(6 votes, average: 8.5 out of 10)
Loading ...Vista a year later: Why IT managers clung to the status quo
It didn’t feel like anyone was really rooting for Vista last year. Seldom has a product been launched with such low expectations from industry observers – expectations that in some respects had little to do with the vendor or even the product itself.
On this, Vista’s anniversary, the occasion feels less like a cause for celebration but a ritual in self-righteousness on the part of those who want to prove how astute they were. I’m not going to bother, because Vista’s prospects weren’t that difficult to forecast. It’s a crappy market for upgrades, especially operating systems. Companies are cheap. XP is still doing a decent job. Instead, why not explore an alternate scenario: What if Vista had taken the enterprise market by storm?
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Expose routine support for the IT grunt work it is
It was a four-letter word, but I didn’t think people would interpret as cursing.
We were in a management meeting, talking about the steps involved in optimizing the Web stories we publish all day so they would get noticed by search engines. This includes all the deep linking, the uploading of videos, the keyword changes and so on. We’re still a long way from getting our new content management system in place, and given the manual nature of these tasks we users were wondering about the possibility of hiring someone who take it on. I made the mistake of calling it “grunt” work.
You could almost feel a chill descend upon the room.
One of the features of a modern enterprise is the notion that any work that advances business objectives is equally important. Even when we automate it, we don’t dismiss it as trivial, we just emphasize how much freer it will leave employees to concentrate on more “value-added” tasks. To highlight the drudgery of the tasks being automated is a taboo, but it may be what IT managers need to do if they want the budget to purchase some of the product sets hitting the market.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Babes, bikinis and the IT buyer
“Yeah, baby,” the guy beside me purred. “I like that.”
As you may have guessed by now, this was not your average IT conference I was attending. It was a marketing event called Interactive to the Max, where ad agency types discussed how they could do a better job of targeting their messages to their intended audiences. The guy beside me was reacting to an ad, shown during a case study by Bud Light, which demonstrated the power of their “blatent marketing ploy” campaign. It’s too bad there weren’t any IT managers there, because I’m sure they would have appreciated it.
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(3 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...What’s in store for Google’s GDrive
Whatever Google offers with the GDrive – assuming it ever actually comes out with the GDrive – it’s got to be better than having everyone in the enterprise working off the F drive.
Although it may go by other names in specific companies, the F drive refers to that shared dumping ground where everything seems to end up. This includes meeting notes, annual reports and even expense form templates. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Google will soon offer an online service that acts as a repository for such data. Makes sense: if you’re going to offer tools for enterprise search, as Google is doing, it helps if users have something to search through.
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(3 votes, average: 9.33 out of 10) Loading ...An image for IT managers: Joggle all the way
Michal Kapral can teach IT professionals a lot about multi-tasking, and he doesn’t even need a computer or a phone to do it.
By day, Kapral works in the Toronto office of Captivate Network, the firm that offers digital audio and video on small screens set in the corners of office elevators. In his spare time, he gets even busier: running marathons while throwing and catching small balls in the air. Last month, Kapral did Canada proud by reclaiming the Guinness World Record for joggling, or juggling while jogging. The image of Kapral in motion may be the best way to illustrate the workload IT managers face in the coming year.
