Posts by: Leo de Sousa

Who is Your Customer?

Who is Your Customer?  This may be easy for many businesses especially if they are selling consumer goods.  If you ask any service organization at a University, the standard response is “Students are our main customers”.  The rationale here is that without…

Implementing Organizational Structure and Focus

When I joined the IT Department at the American University of Sharjah as the Director, I was presented with an organizational structure challenge.  I found out that I had 21 direct reports and that my department did not have a concept of…

My First 180 Days as a CIO

Hard to believe that time has gone so quickly in my CIO role.  On March 17, 2013 I have been the Director of Information Technology at the American University of Sharjah in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates for 180 days. It has been a…

Take Every Opportunity to Document

I am always surprised (and I really shouldn’t be) that we do a great job of responding to critical incidents but almost always fail to document what we did so it can be referenced in the future. As IT leaders we need…

Knowing What You Have Supports Planning

Enterprise Architects all over the world build guiding principles to support their practices and planning. We built one in 2005 and it still holds true today. “Reuse before Acquire, Acquire before Create, Create Reusable Components” The big problem with this is that…

A Personal Thank You for My Half Century

Well this is timely –  December 12 , 2012, my 200th blog post and my 50th birthday. I still can’t believe it because when I look in the mirror or at the mental image of myself, I feel like I am 35…

Leveraging Roadmaps to Link Business and Technology

Enterprise Architects have used roadmaps as a standard model to describe the transition from the current state architecture to the future state architecture.   Many of my fellow enterprise architects have described the many different ways to create a roadmap and to…

An Approach To Project Assessments

Every IT leader at one point or another will be asked to conduct a project assessment.  Sometimes it is a project that was initiated by your organization and others it is a project that was started in a different part of your…

Helping Your Helpdesk

Over the past couple of weeks, our American University of Sharjah IT teams have been working on creating a simple Service Coverage Matrix. We found that we had a knowledge gap with the distributed IT support structure at AUS.  Not everyone knew who…

45 Days into My Adventure

I have been here for 45 days in my new role as the Director of Information Technology at the American University of Sharjah (AUS). I still wake up and wonder where I am some mornings. I am so fortunate to live in…
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