Ramon Padilla Jr.

Motivation and morale building are important aspects of leadership. Both become harder or sometimes impossible if the leader herself becomes demoralized. Part of being a good leader is self evaluation and always performing periodic self checks to determine if it is time to move on.

The performance, image, exposure model is commonly used to help individuals manage their careers. The same model can also be applied to the IT organization as a whole and can prove quite useful in managing IT’s role in the enterprise.

Higher Education leads all industries in loss of personally identifying information. One driving factor in this statistic is how IT is organized. Decentralization done wrong is an accident waiting to happen. Is your organization at risk due to its structure? Read the following characteristics of IT decentralization done right or wrong to see what category your organization falls into.

Is going to work with an expectation of a sense of purpose a pipe dream anymore? Should one just be satisfied to just have a job or should you want more?

A fews days of introspection can help determine the kind of leader that you are.

A $5000 dollar electronic “smart” board is accidently ruined when an adjunct instructor unknowingly damages it beyond repair when he writes on it with a dry erase marker. Whose fault is it? Investigation into the incident reveals that the instructor was assigned to the room to teach a class. No instruction was given to him …

I was reading a book the other night that had a couple of pages devoted to change. After reflecting on the information, I started thinking more about the dual demands that are placed on IT by organizations. The first demand is to be a utility. By this I mean that the organization wants their IT …

I often write in this blog about managing others through problems or crises because it’s part of the day-to-day experience as a manager/leader. But what about managing yourself? You’ve probably found yourself at some point faced with a project or task that you have to tackle, but for whatever reason you can’t seem to accomplish …

I attended a conference last week in which I was a host, a presenter, and an attendee. I am part of the board of directors for this conference so I had a little more work to do than a regular conference attendee. I tell you this in order to set up what happened to me …

I was watching We Are Marshall last night, the movie about the loss of the Marshall University Football Team in a 1970 plane crash, and the ending left me a little flat. Not because of the tremendous courage it took to get a team back on the field the following year, but the fact that …

I just finished reading an article on the top 100 CIOs deemed “transformers” who changed their organizations through IT. The purpose of the article, besides recognizing these accomplishments, was to gather lessons learned from those CIOs. You are probably already familiar with them — closer integration with the customer, becoming one with the business, becoming …

When you have a discussion about management, leadership, succession planning, or career planning, someone usually brings up mentoring. Usually at this point people nod their heads and automatically think that they understand what a mentor is. However, the idea of a mentor probably conjures up different images for different people. Some may picture Mr. Miyagi …