Well, after hacking around on various teams, we decided to put together an official IT Weapons hockey team for this winter season! We are very excited. We have mostly IT Weapons people (Wepz) on the team but several clients have joined us to ice a decent team this year with a 15 person roster. We have our first game tomorrow night and are chomping at the bit to dirty up the new jerseys.
Each Wep will be wearing their ITW#. If you didn’t know, each employee has a designated Weapon Number. They are generated in order of hire. We use them for everything; our phone extensions, our DIDs, our license plate numbers, and even in our XMAS drawing order. I will post brief game summary blogs here as the season progresses but won’t clog up LinkedIn or Twitter with this stuff. Let me know if you play in the True North Hockey League (Brampton).
Speaking of hockey, we are always looking to set up friendly games with clients or vendor teams … (we’ll even pick up the ice time bill and do wings and beverages after the game!). But I just can’t promise we’ll play ‘customer hockey’ 
It’s good to be Canadian, a Hockey fan, and a small business! Oh yeah, the current Wepz on our team roster are: me, Jay, Nuno, Brett, Chris C, David S, Gary, Kevin R, Mike E, Robert C, and Robert E.
As co-founder and CEO, it’s largely my job to develop our business strategy and ensure that our long-term course remains in concert with our vision and our core values. To my mind, a crucial part of a CEO’s job is to look out and look forward. This means that we need to constantly examine how we are perceived in the marketplace. I know we have always been seen as a highly technical group … but I think we’ve had—at least some—challenge ensuring we are also perceived as a team who is equally business-focused when it comes to IT decision making. Good (read: simple) business-minded messaging takes a lot of work … and it goes a long way.
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Categories: Advice, Armour, Industry Observations Tags: business advice, Consulting, industry recognition, IT Weapons Data Centre, IT Weapons team, Profit 100, social networking, Team, value-add service, Why IT
Things to come?
What is the value of information? What about the value of personal information? For advertisers, there is nothing more valuable … and they are willing to pay great sums for it. The more they know about you, the easier it is to persuade you to buy whatever they are selling. On the one hand, the more others know about me, the better they can tailor their offerings to my particular wants and desires … which is great for me as a consumer. On the other hand, I don’t want people snooping, prying, or baiting me for my personal information. How do we keep a healthy balance in this age of information and immediate gratification? I don’t pretend to have the answers … But I have a good idea about what the future might hold for us.
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According to a recent Neilsen survey, the average person spends about triple the time on social media than they do with email. 23% of online time is spent on social networking. To be sure, in the IT industry, these numbers are surely different … at ITW we live and breath our days in Outlook. Email is the fibre of our business and interteam communication. But the general insight about the growing role of social media remains. Now, the deeply committed Facebookies will no doubt claim this as a victory for Web 2.0 … a symbol that social networking is the most virtuous way to stay connected and in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. I’m not so sure they should be breaking out champagne and toasting the new world order just yet.
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