Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
When business conditions are tough, you need your employees to unite to develop strategies that give your firm a competitive edge. Yet if people are anxious about their job security, they are more likely to adopt an independent, preservation mind-set. It can take extra time and effort to overcome this roadblock with your staff and…
Organizations are under pressure to reduce their environmental impacts. One metric being scrutinized is the amount of Green House Gasses (GHGs) being released into the atmosphere. At first blush this would not seem relevant to data centers, but when you stop and look at their explosive growth, this focus becomes understandable. In 2006, an EPA…
During a recent hotel stay, I discovered the show Hell’s Kitchen. For those who don’t know it, here is a brief synopsis of my understanding: A former English chef is asked to come into a poorly-performing restaurant in order to help get things running smoothly and take care of the most glaring issues. Sound familiar?…
Compared to people who have mastered the art of getting help from others, if you rely too much on your talents and energy alone, you are at an extreme disadvantage. Mentors can have a bigger impact on your success than virtually anything outside your own efforts. There are five types of mentors that every CIO…
According to security vendor PandaLabs, its analysis on 430 million email messages from 2008 revealed only 8.4% of messages that reached companies were legitimate. Some 89.88% of messages were spam, while 1.11% were infected with some type of malware. Only January 2008 witnessed levels of spam below 80%. The amount of spam fluctuated throughout the…
The problem is getting worse. Every year, research firm Basex calculates the cost of information overload and the numbers keep going up by a staggering amount. For 2008, Basex estimates information overload cost the U.S. economy $900 billion in lost productivity. For 2006, that figure was $588 billion. “We’re continuing to generate more content, and…
Retailers worldwide are expecting Santa to be a little less jolly this year. Economic pressures are squeezing retailer profits and stock prices as consumer’ fears dampen the season’s good cheer. Margins dip as stores add a long list of loss leaders to bait skittish customers and then slash prices on the rest of the stock…
Despite turmoil in global markets, two-thirds of senior technology industry executives polled in a new survey say the economic slowdown will not hurt them as badly as the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000. However, more than three-quarters of respondents say their business has been impacted by the financial crisis, according to the study…
In recent years service catalog has grown in awareness and a growing number of commercial products are available. Yet the majority of implementations have been developed as in-house or ad-hoc projects. This article outlines the evolution of service catalog capabilities and the trade offs involved in building rather than buying. As the broad movement toward…
Earlier this summer my family and I went on vacation with two friends and their baby. We rented a cottage on the side of a lake and planned to spend a week there, enjoying the sun, the friendship and the absence of mosquitoes. Things did not start out great. Although we had directions to reach…