Economic downturn creates rough ride for IT on spending
With the economy struggling and financial markets in a state of chaos, this is becoming a hard time to be an IT manager.
With the economy struggling and financial markets in a state of chaos, this is becoming a hard time to be an IT manager.
It would be hard to exaggerate the angst that has gripped the US in recent months as the election nears, markets churn and assets melt. But the headlines that have made us dread picking up the newspaper mask a long-term problem that may shape the future of America more than John McCain's plan for Iraq, Barack Obama's health care ideas or Uncle Sam's heroic efforts to rescue the economy.
Science and technology may not have been the focus of the recent debates between presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama, but both candidates have outlined some broad policy proposals and goals. That's a good thing, because, as some of the top technology thinkers in the United States today recently shared with Computerworld, the next president will have to tackle the country's ongoing decline in global technological competitiveness.
What do you get when you add the human propensity to screw stuff up to the building of large-scale IT systems? What the military calls the force-multiplier effect -- and the need for a cadre of top-notch QA engineers.
Think your security staffers are trustworthy? Competent? Knowledgeable? Listen to a security professional's horror stories, and you might think again.
Telecommuting is back on workers' radars in a big way these days, thanks to gas prices that were a whopping 30 percent higher this summer than last.
The collapse of Wall Street may help make computer science and IT careers attractive to students who abandoned these fields in droves after the pop of the last big bubble, the dot-com bust of 2001.
Senior management prizes one simple attribute: predictability. Whether they communicate this value clearly or not, predictability can be more important to your bosses than cost. Trust emerges from the intuitive belief that things are under control. Things are not under control if delivery cannot be predicted accurately.
In Part 1 of this series, I looked at the mechanisms available to IT staffers to activate, deploy and configure iPhones in business environments. But the biggest new business-oriented feature available on the iPhone, thanks to the iPhone 2.x firmware (included with the iPhone 3G and available for free to users of first-generation iPhones or for US$9.95 for iPod Touch users), is the addition of ActiveSync for accessing Microsoft Exchange.
Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when traveling to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because US Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth US Circuit Court ruling in April.
To avoid getting lost in today's constantly evolving online marketplace, you should be looking to upgrade your e-commerce system within the next six to 12 months.
It's a classic case of mine vs. yours: Users are downloading a crop of new and often unsanctioned programs onto their PCs, bypassing IT's careful management discipline.