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Process Trip 04 February, 2008 13:07:03
Why Maritz Travel revamped key business processes — and how business and IT came together to make it workWhen Rich Phillips became COO OF Maritz Travel about two and-a-half years ago, he sat down and took a hard look at the big industry picture - +
Ticked Off at Tick the Box Mentality 04 February, 2008 13:01:15
Does your executive search firm know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients?Does your executive search firm know its MIS managers from its elbow? Does it even know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients? - +
How to Get Real About Strategic Planning 04 February, 2008 12:50:59
Everyone agrees that having a strategic plan for IT is a good thing but most CIOs approach the process with fear and loathing. In fact, the majority of CIOs (and the enterprises they work for) are faking it when it comes to strategic planning. Isn't it time we all got real?Oh, it must be nice to be the CIO of a FedEx or a GE or a Credit Suisse. Places where IT and the business are so tightly aligned you can barely tell the two apart. Where corporate leaders understand that IT is a strategic asset and support it as such - +
Why You Need More Than One Software Vendor 14 January, 2008 12:58:31
The conventional wisdom is that it's always better to have fewer software vendors - or even a single vendor - to manage than it is to use multiple vendors.Lining up a single vendor to supply most of your software seems easy but isn't always smart, says an IT management expert. With fewer vendors to choose from these days, it's best to hedge your bets - +
Toxic Mix or Bit of a Mixed Blessing? 31 December, 2007 10:36:30
“Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog . . . ” The inter-generational office brew of Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y may not be quite as odious as that of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but even so it makes “for a charm of powerful trouble”"Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog . . . " The inter-generational office brew of Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y may not be quite as odious as that of the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, but even so it makes "for a charm of powerful trouble"
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Bill Gates: A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century 28 January, 2008 07:12:19
Transcript of Gates speech, and a Q&A at World Economic Forum in Davos, SwitzerlandAs you all may know, in July I'll make a big career change. I'm not worried; I believe I'm still marketable. I'm a self-starter, I'm proficient in Microsoft Office. I guess that's it. Also I'm learning how to give money away. - +
What kind of an IT manager are you? 17 January, 2008 11:55:20
Are you a Sidney Slacker, Terry Top-Notch or a Taylor Too-Much?Take this quiz to find out. - +
Ch-Ch-Chatting with the South Pole's IT manager 03 January, 2008 07:13:28
Is there a difference between -60 and -100? Absolutely!From the start, Henry Malmgren was determined to get to the South Pole. After graduating from Texas Tech University in 1998 with a degree in MIS he applied for a job in the Antarctic every year before NSF contractor Raytheon finally hired him as a network engineer in 2001. Since then he has alternated between the Denver headquarters and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, spending two summers and two winters there before finally working his way up to IT manager. Staying over is a commitment: Once the winter starts, there's no way to get in and out of the base until summer begins eight to nine months later. "I thought I would just do this for a single season, but somehow it always seemed too easy to keep coming back," he says. - +
How to keep anxious IT workers in the fold 28 December, 2007 07:18:10
After years of layoffs and outsourcing, reassurance is key, says Judith M. BardwickOver the past decade, thousands of IT professionals lost their jobs to layoffs and outsourcing, so it's little wonder that many of those who chose to remain in the IT field have grown distrustful of their current employers. But for IT managers, there are steps they can take to build trusting relationships with workers who may be eyeing the door -- and other opportunities, according to Judith M. Bardwick, a management consultant in California. Bardwick, the author of One Foot Out the Door: How to Combat the Psychological Recession That's Alienating Employees and Hurting American Business, talked with Computerworld about how to reassure nervous workers. - +
Cisco: the new software giant 14 December, 2007 11:06:02
Senior Vice President Don Proctor talks about Cisco's software planFor the first time, Cisco has assembled all of its software assets -- IOS, Unified Communications, Collaboration and Network Management -- under a single organization. The Software Group was formed to coordinate product development and inject a common set of services across all of Cisco's software. Senior Vice President Don Proctor took some time at this week's C-Scape analyst conference to talk with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy about Cisco's software plan.
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services. Revolutionising Back-up and Recovery
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The IP Storage payoff: Turning your investment into efficient, affordable results
Growth Strategies in Uncertain Times: Building & Maintaining Good Client Relationships in Professional Services Organisations
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Wireless LANs: Is my enterprise at risk?
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Understanding Email Marketing: A Guide for SMBs
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William Howell holds strong opinions about hiring IT professionals.
The vice president and chief information officer at Accellent, a $500 million manufacturer of medical components, detests "Microsoft" type questions — brain teasers intended to test a developer's problem-solving skills. He's perturbed by the number of people who use the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator to pigeonhole job seekers. And he thinks most companies do a mediocre job training up-and-coming hiring managers in how to suss out candidates. The best training ground, according to Howell, is the school of hard knocks.
He should know. Howell admits to having made a few hiring mistakes — including one big one in the 1980s while working for the University of North Carolina (UNC) — which he discusses in this Q&A. The incident at UNC irrevocably changed his hiring process, and his experiences have taught him to trust his instincts, to prize a candidate's integrity above all and to rigorously check references. If you've got any skeletons in your closet, Howell will unearth them.
Howell shared with CIO.com his lessons learned over the course of his 30-plus-year career in IT, and his secrets for identifying whether candidates have the right stuff for a job in his 35-person information services organization, for finding objective references and for using LinkedIn as a recruiting tool.
What IT projects are you working on, and how do they impact your hiring?
Our biggest initiative is an Oracle ERP deployment. Three years ago when I joined the company, the chief executive officer at the time was very focused on implementing a common platform upon which to consistently gather and analyze business data. He saw that platform as a way to consolidate operations under one umbrella. We are implementing this initiative across 19 manufacturing facilities worldwide (15 in the US, three in Europe and a very large one in Mexico) in a controlled manner. We do two plants at a time and have done seven plants so far.
Most of our hiring falls into two or three areas. In particular, we hire Oracle ERP experts for our Boston corporate headquarters — senior business analysts and senior developers. These individuals are tied into our Oracle ERP deployment. They also support the sites that are now running on Oracle ERP.
I also hire IT people for our factories, which range in size from approximately 60 or 70 to 450 employees with an equal number of machine tools used to cut metal parts. In my ideal world, I would have one IT person per site, but I'm not quite there for financial reasons.
2008 CIO Summit
19th August, 2008 Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney Developed in partnership with CIO Magazine, IDC, INTEP and the CIO Executive Council.
The world of the CIO is extremely complex and diverse. Multiple priorities demand attention and decisions are needed instantly. Individual teams need to be driven towards common goals, and businesses strive to become more mobile, agile and responsive. For CIOs, the challenge never ends.
Every year the CIO Summit identifies what is top of mind for CIOs across Australia and New Zealand, and offers insight for CIO benchmarking and vendor strategic planning alike.
Recent IDC research shows that over 59% of CIO's believe that 'to achieve their business strategies, technology should be used more aggressively than today.'
Join us on August 19th to discover how this is possible with the latest technologies including Virtualisation, Web 2.0, IP Surveillance and Software as a Service (Saas).
Click here for more information.
Please email Denyse_Robertson@idg.com.au for further information.
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CIO Live Podcast #79: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires Part II 05 October, 2007 06:00:00
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #78: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires 28 September, 2007 17:34:25
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #77: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part III 21 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part three in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #76: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part II 14 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part two in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #75: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part I 07 September, 2007 07:00:05
Part one in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance.
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Information security governance: Centralized vs. distributed 05 September, 2008 10:15:00
Should security policies, procedures and processes be managed within a central body, or distributed at an individual level? You need to find the middle ground.The management of information risk has become a significant topic for all organizations, small and large alike. But for the large, multi-divisional organization, it poses the additional challenge of determining how to deploy an information security governance program among what are often disparate business units. Should the policies, procedures, and processes that define the program be developed and managed within a central, corporate body? Or perhaps responsibility would be better placed at the individual unit level? Is there a workable middle-ground? - +
DNS error brings Sophos antivirus updates to a halt 05 September, 2008 13:40:00
Optus, Internode and Equinix affected among others.A sporadic Domain Name Server (DNS) error has blocked Sophos anti-virus updates around the world. - +
Ouch! Security pros' worst mistakes 04 September, 2008 08:05:00
We've all done regrettable things on the job, but does any valuable wisdom come of it? Four security pros candidly explain their biggest blunders and what they learned in the processIt was a mistake so bad the person who made it asked that his name and company not be mentioned here. Let's call him Frank. - +
Security ROI: Fact or Fiction? 03 September, 2008 08:32:00
Bruce Schneier says ROI is a big deal in business, but it's a misnomer in security. Make sure your financial calculations are based on good data and sound methodologies.Return on investment, or ROI, is a big deal in business. Any business venture needs to demonstrate a positive return on investment, and a good one at that, in order to be viable. - +
Information Security and the Importance of Context 01 September, 2008 10:00:00
Those entrusted with information security must raise their contextual awarenessWhen the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was first created, it created a sudden need for tens of thousands of screeners. Getting a job as an airport screener was a pretty easy process. It seemed as though if you had a pulse, you were in. Jump forward to 2008 and becoming a screener is a bit harder as the TSA has instituted background checks, has upped the educational requirement to include a high school diploma or GED, and added other significant requirements.
Viva la Verticals! Key to Vendor Growth is Through Vertical Market Opportunities, Says IDC 05 September, 2008 11:05:00
F-Secure delivers fastest protection in the online world 04 September, 2008 16:50:00
Rogue security apps dominate Fortinet's Aug 2008 IT threat report 04 September, 2008 16:00:00
IntraPower Signs Deal with Australia’s Largest Service Station and Convenience Store Network 04 September, 2008 10:07:00
TANDBERG Begins Desktop Videoconferencing Roll-Out at New England Credit Union 03 September, 2008 16:01:00
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Radicati Market Quadrant 2008 on Corporate Web Security
An Analysis of the Market for Corporate Web Security Solutions, revealing Top Players, Mature Players, Specialists and Trail Blazers. Read on to discover who makes the grade.
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