Groupon's Engineering Head Offers Some Great IT Management Tips

There's no getting around it: you must be computer-literate in today's business landscape.

Having an IT department helps, but it doesn't mean you can afford to get removed from the cyber-jargon and the important decisions surrounding it.

Fortunately, a recent PC World piece offers some great advice for CIOs that's also relevant to any self-respecting and web-savvy entrepreneur.

Groupon Director of Engineering, Ivan Moscoso, stresses removing the physical distance between the engineering and business departments.

By cutting down the space that separates business types and IT types a bit of "learning by osmosis" will occur., he says. Also, it keeps everyone nice and friendly.

Officials from help-desk software creator Zendesk, cloud-based content software provider Box.net, and online presentation hosting service SlideShare all weighed in with some easy, common sense advice for keeping your office cohesive and keeping your IT department tip-top.

Zendesk, for example, routinely holds "hackathons," where developers bang out small-scale projects in 24-hour sessions. That process strongly resembles Google's motivational "Innovation Time Off" program, wherein engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their work weeks on personal projects -- an initiative that already has yielded great success stories -- including GMail. Ever heard of it?

Read more at PC World.

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