IT Infrastructure - News

• They are leading their competition and want to continue to be in the front of their industry.
• They feel that their competition is about to overtake them and they do not want that to happen.
• They are behind their competition and need to change in order to survive and be profitable.

If they make changes for reasons other than those they should re-evaluate why and what they are doing.

Now cynical me wanted to write this up as "even pirates prefer XP two to one over Vista," but that wouldn't be fair. In reality, the decline in piracy rates is largely due to the fact that Vista is much tougher to fake than XP.

"Piracy rates are lower because it's harder," Microsoft Vice President Mike Sievert said in an interview Monday.

There are a variety of reasons for that, including the fact that businesses no longer have volume license keys that can be used to activate an unlimited number of machines. Another is the fact that Vista machines that aren't properly activated pretty quickly become basically unusable once they enter "reduced functionality mode."

• Setting Corporate Succession Priorities  - Align your succession plan with corporate values and strategy. Your plan must support leadership development and mentoring programs, drive diversity goals, and strengthen rewards and recognition.
• Identifying Key Competencies  - Competency models for key positions are the backbone of any succession planning initiative. Your plan must identify and communicate key competencies and design tools to complement the enterprise's needs.
• Designing the Succession Plan - Document a detailed succession plan. Use methods to create a balanced succession planning design team which is detailed

Speaking at a Town Hall meeting at the Google Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he would appoint a national chief technology officer to ensure that every government agency is meeting 21st century standards.

Obama talked about his plan to connect Americans through technology. Google invited the candidates to hear their views on some of the issues that affect their company as well as the technology industry in general. Obama was the seventh presidential hopeful to participate.

Other presidential candidates who have talked to Googlers are Republicans Ron Paul and John McCain and Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Richardson, John Edwards and Mike Gravel.

Dell Inc. also has invited the candidates to its campus.

(CIO Insight) What is the essence of the CIOs role? It is an important question because the definition of the CIO is morphing and fracturing. Our surveys say fewer than half of CIOs report to CEOs while more report to CFOs. Does that mean the CIO role has been downgraded, or that Sarbanes-Oxley is changing the CFOs role? In our April 2007 CIO Role survey, three quarters of CIOs say helping set their companys strategy will be one of their most important responsibilities in the future, yet just one-third say their role is creating business strategy.

Defining the CIOs role has never been simple.

• The Cyclical CIO When a CEO believes the IT organization needs a shakeup, he or she hires a CIO who thrives on radical visions and changes. When the shakeup is over, out goes the visionary and in comes a chief information offier with a more operational bent. Repeat ad infinitum
• The Band-Aid CIO Sometimes job No. 1 is fixing what your predecessor broke. Couldn't deliver projects on time? Get a project manager. IT out of alignment? Put in someone with more business experience.
• The Rotational CIO Some companies believe potential CEOs need to be well rounded. The CIO job can be just a stop on the Grand Tour.
• The Multitasking CIO CIOs frequently run other functions besides IT, such as strategy, administration and e-commerce. What a mish-mash. Try making a Myers Briggs-style categorization scheme out of this and you'll wind up with scores of possible roles.

PCI Security Standards Council, which represents Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, anticipates expanding requirements to cover wireless and web based transactions.  This standard could be defined in 2008 and many small merchants could be faced with compliance issues.  That will be a problem because many of the merchants do not comply with the PCI-DSS version 1.1 standard.

The Councils general manager was quoted in Network World say that the organization is devising new standards for how to design and evaluate any Web-facing business applications for credit-card processing as well as security rules for wireless. But a final decision is still pending, he said, since there is a growing resistance to new requirements for payment-card holders, many of whom are not yet achieving official compliance with the existing PCI standards yet.

(Computerworld)  As many as 35% of workers have knowingly violated their corporate IT policies at least once, according to results of a study released this week.

MARC Research polled 301 U.S. based workers in businesses with at least 100 employees about their corporate computer usage.

The Information Systems Audit and Control Association, a Rolling Meadows, Ill.-based professional association that represents some 65,000 IT professionals who are responsible for auditing computer systems, commissioned the study.

The survey also found that while 84% of respondents are comfortable with workplace computer security measures, 64% said their home computers are not adequately protected.

Despite warnings about security threats posed by peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, 15% of respondents admitted logging onto such networks from work computers. And 74% of respondents said they don't believe that downloading unauthorized content or software to work PCs is a business risk.

The survey also found that 73% of respondents are not worried about sending sensitive or confidential company information from work PCs to home systems via e-mail. Further, 68% said they regularly work on business documents that were sent from business systems to home PCs.

Internet to be Tax-Free for seven more years

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill to bar states from levying taxes on Internet access through 2014, clearing the way for President George W. Bush to sign the measure into law before an existing ban expires.

The unanimous House vote today resolved a dispute with the Senate, which last week called for the longest-ever Internet-tax ban by passing the seven-year moratorium. The House had voted Oct. 16 to prohibit the taxes for four years. The current ban ends Nov. 1, 2007

Since 1998, a federal law has prohibited cities and states from taxing most forms of Internet access, including cable-modem and digital subscriber-line service. The moratorium was last extended in 2004. Groups representing state and local officials had pushed for a four-year ban.

High-speed Internet providers AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., as well as Web companies such as Google Inc., had sought a permanent ban. Still, they welcomed the seven-year renewal.

Top management concerns are:

• IT and business alignment
• Building business skills in IT
• Reducing the cost of doing business
• Improving IT quality.
• Security and privacy.
• Managing change.
• IT strategic planning.
• Making better use of information.
• Evolving CIO leadership role.

The runner-up is not a well-known tech center like Boston or Seattle/Redmond; it is the Washington metro area.

Data for 2006 from the U.S. Census Bureaus annual American Community Survey (ACS), released just last month, reveal what could be called a metropolitan areas TQ (technology quotient) -- how techie a regions overall workforce is, based on the number of self-reported computer professionals.

Roughly 6% of the D.C. metro area workforce is made up of computer specialists, compared with 8.3% in Silicon Valley. The third-highest concentration of IT workers is in Raleigh/Cary, N.C., at 5.3% of the workforce, followed closely by Boulder, Colo., and Huntsville, Ala., each at 5.2%. The remainder of the top 10 technology worker areas is rounded out, in order, by Bloomington/Normal, Ill.; Trenton-Ewing, N.J.; Austin-Round Rock, Texas; Manchester-Nashua, N.H.; and Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash.

IT Infrastructure is the key to value added processes that aid in creating situations that encourage innovation and improved customer service.

Dealing with pressure can lead managers toward the temptation of taking complete control. However, implementing a strict set of policies and procedures across all customer-facing functions often stifles the one element that enables companies to break away from the pack and grow profitably and consistently  employee-driven innovation.

In many situations, an empowered, engaged employee is a more productive and profitable one. Customer relationship management solutions must enable these types of ad hoc, collaborative interactions to better serve customers, while also automating the process-driven, transactional interactions that serve the needs of the organization.

• Increased application traffic as more of the enterprises infrastructure and process are placed on the WAN and Internet.
• Increased non-work (recreational and personal) traffic as users integrate work environment with personal environment.
• Convergence of voice, video, and data networks with peak demand that impacts enterprise operations
• Implementation of user friendly web applications which have more demand on WAN resources.
• Distributed workforce and applications which are run over the WAN and Internet instead of a single IT silo location
• Concentration of servers in fewer locations  creates WAN and Internet bottlenecks
• Increased overhead for security and attacks on enterprise resources

WAN performance issues include:

• Bandwidth upgrades increase costs yet fail to permanently increase performance.
• Surges from recreational traffic cause urgent, interactive applications to struggle.
• Enthusiasm for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) fades when callers routinely face stutter and static during peak network usage.
• Intranet applications at a main data center offer easy access but poor performance.
• Performance plummets whenever an employee syncs email at a branch office

PCI compliance often kicks off in earnest with a letter from the bank to the merchant. PCI is forcing organizations to go look in the nooks and crannies of legacy systems. The evolution of PCI is extending the compliance mandate into areas such as point of sale terminals, where new requirements may mean retiring older ones.

Fourteen percent of CIOs said they'll be hiring and two percent of CIOs expected to be making job cuts in the fourth quarter of 2007, finds a survey issued Sept. 11 by Robert Half Technology, an IT recruiting firm. The net 12 percent hiring increase compares favorably with net increases of 15 percent projected in the third quarter of 2007. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of CIOs surveyed said that the technical set they were in the shortest supply of in their departments was Windows administration (for Server 2000/2003), while 70 percent of CIOs cited a shortage in network administration (Cisco Systems, Nortel) as being in shortest supply. Database management skills (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2) were cited by 60 percent of CIOs.

But it was networking that CIOs ranked the most in-demand job category, noted by 18 percent of respondents

CTOs are increasingly being counted on to help business leaders make their companies more agile and customer-centric. Contributing to this trend is trust in technology and the Information Technology department to aggressively transform the business. Other critical factors include a CEO who gets it, a CTO with the well-rounded skills to be a trusted business leader, and a CTO who spends a good deal of time communicating with constituents.

Despite these very encouraging developments, the survey also showed that companies and their CTOs still continue to focus a fair amount of their attention on how to migrate away from maintenance IT and into innovation IT and how to find and retain top talent.

The average tenure of CTOs has become notoriously short. Often enterprises are caught in a vicious cycle, hiring each new CTO with the belief that his or
her strengths will somehow fix the problems caused by their predecessors weaknesses. Since no CTO is perfect, however, the cycle can run for many years, resulting in thrashing of priorities and untold missed opportunities. Technical savvy is still indispensable in any IT group, but in addition to the underlying technology, CTOs must understand how the computing services and products depend on each other and fit together. CTOs should also have extensive management experience and financial acumen. The CTO must truly understand the other business units in the enterprise, each with its own goals, metrics and end-customers. These are, after all, the CIOs direct customers.

It is vital the IT crowd is consulted, agrees with and has ownership of any policies that directly affect them, and technical teams must make the effort to try and communicate with legal eagles in a language other than IT speak. It is better to have a legal team which will tell the IT department what we need to be doing. But lawyers being lawyers, it is very difficult to work with them to understand what we want and if they could talk to us in an IT language life would be much easier.

If you express risk in the different languages make sure things are transparent and everyone does understand who is responsible for what.

• They have the same aspirations to create business strategy. Their personal backgrounds are comparable, primarily IT with business and consulting experience,
• Mid-market CIOs have put in as many years, if not more, as the top IT executive, and
• They like what they are doing; more than 90 percent enjoy their jobs most of the time. 

On average, they earn 58 cents (per CIO and the Janco Salary Survey) for every dollar earned by CIOs at larger organizations. If there is a coming CIO shortage, as the Society for Information Management recently reported, this income disparity is likely to lead ambitious mid-market CIOs to look for opportunities at larger companies.

Intrusion-detection technologies are actually mandated by a number of standards (ISO 17799 and PCI-DSS) and regulations (HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley). Organizations under such mandates should look at deploying such technologies independently of industry debate over the finer mechanical points. Almost all require an  incident management and log management process.