My first boss gave me a great piece of advice, which in all honesty, I didn’t really understand for many years. I’m a techie by education and profession, and he told me that after a while, it will feel like there are only 250 techies in the Boston area and that they cycle from company to company, so be good to the people, chances are you’ll see them again.  I smiled at him, thanked him for his advice, thought this was easy advice for me to follow because I’m friendly by nature, and had no idea whatsoever what he was talking about.  Well, he was right. Regardless of your chosen profession or the industry you work in, sooner or later it is going to start to feel like a very small world. This is particularly so if you are a manager or senior executive and interact with a larger volume of people.  This is because, over time, people change companies, meet at conferences, are vendors, customers, or sub-contractors of each other, and so on.  As a result, after a while, you can look at almost anyone’s resume and know someone who either currently works or previously worked at one or more of the companies listed on the resume.  Additionally, LinkedIn and other social media sites make this prospect even more inevitable. Ok, now let’s talk about you. How many people do you know or know you from: College Companies where you have worked Organizations where you have volunteered Civic or religious organizations [...]

As a manager, if you lead, hire or work with techies or other knowledge workers heavily dependent on software technology, in my opinion, their technology-based skill set, from a marketability perspective, has a two year half-life. That is to say, that the exact set of skills they have today will only be half as marketable two years from now. The reason that the marketability of technical skills degrade so quickly is because technology, like time, marches forward.  Software companies continually update their applications.  Hardware vendors upgrade their hardware and software control systems on an on-going basis. Also, technology oriented mega-trends like cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are continually driving and transforming the technology industry. The factors related to using software applications are somewhat different than those related to base programming technologies like Python.  This half-life could be dramatically shorter or longer based on the specific technology and current innovation activities within that technology. That said, the basic concept is the same. I have managed technical teams for almost all of my professional life and over time, learned that one of the best ways to motivate and retain my top performers was to keep them marketable. I would tell these top performers that I wanted to keep them as marketable as possible so they could leave any time they wanted.  Most of them would then pause; look confused, and ask me if I wanted them to leave. I would say no, you do great work and I never want you to leave. [...]

I was speaking to a group of recent college graduates who all had the good fortune of being hired into the same company's IT consulting practice and were in the process of going through an intensive introductory training program.  I would like to tell you what I told them. I asked the class to make believe it was fifteen years in the future. Then, I pointed to a person on my left; I'll call her Mary, and asked the group to make believe that she was now the Senior Vice President of North American operations for the company.  I then pointed to a person on my right named John and said he had left the consulting firm about ten years ago and was now the CIO of a Fortune 500 company. With this stage set, I turned to Mary and told her that John's company was in the process of looking to hire a consulting company for a two million dollar project. I then asked the group which of the following scenarios Mary would have wished had transpired over the past fifteen years. Mary and John had kept in touch every couple of years via LinkedIn, simply saying hello and congratulating each other when each was promoted. Mary and John have not spoken in the past ten years since John left the company, but she did go to his going away party. Mary and John have not corresponded since the training program they were both in at the beginning of their careers. [...]

I was speaking with a group of younger software and hardware IT professionals.  They were a great crowd, extraordinarily knowledgeable in their specific areas of expertise, and just a joy to be with, but had a lot to learn. As part of my presentation to this group, I asked them what they know about less-we-known IT megatrends such as digital twins and dark data centers.  I found it fascinating to learn that most of the people in the room were not at all familiar with these trends.  Upon further discussion, it also became apparent even though these people truly knew their specific technology; they were not very familiar with other technologies that surrounded them within their own IT shops.  As we talked further, it became apparent to almost everyone in the room how a wider view of their chosen profession could help their current job performance and their future professional growth. The moral of this story is NOT that techies should be experts in everything, that’s impossible.  The moral is that you, as an IT professional, should be a mile deep in your technical specialty and be a mile wide and an inch deep in the other areas of IT. What I mean by a mile wide and an inch deep is that you should have a broad, basic understanding of the various technologies used within IT and a general understanding of the technology trends that are driving change and innovation within the industry. This is particularly important to those in IT [...]

What things can I start doing now, as an IT Manager, to move toward me goal of eventually being a CIO? It may sound premature to start thinking like a CIO this early in your career, but it will help you begin to notice things you would otherwise miss. This phenomenon is best described using a totally non-technical example. Think of a highway that you drive on all the time. It could be to and from work, to and from a loved one’s house, or to and from your favorite activity. Ok, with this vision in mind, let’s pretend that one day when driving down the highway, your car is very low on gas, and the “Gas” light starts to flash. Wanting to save money, you made the decision to buy gas at the station near your house, rather than off the highway, because you thought it would be cheaper. Then, during your drive home, you begin noticing road signs everywhere advertising gas stations just off almost every highway exit. Why is it that you never noticed these gasoline signs before? The answer is because you didn’t need gas. As a second and third example, this analogy also works for restaurants when you’re hungry and restrooms for, well, you know. Back to the topic at hand, this same phenomenon is true in the workplace. If you only concentrate on your specific job, and not the other things around you, you won’t notice the manager level, IT-User level, and upper management level interactions [...]