Don Tennant

The 10 Fast Growing IT Job Markets in the U.S. Recruiting the right tech talent has always been a challenge for technology companies and corporate IT departments alike, and there’s certainly no reason to believe it will be any different in 2015. And according to one Silicon Valley human resources professional, SMBs will face their […]

Eight Habits of Effective Critical Thinkers If you’re in the programming trenches and you dream of climbing out, take heart: According to one coder-turned-entrepreneur, there’s actually a way for programmers to make it big by venturing out on their own. He even wrote a book to show you the way. The book is “The Coder’s […]

Eight Tips for IT Career Longevity If you’re looking for a good book to read over the holidays, here’s one you might want to check out: “Geeks, Mush Heads and the IT Revolution: How SRA International Achieved Success over Nearly Four Decades.” If you think the title of the book is compelling, you should speak […]

Earthquakes and the Modern Data Center It’s probably safe to say that if one facet of your IT operation needs to be as fail-safe as you can possibly make it, it’s your disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) setup. Is that something you can reliably entrust to the cloud? It’s one thing to use a cloud-based service […]

Considerations for Maintaining Critical Business Continuity Imagine you’re a CIO, and you just hired on with a $600 million publicly traded technology company. You walk into work the first day on the job, and you find yourself in the throes of an ERP deployment that—well, let’s just say, it isn’t going so well. The previous […]

Dispelling the Myths of Software Robots You don’t have to be an IT professional to know that automation has a downside—when the work that a human performs is automated, that person is out of a job. And you don’t have to be a genius to recognize that being displaced by artificial intelligence and other forms […]

Eight Tips for IT Career Longevity Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been writing a series of posts stemming from a unique opportunity I had to conduct separate interviews with the CEO and CIO of a $600 million publicly traded technology company, to get a sense of the two executives’ perspectives on the role […]

Five Best Practices for Customer Experience Management Programs When a technology company does well, more power to it. When it does good at the same time, it warrants our attention. So when TCN, a provider of cloud-based call center technology in St. George, Utah, announced that it was releasing technology that would help visually impaired […]

Preparing for a Job Interview with the CEO: Ten Questions and Answers Last week, in a post titled, “An Inside Look at One CEO’s Working Relationship with His CIO,” I wrote about how Paul Lidsky, president and CEO of Datalink, a cloud services provider in Eden Prairie, Minn., described his working relationship with Dave Brady, […]

Third-Quarter IT Reality Check — Budgets, Hiring, Trends Earlier this week, I wrote about the concept of the hybrid CIO as championed by Paul Lidsky, president and CEO of Datalink, a cloud services provider in Eden Prairie, Minn. But there’s more to the story: how Lidsky works with his own CIO, and where that CIO […]

Eight Tips for IT Career Longevity We have the hybrid cloud, hybrid storage architectures and hybrid hard drives. So it probably should come as a surprise to no one that an argument in favor of having a hybrid CIO would be a particularly strong one. One vocal proponent of that argument is Paul Lidsky, president […]

Five Ways Automation Speeds Up Big Data Deployments You’d think physicians would have enough to worry about, with all that medical stuff they have to deal with. But it seems that in addition to the stethoscope draped around their necks, a lot of them are wearing a data analytics hat. That’s only one of quite […]