USA Today just published an article on social networking sites. All the teens I know have Xanga, but it appears that MySpace is the place to be now. And of course Facebook is still exploding on college campuses.

Hat tip: Richard MacManus

The people on my team will attest to fact that one of my favorite things to say is: “Our job is to find a way to say ‘yes’.” “No” is easy. “Yes” requires you to exercise your creativity. My “say ‘yes'” philosophy is echoed in this post by Dave Ferguson.

Check out Business Week’s story about major changes at Intel brought about by Paul Otellini who took over as CEO in May 2005.

Today I had an IM exchange with a friend whose son is in college. We were talking about his major and his interests. When the conversation ended I said, “I should blog this!” So here it is …

Clif says:
Your son knows a lot about computers. After an ugly couple of years the IT labor market is coming back strong. So it would be a good option for him if he’s interested.

My friend says:
That is interesting… he has asked me what I thought of the market in IT and I have hedged. Do you think the improved conditions have any staying power?

Clif says:
In short: yes. Here’s my high-level view …

1. The market overheated with Dot Com and Y2K. There was a labor shortage. Compensation rose in response, attracting career-changers and causing a boom in the IT training industry and the IT consulting industry. (1998-2000)

2. The bubble burst. The NASDAQ collapsed. The macro economy went into recession. 9/11 happened. (2000-2001)

3. Business people were tired from the boom 90s. The IT innovation curve flattened. Businesses took the opportunity to consolidate and reap the productivity gains of the previous investment cycle. (2002-2004)

4. There were lots of initial experiments in off shore outsourcing. Some successful. Some not. (2002-2004)

5. The entire labor market adjusted to a new lower demand level combined with a new source of cheap supply overseas. The career-changer folks lost their jobs, many leaving the industry and not returning. The IT training industry collapsed. The IT consulting industry collapsed. Many people lost jobs and consulting assignments with inflated compensation and eventually found new jobs at more reasonable compensation. (2002-2004)

6. Now the economy is growing robustly (GDP growth in the range of 3% to 4.5%). The labor market has adjusted to the overseas supply. Business managers have determined what they can and can’t outsource off shore. IT training is back to a more normal level, with no new career-changers. IT consulting has returned, but at a much reduced level. (2003-2005)

7. We’re seeing a dramatic increase in the IT innovation curve that will continue for the next three years, at least. This innovation curve is driven by: RSS, AJAX, web services, multi-core processors, Windows Vista, Office 12, and wireless. (2005-?)

So … in summary, IT is a good field again. Not overheated, but not depressed. Healthy sources of innovation that will drive growth in demand, coupled with stabilized labor supply. [See also my previous post on the economy, IT innovation, and the IT labor market.]

My friend says:
I am less exposed than you are to much of this but I agree with what you are saying. The question in my mind is which jobs are the most secure. (most difficult to commoditize and outsource)

Clif says:
Well, that question (at least for now) has been answered.

The very high-tech stuff is still done here: chip design, compiler design, etc. But there are very few folks who do that work.

Work in large organizations that is highly repetitive and relatively low value is done off shore: call centers, big software development sweat shops, etc.

The biggest demand for people here is in the middle: project managers, people who understand technology and can apply it, system architects, etc. Also, nearly all small-to-medium businesses use local labor because it’s too difficult to establish off-shore relationships, find good people, and manage them. Only the largest companies can really do that. (And they’re finding that the cost advantages are more modest than they expected in the beginning.)

Bottom line: off-shore is now a permanent part of the labor market. But it doesn’t threaten anything that your son would really want to do with his life.

Dave Winer: “I don’t like Christmas, maybe that has something to do with not particularly liking Christians. Let me explain. It’s not the people I don’t like, it’s the Christianity of the people. “

Something for all of us to chew on during our Christmas break.

Dave Ferguson: “policy is what happens when we can’t get people to do what we want them to do or when people are not championing a clear cause. Policy occurs when the ethos of a church culture is weak and the cause is not compelling.”

Wow. Maybe there’s a good reason I don’t like to think or speak in terms of “policies”?

Did I mention how cranky I am with Road Runner right now? It gets worse.

Our master e-mail list has around 9,000 subscribers. All of a sudden, the number of subscribers dropped significantly yesterday. Upon investigation, 1,400 of our 1,700 Road Runner subscribers are bounced.

Road Runner tech support is clueless – we might as well be talking to a wall. Our IP addresses aren’t getting blocked. We aren’t on any blacklists that we can determine. We are having a temporary problem with our DNS service that messed up our SPF record, but that doesn’t explain the issue. Is it related to the issue we had last week? Who knows?

Our e-mail service is Intellicontact. They are nice and helpful, but they haven’t been able to figure it out either. The problem is, they send huge numbers of e-mails for thousands of clients, so figuring out why one ISP is bouncing the e-mails from one client is a needle-in-a-haystack problem for them. According to Intellicontact, they are on the Road Runner whitelist. If so, it isn’t helping us. Their web interface shows the number of times bounced for each subscriber, but it doesn’t show the last date/time bounced or the bounce reason – both of these pieces of information are critical to figuring out why Road Runner is bouncing us. So Intellicontact is investigating.

But in the meantime, we can’t send e-mail to 1,400 people – 16% of our entire list. Christmas Eve is 36 hours away and we can’t communicate with 16% of the congregation. I’ve spent a full day on this and I don’t feel any closer to resolution. Road Runner, your spam Nazis are making it impossible for us to communicate with 16% of our congregation. Would it get your attention if they started switching to other providers?

Here are the most popular searches this year on Google. (“Zeitgeist” means “spirit of the times”.)

While you’re on Tony Dye’s blog, also check out his post on Choices for the CMS we want and the comments that follow. This post sparked a lengthy conversation between myself and Brian Slezak, my fellow Appian Way blogger who works with me in the IT Department at Resurrection. Particularly, we discussed the comment by Carl Wilhelm. I guessed that Carl’s comment was referencing Barna’s new book Revolution that I posted about previously. (I haven’t read it yet because our bookstore hasn’t been able to get a copy – apparently there have been some delays in printing and distribution – but I know enough about the subject matter of the book to surmise that Carl was referring to it.)

Our conversation was around the differences between tactical IT execution and strategic IT leadership. This is a subject that deserves a long post of its own, or perhaps several posts. In very brief summary, we have found smooth sailing when we’re responding effectively to an IT need identified by a ministry leader. These are generally situations where there’s an opportunity to improve efficiency (and thereby reduce costs) by automating an existing process that has gotten to a large enough scale that automation is appropriate. On the other hand, when we begin to think bigger, more strategically, about social and technical trends and how that may impact ministry in the future, then we are sailing on much more difficult and choppy waters. The risks are much higher because our role as servants of the other ministries of the church puts us in a great position to respond to their needs, but a bad position to lead technical change.

Speaking only for myself, I have been an IT executive for a number of years. As such I have been accustomed to being on the executive team in the secular, for-profit world and sitting in all of the executive meetings where strategy is being discussed and the technical implications of each strategic option are thoroughly explored. At Resurrection, I’m not on the executive team. My boss is, but he’s the CFO and is not a technical person. So I’m not able to influence church strategy from a technical standpoint. I know from talking with a number of my peers at very large churches that this is the case in most of their churches as well. Few churches have an IT expert on their executive team, unless the senior pastor happens to be a person who thinks strategically about IT and drives it.

This becomes very important when you start considering questions like those raised by Carl Wilhelm. Even though I have the background and skills to determine technology strategy and to make a plan that directly responds to Carl’s questions, I’m not in a position to influence the decision-makers to make it happen. Is it just a simple as me learning how to “lead up”?

A few weeks ago Tony Dye posted the PowerPoint he used in a “lunch & learn” session on syndication and blogging. Thanks Tony for this great resource. I know I need to offer similar training to our staff at Resurrection.