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Newsletter – July 14, 2009 –Gardening, Digital Images and Knowledge

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Gardening

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Let me admit it – I’m not really into gardening. Depending on the climate you can spend your weekend being hot, dry and dusty or cold, wet and muddy. And by next weekend you have to do it all over again.

These thoughts were prompted by an article in last Sunday’s (UK) “Sunday Times” by Jeremy Clarkson. People tend to either like or hate Jeremy because of his outlandish views. Personally I find him highly amusing. I can recommend this particular article as one of his better rants.

In it he defines gardening in the best definition I’ve yet heard – “Gardening is like doing a jigsaw. A pointless way of passing time until you die.”

Jeremy recommends that you sell your garden to a developer and spend the money on a decent holiday every year. (Sorry – I did say I would stop going on about my holiday).

I reckon we have the best of both worlds. We live in a small block of flats set in a beautiful garden – and someone else does the gardening!

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Digital Pictures

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As a marketer of digital products, I am interested in the ways in which the large traditional media and music businesses are fighting to retain their traditional monopolies.

The music, software and DVD distributors go to great lengths to try to convince us that every time a copy is made they lose some profit and that this constitutes “theft”.

We are asked of course to forget that they can re-issue a 30 year old LP on CD, and charge a fortune for it with a production cost of a few cents. Or that many LPs / CDs contain only one or two decent tracks, with the rest as filler.

And don’t get me started on the “region” coding on DVDs. If I buy a DVD why shouldn’t I be able to play it on any DVD player in any region? The answer of course lies in the way the big corporates carve up the world markets to suit themselves.

To this bunch of corporate greedies it appears we now have to add The National Portrait Gallery (UK). They are in the process of suing Wikipedia for daring to publish on the web digital images of some of their pictures.

You might think the Gallery would value the free publicity but apparently not. The problem as always is about money, as The Gallery believes it is entitled to a “licence fee”.

I tend to agree with the art critic Brian Sewell who said “The National Portrait Gallery has always been managed by fools and this is another example of their folly. I’m on Wikipedia’s side. The only thing the gallery has to preserve are the pictures themselves. The images must, in some sense, be public property already.”

Truly the old dinosaurs are finding it difficult to adapt to the digital age. Of course they are being joined by a new breed of dinosaurs.

I predict a coming shakeout in the mobile phone business, where a handful of very large companies still think it’s their “right” to extract massive profits from infrastructure that must have already paid for itself several times over.

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So much to know

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Last week I mentioned that there is now such a vast repository of knowledge in IT that you can’t possibly know everything about everything. It would take too many lifetimes – and encroach onto your holiday time!

So how do professionals cope? Most of them, whether consciously or subconsciously, actually make selections about which bits of knowledge are useful to them. So how do you do this?

You can wander along your career path, picking up bits of knowledge as you need them, or you can take a more proactive and targeted approach.

That targeted approach is much of what Jack’s Guides is all about. Some knowledge is much more valuable than other kinds of knowledge, and some are easier to acquire than others.

The topics that IT managers have to know something about can seem long and bewildering. Here is a sample – take a deep breath!

Project Management
Prince 2
PMP
ITIL
Call centre management
Customer Relationship Management Systems
Accounting Standards
Accounting Software (SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft etc)
Software development – traditional and agile
.Net
Java
UNIX – in all its flavours including LINUX
IP protocols
VOIP
Virtualisation
Effective software testing
Key Performance Indicators
Dashboards
Balanced Scorecards
Web Servers
Computer networks
Intranet and Internet design and management
Software Licence management
SSL certificate management
Asset management
Business intelligence and data mining (including Business Objects, SAS etc)
Relational Databases (including Oracle, SQL Server, mySQL, Access)
Content Management Systems
Service-oriented architecture
Messaging systems (including MQ and MSMQ)
Data warehouses
Open-source software
SQL
Information Architecture
Programming Languages (VB, C, C++, C#, PERL, PHP, Javascript, Java etc)
Service level management
Service continuity management
Capacity management
Information security management
Help-desk management
Risk Management
Business Analysis
The Unified Process (including Use Cases)

The bad news

The above list contains at least 40 items, each of which is a major field of study in its own right. So can you be an expert in all of them? Of course not – it’s nearly impossible.

On the other hand, look at a typical job advert in the IT world. An amazing number of the topics listed above will be mentioned in the advert, some as “must have”, some as “nice to have”.

What do you think your chances are of getting that job if you can’t at least talk intelligently about all the topics they have named? That’s right – just about nil.

One of the tricky aspects of the modern business world is that organisations do not like to train people any more, especially newcomers. You are expected to “hit the ground running”. So you need to be familiar with all of the topics they are interested in, otherwise you won’t get far.

The good news – generalists and specialists

There are basically two kinds of jobs in the IT / Business world, generalists and specialists. The specialist jobs are mostly (but not always) the more technical jobs or those involving deep knowledge of business products or complex business procedures.

The knowledge that is valuable to you will depend to a large extent on which “camp” you are in.

Next week we will look at the differences between generalist and specialists and some pointers as to which bits of knowledge you really need and how to get them.

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For our full list of publications see our websites at www.jacksguides.com

Previous newsletters.

In response to several requests, we have published many of our older newsletters. You can find them at http://www.jacksguides.com/news.html

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This newsletter is published by Kevin Ramsey for Jack's Guides.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced

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I hope you've enjoyed this issue of our newsletter.

Please let me know if you have any questions, suggestions

or requests.

Enjoy and prosper in your chosen career.

Till the next issue.

Kevin Ramsey

Founder of Jack's Guides