Merry Christmas to Happy St. Patrick’s Day – Where has the time gone?

Wow! It’s been a minute since I posted something here on Rivers of Thought!

My last post was a Christmas wish and now it is St. Patrick’s Day! To say the first 10 weeks of the year have been a blur is an understatement. While it may seem from the perspective of this blog that I have not been doing much. Nothing could be further from the truth! Let me catch you up on a few of the goings-on!

JANUS Program

In January I had the honor to deliver a two-day workshop based on my book Amplify Your Job Search to a group of America’s finest! I spent two days at Camp Mackall in North Carolina with 30 Green Beret. These were soldiers who were within 18 months of their transition date out of the military and into civilian life. The JANUS Program provides transition assistance to our heroes to ensure a smooth entry into life outside the military. Job search skills training is an integral part of that transition.

This was only the second live event I had participated in since the COVID lockdowns in 2019. I was a little hesitant to fly given the pandemic and some of the wacky things going on at our Nation’s capital in January, so I rented a behemoth SUV and drive to North Carolina. The drive was mostly uneventful, other than the six inches of snow that fell as I crossed the mountains one way and the dense fog I encountered coming back the other way.

Institute for Digital Transformation

Late in 2020, I was welcomed back as a Fellow of the Institute for Digital Transformation after a several-year hiatus. The Institute’s mission is to help prepare leaders and organizations for transformation. The Journal is the Institute’s blog. My first article since returning appeared in March 2021. “Is it time to disrupt the IT service desk” takes are hard look at the state of the IT service desk, the impacts of the pandemic on the service desk professionals, and offers up some thought about transforming the service desk through people, process and technology.

The Institute has also been hard at work on the creation of the Digital Transformation Manifesto.  With so many conflicting ideas about digital transformation, we thought it was time to release a manifesto in the same ilk as the Agile Manifesto. The manifesto will provide a definition of what digital transformation is…and what it is not! Be on the lookout for it coming soon!

Status Go

In January, we celebrated our 100th episode since launching Status Go in 2018. That is 100 episodes of great, actionable content from nearly 100 guests on topics ranging from technical, strategy, and leadership, to gender and racial diversity, and everything in between.

So far this year, we’ve released (or dropped in the vernacular of the podcast biz) twelve episodes, including:

• Bill Serva, vice president of IT for Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona discussing his first 30 days in the role
• Lauren Herring, CEO of the IMPACT Group on the state of employment and hiring in the tech sector
• Aleta Jeffress, VP of consulting services for CGI exploring the future of work, security, and women in tech
• Dustin Milberg, field CTO cloud services at InterVision taking us on a journey…a cloud journey
• Dayna Beal, business lead for Disher unleashing his (and our) inner ninja
• Nayeli Hernandez of Cardon, clinical researcher Sudha Gayathri, and Ashish Khandelwal a postdoc clinical researcher team up to discuss artificial intelligence and its implications for race in tech 
• Nicole Crain, CEO of Techtonic continues our discussion of race in tech and ways in which we can expand the talent pool 
• Thomas West co-founder of Green Dot Consulting Group and I nerd out on process improvement
• Ron Teeter, VP of  engineering at Jobvite takes us on his cloud journey
• John Gray, CTO and Dustin Milberg field CTO from InterVision dive deep into cloud optimization
• Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E joins us to talk about his company’s recent study into the state of the service desk
• Varouj Seuylemezian the senior director of IT at the Los Angeles Unified School Districts relates his push to take the district to the cloud

Forbes Technology Council

I continue to write several times a year through the Forbes Technology Council. This is one of the many councils Forbes has developed. These councils provide a community of thought leaders across several disciplines such as human resources, finance, and, of course, technology. One of the benefits is the access to write content to appear on Forbes.com. In 2021, I have had two posts appear.

In February, I published the third installment of my Race in Tech Series, The Funnel. This post blows up the myth that there are not enough minority candidates in the job pool and challenges business leaders to “open the aperture” by reviewing their job qualifications. The Funnel looks at several organizations that are working diligently to expose unseen candidates to organizations across the country.

Part one in the series is Race in Tech, Part I: Inside the Numbers, a look at research results into the current state of employment in the tech sector.

Part two in the series is Race in Tech, Part II: Being ‘The Only’ provides a glimpse into what it feels like to be the only underrepresented minority at work or at an event. I go on to highlight some organizations whose mission is to support “the onlys”.

People Development Magazine

In March, I wrote a piece for People Development  Magazine, published out of the UK, Gender Equality in Tech – It got worse…and it may be your fault is a hard-hitting piece that reveals the adverse impact the pandemic has had on gender diversity. If you are in a leadership position in the tech sector, the reason for this regression may rest on your shoulders. For this article, I asked eight women around the world what actions men who want to be allies for women in tech can do immediately to start to tilt the scale.