Exterminate IT management detritus

With coming of daylight-saving time, spring cleaning has entered my thoughts, and I’ve begun thinking of ways to clear out the bits of IT management detritus that seeped into my work life during winter. I’m feeling like Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now, except the mysterious winding river is my desk, and if I do find my own Kurtz somewhere underneath it all, his dying breaths in this case will likely be, “The clutter! The clutter!” I have decided that I need a strategy to terminate disorganization with extreme prejudice. If my strategy is to succeed, I must focus on leveraging emerging technologies to make IT management more efficient -- and on some mundane, practical matters, too.

One of the initial things I’ve noticed in my quest is the abundance of useless paper from meetings, which makes it difficult to keep up with important documents. After a number of brief flirtations with a paperless existence, I’ve given up on that possibility for management areas outside of my control. But I have found some technologies that essentially eliminate the paper flow from meetings within my own group at InfoWorld. During the past couple of months, my group has seriously embraced Weblogs to keep track of technical documentation, meeting agendas, and other shared information. With ubiquitous Wi-Fi in our offices, everyone brings his or her laptop to meetings, and we collectively go over the plans that we keep in the Weblog. When changes must be made to a document we're discussing, we update the group Weblog in real-time, avoiding yet more handouts of updated information for the next meeting. Unlike paper, the information in the Weblog is searchable and well-indexed. When we started down the Weblog road, I expected it to be a success, but I’m finding that this approach is far more effective that I had originally anticipated.

The next area of attack is something I’ve been meaning to deal with for a while: cables. Why would a CTO worry about cables? Dealing with cabling is not something I do on a daily basis, but as a frequent business traveler, carrying around a tangle of CAT 5, phone cables, FireWire cables, and cell phone chargers in my computer bag creates a certain base level of frustration. I have a two-pronged strategy to deal with this. For network and phone cables, I’m placing an order with Zip-Linq, makers of all kinds of compact retractable cables. To deal with the charger problem (a problem I thought would never be solved elegantly), I’m looking at the APC TravelPower Case, which provides integrated universal charging for a variety of devices (not including the Apple PowerBook), so you can leave most of your chargers at home. On the surface, cables and chargers don’t amount to strategic concerns for a CTO, but missing an important conference call because you forgot your cell phone charger can quickly become a strategic problem.

Finally, I think I’ve finally found a working method for dealing with my flood of e-mail, the prime source of my clutter. I have two folders for incoming mail: “Must respond” and “Respond if time.” I find that just answering the items in the “Must respond” folder takes a huge amount of time, but at least it makes the task more manageable, and important e-mails don’t generally get lost in the shuffle.

Now if I could just get wireless electricity, I’d be all set.