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| Volume 5, Issue 7 |
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In This Issue:
 Steve Jobs calls family of teenager killed for iPod
Microsoft's personnel puzzle
Site offers open-source clearinghouse
Hacking for dollars
Soaring malware levels hint at criminal activity
The mystery of time travel
 Love that 'Legacy'
Employee development on a shoestring
Lying low, and thinking big picture
The project's red. Tag! Your it.
This fascinating business of IT
 Meet tech's cash-rich royalty
Microsoft crashes the RSS party
 Will Exchange 12 be par for the Redmond course?
 Keeping your endpoints in line
 How to dig out from under Sarbanes-Oxley
Open source ascendant
Good riddance to bad bosses
Getting good managers up to speed
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Steve Jobs calls family of teenager killed for iPod
As Errol Rose made preparations on Monday to bury his 15-year-old son, Christopher, who was
killed last week in Brooklyn during a fight over an iPod, he received a telephone call from a
stranger. The man spoke in tones that the grieving father said had momentarily quieted his anguish.
The stranger, Rose soon learned, was Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Computer, the company
that makes the iPod. "I didn't know who he was," Rose said yesterday. "He called me on my cellphone,
at 4 maybe. Or maybe it was 5." Rose said he had stopped noticing the passage of time since his son
was killed...
Read the article. Back to top
Microsoft's personnel puzzle
Arthur Sorkin has been courted by Microsoft twice now, and both times the computer scientist has been put off by the software giant's approach.
Sorkin, who holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Los
Angeles, said he first received an unsolicited invitation to Microsoft's Redmond, Wash.,
headquarters in about 2000, on the recommendation of a senior Microsoft manager. But rather
than attempt to win him over as a prize prospect--Sorkin specializes in operating system
design and computer security, among other areas--Microsoft interviewers challenged him with
a technical "pop quiz," he recalled. No one tried to sell him on either the company or the
job, he said. He withdrew his application. Then, during the past year, Microsoft called Sorkin
to say it had scheduled a phone interview with him for another job. He hadn't applied for it,
and no one had asked if he was interested...
Read the article. Back to top
Site offers open-source clearinghouse
Start-up SourceLabs has launched a Web site that draws on the latest collaboration
and syndication tools to create a sort of owner's manual for open-source software.
Called Swik, the site combines a search engine, a wiki for posting documentation and
reviews, and information-sharing tools that use Really Simple Syndication, or RSS.
The site was launched Wednesday. Swik is aimed at people, notably software developers,
who seek a listing of open-source products and a communications hub to help navigate
through the tens of thousands of projects out there...
Read the article. Back to top
Hacking for dollars
"The motivation behind today's new
e-mail-borne threats is far more
sinister than traditional large-scale
attacks."
--Mark Sunner, chief technology officer, MessageLabs
Hackers have traded fame for financial gain, experts say.
In the past, lone hackers defaced Web sites or launched global worm attacks, mainly
to gain notoriety among their peers. Today, they use their skills for profit. They
hunt for security flaws and find ways to exploit them, hijack computers and rent those
out for use as spam relays, or participate in targeted attacks that steal sensitive
information from individuals or spy on businesses. "In the last year, we have seen a
dramatic shift to hacking for financial gain," said Oliver Friedrichs, a senior manager
at Symantec Security Response. "The benefit of creating a widespread worm on the Internet
has really been superseded by the potential of monetary gain."...
Read the article. Back to top
Soaring malware levels hint at criminal activity
Security company Sophos has seen a dramatic rise in the number of viruses, worms and
Trojan horses this year as more organized criminals turn to cybercrime.
The company reported last week that it had detected 7,944 new pieces of such malware in
the first six months of this year--almost 60 percent more than the same time last year.
The biggest growth was in Trojan horses, programs that can damage a user's files, steal
information, or even create a backdoor that can be used to compromise a PC...
Read the article. Back to top
The mystery of time travel
There was a conference for time travelers at MIT earlier this spring.
I'm still hoping to attend, and although the odds are slim, they are apparently not
zero despite the efforts and hopes of deterministically minded physicists who would
like to eliminate the possibility of your creating a paradox by going back in time and
killing your grandfather. "No law of physics that we know of prohibits time travel,"
said J. Richard Gott, a Princeton University astrophysicist...
Read the article. Back to top
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Love That 'Legacy'
Like it or not, old code is still around, and it needs special care.
Quiz: What is "legacy" software?
a. Cobol/mainframe code
b. Software written before 1990
c. Applications that have become obsolete
d. Poorly documented systems that no one wants to touch
e. Secure, reliable and effective stuff that just keeps running, year after year
Interviews with a number of IT managers turned up all of those definitions, and more.
"Legacy is a word I despise," says Frank da Cruz, an IT manager at Columbia University in
New York. "People say 'legacy' and it's like, 'Oh my god, how could you possibly use that
old garbage?' But what it really means is that it was written by smart people a long time
ago and it really works, instead of being the latest bug-ridden, bloated piece of garbage
from some company that has only teenagers working for it." However you define legacy software,
IT people say they know it when they see it, and they know it didn't all go away during
Y2k remediation. It's the stuff with poor documentation, spaghetti code stirred by too many
cooks, and processing cycles more appropriate for 1970s ways of doing business. And it's
definitely not the stuff you tell college recruits about when they come looking for Java,
Web services and grid computing. Yet, like da Cruz, a number of IT folks swear by it, not
at it, saying they wouldn't dream of switching that trusty old accounting system they
custom-coded in the 1980s for some newfangled commercial package with a seven- or eight-figure
price tag. But even the most enthusiastic of the legacy loyalists acknowledge that old
software often presents special challenges...
Read the article. Back to top
Employee Development on a Shoestring
Boosting skills needn't take much extra time or money, but it does require thought and effort.
Your organization is only as effective as the people who work there. And the best way to
develop an effective and motivated workforce is to keep people challenged. So why is employee
development often overlooked at U.S. companies? A study by Lominger Limited Inc., a leadership
development consultancy in Minneapolis, looked at how well managers at many levels and across
multiple industries performed in 67 defined competencies. At the bottom of the list was
"developing direct reports."...
Read the article. Back to top
Lying Low, and Thinking Big Picture
CIOs engaged in the long march toward the technology-enabled enterprise -- a journey that
can take more than a decade -- try to balance their desire for dependency on technology
against the credibility of the IT organization.
Paradoxically, though, you can be too credible for your time, and you just might have to
lose some credibility to gain your long-term objectives...
Read the article. Back to top
The Project's Red. Tag! You're It.
People started to refer to the business unit's struggling project as "an IT issue" last week.
You didn't ask for it, and you certainly don't want it now. As the IT member on the project
steering committee, you tried to help them with missed milestones and budget overruns, but it
isn't working. What happened? The game of tag -- shifting the responsibility when things go
red -- has begun.
Increasingly, business units are responsible for project management, relying on IT to provide
the services. By "business unit," we mean the group that owns the function the project addresses.
This is good...
Read the article. Back to top
This Fascinating Business of IT
It's Saturday night, and this pilot fish works into the wee hours helping to verify some device information in the data center.
"My boss would read off a list of device numbers, and I'd check them against another display,"
fish says. "The list had at least a hundred numbers. My boss kept reading and, hearing nothing
from me, assumed everything was checking out. Only when he got to the end did he notice I had
nodded off!"
Got Change?
User calls help desk pilot fish to complain that when he prints a document, the text covers
the logo on the company stationery...
Read the article. Back to top
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Meet Tech's Cash-Rich Royalty
From Microsoft's mountain of money to Cisco's pretty decent pile, here are the sector's
leaders -- and what they may do with all that dough.
They're the titans of tech cash. At a time when Corporate America is rolling in dough -- and
tech companies have amassed well more than an equal share -- a handful of hardware and software
leaders have built fortunes that are truly for the ages (see BW Online, 6/20/05, "Tech's
Idle Billions"). Here's a look at the royal court of techdom. The ne plus ultra of
corporate wealth (cash stash: $38 billion): After years of crossing swords with rivals
and regulators around the globe, Microsoft (MSFT) is richer than ever. Last year the
fortune peaked at $75 billion. That was more than enough even for Chairman Bill Gates, who
insists on maintaining a horde comparable to an entire year's worth of revenue. He had enough
for two, and some experts were worried that the government would reclassify the software titan
as an investment company if it didn't return some cash to shareholders. So Microsoft...
Read the article. Back to top
Microsoft Crashes the RSS Party
Microsoft (MSFT ) has rarely been a company on the bleeding edge of new technology.
Instead, it usually waits, watches the new thing catch on, then uses the sheer force of its
market heft to muscle into the arena. It's a pattern rivals and partners have seen before,
and one that's about to emerge again. The software giant has decided to put its considerable
weight behind Really Simple Syndication, known to the digerati simply as RSS. The technology
makes it convenient for Web users to keep tabs on their favorite blogs, news feeds, columnists,
and video by signing up to have updates automatically zapped to their PCs or mobile devices.
Microsoft, which has largely been on the sidelines as RSS gained in popularity, announced plans
on June 24 to bake RSS technology into the next version of its Windows operating system, dubbed
Longhorn, due at the end of 2006...
Read the article. Back to top
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Will Exchange 12 be par for the Redmond course?
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Messaging platform could bring promising VoIP integration, but may lack active-to-active server clustering.
Why is it that geeks don't much golf? I seem to be largely alone amongst my geek colleagues
in my unexplained need to spend five or six hours a weekend beating the tar out of a little
white ball. Nevertheless, golf has its own life lessons, not the least of which is that life
simply won't conform to expectations. One week you're swinging smoothly and shooting an 87;
the next week, it's 102 and you're looking to bury your loft wedge in the forehead of a
giggling cart buddy. Birdies and bogeys. Ups and downs. A fact of life, especially for those
of us bound not only to the links but also to Redmond. Each new iteration of a popular platform
brings the expectation that all our problems will be solved, but instead, Microsoft (Profile,
Products, Articles)
usually solves only some of our problems while releasing features aimed at problems we didn't
even know we had. Exchange 12 is this week's object lesson...
Read the article. Back to top
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Keeping your endpoints in line
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Setting and enforcing security policy
on your network endpoints could be key to making it through your next compliance audit.
In our Clear Choice Test of endpoint security products that provide policy
enforcement mechanisms, each product was required to identify systems out of
policy compliance and take action to remediate that condition. On a more complex
level, we created a wish list of policy enforcement checks the products should
offer, including being able to identify missing operating system and application
patches and noncompliant system security settings, limiting access to these systems
and creating reports to analyze noncompliant clients and the remediation actions taken
to get them back in line. (See "How we did it". ). We made this wish list with the
understanding that no one product would meet all of our requirements, but were open
to vendors submitting product combinations that collectively did. Because no security
product added to a corporate network should pose a security risk, we also tried to poke
holes in the products' own security architecture (see story ). From a field of 13 vendors
invited to participate in the test, Check Point, Cisco , Citadel, InfoExpress, Senforce,
Trend Micro and Vernier Networks (in cooperation with PatchLink) agreed to let their products
be tested. Elemental Security, EndForce, McAfee, Sygate, SecureWave and StillSecure declined.
The Vernier Networks/PatchLink combination came out on top ...
Read the article. Back to top
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How To Dig Out From Under Sarbanes-Oxley
Unless CIOs do Sarbanes-Oxley differently this time, it will cost even more money and
cause even more pain. Here's how to avoid all (or at least most) of that.
The dirty little secret of the first Sarbanes-Oxley audit is that no one really knew what
they were doing. Not the auditors, not the consultants, not you. For Al Schmidt, vice president
of IT for Arch Chemicals, that became painfully obvious during a September 2004 meeting in
which his internal auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), and his external auditor, KPMG, discussed...auditing standards. (Sarbanes-Oxley mandates that companies have different internal
and external auditors to avoid Enron-like conflicts of interest.). As Arch employees and about
five auditors from each firm sat silently, the lead partners of the two firms went back and
forth for about 20 minutes, debating the different methodologies that each was using for
the Sarbanes-Oxley 404 review of the $1.2 billion specialty chemical manufacturer's internal
controls. "Let's just say it was a learned discussion between two parties," Schmidt says. "I
was surprised that those details hadn't been ironed out ahead of time," he adds. "That was my
introduction to the fact that the under-lying issues [with the Sarbanes-Oxley audit] were not firm.
"For Schmidt, that was also the beginning of a constant tug-of-war with his auditors...
Read the article. Back to top
Open Source Ascendant
Free, But Not Risk-Free
CIOs need to advocate for testing
and training when their companies
invest in new, less proven technologies.
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How Cendant Travel Distribution Services replaced a $100 million mainframe with 144
Linux servers and lived to tell about it.
In the summer of 2003, Mickey Lutz did something that most CIOs, even today, would consider
unthinkable: He moved a critical part of his IT infrastructure from the mainframe and Unix
to Linux. For Lutz, the objections to Linux, regarding its technical robustness and lack of
vendor support, had melted enough to justify the gamble. "The issues raised around open
source, around its viability, were in the past," recalls Lutz, CIO for Global Agency Solutions
with Cendant Travel Distribution Services, the parent company of online travel brands Orbitz
and CheapTickets.com. Few CIOs agreed with Lutz then or now. Many CIOs are experimenting with
Linux these days, but less than 10 percent of the Fortune 1000, according to research company
Meta Group, have been willing to bet their core infrastructures on it-to transform the Linux
penguin mascot from cute to brute...
Read the article. Back to top
Good Riddance to Bad Bosses
There's one sure-fire rule to avoid being a bad boss, and you learned it long ago. Jun 30, 2005 -
Are you a bad boss? Do you bully employees, rely on intimidation to get things done, and
"kiss up and kick down"? Or do you work for a bad boss-an egotist who thinks his every
thought is golden and can't abide dissent? The work world is full of bad bosses, to judge
from the number of books, articles and websites devoted to getting out from under a tyrant
(for instance, Brutal Bosses and Their Prey),
getting even ( When You Work for a Bully:
Assessing Your Options and Taking Action),
and complaining/commiserating (the discussion
forum on Badbossology.com).
No doubt the offices of CIOs hold their share of bad bosses.
(Disclaimer: The great majority of CIOs I speak with are polite and personable-but then,
I don't work for them.) What is a bad boss, fundamentally?...
Read the article. Back to top
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Getting New Managers Up to Speed
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| The usual employee-orientation process
needs to be retired. In this article from Harvard Management Update,
savvy companies explain how to jump-start the success of new managers.
Tip: Set up meetings, use technology, and coach newcomers. | |
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When Jacqueline Lopez, a new program manager at Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, arrived
for her first day on the job, Jessica Rocha, her boss, handed her a calendar bursting
with already-scheduled meetings.
These meetings had nothing to do with the usual employee-orientation process, through
which new hires learn about Intel's values and HR procedures. Rather, Rocha had scheduled
face-to-face interviews with people across Intel who had the technical expertise, cultural
lowdown, and political "juice" Lopez would need to accomplish her work. Thanks to Rocha's
foresight, "I ramped up quickly," Lopez says. "I accomplished strategically important
work"-such as developing key training initiatives-"and provided my deliverables faster."
Lopez also swiftly built trust and established credibility with people throughout Intel.
"My boss set me up for success," she says...
Read the article. Back to top
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