IT Gnomes

January 8th, 2008

Well it appears that this office has some IT Gnomes. for the last few weeks they have been doing some interesting thing. I will document what is going on in a later post but for now I have to go and find those damn gnomes.

Happy New Years

January 1st, 2008

FYI, I am taking today off. It’s new years day and I want to relax and spend the day with the family

New job same direction

December 31st, 2007


On Nov. 15 I started a new job as Systems Administrator for Meet Minneapolis.  This is the official visitor and convention association for the City. As the systems administrator I work with about 75 end users.  There are also 10 server on site and about 30 servers off site. The office itself has a nice Cisco VoIP system and about 2 terabytes of data storage. It’s a mix of desktops including PC, Macs, and Thin Clients.

 

I have found that my job is something of a status quo for the types of positions I gravitate towards.  In this case it has to do with my passion for social media and how it can integrate into the business.  This isn’t my primary role but I can’t seem to help the fact that I see business processes and I see how social media can integrate into the process.

 

Like most companies this one has a mix of people from those who have limited computer skills to those who are technologically savvy.  However, most of the people don’t have social media savvy yet.  They have heard the term but don’t really understand it. This is what I find in most companies still.  This is also what allows me some inroads to describe the use of social media and how it can affect business processes.

Stumble upon innovation

December 21st, 2007


The economist.com has a great story on innovation from the perspective of Evan Williams, founder of blogger and twitter. In it he says there are 3 rules to innovation

 

  1. Genuinely new ideas are stumbled upon
  2. New Ideas are by definition hard to explain to others.
  3. The idea seems obvious in hindsight.

 

This is exactly right I think. I try to explain blogging, podcasting, and social media to people and I get blank stares. Sure others are explaining it as well but they have more success then I. For me it is in the enterprise that I have the blank stares. If I talk with friends and collogues it is a different story.