Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Why did the worlds of entertainment and advertising decide to ruin the month of October? I really like some things that come with October. Where I live, the trees turn orange and red and yellow. The temperatures drop to a point where I wear a light jacket in the morning. I love […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I earn a ITIL Foundation-level certification. For the past six or eight years I have heard of ITIL  certification. I didn’t pay much attention to it as I wasn’t an Enterprise IT person and did see a way that I could qualify for it. A recent look at it changed my mind. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I’m not sure what the job title is, but every organization needs a person whose job it is to find the stupid that is hindering everyone. I have seen this every place I have worked. Somewhere in the greater organization, people—often smart, loving, caring people—are doing something that is just plain stupid. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Often, greater efficiency means sharing resources that were previously not shared. When a shared resource breaks, everyone suffers. Twenty years ago I worked in a computing lab that suffered great improvements in efficiency. Yes, we improved and suffered at the same time. We began sharing resources. We had computers that were idle […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Too often I hear adult-to-child language used in discussions of adult privacy. If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t care if I’m watching. This is what parents tell small children. I heard it often as a child and I said it often as a parent of then small children. It seems […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I seem to want to see the amazing and new. I am rarely satisfied. On several occasions I have been taught the lesson of the title. It doesn’t rain most of the time. People don’t change most of the time. Riots don’t occur most of the time. Most of the time, nothing […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Technology appears to be changing so fast that culture and jobs cannot keep pace. This leads to a large group of people whose newly acquired skills never give birth to a new job. Culture adjusts to technology. The automobile displaced everyone in the horse and buggy industry. The culture and the economy […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The success of many endeavors should lead to dissolving the endeavor. It is unfortunate, however, that the result is often bureaucracy. I have seen it many times. Let’s start an association: to improve the performance of X, to increase the awareness of Y, to teach the practice of Z, or some such […]

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by Dwayne Phillips To gain approval for an endeavor, you must “sell” it to those who decide such things. Then, as work progresses, you must continue to engage those who decide and keep the project “sold.” I hate this topic. That is because one of my worst experiences in my career was due to my […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s be practical, but let’s still try to attain what we wish. When told that something is “for someone else,” question to motives of the person telling you that. I first encountered this practice when I was in high school. I attended a small, rural high school in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana (Loranger […]

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