John's Music Blog

I’ve always been one to appreciate the support of an IT department.  Notice, I didn’t say “a good IT department.”  I mean any IT department.  No matter how underfunded the department, I can pretty much guarantee that an IT department will do a better job of satisfying my information-access, communication and collaboration needs than I can do on my own.   They build, install, and support a variety of email, customer relationship management, accounting, and collaboration tools that make sure that I can do my job better.  Since striking out on my own, however, I am, from an applications perspective, pretty much on my own.

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We had some interesting conversation around the office this week.  I was doing some research and wanted to see who I knew in my LinkedIn network that might know someone at the company I was researching.  My partner looked at one person’s LinkedIn profile and wondered aloud about how the guy’s current employer might react to reading his profile.  He said, “It reads like a resume’, and it looks like he’s looking for a job.”  So my partner and I talked for a bit about how the world has changed.  Employees may have great company loyalty, but only as long as the company shows them similar loyalty.  It’s not a one-way street.  So employees (and executives) are taking more interest in developing their own network and personal brand, independent of their employers.  If the employees are treated right, their employers will benefit. 

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The last two weeks have been a bit overwhelming.  As some of you know, I recently made the decision to leave IDC, after 11 very good years.  I gave my notice about six weeks ago, but kept it quiet for two weeks, so that the really-senior management team could work on transition and communication plans.  The announcement went out on Valentine’s Day, and since then, things have been rather frenetic. 

Since I haven’t had a chance to speak with everyone individually, I thought I should take the time in this first blog entry to answer the frequently asked questions.  This will be like the time I tripped over my cat and broke my toe, and the doctor decided that in order to preserve my avocation in hiking, he should cast my foot up to my knee.  Who knew? After repeating the broken-toe story 10 times, I thought it would be easier and I would get more work done, if I just typed up and passed out the answers to the frequently asked questions.  So that’s what I did.

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