Week 1 Discussion Comments 2014

I would like to highlight the comments made in several areas.

Discussion 2:

Working 24/7: A number of you mentioned that you have your Smartphone at all times and therefore can work at any time. All of us have to figure out how to establish a balance between work and the rest of our lives. Articles for managers explain how today's "young people" do not separate work from personal lives as much as people my age (well over 50) do. These articles tell managers to be tolerant of personal tasks being done "at work" because work tasks will be done at home. You will get to deal with these issues both as an employee and a manager.

IT Investments: Not all investments can be evaluated in terms of profit increases (cost reduction, revenue increase). Some investments might have to be made to protect the business and keep it from being crushed by competitors. Colleges and Universities will need to invest in online learning and other technologies to stay in business.

Systems on your job : Several of you reported interating with systems on your job. One comment questioned whether 10 separate systems that one of you work with should be replaced by one system. My personal comment is that attacking many systems at once can have a very high risk. Attempting to replace"everything" with a great new system can be dangerous. When we get to ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Systems, we will see what can go wrong if the scope of a project is too large.

Reading for business that you are not required to do: You made the comment "I wish I had time to read (tech articles)." I have found that reading material that I was not "supposed to" read but that interested me advanced my career significantly. On one of my early assignments, I took home a different technical computer manual each night. Soon I was answering questions for everyone else on the team. I was recognized as a "expert" and promoted. You probably would not enjoy technial "stuff" as much as I did when I was 22 years old but you can find material to read the relates to your job or to your company. The "trick" is to find something that you enjoy enough that you will want to read it.

 

Discussion 3:

Building a Team: Many of your comments shows that you appreciate the need for both business and technical skills and that it is not a choice of "business" or "computer specialist". You will probably manage a project (or two or twenty) during your career. Many projects succeed or fail based on setting the right scope and getting the right staffing (skills).

What is an IT Specialist: Think beyond a person that fixes printers or Excel problems or recovers lost passwords. Instead, think of specialists in Enterprise Resource Planning Systems such as SAP and database management systems such as Oracle, Learning Management Systems such as Canvas. Some IT specialits would be skilled in planning, building, and configuraing data centers with racks and racks of servers and disk drives that fill a large building. Others are very skilled in certain programming languages or in managing complex software development projects.

Computer specialists: I have been both a computer specialist and a manager at various times in my career. If a computer system is being designed or implemented for your department, DO NOT decide you "don't have time" to work on it. As you saw in the Discussion, computer specialits will probably not understand your business or your department and therefore will implement something that could be painful to use. Become actively involved with the design decisions, training plans, and implementation schedules.

Personal Opinion: Not all IT Specialists need an MBA or business knowledge. I would rather have a Network Specialist who had the appropriate CISCO certifactions than one that had an MBA. CISCO is the leading IT Network hardware/software company and defines the way that most corporate networks are configured.

Electronic Medical Records (EMR): . My Doctor had to greatly improve her typing skills when all charting became electronic. From a patient's point-of-view, the new system seems to be much better organized and the system automatically displays follow-up information based on what happened in prior visits.

Introducing a major change such as EMRs can be a culture shock to an organization. Dealing with change management issues such as this is just as important as building a system that will work from a technical point of view.

Switching costs between EMR systems can be very high. That's why vendors work so hard to get an initial sale. Once you are using their system, it is almost impossible to switch.