Yald - Patrick Grote's Technology Notes - Business

eBay's clothes are missing

Patrick Grote — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:24:21 -0400

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.

Removing a team member to make a stronger team - Debbie Monterrey prospers

Patrick Grote — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:23:15 -0400

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.

How to handle weekend IT outages

Patrick Grote — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:54:26 -0400

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.

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Best process for computer support status reports

Patrick Grote — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:55:41 -0400

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.

CBS buys cNet

Patrick Grote — Thu, 15 May 2008 07:29:28 -0400

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.

Common resume mistakes in the IT industry

Patrick Grote — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:57:36 -0400

We're in the middle of hiring a couple of people for our teams at work, which means you have to look at a ton of resumes. The group responsible for our recruiting does an excellent job in gathering possible candidates. As I read through the technical resumes a few things pop out to me. Common mistakes that many people seem to make appear after the 50th resume, so I thought I'd pass on what I've seen. Maybe you could use it to avoid any problems.

I was going to use screenshots from the actual resumes, but decided against it due to privacy issues.

How to give great powerpoint presentations

Patrick Grote — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:13:22 -0500

I've written before about presentation tips, but I wanted to make sure I noted how to give really good, engaging presentations. The presentation type I'm going to focus on is informational with some persuasion tossed in. These are presentations where you want to provide strategy or direction, but you'd like your audience to agree with you.

Here are the top five things about handling these presentations:

1) Tell a story: You know your information, so you need to tell a story with it. Stories engage people in the information and, more importantly, force them to follow along with what you're saying. Since you haven't handed out paper copies, they need to look at you or the presentation screen. It's time to tell the story. Relate your points in terms people understand, but with all stories you need to focus on the main point.

Transparency in an IT support organization

Patrick Grote — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:00:06 -0500

There has been much talk lately of transparency in business. Transparency is the conducting of business in an open atmoshphere where customers, employees, vendors can all see your processes, results and status. It's been a hot buzzword due to the accounting scandals of the early 2000s.

At the end of 2007 I spent time thinking about transparency. My mind tossed around the following questions:

Does transparency bring value?

Can transparency happen without effort?

What does transparency mean in an IT support organization?

I came to the conclusion that there is value in transparency, it requires effort and it means an increase of trust and business commitment to an IT support organization.

New Years resolutions for an IT support team

Patrick Grote — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:22:54 -0500

I usually work at the end of the year, but this year my vacation and personal time slipped by, so I found myself having to take the last week of the year off. It's funny that even though you're off work you still think about it.

One of my preoccupations during this time off has been setting our goals for the new year. You can do this anytime during the year, but I've found the end of the year is the best time to focus on this. We have system change moratoriums and most of our higher priority projects are finished.

The mortgage crisis is nothing new - Citicorp Mortgage Power Plus

Patrick Grote — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:40:18 -0400

I have to shake my head when I see articles, such as this one in the New York Times, that detail the mortgage industry crisis. It's as if no one remembers the mortgage industry collapse of the early 1990s. I had a front row seat for that one, and it is just like what is happening now.

Back in the late 1980s the mortgage process was still paper driven. Very few companies had remote IT solutions for handling the origination portion of the mortgage process. I worked for Citicorp Mortgage, which is was doing very well at the time. We debuted an online origination system called Mortgage Power Plus. It was a very slick process for the day. We could literally load it on a sales associate's laptop and they would be able to originate loans anywhere with a modem connection.