CH,CH,CH,CH, Changes......

I recently made an observation in my daily work life, 9 times out of 10 I am the only female in the meetings at work. I am a project manager for an enterprise system implementation. I have a 21 person team and only 3 women are on the team (including myself). So I started to wonder if this was just my experience or if this is a wider norm. I polled a few trusted (male) pals and they shared experiences that contradicted mine. In fact, my polling prompted a discussion on the following topics:

• the seemingly male dominated IT world - perception or reality?
• the dynamics of a the working relationship between males and females vs. same sex workplace interactions
• and the future of application development (and IT in general) with the looming certainty of total offshore development.

Each of these topics really peaks my interest and I plan to devote several blogs to exploring each. I would love to hear any initial thoughts to get my creative juices flowing.

Always Know "Why"

I had the pleasure of having a conversation with the CIO of a leading fortune 500 company at a recent LEGG event. I was immediately struck by his attitude and philosphy toward leading his organization. When I asked him what his biggest challange is he said "getting business engagement and the expectation from the business that IT can fix their problems". He told me that he coaches his team to "always know why". It's the responsibility of the business to determine the best solution to their problem, it's the resposibility of IT to design technology that automates and facilitates executing that solution. He teaches his team to keep asking questions of the business until they have the solution. IT should feel comfortable drawing the line in the sand between the business's role and IT's role on a project.