Nicholas Carr is a bold author who takes a long term view of the world. He published a book last year entitled, "he Big Switch" that runs through moving from a local based computing model to a cloud based computing model. During this switch IT departments will be reduced drastically as the support processes move behind the scenes. As someone who provides corporate IT support this is an eye opening statement. 

Before I list some reasons why I don't think the corporate IT groups should go on the endangered species list, I need to let you know I am huge cloud supporter. Back in the day I was involved in testing the first cluster applications for NT when Digital released them for their Alpha boxes. I saw the future. When the web hit I was a huge proponent on moving as many applications as possible onto web servers. The savings in resources were fantastic and the reliability increased.

I've spoken about luck as a factor in success before, but Seth Godin has a post today entitled, "Is effort a myth?" that discusses this thought.

In Seth's piece he takes it a step further and very cleverly gets people to think about the effort they put towards things. While some of Seth's pieces int he past have been, well, part of lala land, this one is actually right. 

The site The Consumerist is fantastic for handling consumer issues. Recently, they asked how you would turn around Circuit City and make it a success. It's a fascinating topic and I have a couple of ideas:

Outsource to Amazon: You need to move your online presence to Amazon. There's no reason to duplicate functionality since A) Amazon does it better and B) You need to pay attention somewhere else. While you're not going to make more money in the short term, in the long term it's going to help you focus on your brick and mortar stores. 

The current proposed $700 billion dollar bailout is nothing less than a raping of the American taxpayer and the downfall of the United States capitalism system. With that off my chest, I must admit I was wrong when I made an earlier entry about the mortgage mess having happened before. This time it's way worse. 

I started wondering how we found ourselves in this mess. Outside of the normal greed and corruption motives, I found that the Federal government actually caused this issue. It all started in the late 1990s when the government told Fannie Mae to ease the credit requirements for potential homeowners. The move was designed to allow more minorities, who happen to have worse credit, to buy homes. As the New York Times said at the time:

There are many things I don't understand, but the one that has consumed me lately is alternative energy. Specifically, solar and wind. One of the many great mysteries is why, as an American, we don't hold our state and federal governments to account on these issues. 

Scientific American is a fascinating magazine, and one of their articles addresses the shortcomings of alternative energy generation in the United States. They focus on solar energy, but one needs to consider wind power as well. 

The tale of The Emperor's New Clothes  is an apt way of describing the current eBay. They are now naked. The latest attempt to convince everyone in the marketplace they're wearing a spiffy new suit was covered by ReadWriteWeb in a post entitled, "Is eBay Artificially Inflating Listing Numbers? " by Josh Catone. 

The article details what appears to at best, a programming error, and at worst, a fraudelent attempt by eBay to inflate their listing numbers. This is important since eBay really makes a big deal of using their listing numbers to show how well they are performing. 

As I've mentioned earlier, I listen to the radio online throughout the day. For those times I am coming to or going from work , I'll listen in the car. One of the main stations I listen to is KMOX. They have a news focused morning show called Total Information AM. The hosts are pretty bland, except for this week. 

This week Debbie Monterrey has been spectacular. Yes, there is the normal news focus, the weather and traffic every 10 minutes, but she was entertaining this week. She related stories from her life, made fun of her co-host and didn't act like hosting a news show was life or death.

When you manage IT teams, your customer's schedule becomes your schedule. This means if your customer's are working on the weekends you need to provide support, which can be problematic when your team is lean or new on the job. Here are a series of best practices we follow to ensure our customer's always have the support they need when we're not in the building:

Defining priority and service levels: This is the critical step; without it you're not going to succeed. You need to ask your customers what priority they place on certain types of issues and also what service they expect. For instance, a broken mouse or keyboard means someone could move to another workstation. An online system going down is going to require intervention from the local support team.

When you manage groups of technical people in computer support there are many out of the normal considerations. One of the largest I've come across is boasting. Tooting your own horn. Publicizing your achievements.  Many technical people don't want to take the time to document their efforts, as they think the work speaks for itself.

One of the larger reasons for transparency in computer support is communication. One of the main ways we accomplish this is through our status report. In the past, the status report was driven from the top down. Managers assembled it and put it together with little input from those actually doing the work. I changed this to encourage each person to develop their own status, which would be assembled weekly. I carved out individual pages on the knowledge base for folks to edit their status reports. 

Interesting. According to the local CBS radio affiliate, KMOX, CBS has bought the cNet network of properties for a little over $11 a share. This was according to a memo sent to all employees by Les Moonves.

The radio guy was mkaing fun of some of the web properties, but he made an excellent point:

We didn't even know the internet existed five years ago.

It's a fascinating play for CBS to make at this point. Others have pointed out that cNet continues to lose money, but with the right direction they could make a ton of cash.