The key to freeing IT up is to increase the “IT smarts” of your team. In my previous post, “Find the IT Innovator Within” I recommended creating an “IT gifted and talented” program for the lead (or power) IT innovators on your team by elevating the relationship with IT from supporting existing technologies to supporting innovation. But overall, business leaders don’t feel very smart about IT.
For example, in my recent survey…
- Only 11% personally use and fully leverage the capabilities of the technology currently in place
- 50% agree with the statement that “business leaders don’t understand how to use their systems and technologies”
- Only 25% of business leaders consider themselves “IT-smart”
This lack of competence and confidence means that you are letting technology manage you rather than the other way around. [via Bloomberg]
Facebook has just hired Greg Badros
, a Google Senior Director of Engineering, we’ve learned. Badros joined Google in early 2003 and has worked his way up the chain since then. At Facebook, his official title will be Director of Engineering.
At Google, Badros was in charge of the AdSense engineering team from its formative years in 2004, through when it exploded in popularity with billions of dollars in revenues. He has also led the Google Calendar, Google Reader and Gmail teams. Since March 2009, he has led the Application Platform group. But it’s the AdSense experience that is particularly interesting here, as Facebook is attempting to better monetize its service.
[Via TechCrunch]
I not-so-secretly love the “people wars” that are playing out in newspapers, and on our tech enabled cell phones. It seems there are a quite a few companies trying to out do their competitors when it comes to human resource aquisitions.
