Business Intelligence Lowdown: How to be a Terrible Network Admin – 25 fail safe tips.
I guess “practices to avoid in network administration” didn’t have quite the ring to it. Most of these are common sense tips; but because there’s so many of them, even the best of us could use a reminder – there’s probably something you’ll read about and realize that you missed something.
Anyway, we really like #3:
3. Say no to knowing your network: Monitoring your servers and your network interface is unnecessary, simply because you have no need to know how much traffic is traveling about your network. Regular observation of your network provides you with knowledge on normal, trouble-free usage, which in turn helps you identify problem spots and potential causes when you’re called to troubleshoot and plan for future growth. This is not necessary for a terrible network administrator.
ComputerWorld: How IT Makes Johnny More Productive.
This story by Kathleen Melymuka talks about a study from Sinan Aral and Erik Brynjolfsson about exactly how IT helps worker productivity by studying individual executive recruiters and their interactions with technology in the workplace.
If you look across e-mail and social networks, database and phone, the surprise was that overall, IT use is not associated with an increase in speed. In fact, it’s associated with slower speed. But we found that heavier IT users are much heavier multitaskers, so over time, they’re completing more projects and bringing in more money for the firm.
Anyone who tells you more technology is associated with faster speed has not looked at the story of the Franklin stove.
Throughout much of American history, technological improvements have been marketed as labor saving devices. But cooking times increased dramatically when the “labor saving” stove was invented – because people were no longer content with the simple meals that can be cooked over open pit-fires, and asked for more time-intensive meals that were now possible.
Similarly, despite many advances in technology, it takes a person roughly the same amount of time to clean a house as it did to clean a house in the 19th century – it’s just that our standards for cleanliness have become much higher.
So this seems entirely plausible to me – that we get more done, but we don’t necessarily get things done faster.
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