From technology to management

Do you have the potential to become a manager? Turning a technician into a manager is not a simple task. The training method in this article will be helpful to you.

Is technology useful to managers? Is it possible to train technicians as managers? These questions may be a little abrupt or even a little difficult; after all, what are the real differences between technicians and other employees in their work? The answer to the last question is definitely yes.

Traditionally, technical employees prefer to stay in the office where they do not need to communicate with others. They lack soft skills such as communication and listening, as well as the ability to work together. It seems that it is just as difficult to train technicians as a manager to ride a bicycle. However, it all depends on how much we have paid attention to the tradition. If we agree with the traditional saying, we will probably think that all second-hand car brokers are difficult, politicians are a group of dummies who are far away from the public.

However, regardless of their career experience, some people have no management skills, while others are different. I think it can be pointed out that many people in the office will never become managers. Damn it, I bet some of you are pointing to your sutra. "What does this guy know besides technology? How does he manage this department ?", However, the knowledge required for management is far from what it can contain. It seems that the same is true for all departments of the company, but the gap between IT departments is the biggest. Soft techniques are needed to bridge it all.

In a conversation with news interactive Operations Officer Ivan Wilkins, he said that a person skilled in procedural tasks does not mean that he can lead others. Wilkins is now working in the network department of the news group and is responsible for running the News.com. Au website. He will accept direct reports from the following six departments. He recently attended a leadership course in Dimension Data learning solutions,

"I think it people all have serious lack of soft skills. They are special people, they must be carefully led-social networking and behavioral skills seem to me not indispensable to IT managers, "he said.

Wilkins was confident that soft skills could be obtained by Professors. He also said he planned to send his employees to ddls for various soft skills training courses, such as time management, leadership, and communication, team Cooperation and customer relationship. "I hope they can achieve certain expectations in terms of behavior and communication," he explained.

Of course, it is impossible to train a manager by training only one soft skill. In this regard, Wilkins said, "I am not sure that I can train a technician as a manager. It depends on whether they have this desire... This is a group of different people. If a technician wants to be a manager, they must be able to solve it problems first before giving orders to others"

Transformation

Steve butti is switching from a technician to a manager. He used to be an interface developer in Hongchang and is responsible for website front-end construction. Now he has become a network analyst. "Recently, the company has developed rapidly and the industry has changed rapidly. My role has also changed. I am responsible for the customer's network strategy to ensure that it meets their needs. Determine their needs and goals from a business perspective-this is still a highly demanding job, but there are still a lot of technical skills ." He said.

Butti said it was not that easy to change to a manager. It was a process of gradual increase from 18 to 20 months.

"It is quite difficult to turn into a manager. In this process, you must be an independent and confident leader in a team. Suddenly, you have to face a lot of things, to inspire everyone's morale and maintain the team's vitality, let everyone focus on some goals they might not care about, "he said. "The process is rather difficult to transform from a technician focusing on technical skills and tasks to a manager focusing on interpersonal communication and results ."

He added that, not only for IT people, this process is equally difficult for engineers, scientists, and experts in other fields. Like Wilkins, he also believes that some people are managers, and some people will never be able to do this.

"Some people have defects in this regard and they cannot be changed. You can solve some technical problems with scratching your head, but never count on them to manage others. Their interpersonal skills are really poor, but technically they are quite outstanding ." Butti said.

He also pointed out that sometimes the more skillful a person is, the more difficult he is to change to management, because it becomes a dominant problem. One thing managers need to do is to direct others to work. When you know that you can accomplish this task better and faster, it is difficult for others to do it. "What they want to see is that everyone's technical skills are excellent ".

Anyone asking you how to redesign a company's business process will tell you a lot of stories about how to adapt the software to the changed business process.

Currently, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and middleware providers provide some form of workflow or business process management (BPM ). However, the requirement for this design task is equivalent to extremely high mountaineering technology, especially when applications from different vendors and diverse and independent processes must be well coordinated.

Intalio, a company that has been working on BMP research for about four years, may have uncovered the secrets of clearing the rough edge and unreasonable costs of BPM. According to intalio co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Ismael ghalimi, the company's intalio N3 2.0 software can reduce the cost of designing and executing business processes by 75%.

In an interview last week, ghalimi told me that the reduction mainly comes from eliminating the need for manual decoding and the process (not only data and applications) as the basic component of the company's information system.

I doubt that it claims that programming is suitable for non-programmers, but intalio seems to have its correctness. The software provides a visual interface for end-to-end business process design, including information transmission, data conversion, processing, and business rules. Existing business flow models, programs and rules can be input and applied to the intalio environment without coding. With a few clicks, the visual map is converted to executable code running on the intalio server.

To confirm this, I spoke to Eric austyold, director of AMR research at the BPM market. He is also impressed with intalio's BMP platform.

"Intalio represents the future of shortening the cycle time for new products to be put into the market. It creates dramatic connections with vendors, builds data exchange pipelines, and draws business flow maps," austvold said, "Today, intalio has spent several months and some development tools to integrate a batch of development tools into the intalio N3 environment."

In addition to a single, integrated environment-interface development environment-intalio extracts the business process design from the specific execution process. For example, if a company applies enterprise application software such as SAP and PeopleSoft, intalio considers them to belong to the API and process level, including web service, if a business process of an application sap and an application PeopleSoft performs similar functions, intalio generates a single process and connects two applications. In the end, you will have a single, independent business flow application software that can run freely between two applications.

This system, which also allows reuse of processes and the dynamic transformation during execution, provides more flexible adaptability than traditional EAI or work solutions. Intalio also includes adapters and connectors for a wide range of application software and middleware. Xpage, intalio XML-based language, instead of many language applications, including JSP, Java, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, HTML, and CSS.

Intalio's visual development environment and ease of use are characterized by its support for developing languages for emerging process models. The visual model is converted to the bpml (Business Process Modelling Language) or BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) encoding. Ghamili estimates that 100 bytes of bpml encoding can replace 50,000 to 100,000 bytes of J2EE encoding.

Intalio is the co-initiator of www.bpmi.org, which created bpml and hopes to establish a standard and independent platform as the basis for their products and markets. Later, IBM, Microsoft, and Bea formed a federation and developed BPEL4WS to compete with bpml. Intalio supports both products very intelligently. To some extent, two model languages can be integrated into a single standard: it is not very difficult to decide which group to enter the driving seat along with IBM, Microsoft, and Bea advancing BPEL4WS.

On the same screen of WSCI (Web Services choreography Interface), determine the interaction between services deployed across multiple systems and promote the interaction between bpml and BPEL4WS, it determines the business process after each service. Intalio, together with Bea, sap, and sun, developed WSCI 1.0.

Austyold believes that intalio can have a major impact, just as Oracle did in the database market. However, he also saw obstacles on the road. "intalio is the leader in theory," austvold said. "Some companies, such as IBM, websphere, Microsoft, and Biz talk, some smaller companies such as fuego, Lombardi software, and Savion use bpm. However, intalio is superior to any other company in terms of business process management. The biggest challenge for the company is how to survive in the Ice Age of science and technology economy.

The company currently has some window display users, including the BAE System, iuniverse, lexinexus and Computer Sciences Corporation .. Although the average price target is between 500,000 to 1 million USD, intalio needs high-grade bulk purchases to participate in the business and IT services of most companies.

From the perspective of ghalimi, intalio has gone a long way to build a bridge between business and IT. Merchants can have a tool to help them build business processes without having to worry about complicated internal coding. Meanwhile, tech workers can have a more flexible and convenient tool to align with business organizations.

Intalio seems to have made significant progress in the plug-and-play BPM field. It is now time for the market to decide whether it is the next oracle.