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Aug 13 2008   2:46AM GMT

IT in the Ad Biz, Take 2



Posted by: John Wilder
Blogging, IT department

When I started this blog several months ago, I did so with the premise that IT in the Advertising business was a somewhat unique niche. I suggested that the people and the nature of our business, our use of two platforms, and our insatiable need for bandwidth and disk space make our version of IT somewhat different. However, at the end of the day - we still do IT, and we face many of the same issues faced by many other IT folks.

I hope that the topics of my posts provide interesting reading, even for those of you who don’t work in this particular industry. I’d also like to ask those of you who might be regular readers to provide some feedback. Are the posts relevant to you because you work in this business, or is it the topics themselves which are of interest?

The Mac vs. PC thing will undoubtedly continue to be a topic I come back to again and again. However, there are other issues which impact those of us in this business, but which might seem very general in nature. Case in point, my recent post regarding the commoditization of IT (Am I The Director of Electricity?) is a topic which has been covered by plenty of bloggers before me. I hope my angle on it was just a little bit different, in that I make a case that the Advertising business may be one of the first to see this trend take hold.

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Aug 4 2008   8:33PM GMT

User Feedback via Company Blogs



Posted by: John Wilder
Blogging, IT department, IT Policy

We had an interesting post on our company blog (internal) today. It was a very negative post regarding Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 for the Mac. We’re not particularly heavy users of PowerPoint on the Mac platform, so I’m not terribly concerned about the perceptions regarding this particular product, however it does raise some interesting questions regarding the use of company blogs.

As those of us in the IT community know, perception can easily become reality in our business. When a negative groundswell exists regarding a technology product, it can become exceedingly difficult to support it. I’ve seen it work in reverse as well, where people fall in love with products, and before we know it we’re rolling something out much more rapidly than we expected.

It’s up to us to attempt to control these perceptions, whether they arise on blogs or in the hallway. We need to stay on top of what’s being said, and we need to counter these arguments when necessary. In my own case this morning, the particular user doing the commenting was someone whom we respect and was asked to evaluate the software. We defended ourselves with an explanation about how we test and deploy new software, and hopefully a little bit of humor. In the future, I’m going to be a little clearer about asking them to at least give me a heads-up before they go public with a negative review, but I’m also not going to attempt to censor the discussion.

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