December 2010 Archives

Approaching the end of the year, I find myself reflecting on the events from 2010. Obviously, this has been a year of change: In June, I left my role as Senior Manager (Operations & Infrastructure) in the Office of Information Technology to become the Campus IT Director at the University of Minnesota Morris. My first 100 days were very busy, responding to a previous IT audit, helping the campus migrate to Google Mail and Google Calendar, drafting a 5-year IT plan, among other projects.

I thought I'd also reflect on a few of my favorite blog posts from this year, in no particular order:

• Write moar good
• Speaking well
• Keep it short
• Meetings, bloody meetings
• Communicating through change
• What's your mistake strategy?
• The importance of measurement
• How to use PowerPoint
• Coaching buttons and conversation gifts
• Lead-manage-do

See you next year!

I've written before about the importance of maintaining work-life balance, but with the holidays upon us, I thought the topic was worth revisiting.

Jim Collins has a great quote about work-life balance in an interview, Good to Great Expectations. We all make a choice on our own work-life balance, and how to maintain it. I especially loved this quote:

Q: You've got to admit, though, that technology has made it [life-work balance] harder today.

A: I don't think it's obviously harder today at all. Technology helps, not hurts, as long as you have the discipline to turn these things off. You don't report to your BlackBerry.

"You don't report to your BlackBerry" is a great quote to keep in mind. It applies equally well to any method of accessing email. Too often, I see evidence of people doing work email late into the evening. (I'm guilty of this sometimes, myself.) We need to manage our email, not let our email manage us, or we won't have a life-work balance, and we'll eventually burn out.

If we take the opportunity to "unplug" from our work routine, to completely relax, we can return to work refreshed and ready to tackle the big issues.

As an example, several weeks ago, my wife and I spent the weekends with friends at their lakeside cabin. I felt I had some things I needed to "get done" before Monday, so I brought my laptop with me. I turned it on, and tried to write a strategy document for maybe 5 minutes. Then I realized I was wasting this rare opportunity to relax. The laptop stayed turned off the rest of the weekend.

When I returned to the office, I noticed I was able to focus on topics more effectively, and quickly got caught up on projects - including that strategic positioning document. It was a great reminder on the importance of maintaining a work-life balance.

This holiday season, I intend to remain unplugged from work. Sure, I'll keep my cell phone at hand in case of issues, so staff can reach me. But no email, no documents. What's your commitment to work-life balance for this holiday break?

In October, Gartner outlined the 10 technologies it thinks will give organizations the most bang for their budgets in 2011. How many of these technologies will be a true hit?

1. Cloud computing
2. Mobile apps and media tablets
3. Next-gen analytics
4. Social analytics
5. Social communication and collaboration
6. Video
7. Context-aware computing
8. Ubiquitous computing
9. Storage class memory
10. Fabric based infrastructure and computers

Items that were added to the list are shown in bold.

Curious to know what's changed from last year's list? This time last year, Gartner suggested these technologies were the ones to watch:

1. Cloud computing
2. Advanced analytics
3. Client computing
4. IT for green
5. Reshaping the data center
6. Social computing
7. Security - activity monitoring
8. Flash memory
9. Virtualization for availability
10. Mobile applications

Technologies that dropped off the "Top 10" list from 2010 to 2011 are shown with strikeout. They haven't completely disappeared from the IT radar, but others have taken their spot on the "Top 10".

Laptops have been part of the IT culture for so long, many of us probably have forgotten the time when they were "new". Today, most users have a laptop as their primary work computer. Having a laptop means a greater degree of freedom. How many of us have taken our laptop home to "catch up" on work over the weekend?

But that work laptop is also a source of great worry. You have a lot of important information on a device that is easily lost, or stolen. The largest single type of security breach is the stolen or lost laptop, according to the Open Security Foundation, yet these computers are among the least protected of all IT assets. The key is in protecting the data that's on the laptop.

InfoWorld has a great article "Your laptop data is not safe. So fix it", which makes 2 recommendations:

1. Full-disk encryption
2. Virtual disk encryption

If the laptop is lost or stolen, encrypting all data on the hard drive limits the risk that data can be recovered by a "bad guy". The article also make a case for full-disk encryption coupled with the Trusted Computing Module ("TPM") available on most modern systems. However, most operating systems provide for some type of software encryption.

This is the less-expensive alternative to full-disk encryption is the virtual disk. Typically, you create a virtual disk (say, drive "X") and only encrypt that. Some may choose to partition the drive and create a separate area just for encrypted data. Whichever method, you get a performance gain because the operating system (drive "C") remains un-encrypted. But users have to be aware that drive "X" is there, and that they need to store their private files there.

While encrypting a virtual disk is certainly cheaper, there's always the risk that a user would save a file with private data on the "C" drive, thus rendering it readable.

I always encourage the use of full-disk encryption, with or without TPM. As we roll out Active Directory across the University of Minnesota Morris campus, we will ensure that encryption keys are backed up ("escrowed") into the Directory, so the University can recover the data if the original passkey is lost or forgotten.

I also like the full-disk encryption option because it means the user doesn't have to remember which area is encrypted (drive "X") and which is not (drive "C") because everything is encrypted by default. If the user doesn't have to do anything extra to get that level of security, I'm all for it.