Admit it: as senior IT leaders and managers, how many of us have felt at one time or another that the IT Steering Committee was just another opportunity for the business to micromanage IT, complain about IT, and/or try to squeeze more money out of the IT budget? After all, we’re seasoned, experienced IT professionals. The last thing we need is a committee of business people telling us how to run our IT shops!

Let me suggest it’s time to change our perspective. Demand for IT projects is high and may be even higher during the slow economy as company’s try to leverage IT to reduce expenses and/or increase efficiency in other parts of the business. And is the supply of IT resources increasing to keep up with increased demand? I didn’t think so.

In this environment, close collaboration between IT and the business is even more important. A recent study by Info-Tech Research Group showed that “organizations with steering committees reported being almost 10% more effective at prioritization of IT projects than those who do not have a steering committee.” Who wouldn’t want to be 10% more effective? But how do you do it?

Our workshop, IT Strategic Planning – Building a Partnership Between IT and Your Business, will cover a number of critical elements designed to help you increase your effectiveness and the effectiveness of your IT team. Join us as we acknowledge the traditional divides that exist between IT and the business and discuss how to bridge those divides.

Imagine a world where people didn’t take themselves seriously. Even more, imagine a world where people didn’t twist your words and think you were out to get them with every word and action. After all, “it’s just business.”

Snap! Wake up! As a manager, you might believe that what you are doing and saying is just business. But the effect you have on others is most definitely personal.

For new managers, figuring out how to communicate in ways that gets the business done and respects the personal impacts can be challenging. For the adventurous, the lessons might compare to white water rafting: you must be alert, understand the system you’re navigating in, stay flexible to circumstances, and apply some amazing skills. It helps to understand that:

• Communication skills are often simple, but not easy – it takes awareness, intention, feedback, and practice;
• The hierarchy you work in creates some dynamic communication patterns that influence your effectiveness;
• You can communicate in ways that meet business needs, yet also let people know they matter

Our workshop, New Manager Skills: Communicating From the Middle, teaches you how to balance the “just business” realities with the personal. Learn the system and skills of communicating up, down and sideways in order to succeed in your position.

The first step is to admit you are an awesome geek. You stood in line for 24 hours to purchase an iPad because you couldn’t wait for the one you ordered online to arrive. You plan your vacations around Comic Con. You sometimes have difficulty separating your SIMs world from reality.

So go ahead. Admit it. We promise not to judge you. In fact, we love how smart you are and can harness the passion you have for what you do to help you be super effective with those around you. Research shows that you need to possess interpersonal skills to be successful at a job, not just the smarts and experience to do it. Our Soft Skills for Geeks: Communicating 2.0 teaches you to better analyze people and assess interactions and relationships. It will enhance your ability to communicate and make projects successful. And best of all, you can use your new skills not just at work – but in your personal life too.

More on how your communication skills are essential in the workplace: http://blog.nerdguru.net/2009/02/20/how-to-manage-geeks-send-this-to-your-manager/

When all goes according to plan, working virtually is much like working in a traditional brick and mortar office, only it can be cheaper, more efficient and does not come with a daily commute. That’s because the most prosperous virtual organizations — large and small — seamlessly replicate the best aspects of an office environment for their employees, customers, partners and suppliers.

Success doesn’t mean investing in the latest or most expensive high-tech gear. The best organizations consider what changes they will make in how they communicate, their work processes and how they will handle common issues such as managing people, changing roles and time zone differences.

Knowing what works for you, your team and your organization is a key starting point for success. For instance, if you crave water-cooler conversation, there is Skype, instant messaging and email. If you’re worried about equal access to your management team and maintaining productive long-distance relationships, try having everyone dial into conference calls, whether they’re working on-site or remotely. As a manager of virtual teams, you need to be much more aware of your actions. As a remote employee, you need to be conscious of your company culture and structure to reach out effectively and maintain your visibility in your organization.

Virtual teams enable large companies to tap the best talent for the job, regardless of location. The same is true for small and mid-sized, start-up companies – and even start-ups, which can leverage a distributed workforce and establish a presence in numerous key geographic areas without the expense of frequent travel and real estate.

For an interesting take on the virtual office, check out this Inc. article. For more on how to become a successful member of a virtual team, check out our course offering at http://oregontrainingnetwork.com/training-topics/virtual-teams/.

Or something like that, anyway. At OTN, we take pride in offering great classes at great prices. We survey and query often to determine what type of training it is that you need. So it brings huge smiles when we hear comments like we did yesterday, the first day of the ITIL V3 Foundations class. “This is a great class, and it’s a steal. My boss couldn’t believe you offered it so cheap.” “This is really awesome. Thank you so much for offering it.”

In addition to great instruction, it also warms our hearts to hear how happy our class participants are with OTN’s choice of venue, which in many instances has been the Executive Meeting Center at the Lloyd Center Doubletree. It’s a great event space, which also wows people with the all-day, self-serve food and beverage options, ranging from fresh fruit to Julie’s Organic icecream bars to bite-size Snickers. We especially liked this one. “We never get treated this well at work. But if we did, I know we’d work harder.”

In 2008, Gartner Group conducted one of their many surveys, this one on IT Service Outages. A Service Outage was defined as the loss of an organization’s business productivity due to lack of availability or significant impairment of an IT Service supporting business processes. They divided the results on the cause of these outages into three basic categories:

• Technical (an actual hardware or software failure)
• Training (someone with inadequate technical skills)
• Process (a person or group not following good processes)

The results demonstrated what some of us know to be true already. Only 10% were the result of a technical failure, 20% due to technical skills, and SEVENTY percent caused by process issues. When we look at these figures, they represent more than 2/3 of the mix. Given our current economic climate and the focus so many businesses and agencies have on cost these days, how can it be possible to ignore this number, given that the loss of productivity, reactive procedures, and potential damage to reputation all COST MONEY?  Although spending has been reduced in most IT departments, what training dollars remain, continue to be focused on technical skills upgrades. This is great, and addresses both of the smaller components mentioned, but it doesn’t do much for the largest component.

It should be noted that, in addition, outages caused by violations of process discipline, people can’t follow a process that doesn’t exist or is insubstantial. Service Management is the practice of running IT like a business, integrated with the strategic objectives of the business. Part of the IT Service Management portfolio is ITIL, a refined set of interconnected processes for running an IT shop, developed over more than 25 years by every size and type of IT organization. ITIL provides a library of information compiled to aid any IT shop in providing the process framework necessary to ensure IT Services are directly and measurably impacting the business in positive ways.

With this type of information gathered for our use, it makes sense to pay attention to the most critical area of Service Delivery, IT processes that can be linked with successful delivery of business processes critical to support the overall strategic goals of the organization. Not doing anything about that 70% area while claiming IT is getting better — that would be scary.

OTN is all about improving and empowering  the 21^st Century Workforce.

We believe it’s important that everyone keep learning in some capacity. For some that’s taking a belly-dancing course at the local community center, while others seek out classes that will enable them to deliver measurable value to their organizations by better integrating technology with business practices.

Our trainers are seasoned strategists who like to help people refocus their business processes, through classes that discuss real world issues, such as the vendor-neutral pros and cons and ins and outs of outsourcing . In other classes, our trainers focus on timely topics (like this one) that should be of interest and relevant to just about any of today’s professionals http://oregontrainingnetwork.com/training-topics/virtual-teams/

Ready to be empowered? We thought so.

OTN was pretty excited to sponsor Ignite Portland 8 last night, and apparently lots of folks were similarly psyched to attend the free event at the Bagdad Theater.  A few hundred people filled the theater, and maybe another 75 were turned away.

What is this Ignite thing OTN wants to sponsor and so many people want to witness you ask? The opportunity for high-energy, creative folks to give a 5-minute spiel, using 20 slides on ANYTHING. Last night’s show was bookended by talks on “Drink Your Way to a Better You” and “How to Write Sketch Comedy”. In between, there were timely chats on much-discussed topics like “How to be Unemployed,” and random musings on not-your-average-water-cooler conversations like “The Beginner’s Guide to Psychiatric Hospitalization.” The rest were funny, informative, entertaining, and yes, some were none of those. But you’ve only got to listen for five minutes!

This week, organizers estimate more than 60 similar Ignite events are happening on five continents around the world, with an audience of roughly 10,000. Portland’s Ignite is one of the oldest and largest; so check out Ignite Portland 9 on Sept. 23. We’ll be there.

If you have a presentation that you would like to give at Ignite Portland 9, submit them here: Ignite Portland 9 Proposals