Early 2008, well before the financial meltdown in mid-September, CIO Michael Twohig met with the executive leadership at Clean Harbors Environmental Services, to discuss the company's 2009 budget. It was the first of many meetings intended to address what they saw as a troubling economy in the coming year, given conditions in the financial markets and general economic indicators.
Jock? Geek? Artist? Underachiever? Do our high school selves predict our career paths?
For members of the Bush administration, January 20, 2009, marks the end of a job. However, for the staff of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), it's just the beginning of a project unprecedented in size and scope: sorting, indexing, preserving and ensuring access to all the records, both paper and electronic, created by the administration over the past eight years.
Eighteen months ago, Serena Software began exploring the feasibility of supporting Apple MacBooks as an option for its users, most of whom are developers. It was interested in lowering support costs and increasing satisfaction among employees who used Macs at home, including the CEO.
When the computer industry buys into a buzzword, it's like getting a pop song stuck in your head. It's all you hear. Worse, the same half-dozen questions about the hyped trend are incessantly paraded out, with responses that succeed mainly in revealing how poorly understood the buzzword actually is.
A funny thing happened on East Carolina University's journey to creating a data-retention strategy. As part of a compliance project launched one and a half years ago, Brent Zimmer, systems specialist at the university, was working with attorneys and archivists to determine which data was most important to keep and for how long. But it soon became clear that it was just as important to identify which data should be thrown away.
Role management software enables the creation and lifecycle management of enterprise job roles, according to Forrester Research. It does this by discovering and logically grouping application-level, fine-grained authorizations and entitlements into enterprise job roles, which can then be assigned to people by rule-based provisioning or request-approval workflows.
CIO Jeff Saper drives a hybrid car, favors service providers that use alternative energy and has launched many green IT initiatives at his strategic communications firm, Robinson Lerer & Montgomery in New York. But he's also concerned about a type of pollution that even Al Gore has yet to tackle: digital pollution.
Microsoft calls it TownSquare. Deloitte hosts D Street. IBM has its Beehive, and Best Buy its BlueShirt Nation.
Solid-state disk, once considered a niche technology for ruggedized, industrial and military applications, is on its way to the mainstream. This is partly because of SSD benefits, which include performance, power efficiency, ruggedness and a lightweight, compact size. But other developments have also come into play, including technology and market developments that have begun to help this technology overcome its pitfalls -- namely capacity, reliability and price.
So you accept that new position, and within the first couple of weeks on the job, it all becomes clear: Your boss is an idiot. Now what?
It's a management axiom that the smarter the employees are, the harder they are to manage. Employees with a high degree of left-brain intelligence, which is common among IT professionals, can be demanding, blind to the opinions of others, easily bored and bent on being "right," according to the people who manage them.
You'd think the words "brain drain" would strike fear into the hearts of IT managers. As the calendar has turned to 2008 -- and the oldest baby boomers are now eligible to receive Social Security -- it has become clear that growth in the number of older workers will soon surpass the growth in the number of those just starting out. In eight year's time, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in four workers will be 55 or older. And particularly in IT, there's not a big influx of new talent. According to the Computing Research Association, computer science enrollments dropped 14 per cent each year between 2004 and 2006.
Aaron Martin likes to plan ahead. One year ago, the IT manager at Loro Piano, an Italian luxury goods manufacturer with US operations in New York, plunked down US$30,000 for a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet storage array from Nimbus Data Systems. At the time, it was one of the only iSCSI-based storage systems available that took advantage of 10G bit/sec Ethernet speeds, with most systems supporting 1Gbit/sec Ethernet.
Corporations are woefully unprepared to counter attempts at corporate espionage, say experts who perform vulnerability assessments designed to uncover security weaknesses. US corporations lose as much as US$300 billion a year to hacking, cracking, physical security breaches and other criminal activity, according to Ira Winkler, author of Spies Among Us (Wiley, 2005) and president of the Internet Security Advisors Group, which performs espionage simulations and provides other services.