1. You need the business to identify business issues, opportunities, and priorities, and then you and your people have to come up with a way of addressing them from the technology perspective.
2. If you’re told that there’s no time to think, you tend to sacrifice quality of decisions for the sake of speed, even though there may be plenty of time to plan and execute. The net result is an organization with a high rate of project failures, too focused on firefighting and too “busy” to think strategically and identify work that’s truly important.
3. You can never have enough time, staff or money if your priority system is out of order. The key is in using the resources you have in such a way that they produce the best ROI possible.
4. If you merely concentrate on the financial side of costs and benefits and require that all projects have a positive immediate ROI to be pursued, you’re killing innovation in your organization. Think about it. How innovative would you want to be if every suggestion you make is immediately evaluated in respect to financial benefit?
5. The best value generated by an IT department today does not lie in trivial and often mindless cost-cutting but in innovation, business alignment and strategic thinking. Today more than ever, your organization needs new ideas, bold thinking, full understanding of business priorities and the ability to think about the needs of tomorrow, not the adversity of today.

If you want, you can also watch the video or read the article through these links:
Five Ways Of Thinking That Can Fell IT Leaders – Ilya Bogorad – TechRepublic.com
Video: Five Beliefs That Can Take Down An IT Leader – Jason Hiner – TechRepublic.com

It needs Firebug to function. 

The add-on appears very useful because of the quality of information it delivers.  See the screenshot below:

Click to see a larger image.

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Glimmer allows you to easily create interactive elements on your web pages by harnessing the power of the jQuery library. Without having to hand-craft your JavaScript code, you can use Glimmer’s wizards to generate jQuery scripts for common interactive scenarios. Glimmer also has an advanced mode, providing a design surface for creating jQuery effects based on your existing HTML and CSS.

Click here to go the Glimmer website.

Vroom’s “Expectancy Theory“: “The force motivating a person to exert effort or to perform an act in a job situation depends on the interaction between what the individual wants from a job (valence) and the degree to which he/she believes that the company will reward effort exerted (expectancy) on that job with the things he/she wants. Individuals believe that if they behave in a certain way (instrumentality), they will receive certain job features (Vroom 1982).”

For a successful online learning program it is important that the psychological climate in the workplace is positive and oriented towards it. Motivation is the key to building interest among employees to sign up for an online learning program. Retention of enrollees would depend on the level of expectations for the rewards of the program.

The following are the factors that contribute to a positive psychological climate:

#1 — Role Assignment: Team members are given sufficient time, training, and resources are provided to perform an assigned task so that it is clear what outcome is expected of them.

#2 — Role Harmony: Student receives information about what is expected of him or her in the execution of the job, and it is compatible with job expectations; and later, when detailing the behaviors involved in the performance of the job, expected behaviors are consistent with the employee’s understanding of the job. The expectations, requirements, and desired outcomes are clearly spelled out and updated regularly. Models of successful behaviors and outcomes are provided.

#3 — Role Clarity: Expected role behaviors have been clearly defined to the employee, and everyone involved has the same expectation.

#4 — Organizational Identification: In reviewing his or her role in the organization, the student believes his/her organization performs an important function, and in doing so, offers unique opportunities for growth and reward, resulting in the fact that the employee takes pride in the organization. Risk-taking is encouraged, and if an idea does not work, team members are encouraged to explore how their expectations were different than the outcome, and how lessons learned can help salvage or repurpose the results.

#5 — Leader Goal Emphasis and Work Facilitation: The instructor encourages and stimulates individuals to become personally involved in meeting learning goals by stressing high performance standards, creating an atmosphere that rewards high performance, and then participating in the work himself or herself, therefore setting an example. The leaders does not co-opt or deliberately outperform the individuals.

#6 — Job Challenge and Variety: Individuals are encouraged to use their skills and abilities in their work, and their initiative is rewarded as they engage in a wide range of behaviors while accomplishing the learning goals. Students are encouraged to share their unique approaches, and to heighten a sense of affiliation and accomplishment through sharing their experiences.

#7 — Leader Trust and Support: The instructor takes the time to become aware of the needs of the subordinates, does not co-opt or distort what the elearner is saying to him or her by misinterpreting, ignoring, or punishing open communication. The supervisor is both aware of and responsive to the needs of his/her subordinates.

#8 — Workgroup Cooperation, Friendliness, and Warmth: The atmosphere in the online course is open, and relationships are characterized by cooperation, sincere friendliness, and warmth.

#9 — Management Concern and Awareness: The organization attempts to assess and respond to the student’s needs and problems. This is done frequently, and response times are quick.

We all know how we name many of our pages. I’m referring to pages we create to do well for a specific keyphrase.

Let’s say our keyword is..

Buy Microwaves Indiana

Let say you have a page name www.domain.com/buy-microwaves-indiana.php

Many people would simply try to create blog posts using “Buy Microwaves Indiana” as their keyword anchor text (the text that is underlined in your blog post).

Now what is wrong with that? Well a couple of things. If you use any of the popular keyword research tools you often see many keyphrases such as this, and I’m referring to phrases that really aren’t correct English.

Now here’s the problem. If you were to pay someone to write the above post or even if you write it yourself. You are trying to work a non-human friendly phrase into a post. You may say, “But the keyword research tools tell me this is how people are searching”, and while there may be truth in that statement, what that tool is not telling you is that this is not what Google’s spiders are looking for.

Google tries to detect natural language patterns. If you are using the above phrase in a blog post, it simply is not going to look like it was meant for humans.

People are so obsessed with having Keyword text match exactly what keyword tools tell them they should be using that they are in fact leaving a giant footprint for Google and other search engines that you are ‘over optimizing’. If you ever read any of the search engine optimization forums, I’m sure you’ve seen people discuss this.

What I’m trying to say is that whether you have other people write your blog posts for you or you are writing the posts yourself, make certain the keywords are used naturally.

For example, the above phrase should be ‘buy microwaves IN Indiana’ or ‘where to buy microwaves in Indiana’

What you perceive you are losing by not using the exact keyword you are more than making up for by using text that appeals to Google’s LSI (Latent Symatenc Indexing) technology.

I’m sure you’ve seen sites generated where the navigation menu down the side has tons of these phrases. None of them are natural. These will stand out like a sore thumb to Google! As long as the main words you want to use as your keyword text are PART of the actual keyword anchor text you use you will be fine.

Not only will the blogs look more natural, your post will look more natural.

The key to triumph will like you, and anyone who writes posts for you will be able to write a much better, more natural sounding post for you. While this might go against the grain of what you’ve been told to do or have been doing, I can assure you that it works.

Find out how to get free traffic to your sites.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Search engine ranking is losing its ground in terms of importance in SEO, says Matts Cutts in an interview with Mike MacDonald of WebProNews. Google’s spokesperson is basically saying it’s not the SERP position that’s going to matter in the years to come, but the number of conversions against the number of visitors to your site. The purpose of raising search ranking is to increase traffic but it’s just one of the many ways of doing so. In fact, it shouldn’t be the only concern of SEOs.

For example, one alternative to search engine ranking is social media optimization. Having a high visibility in social media sites coupled with a good reputation on the net, any marketer can sell a product or promote a service. According to Matt, SEOs today have evolved into marketers instead of just technical wizards, link developers or content developers.

Furthermore, SEOs should focus more on studying analytics rather than search ranking reports. Look at bounce rates rather than SERP positions from week to week. This means a shift towards content development from link development.

Google’s Bruce Clay says people searching for JAVA may be looking either for a variety of coffee beans, a place to travel to, or a type of programming language. Added to that the effect of Universal Search, Personal Search and Vertical Search, the SERPs are obviously being customized for the users’ welfare, and not for the websites’.

For example, a search for “thinning scissors” will reveal search results from shopping sites, Amazon and video results. These sites, no matter what other sites do, will never get knocked off the top ranks. The next best thing that a non-shopping, informational website can do is provide product reviews which users who might be shopping around for “thinning scissors” will get value from.

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