...good questions to ask a CIO

I was invited to an informal group lunch with our CIO today. He's an okay guy, but one thing he's notorious for is asking tough questions of the group if no one has any questions for him. Wanting to avoid being put on the spot (again), I naturally turned to Google for my daily dose of wisdom. As usual, Google did not disappoint:

7 Questions Every CEO Needs to Ask Their CIO

Obviously I'm no CEO, but the article looked promising. I chose question #5. Not only did Kevin think that was a good question (go me?) but he actually answered it in the way the article indicated a good CIO would answer, and it prompted enough follow-on dialogue to last the rest of the lunch.

Mission accomplished!

...Documentum did NOT improve in this year's WCM Forrester Wave...

...even though EMC promised me they would.

This is not making my life any easier. Not at all. *groan*

...some great customer reference questions

I'd like to personally thank Adam Kalsey for writing this blog post five years ago. The internet's a beautiful thing!

I'm in the process of getting a customer reference call scheduled with a Documentum web content management customer and needed a jump start on providing some questions up front. Adam's blog post was the perfect thing. I love the internets!

When interviewing references, people don’t often know what to ask other than non-specific questions about how they like the product and how good the vendor support is. This is certainly the information you want to get, but unless you ask specific questions, you aren’t going to get specific answers.
Read more...

...crap does indeed roll downhill

:-\ Nuff said.

Gotta work harder at climbing that ladder. I'd love to let some of this just roll right over me and smack into somebody else's face for once. Argh.

Gripe over.

...there's going to be a virtual exhibit hall during the ASUG Virtual Education Summit

ASUG is going to be hosting an online SAP educational event on September 9 - 10 this year, most likely in response to the big crunch on travel that all companies are going through. This event is totally free to ASUG members and is going to offer approximately 150 educational sessions all through webcasts and live Q&A.

I was pretty stoked about that, and then I learned they're even going to have a virtual exhibit hall!

That's the cherry on the sundae, lol! This rules. I love technology.

...how to create a small Gantt chart in Excel

MS Excel is no MS Project, but it works for little mini-Gantt charts when you need a picture to go with a small written timeline.

If you want your horizontal axis to be a little more meaningful however (i.e. Q1, Q2, etc.), I found you have to do a little manipulating. Setting the horizontal axis major tick marks manually is usually required, along with hiding the number values altogether and fudging it by putting text boxes with your own values by the tick marks. But it works beautifully for small timeline illustrations, when the tasks aren't in MS Project.

Read more about it...

...SAP put their Collaboration Portal plans on hold

Apparently SAP's trial run of their Collaboration Portal (with Sharepoint-like functionality) didn't get very well received with their pilot customers. So we're still stuck with Collaboration Rooms. Too bad... this time period was probably SAP's last chance to get their foot in the collaboration door at [insert my employer here].

...feeling and acting confident can get you places.

Confidence is inspired by confidence. When I need to do any kind of persuasion, stating my position with confidence (not arrogance!) is so much more likely to prompt the audience's own confidence in me, even if I feel like I don't entirely know what I'm talking about.

It seems to be a very fine line to tread. I've seen people make very bold statements without having a clue about what they're saying and be regarded as dummies. I've also seen people who do know what they're talking about but cross far over the arrogance line, at which point they once again lost their audience. But I've also seen (too often) very good, sharp, intelligent people be disregarded due to not speaking with enough confidence. It makes me want to beg them not to be nervous, because everyone around them isn't worth being nervous about.

Maybe it's all a part of enjoying your work.