Stories by Bruce Kirkham

All's fair in love and war . . . and browsers

I’ve decided that the long awaited nirvana of the paperless office is more distant than ever after receiving a press release touting a swag of new printers, which shows they’re alive and thriving. I have the press release on my desk so I can’t give any specific details, not because I can’t find the press release on my desk, but I can’t find my desk. It’s probably somewhere under numerous piles of paper

I was prompted to evaluate my skills and training certifications when I saw a position description with our company that seemed eerily similar to <i>my</i> position on a job Web site. I'd ignored skills development over the past few years, having focused on getting my job done instead of training for possible future jobs

I feel sorry for Microsoft. I realize this is probably the first time that sentence has ever appeared in print, aside from marketing glossies that touted "far superior" competing products from companies no longer in existence. But Microsoft has had a tough time over the past few months, and they're being picked on from all quarters

I see the recent decrease in stock market prices has been immediately balanced by the increase in doomsayers. This follows the time-honoured tradition where economists and other seers say exactly the opposite of what they said last week (that is, if market moves contradict what they'd previously forecast)

I was just beginning to contemplate the formulation of the thought to back up my files when my desktop suddenly died. While waiting for it to rebuild, I read an article telling me that the desktop computer was dead

I recently attended a seminar on service-oriented architecture (SOA) mainly to discover why, given it's already been around for a few years (an eternity in IT management time), people are still holding seminars on it

I have been working on my end of year performance appraisal to hand to the boss for signoff, a practice I've developed to ensure a better rating. However, it's forced me to reflect on what I've achieved this year and why that list is so short

I recently endured another team-building, personality-rating exercise that again tagged me as an Introvert, which explains why I dislike team building exercises. This feeling was not improved when I got back to my desk to trawl through another half day of e-mails that accumulated in my absence

I am a very organized and procedural person. The evidence is in the hundreds of procedures, processes, plans, methodologies and a smattering of paradigms I have filed away. These were painstakingly defined, developed or stolen by me whenever I had a new project, as I always found it more exciting to create new procedures than modify existing ones. It gave me a great feeling of achievement to create new processes - a feeling I rarely got from the project itself as I rarely followed these procedures

I have just returned from a fact-finding mission about moving our IT operations offshore

The lure of free phone calls might be enticing, but configuring commercial VoIP systems is still a black art

I am embracing that great tradition of those who can't do, teach by offering advice on how to be a successful manager of IT. Unlike many articles, my advice does not rely on authoritative surveys, interviews or research, as I think anecdotes and personal recollections are often undervalued as training tools

I'm convinced that this is the right time to implement a business intelligence (BI) solution. Other CIOs have ranked BI projects as the number one technology priority for 2007, so I need to get in quickly if I'm going to look proactive

I'm seeing an increased emphasis on environmental greening of the IT industry. It may be due to the reduced levels of green on the actual environment due to ongoing drought, or to Al Gore's film, <i>An Inconvenient Truth</i>. Gore recently addressed a group of 1500 Silicon Valley business leaders, imploring them to promote green technology that causes less pollution. Companies seem to be heeding his request in one of two ways: Green by Proxy or Do as I Say