid-sized companies, IT teams often get caught off guard by the unanticipated demands of the product selection process. Although competitive bidding is a well-known best practice, many organizations lack the practical experience or the tools to execute a selection process effectively. Companies who find themselves “reinventing the wheel” with each product selection project will likely encounter any of a number of risks:

• A lack of expertise and experience in the full competitive bidding and product selection process.
• Failure to set up product selection as a formal project.
• Inadequate handling of requirements.
• A lack of balance between business and technical emphasis.

When these pitfalls occur, the company could end up making a buying decision for a solution that won’t be adopted, isn’t aligned with the real requirements, or costs much more than a better solution.

Here are the white paper’s key recommendations:

1. Set up each product selection effort as a formal project.
2. Augment your internal expertise as needed: Partner early on with a provider of talent with experience conducting product selection projects.
3. Engage an internal or external business analyst to gather and document requirements.
4. Leverage existing tools and methodology to execute the selection project.
5. Foster a good partnership between business and IT throughout the project.
6. Choose the appropriate type of competitive bidding request, one that best suits the project objectives.
7. Adopt a component-based, reusable RFP format and structure.
8. Adopt a standard, reusable timeline for the bidding and selection process.
9. Conduct the selection using a complete decision package.
10. Prepare early for the transition to implementation.

The paper explains each of these recommendations in detail, giving IT practitioners a practical set of steps for reducing product selection risk and raising IT’s profile as a key contributor to business success through quality technology purchases.

The white paper “Avoiding the Product Selection Quagmire” is available free on our Resources page to all registered visitors to our site. Registration is free and gives you access to all of our other free white papers, articles, templates, and work samples.

But project closure provides one of the best opportunities for improving your overall project execution. It’s the time when completed objectives can be compared to original intentions, when a team can scrutinize its methods and processes to determine what worked and what didn’t. The team activities of project closure – the “lessons learned” meeting, the closing report, etc. – provide one of the only opportunities for retrospection amid the busy operation of a full portfolio.

One of the best ways to learn about the effectiveness of a project’s management is to evaluate the project through a survey of team members and stakeholders. A written survey helps guide reflection, spark recollection, and focus on key points of execution that require the most vigilance in maintaining project excellence. Surveys collected over a number of projects provide valuable historical insight into the effectiveness of particular methods, and help guide decisions about adapting your PM methods to your organization’s unique circumstances.

In our Resources section on this site, we’ve posted an example of our IT Evolution project evaluation survey form for our registered visitors. It’s built from a number of sources combined with themes from our own experience. Feel free to download and use the survey for your own projects, and start building a history of your successes and improvements.

(If you haven’t registered yet, you can sign up using the “Registration” link on the upper left of the Resources page.)

What you may not be aware of is that Outlook isn’t limited to single column sorting. To create a secondary sort, first create the primary sort by clicking the header of the principal column. Then, hold down the [Shift] key and click the header in the column that will be the secondary sort criteria. This can be used to easily locate e-mail without utilizing the search function: for example, a secondary sort based on Subject or Size within a primary sort by “To” can greatly simplify locating a specific e-mail, particularly from a Sender with whom you frequently correspond.

In the meantime, Toby Elwin at the Project Management Hut has put together a useful compendium of Twitter knowledge for project managers that goes beyond what novices need to know. He’s clearly an enthusiastic advocate of using Twitter as a project communications tool:

You have an obligation to communicate, but with Twitter you now have an opportunity to communicate more efficiently, more effectively. 4 reasons to use Twitter for project management:

• Concise messages
• Topics filtered by keyword (more on this below)
• Link to documents or websites
• Track communications by user and using a time stamp

I wish he contributed a few more words to how Twitter – or microblogging in general – should fit into an overall project communications approach. Some kinds of project communication are easily adapted for Twitter, while many are not. I’m also skeptical about Twitter’s effectiveness as a project tool simply from the perspective of user adoption. For Twitter to be effective in this context, all of the project team has to develop the Twitter “habit,” which means making Twitter and tweeting as much a part of your electronic communications activity as e-mail and web browsing. That takes time, and people new to Twitter don’t often grasp where its value lies. Twitter for projects works best in environments where the team members have already drunk the Twitter kool-aid.

All the same, Elwin’s post provides helpful tips and lists of tools that can direct an early explorer of the Twitterverse to a better knowledge of the platform.

I’d love to hear from anyone who has experienced Twitter – or its more corporate-friendly cousin, Yammer – in a project context.

Project managers in IT often confront the tall hurdle of fostering smooth communication among team members separated by time and distance. It’s not easy. The IT project highway is strewn with failed and discarded projects that spun out from poor communications across widely distributed teams.

The challenge for a project manager is to develop for distributed teams a sense of presence that leverages new technologies with appropriate usage. Presence is one aspect – perhaps the biggest – of a team member’s engagement with the project team and its coordinated activity. Although e-mail supports an existing sense of presence, it is incapable of creating a sense of presence on its own.

Think of what “presence” means relative to the physical placement of a team of people working together toward a common goal. The best sense of presence exists in a team where the members are in the same place at the same time interacting face to face (e.g., a football team or a focus group). Close behind is the team that’s under one roof but in different locations (think cubicles). Then there’s the team where the members are in different buildings but the same postal code. The physical separation of teams can extend across multiple states, countries, and continents.

Contrary to what telephone ads say, long distance is simply not the next best thing to being there. To be successful, we need as much team presence as we can achieve, but we can’t achieve much when we’re so geographically separated. Well, presence is all about communication. If we look at the spectrum of presence in the team examples above, most person-to-person communication generally falls into two categories: synchronous and asychronous.

Synchronous communication occurs when people interact in a real-time dialogue. The obvious example is two people in the same room talking to each other. Direct telephone conversations are synchronous (although phone tag via voice mail is asychronous). Instant messaging (IM) and chat are synchronous, but with intriguing potential for latency (such as sending an instant message to somebody who gets it an hour later). Through high-tech telephony (e.g., Voice Over IP (VoIP)), IM, and chat, we’re experiencing new and diverse ways of increasing the information stream through the combination of visual and aural channels. Video-enhanced IM is an example of this, and so is the IM window that displays what songs you’re currently listening to while you’re chatting with somebody about your latest status report.

Asychronous communication, on the other hand, operates in bursts of one-sided dialogue. The most obvious example is e-mail. When I write you an e-mail message, I send it without knowing when you’ll read it or when (or if) you’ll respond to it. I generate it on my own time and terms, and you respond on your time and terms. This is good in a world in which we’re not all on the same schedule. Messages can be queued up, and the act of responding can be queued up as well. Before e-mail, the written memo was the primary example of communication asynchronicity. Another example of asychronized dialogue is the blog, which has the added backbeat of e-mail as well as blog comments to augment the layers of communication. Twitter and its corporate-friendly cousin Yammer are kind of a mash-up of IM, blogging, and e-mail.

Both synchronous and asychronous communications provide the means for people to be present to each other in varying degrees. Assuming we have all of these diverse, cool ways to communicate, what helps a team the most as it strives for its goal?

To me, it seems to come down to two things: bandwidth, and what I’ll call (for lack of a better term) appropriate messaging.

For this discussion, bandwidth refers to the potential range of information that can be communicated in the context of a particular exchange. Two people talking in person, face to face, is high-bandwidth communication. In addition to the actual words, each communicator can also parse intonation, facial expression, body language, and some of the more subtle signals (personal appearance, etc.). A two-way videoconference is high-bandwidth (although not as much as in-person) because it combines visual and aural richness. A telephone conversation is the next step down in bandwidth, eliminating the visual and some of the detail in the aural spectrum. (With cellphones, bandwidth shrinks even more because of the “Can-you-hear-me-now?” syndrome.)

Asynchronous communications generally have less bandwidth than synchronous, but not always. A video-mail message has greater bandwidth than a conventional e-mail message. But it has less bandwidth than a videoconference because the latter is synchronous and real-time, incorporating the immediate responses of all participants to the messages being conveyed. For all the ubiquity of e-mail in our working world, it surprises me how much people ignore the low-bandwidth nature of that means of communication. Without quirky visual add-ons like emoticons and “grin-dicators,” e-mail cannot convey emotion very well, or any of the other nuances that come through the visual and auditory aspects of higher-bandwidth exchanges. Nearly everybody has had at least one bad experience with misinterpreted humor in e-mail, and we all know the principle that major bad news should not be conveyed through e-mail.

Yet distributed work teams often rely heavily on e-mail as the medium of choice for most communications. Because of e-mail’s inherently limited bandwidth, this can mean real problems in overcoming the challenges of being physically distant. Without augmenting presence with other communication channels — in-person meetings, Twitter/Yammer, phone calls, IM, videoconferencing, etc. — a team can run amok in response to misfires, omissions, and the other slings and arrows of a limited medium.

However, the asychronous nature of e-mail is its saving grace. There are plenty of communications where e-mail is the best medium for the message. And that’s what I mean by “appropriate messaging”: Pick the right means for what you need to communicate.

• To exchange a lot of information in a short time, get everybody in the same room. (Get rid of the chairs beforehand if you want to keep the meeting short.)
• To ask a quick question, use IM or the pick up the phone. (It’s best to batch up your questions if you risk repeatedly interrupting somebody’s work.)
• To engage in a one-on-one dialogue with a geographically separate colleague, crank up the webcams to allow facial expressions and body language to increase the level of engagement.
• To make a specific statement for which an archival record is required (e.g., meeting minutes, meeting agenda), use e-mail.
• To conduct brief written dialogues with the whole team in order to convey status, progress, questions, issues, etc., check out Yammer, the internal microblogging platform that has grown increasingly popular in IT environments.

The presence to each other of distributed team members is enhanced less by the increase in the means of communication and more by the specific means they choose for conveying their messages. While it’s probably best to have the most high-bandwidth exchanges you can afford, it doesn’t mean lower-bandwidth communications aren’t useful as well.

Well, according to a study by Bain & Company covered in MIT Sloan Management Review titled “Avoiding the Alignment Trap in Information Technology”, alignment may not be the largest problem in an underperforming IT organization and it may not be the first place to look for answers or make adjustments. The study suggests that the first place to investigate is the effectiveness of the IT organization. Are projects being accomplished on time and on budget? Are the systems used today running smoothly? Is there unnecessary complication in applications and infrastructure? Richard F. Connell, CIO of Selective Insurance Group, said in the article, “Aligning a poorly performing IT organization to the right business objectives still won’t get the objective accomplished.”

Additionally, the study presented some very interesting numbers and drew some interesting conclusions about the correlations between the overall performance of a business and the effectiveness and alignment of its IT organization.  As you may have guessed, the companies where the IT organizations were both effective and aligned were the most prosperous.

How would you rate your company’s IT effectiveness and its alignment to the business?

You can also view the full article in the MIT Sloan Management Review (subscription required for access to full article).

This is the message confirmed by the IT salary survey conducted last month by SearchCIO-Midmarket.com. In addition to the survey results themselves, comments in the article by several IT managers confirm that generalists are in demand:

“‘Specialists are in big trouble, in my opinion,’ [according to Bob Clabaugh, director of network and systems engineering at Northwest Regional Education Service District in Hillsboro, Ore.] ‘Broad-skilled generalists who have had their hand in everything are going to be the ones scooped up by midmarket IT shops.’ Smaller organizations will be looking to fill multiple roles with one person, saving on employee onboarding costs and multiple salaries.”

In our work with many midmarket companies in the mid-Atlantic region, we’ve spoken with many CIO’s who express a need for IT practitioners who demonstrate knowledge of and interest in the business side, who regard IT as the enabler of business performance, directly or indirectly. Often, when an organization lacks such generalists internally, outside help is often needed to both provide a broader perspective, and to coach the organization to develop that talent internally.

Visit the the IT salary survey at SearchCIO-Midmarket.com for the full article.

1. Select any folder from Windows Explorer where you want to locate the “GodMode” folder – I placed mine in C:\, but any location will work
2. Create a new folder titled:  GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
3. Enter the new folder – all of the Windows tools should be there broken out by base function.

A trend in high end desktops and laptops that is likely to quickly be adopted at all price points is the use of Active Power Correction Factor  (Active PFC) based power supplies.  Active APC has benefits, but mostly for enterprise level use, as it reduces stress on the AC wiring by lowering the current drawn by power supplies with a high Power Factor, which can reach 90% in an Active PFC supply, vs. the 65% seen in typical Passive supplies.  UPS costs are also reduced, as an Active PFC requires less current capacity than the older Passive supplies.  Active PFC supplies don’t use less power, but they do deliver a higher percentage of it when called upon to the PC components.

So what’s the downside and why wouldn’t you want all of your new hardware to utilize Active PFC?  There are two compelling reasons:

• Your existing UPS probably won’t keep an Active PFC based PC running when the power goes off, or during a brownout when the UPS takes over.  This is due to the need for most Active PFC power supplies to be fed a true sine waveform. The majority of the household UPS’s are stepped “simulated” sine, which isn’t a viable source of power for Active PFC based designs.  Data Centers typically use UPS’s utilizing true sine waveform, so see the benefits, but at price points starting at around $500, aren’t a viable option for most home and SMB based computing.
• Active PFC won’t likely reduce your electric bill.  Power Factor isn’t a criterion on which homes and small businesses are billed for electricity. This is true except in the case of commercial utility users who pay for V(oltage) x A(mperes).

Some vendors are providing options for Active or Passive Supplies.  Unless your existing UPS is a true sine wave capable device, or you plan on replacing the OEM supply, strong consideration should be given to avoiding Active PFC.

When we work with IT organizations to enhance the effectiveness of their project and portfolio management, we start by assessing where they are now: What are the needs, perceived weaknesses, challenges, opportunities, and anticipated benefits? After building a team to focus on PM effectiveness, we start our work by conducting a survey of the team to gather current impressions about how project management is handled now. Conducting the survey at both the beginning and end of a PMO development effort provides a yardstick for measuring specific improvements later on.

We’ve posted a copy of one version of our Project Management Effectiveness Survey on our Resources page. It’s available free to registered visitors. Of course, we encourage you to register for access to our entire library of white papers, technical articles, tools, tips, and other documents available free on our Resources page.

If you’d like to talk with us further about our project and portfolio management services, send us a note on our Contact Us page.

Many factors influence project success and failure, including schedules, resources and funding. But new project management research from training company Insights Learning and Development, certain chapters of the Project Management Institute and a strategic execution consultant suggests that the single most important factor influencing project success is the project’s link to the organization’s business strategy and the project manager’s understanding of how the project supports the business strategy.

This certainly conforms to our experience with a wide range of IT projects at IT Evolution. Every IT project should demonstrate its full business value before it even gets launched. Part of the value equation involves a solid knowledge of the organization’s strategy on the part of a project’s PM, sponsors, and stakeholders. Sometimes, the PM needs to act as the evangelist on business strategy to those who might not be as familiar with it, particularly in technical environments. Clear alignment with business strategy raises a project’s profile, solidifies its support, and significantly enhances its chances for success.

Read the full article over at CIO.com.

1. In Internet Explorer, select Tools/Internet Options. The Internet Options dialog appears.
2. Select the Security tab, click the “Trusted Sites” icon at the top, then click the “Custom Level…” button at the bottom. The Security Levels dialog appears.
3. Scroll all the way down to the bottom to the User Authentication/Logon options, then click “Automatic logon with current user name and password.”
4. Click OK, and save settings as requested

1. Properly designing the physical space to minimize “heat islands”
2. Locating heat generating devices such as air conditioners outside the primary data center and utilizing “Economizer” modes
3. Proper location of venting
4. Sizing the primary electrical systems and UPS to avoid operating above 75% of maximum load
5. Reduction of server count via virtualization and retirement
6. Migration to energy efficient computing platforms such as blade servers and multiprocessor/multicore solutions
7. Elimination of older, inefficient servers
8. Utilization of power management features (CPU throttling)
9. Storage centralization and the introduction of efficient disk storage (solid state drives, unused drive spindown)
10. Implementing and utilizing energy tracking systems to identify opportunities to reduce power consumption

APC offers a comprehensive white paper on this subject, which is available at : http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/NRAN-6LXSHX_R0_EN.pdf

1. Make a copy of the corrupt document.    Creates a version that you can return to if other methods further corrupt the document
2. Try opening the document on another computer – sometimes the issue is local (Operating System or Word)
3. Run Chkdsk – If the issue is disk corruption, Chkdsk may repair the file system and allow the document to function properly
4. Try opening the file in another editor – Wordpad, Notepad, or other editors may allow you to recover the entire document, or at least the raw text
5. Use the “Open and Repair” option n Word – select the file in the Open dialog box and choose Open And Repair from the Open drop-down list in the bottom-right corner.  This will force Word to attempt to recover the document.

If these methods don’t succeed, there are a couple of options to consider:

1. Look for copies of the document outside of the local system.  Check your e-mail to see if you may have a copy there
2. Use Shadow Copy to recover recent versions of the document.  To do so, right-click on the document and select the Properties command from the shortcut menu. When the document’s properties sheet appears, select the Previous Versions tab.  The Previous Versions tab will show you any previous versions of the file that are available.
3. Use a recovery program.  OfficeRecovery and Ontrack both offer solutions to attempt to recover important documents.