(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...Green IT will have to wait until 2008
A lot of PCs are probably going dark right about now. Even more will be turned off tomorrow, and in the week ahead. Although retail and e-commerce operations may see a peak, other industries might find this the “greenest” technology period of the year. Like everything about green IT, though, it happens only as a by-product of something else.
When we recently published ComputerWorld Canada’s year-end editorial about the top trends of 2007, we didn’t include green IT. Although the hype was there, the evidence of a real trend was not. Particularly in Canada, research firms like Info-Tech aren’t seeing a lot of activity in the enterprise. Sure, they’re virtualizing infrastructure and trying to bring energy bills down, but that’s not really what green IT is supposed to be about. Neither is the effort by all sorts of vendors to create more power-efficient products.
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(3 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Yes, sir, that’s my data
When I decided to tell my friends this week that my wife is three months’ pregnant with our first child, I also unintentionally conducted a bit of a social experiment.
Although in most cases I know my friends’ work e-mail addresses, I decided to use their personal accounts. It seemed to make sense. We are obviously excited about this news, but it really has nothing to do with work. And since this is the last week before the holidays, I figured people might be rushing to finish up projects and might prefer to get this kind of announcement on their own time. After sending off the message at about 9:30, however, I started getting responses within minutes. The first came from my colleagues here at IT World Canada, but a friend who was also presumably busy at his office in another part of the city also congratulated me from his home account. So did countless others, suggesting that if they were grappling with information overload based on what they get out of corporate information systems, their challenge is compounded by what they have to manage through personal information systems.
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(3 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Digital footprints are left in the enterprise, too
Of course I Google myself. You can’t have to be an American to do that.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project’s “Digital Footprints” report looks at it from both ways – how we use search engines and others tools to track our own online presence but also that of friends and colleagues. According to the report, for example, nearly 50 per cent of Internet users have searched for their own name online (though not with any regularity) and 53 per cent of Internet users have searched online for information about personal and business contacts. This, however, is not the big deal. The big deal is when we shift from scouring for digital footprints on the public Web and instead track the paths we’ve taken through enterprise IT systems.
Until recently, most of us left our mark on enterprise IT by the word processing documents and spreadsheets we created and then stored in a folder on a shared drive somewhere. If an IT manager wanted to, they could also (usually at the request of a senior executive) go back through e-mail records, something that is still done as part of various e-discovery requests. As enterprise search technology matures and social networking becomes an enterprise staple, however, we’ll be leaving digital footprints in a lot more places at work. And because of that, we may want to watch where we step.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Bill Gates needs to brush up on his people skills
Come on – did Bill Gates really think anyone would say knowing how to use a computer is more important than teamwork?
In the results of a Microsoft-commissioned survey of 500 U.K. board members this week, the company found that IT skills ranked seventh. Outranking technology prowess were such trivial matters as initiative, analyzing and problem solving, verbal communication and personal organization. Anyone who’s going through a performance review this time of year is probably hearing a lot about those six areas, but I can’t imagine many of them are losing their annual salary increase because they make poor use of e-mail.
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(3 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...The philosopher and the IT manager
We think, and therefore we are, but IT managers and their business colleagues have never been content to stop there.
The whole point of all this technology is to get a better understanding of information. The question of whether “truth” exists is one we leave to the philosophers. But curiously, some philosophers are no longer probing such issues on their own. They are using study methods that would be familiar to any IT manager, and suggest the worlds of theory and practice are moving closer together than ever.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Why open source has always deserved a census
Ever since we learned that the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft doesn’t take into account open source software when it comes up with its annual piracy statistics, we stopped reporting their numbers. When you only look at proprietary shipments, you miss a great piece of the puzzle. We just don’t know how big a piece it is.
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(3 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Outsourcing until there’s no way out
When a friend of mine went on vacation this past summer he gave me the keys to his apartment so I could check in on his cat. My duties included feeding her, cleaning the litter and playing with her with a little. I did as expected, and everything went fine. But imagine if I decided to buy what I felt was a healthier, but more expensive kind of food. Suppose I used my friend’s credit card and bought some toys I thought would stimulate the cat a little more. Perhaps I could have taken it a step further and moved the litter, rotated her feeding schedule and had her performing some tricks by the time he got back.
He might have thanked me – or he might have reacted the way IT managers do to their outsourcing partners.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Some counsel for the Blog Council
The only way the corporations who formed the Blog Council on Monday could have further incensed the blogging community would be to have placed the word “Official” in its name.
From the moment its press release went live, some of the most prominent voices online – including Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis and Canada’s own Alec Saunders – were quick to offer their own critiques. Who needs such a thing, they wondered. What good could it possibly do? There is a sense that it vindicates the work of those trying to bring blogs into the mainstream, but at the same time some resentment that “outsiders” were forming their own little clique. In fact, the only potential problem with the Blog Council – which includes executives from Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola and General Motors – is that is seems to stem more from marketing than IT. And yet the council’s very existence shows how blog content is becoming enterprise data which will be managed (some might say policed by) IT departments.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Phishing for IT expertise
As soon as I got the e-mail from BMO Financial Group, I knew it couldn’t really be from BMO Financial Group.
First of all, although I have accounts with that particular financial institution, and even do a lot of online banking there, I am certain they would not use e-mail as their primary channel for contacting me. To that extent, the message was no big deal. A phishing scheme is a phishing scheme. What intrigued me, however, was the approach the phishers took in trying to reel me in – using enterprise IT infrastructure as a means to distract and, ultimately, to deceive.
“Bank of Montreal is pleased to notify our online banking customers that we have successfully upgraded to a more secure and encrypted SSL servers to serve our esteemed customers for a better and more efficient banking services in the year 2008,” the message read. “Due to this recent upgrade you are requested to upgrade your account information by following the reference below, using our new secure and safe SSL servers.”
Okay, so there’s a bit of bad grammar there, and the technology terms are repeated just a little too frequently, but how closely do most of us read these things anyway? That the phishers would refer to SSL servers at all says a lot about how cyber-criminals see the world. I don’t know if some of my friends (and certainly few in my family) would know what a server is, let along one that has been secured through SSL. When you see it pitched this way, however, you could easily imagine a novice user translating SSL to mean something highly protective of their information. Jargon is as much a weapon here as the use of a well-known company and its logo.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...All I want for Christmas is a secure automated agent
For the people who love to hate Microsoft, Christmas came early this year.
The company was using an automated agent at nothpole.live.com to let kids talk to Santa and his elves. When one user managed to get an elf talking about oral sex, however, Microsoft quickly shut the service down, prompting jokes about Microsoft killing Santa. This may be the season for peace on Earth and good will towards men, but not if they work for the world’s largest software firm. Which is strange, because Microsoft may have done IT managers a favour by exposing a problem that it almost sure to haunt them in the years to come.
