Jeff Ello, writer at ComputerWorld, recently wrote in an op-ed that he can sum up every IT Management article/book/etc. that has been published: "Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these intractable behavioral deficits you must do X, Y and Z." (See "How to Make IT Staff Less Angry" for an example.)

Ello believes, however, that this is a patronizing stereotype that is not useful for IT Managers. Rather, he believes that respect is paramount, and offers several ways to leverage it with your IT team.

What do you think?

Curt is the founder & CEO of a timesheet software company in Austin, Texas.

Dell has unveiled a new laptop in its Latitude line that is turning heads this week.

The feature on the new Latitude Z that is getting the most attention is its wireless charging dock that works sort of like one of those cordless toothbrushes. It just sits on a docking rack with an "inductive charging pad". Bottomline: no wires.

Cool!

Price for all the wireless docking accessories: $400; which is not so cool.

But wait there's more!

The 16' Latitude Z, billed by Dell as the lightest and thinnest notebook in the world (this week), is James Bond slick and weighs about four and a half pounds.

I really don't care as much about the weight or thickness. However, there are a few other features that do impress me.

1. It has a second low-voltage processor dedicated to turning on the laptop with a instant boot up called "Latitude ON".

2. It also has a webcam that uses Dell's face recognition software called FaceAware. It's a great security feature. You step away from the camera and within seconds your computer shuts down requiring your login to get back in again. Other faces need not apply.

3. Want more security features? The Z also has a smartcard reader and a fingerprint reader. It does not, however, have a feature to make the whole thing go up in a puff of smoke should you choose to accept your mission.

4. The built-in webcam doubles as a scanner for business cards. Just hold up the card and swipe it in.

All that and it's pretty.

Expensive, but pretty!

Bad customer service happens. We all know it. We've all been on the receiving end of it. For those of us who deal with the public, we've all had our less than stellar days. For e-Businesses, sometimes it's not a human moment that gets in the way; it's a burp in the technology.

What counts is how a company takes responsibility for that occasional bad customer experience. It may surprise you what customers really, really want when it happens.

The Nottingham School of Economics recently published a new study asking disgruntled eBay customers what would be more likely to smooth their ruffled feathers; some sort of monetary compensation or a simple apology.

The overwhelming response was a preference for a straight apology.

Researchers worked with a large eBay seller (10,000+ sales a month). Approaching customers who had left negative feedback, some were offered somewhere between $4 - $8 to reconsider their complaint. Others were offered an apology to do the same.

45% of the participants offered an apology withdrew their complaint.

23% of the participants offered cash withdrew their complaint.

Okay, so now we know what they want (er um, I call it simple human decency), The tricky part for the online business, however, is what constitutes a sincere apology from a faceless e-Business. I personally would not be impressed by an automated message. That's about as warm and fuzzy as my ATM machine wishing me a good day (banks really do that - hello!).

As you consider how to reach out and touch your online customers and contacts, consider this:

1. If it's important, like an apology, use the phone when possible.

2. If you don't have a phone number, use e-mail and sign it from a real person, with a real title and a real e-mail address to reply back. Don't use form letters. Write a short, sincere, personalized note addressing what happened and how the matter is being corrected.

The bottomline is that people online are expecting an impersonal automated response. What they want when they are upset is for a real person to listen to them and, yes, to apologize when its warranted.

If it's really bad; apologize first and then offer appropriate compensation (airlines take note!).

ComputerWorld tells the story of one CIO who, upon hearing a large number of complaints about the volume and relevance of email, decided to do something about it. Tony Murabito of Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. set a goal of cutting email down by 25% at his company by training people on how to use email more effectively. According to Murabito, limiting the amount of unnecessary email can help save 15 to 20 days of lost productivity per worker per year.

The GM of one of my divisions at Journyx recently told me the following: "I never send an email when I could call someone on the phone. And I never use the phone if I can sit down and talk with someone face to face."

Nor should any of us. The bitrate is just way higher face-to-face. You can sense attitudes and nuances and understand people in a way that email will never enable.

But people get addicted to email. Another rule I've heard is that if you see more than 2 or 3 replies in an email chain it's probably time to get people together in the same room, especially if you see hostility showing up in the communications.

Personally I have so much email I'm considering getting a new address nobody knows about. Most of it is just not worth reading.

Curt is speaking at the PMI Global Congress in Orlando in October.

I had an "A-ha" moment the other day thanks to my friend, Barbara, founder of Bloom with Barbara Scala.

Barbara is an enterpreneur that offers life coaching and a variety of services to facilitate career transitioning and networking among women. In other words, she gets around; both offline and online, and she's been doing it for a number of years now.

Like everyone else, Barbara knows that Web 2.0 has been a real game changer for her online presence. But, I didn't really hear it framed this way until speaking with her about it over the weekend.

"It's not about getting people to come to my web site anymore. It's about getting my content; my videos,my articles, my event promotion announcements, on YOUR web site. That's what I'm paying attention to now."

- Barbara Scala, Founder of Bloom

She's so right when you think about it. Instead of focusing on building unique visitor stats, businesses need to be focusing on deciminating unique content around the web virally.That's the way to garner the most eyeballs to see exactly what you want them to see.

What does it mean anyway to have site visitors that come to your site and look at the wrong thing?

What looks like more of a presence on the web; a site with decent unique visitor stats or having your viral video popping up allover Facebook, e-mail, hundreds (if not thousands) of smaller sites?

I'll give you a great example of a success story.

I subscribe to Momsrising.org. I never, and I mean never, go to their web site. But, I am aware of what they are up to intimately.

Last May, I got a viral video put out by Momsrising customized to make me "Mom of the Year" just in time for Mother's Day.

It was a howl. It was a fake two minute newscast about my winning "Mom of the Year" singing my praises. It had soundbites, video of a march with my name superimposed on a street banner and my name dropped in on graphics. It was a clever customization job and, as a Mom, I sucked it up. At the end, I had the option to plop in the names of other Mom friends sending their version to their e-mail (giving Momsrising a new contact in their database).

I sent it to twenty friends and no one complained. Most wrote back thanking me and telling me they sent it out allover the place too. They all loved it.

In the meantime, Momsrising garnered literally over a million new contacts for their database.

Brilliant!

And, it had nothing to do with driving traffic to their site.

Thanks for articulating this so well, Barbara. I didn't realize I was at a loss for words until you gave them to me.

What are they thinking?

AT&T is launching its multimedia messaging service (MMS) to iPhone customers today (this afternoon; eastern time).

MMS allows users to send picture and video messages. The service will be at no additional charge.

In other words, prepare for a possible network meltdown.

AT&T currently has over nine million iPhone users. Figures released over the summer show that iPhoners are using some 20 times the amount of bandwidth compared to all other AT&T customers. That includes other smartphone users.

There are some 20 million other smartphone users on AT&T . They just don't suck up the bandwidth like iPhone users do (maybe those gazillions of iPhone apps have something to do with it). So my poor Palm Centro can't download my Gmail (which was down for its own reasons this week), because of all those nearby iPhone users who are playing retro Frogger and watching diet coke mento bombs on Youtube.

As for that 3G network that AT&T loves to brag about; it's apparantly near the breaking point in some areas.

AT&T can't get new towers up and upgrade the network fast enough. The problem is physically putting up more cell towers tends to be a slow journey through each individual and local bureaucratic maze involved.

With MMS coming on the scene just in time for what is a three day weekend for many around the country, it will be interesting to see what happens between now and Tuesday.

Yipes!

You guessed it! Today's headline is a lead-in to another Gmail outage.

Memo to Google: Just because you are giving it away for free, doesn't excuse you from repeat outages. People depend on their e-mail. It's a big deal when it is down.

This is the fourth significant outage this year. It happened twice last spring, earlier this month and today.

Whether its free, cheap or costs an arm and a leg; any product or service your business offers - especially to businesses - needs to be all but bullet proof.

The temerity of the technology industry never ceases to amaze me. What other business sector considers the occasional outage, bug or glitch just part of doing business? Just fix it, apologize and move on to the next thing. Customers are supposed to just accept that?

What if Amtrak or car makers worked this way? Can you imagine the FAA being offline all morning grounding millions of travelers at a time and just saying "oops, it's all fixed now"? What if four times a year a major city hospital came to a standstill for a few hours? How about all the traffic lights in your city going dark all morning on a busy Thursday?

Be glad Google doesn't make dialysis machines. Be glad Microsoft doesn't really make windows (they'd all leak or just spontaneously crack from time to time). Be glad software makers don't make smoke alarms for your home requiring you to update the glitches perhaps as often as every month (I have a hard enough time remembering to change the battery twice a year). Be glad cell phone carriers don't carry the mail to your house. The Post Office would be charging you over a hundred dollars a month and if they "dropped" 10 percent of your letters on the way to your house a few times a month; well, they'd post a nice letter of apology on their web site telling you how much they care about your business. Pro-rating your bill to reflect the lost hours of service? Uh, no we don't do that.

There is only one industry I can think of that is just as shameless: toy and furniture makers that use the words "some assembly required".

Since the advent of social networking tools such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, there have been those who expressed concern over the sharing of personal information in a public forum like the internet.
Including me. I have kids too.

These criticisms might be validated by recent data on the dangers posed by these sites. For example, InformationWeek just ran an article stating that users who post information about their vacation plans online increase their risk of becoming the victim of a break-in. "Burglars can easily use the information gathered on social networks to choose their victims, and then scope out more information on their homes through other Web sites, such as Google Street View."

A TechNewsWorld article focuses on another risk posed by social networking - identity theft. "Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn all encourage users to provide personal information such as name, address, sex, birth date, schools attended, birthplace and interests. [...] These details can provide the crucial information identity thieves need to misrepresent themselves as you. The more information that is included, the easier it is for a fraudster to fill in the blanks."

And yet, not everyone agrees. A BNET article entitled "Social Networking Myths and Risks" lists "I'll lose my privacy" as a myth: "A stranger browsing Google won’t be able to trawl for your email or contact info — unless you’ve put it in your public profile. [...] Think of it this way: There’s already bountiful information about nearly everyone on the Internet these days. At least with a social network profile (which tends to rank highly on Google), you control some of it."

Identity theft and security consultants love to tell you about the dangers of being online, and they're right in a way. Bad guys can figure out stuff about you online. No doubt. But if you're an average Joe and nobody is targeting you, reasonable participation in online communities is probably relatively safe.

Curt helps people improve business execution.

Wikipedia has announced that it is going to start assigning editors to articles to approve edits before they go live on the site. According to CNN, some critics believe that this goes against the nature of the crowdsourcing concept that Wikipedia was founded on. Caterina Fake, the founder of Flickr, agrees with Wikipedia's choice, saying that user-submitted content sites can no longer be a "free-for-all" without rules.

Others, like web writer Marshall Kirkpatrick, view this development as "a departure from the essential nature of Wikipedia." In fact, the Irish Times ran a story on this with the telling title, "Wikipedia editing controls spell end to famously open system."

They haven't claimed they'll do it for all entries, and the limited number of committed editors that are trusted to review input means they'll have to only do this for contested areas of the site. I think they're probably doing just the right thing.

And don't forget how open and free it still will be compared to any major news outlet or any old-style encyclopedia.

Curt is the founder & CEO of a timesheet software company in Austin, Texas.

Silicon Graphics is taking a big gamble this week introducing what they call its first "personal supercomputer", the Octane III.

Is it me or does this sound like an oxymoron?

When I think of supercomputers, I think of Cray supercomputers from back in the day that took up entire rooms and were used to back-up NORAD.

Actually, even Cray is selling these so-called personal supercomputers. They introduced theirs over the summer (Cray CX1).

To give you an idea of how much power is under the hood on these puppies, the Octane III sports up to 20 Intel processors and one terabyte of memory. All this for $8000, which is a lot of processing bang for the buck.

For certain niches businesses, Cray or Silicon Graphics offerings will put supercomputing within reach of a lot of smaller businesses.

For any company working with HD, it would takes this kind of power to render video or graphics, for example.

It would also help certain R&D companies that need to do some serious data crunching.

Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux open source programming, has never been shy about giving a provocative quote.

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code," is one of my personal favorites.

Over the years, Torvalds has trashed Microsoft, SCO, programmers, the GNU Hurd (another Unix programming alternative)... and now he's trashing his own baby, Linux.

The problem for Torvalds is that his baby grew up.

" Linux is bloated. While the open-source community has long pointed the finger at Microsoft's Windows as bloated, it appears that with success has come added heft, heft that makes Linux "huge and scary now,"

- Linus Torvalds, LinuxCon, Portland, OR, Monday

At his keynote address; Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, gets the award for understatement of the week:

"There is only one Linus Torvalds."

Is there a place for ethics in business? Many would argue that there is, but would they still feel that way during a recession when money is tight? A new ComputerWorld article, “The High Cost of Ethics Compliance,” addresses this question: “Should an IT department hire a more expensive vendor because the vendor shares its own company's ethics standards, or should it go with a lower-cost provider that doesn't?”

The evidence suggests that companies which have already made a commitment to ethics compliance will continue to do so regardless of the economy, but companies which have not yet done so are not likely to spend additional dollars to start. “Even when CIOs are committed to designing systems that promote ethical behavior, they usually have to sell the applications by promoting whatever financial benefits the tools can create -- and not on any particular ethical merit.”

Environmental degradation is more common in poor countries than rich ones. Wealth leads to "green" because being green usually costs more. Similarly, being ethical costs more - in the short term.

Great investments only make sense when you have the money to invest.

Curt helps people improve business execution.

What's the difference between small to midsize business IT and enterprise IT?

Most would quickly answer; size! Enterprise IT is clearly bigger. The bigger the business, the bigger the IT department!

But there is so much more to it than that.

Here's a comparison between to the two:

1. Enterprise IT has an on-going relationship with its vendors, often with a vendor representative assigned full-time to their account. SMB's sign a service contract and there is typically no relationship until the day something goes wrong.

2. Enterprise IT buys services from its vendors. SMBs buy hardware and software products.

3. Enterprise IT gets their new technologies tailored to their business needs. SMB's adapt their business around the capabilities of the technology.

4. Enterprise IT decision-makers are typically able to go to trade shows and industry conferences learning about new vendors and new solutions. SMB IT decision-makers typically do not have the budget to attend events. This leaves them limited to only the better known major name vendors.

5. Enterprise IT has a C-level executive. SMB IT leaders may or may not have the ear of top level management.

For the emerging company, it begs the following questions:

How will your company make the transition to an enterprise level IT department when the time comes?

Would that transition spur on the growth of your company?

Is your typical SMB IT department holding back your organization?

If you read this blog on a regular basis, then you might recall that I took the Netbook plunge a couple of months ago.

My laptop met an untimely demise (lightening fried my hard drive) during the summer and I didn't want to replace it with another when we are so close to the launch of Windows 7 (October 22nd).

Solution: I got a Netbook thinking that I would just use it to get by for a few months.

My expectations at the time:

- I would miss my laptop, especially the larger screen and the DVD drive.

- I would get by without a full size laptop, but it would be somewhat frustrating in the meantime.

- I will get a laptop later this year and then my Netbook would likely get dusty on a shelf used as a backup or pawned off to my kids.

I started a new job this week (in a unrelated field to this one) and was issued a laptop by my new employer. It's a 15 inch Hewlett-Packard with Windows XP and is probably about four years old.

Let me clear:

It feels like it weighs about the same as a Volkswagen and is the size of my dining room table.

I repeat:

It feels like it weighs about the same as a Volkswagen and is the size of my dining room table.

Oh my gosh! Holy albatross, Batman!

I put it in my briefcase and it felt like I was carrying a bag of rocks home.

Let me add to that; I haven't used my briefcase since I bought the Netbook. My Netbook actually fits in my messenger bag size and shaped purse. So I have downsized to carrying just one bag, instead of two, which has been liberating and great for my shoulders and back.

Three days after schlepping a laptop back and forth in a briefcase, I'm ready to call a chiropractor

About those expectations that I mentioned at the top of this posting:

- The smaller screen and the lack of a DVD drive is a pain in the you-know-what.

- I probably will buy my own full-size laptop after Windows 7 comes out later this Fall.

- I am a little frustrated with the limitations of my Netbook.

All that being said, I really don't care and there is no going back to lugging a laptop.

What I have learned from the Netbook is that a laptop doesn't belong in my lap and portable as it is; I don't want to carry it around anywhere. It belongs sitting on a desk. Period.

What does this mean for my Netbook?

It will not be gathering dust and as for my kids; from my cold, dead hands, children.

Love, Mom.

CNN Technology just published an article on the 12 most annoying types of Facebookers. The list includes:

• The Let-Me-Tell-You-Every-Detail-of-My-Day Bore
• The Self-Promoter
• The Friend-Padder
• The Town Crier
• The TMIer
• The Bad Grammarian
• The Sympathy-Baiter
• The Lurker
• The Crank
• The Paparazzo
• The Maddening Obscurist
• The Chronic Inviter

The most annoying thing to me about Facebook is probably the endless quizzes I get invited to take and games I get asked to play. I'm kinda busy for all that. The "Mafia Wars" game seems to be particularly popular with people I know. I don't know what it is exactly but people keep giving me virtual guns and things.

The great thing about Facebook for me is that I can take a picture of something from my phone and publish it to people who are interested instantly from anywhere in the world. Recently I took a picture of my audience at a speech I was giving in Dallas during the speech and before I got back to my hotel room my Mom was making comments about my listeners.

It lets me keep people informed very efficiently.

Curt has 7 patents and is the CEO of a timesheet software company in Austin, Texas.

I have to admit that's not really a headline. I don't think it is news to anyone that e-mail is in desperate need of being overhauled or dumped altogether.

But just how bad is it?

Let's review some findings from a recent survey of businesses with at least 10 employees from the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), a non-profit think tank for helping businesses think about better information management.

E-mail would not be one of those ways to better manage information.

Key findings include:

1. The average worker is spending at least one and half hours a day doing e-mail.

2. Only one in ten organizations have an e-mail management policy.

3. Biggest concerns about e-mail include "sheer overload", legal discovery, archiving and retrieval.

4.More than half of all employees are accessing work e-mail by their mobile device. Two out of three of those people are doing thier e-mail remotely after hours, on their weekends and vacations.

I'm still getting over number one. 1. 5 hours a day! That's 7.5 hours a week per employee. In other words, the average employee is spending just under one out of five business days doing nothing but e-mail.

Granted, doing e-mail is typically work; so, it's not like the average employee is gold-bricking 7.5 hours a week (especially when you consider it's likely happening on their own time; see number four).

However, that's a heck of a lot of work time on e-mail. The real expense may very well be the expense of managing such a high volume of hard to manage bits of data, rather than hours of human productivity (see point three).

Sufficiently rattled? See point two.

Twitter is now working on providing geolocation tracking for users who want it, which would attach location information to each Tweet they post. At first, the company plans to release a preview of its new API to external developers. According to BusinessWeek, “developers can expect to soon see a "Geolocation Best Practices" guide from Twitter that will address key geolocation API topics like security and privacy.”

Once the geolocation feature is fully implemented, users will have to opt-in in order to use it.

Curt Finch is the founder & CEO of a resource management software company.