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Experienced Technologist For Hire (Specialty – Nonprofits)

Once again, I’ve left a steady paycheck and I’m open for consulting and fractional CIO work. I am officially available to help out organizations with technology management and strategy. As always, my preference is to work with organizations that help people and/or the planet. Here are some of the ways that I can do that: Act as a CIO: serve as your Chief Technologist  on a part-time and/or interim basis. This can be helpful for an org that is either just setting out to implement technology strategy and/or infrastructure, or needs to reassess what they have in place, but doesn’t want to commit to hiring… Read More »Experienced Technologist For Hire (Specialty – Nonprofits)

Career Management In The Social Media Era

If you believe that your current job is your last job — the one that you will retire from — raise your hand.  You can stop reading. Now that those two people are gone, let’s talk about managing our careers. Because its a whole new discipline these days. Gone are the days when submitting a resume was sufficient.  Good jobs go to people who are referred in, not to those with no one to vouch for them. Per the ERE recruiter network, between 28% and 40% of all positions in 2012 were given to candidates that were referred in, but only 7% of all candidates were… Read More »Career Management In The Social Media Era

My Foray Into Personal Fundraising

This article was first published on the Idealware Blog in December of 2011. My work planning for, evaluating and deploying technology at nonprofits requires that I have a good understanding of fundraising concepts and practices, and I do.  It’s an area that I’m sufficiently knowledgeable about, but no expert. So my current personal fundraising campaign for Idealware is an amateur effort. It is, happily, a successful one. I did some things right, including, I think, making strategic use of my social networking connections and channels. I might have done a few things differently, given what I’ve learned.  And much of the success has been instructive. Setting Up… Read More »My Foray Into Personal Fundraising

Sleazy Sales Tactics and Social Networks

This is a public service announcement (aka rant) intended for IT product and service reps. In a nutshell:

If your spam and cold calls haven’t resulted in a business relationship, tracking me down personally on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook won’t work either.

The SysAdmin Trap

In mid-2008, Terry Childs, the (then) System Administrator for the City of San Francisco, was called into a meeting with the COO (his boss); the CIO of the SF Police Department; a Human Resources representative; and, unbeknownst to Terry, by phone, a few of the engineers he managed. He was ordered to share the system passwords for the network. He made them up. Subsequently challenged with this fact, he refused to reveal the passwords, ending up in a city jail cell.

Feed Fight

LinkedIn has Facebook envy, and Facebook has Twitter envy. Ignoring MySpace (my general recommendation), these are three big social networks that, sadly, seem to be trying to co-opt each others strengths rather than differentiate themselves.  Per Readwriteweb, LinkedIn is jealous of Facebook’s page views, and is looking for ways (like applications) to keep users connected to the web site.  More noticeably, Facebook’s recent failed attempt to buy Twitter was followed up by a redesign that makes Facebook much more like Twitter.  Al of this inter-related activity has created some confusion as to what one should or shouldn’t do where, and a question as to whether… Read More »Feed Fight

Book Report

NTEN‘s first book is available for pre-order, and you can find me in it. “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders” is a one of a kind book, designed to help the CEOs, COOs and EDs in our industry understand how technology supports their organizations. I wrote chapter 4, “How to Decide: IT Planning and Prioritizing”. You can also order it on Amazon; NTEN members can pick it up for $30 when they register for the annual conference. The book is due out in March.

About that Google Phone

This post was originally published on the Idealware Blog in November of 2008. After my highfalutin post on mobile operating systems, I thought I’d step back and post a quick review of my T-Mobile G1, the first phone running Google’s Android Mobile OS.  Mind you, I’m not posting this from my phone, but I could… 🙂 Hardware Specs for the G1 In order to discuss this phone, it’s important to separate the phone from the operating system.  Android is open source, based on the Linux kernel with a JAVA software development approach.   The G1 is an HTC mobile phone with Android installed on it. … Read More »About that Google Phone

From Zero to Sixty: What type of Project Management tool is appropriate?

Here’s another recent Idealware entry (from 9/25/2008). Note that the Idealware post has a healthy comment stream. It seems like every month or two, I happen across a forum thread about project management tools. What works? Can you do it with a wiki? Are they necessary at all? Often, there are a slew of recommendations (Basecamp, Central Desktop, MS Project) accompanied by some heartfelt recommendations to stay away from all of them. All of these recommendations are correct, and incorrect. Project software naysayers make a very apt point: Tools won’t plan a project for you. If you think that buying and setting up the tool… Read More »From Zero to Sixty: What type of Project Management tool is appropriate?