"It can happen anywhere, at any time. You’re doing your job, minding your own business, and it suddenly dawns on you: you’re the company’s webmaster."
--Shane Schick, "Accidental webmasters rejoice – help is on the way", GlobeandMail.com, September 5, 2007
There are a couple new articles at ComputerWorld that peaked my interest and may be something you too will be interested in reading. The first is an opinion piece by Frank Hayes, "Frankly Speaking: Rewiring Respect for IT".
Why don’t IT people get more respect? On this Labor Day, things are actually looking better for people who work in corporate IT. Budgets aren’t quite so tight. Companies are hiring. Interesting IT projects are getting a green light. But when it comes to how our fellow employees think about us, IT work is a train wreck. Users break the rules we set up, ignore the processes we develop and generally act as if we’re clueless in what we do.
On a different subject, Bruce A. Steward has written an article to remind us that supporting our customers is more than just improving the business process.
Michael Silverman has a great article on The Content Wrangler regarding content management. The full title of the article is "Making The Business Case for Web Content Management: First, Admit You Have A Problem". The article is a one-stop place for explaining content management, why a business or organization should implement a content management system (CMS), and tips for choosing and implementing a CMS.
"Tech is so illogical and arbitrary, it needs folks like you and me to explain it to everybody else."
--Stephen Manes, "Full Disclosure: If You're Not a Geek, You'd Better Know One", PC World Magazine, September 2007
A few months ago I mentioned that I was hosting my site using a "budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy". In that same article, I also mentioned that although I prefer to run my sites on a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server (VPS/VDS), I wanted to try experimenting with the cheap shared hosting plans despite the plans not offering full MySQL functions such as CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE. For the most part, my sites have been running fine on the shared hosting plans but I wanted better control (oh how I miss Linux command line via secure shell). So, I began searching for a better reseller hosting plan. Unfortunately, my search for the perfect reseller host plan still continues.
I thought my hosting requirements were pretty simple. I wanted a reseller hosting plan that provided CPanel, PHP5, MySQL5, secure shell, and a license to a client billing system such as ClientExec. Oh and I wanted to be sure the hosting plans provided were Drupal friendly. While I host more than just Drupal sites I've found that if the server is configured properly to run Drupal then it can run almost any other PHP-based CMS out there. All in all I wanted a shared hosting plan where I spent less time managing the server, yet had the controls I needed via a Linux shell. Simple enough right? In fact I thought I found a great reseller plan through ResellerZoom (RZ). However, after spending most of my weekend hours trying to work it all out, I've come to the conclusion I'm still looking for something that works better.
"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes. Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."
-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.
Now that Summer 2007 is finally here, it is time to step back for a couple weeks and spend less time in front of the computer. As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to use some of this time to publish online a professional report I did on IT user support. This report was submitted a couple years ago as a requirement for a Master of Science in Administrative Studies with an Information Systems track. You'll get bits and pieces of it in the following weeks and once I'm done, I'll regroup them similar to the research paper I posted earlier this year.
The biggest reward I get from working on IT projects is the opportunity to take new ideas and new strategies and piece them together into something that has never been done before. Even when I'm not the one originating the new idea, I like helping other innovative people bring their ideas to the table. I have ideas, dreams, and aspirations to help take my workplace to the next level of where it should be via innovative use of what I know best, information technology. How could innovation and all these wonderful ideas I have in my head not be anything but a good thing for my organization? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal answers just that question by saying that there are negatives for an organi