In this edition of Jeff’s Quick Rants, I’d like to share with you the one thing that should never be said by your customer-facing, level I, level II, and level III support staff. When an IT person utters this four-word phrase to someone not in IT, the message it sends is, “You’re obviously an idiot […]
In this edition of Jeff’s Quick Tips, I’ll share three tips for using tables in Microsoft Word that every Word user in your organization must know. Feel free to pass these productivity and formatting tips around to your users, your help desk staff, and technical trainers. These tips work the same way in every version […]
Are you smarter than the average IT manager? If you think so, we invite you to take ToolKitCafe.com’s IT Management Knowledge Quiz. IT management coach Mike Sisco designed this quiz to test your IT management mettle. It takes just a few short minutes to answer 10 questions. Your answers will be graded and results displayed immediately […]
In part I of this series on ERP, we interviewed Brian Schaffner about five of the things he wishes he’d known before he started implementing his first ERP solution. This week, our interview continues with five more lessons for CIOs, IT directors, and IT managers who are staring down the gullet of an ERP implementation […]
Oh, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), you promise so much but you’re a fickle consort. That’s the lesson we learned when we interviewed Brian Schaffner, Director of Enterprise Architecture and Infrastructure for a healthcare provider with operations on five continents. Brian has worked and lived through his fair share of ERP implementations in companies of various sizes […]
I hate to break the news, but if you don’t love project management, you’re probably failing as an IT manager. Why? Because if you’re not embracing project management, you’re making the people who report to you work longer and harder than they should. In this column, I’ll tell you why you need to be your […]
Got vendors? You need vendor management. As an IT manager, you spend a lot of your company’s money. You hire individual consultants and big-time corporate consultants. You sign Statements of Work or multi-year agreements with niche- and enterprise-software vendors. You pay big bucks for professional services provided and software and hardware maintenance contracts. So how do […]
As an IT manager, are you “living the dream?” Or do you find yourself frequently wondering how different your life would be if you were selling shoes or painting houses for a living? It isn’t easy being a good IT manager. In this column, I’ll share with you seven “mentally tough” rules for technology managers […]
In this column, I’ll tell you how one Big IT Shop solved the problem of how to enforce the email information security policy in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) era when 95% of their employees access corporate email via smartphones, tablets, and company-issued laptops. One ISO’s “Good” solution for enforcing email policy I recently consulted […]
In this column, I’ll tell you about the worst IT managers I’ve ever worked for, with, or alongside. After you read about this story of unbridled arrogance, I dare you to tell me a story about another IT manager who is worse. Worst IT Manager #1: a heinous crime against a friend of mine I […]