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| Volume 6, Issue 7 |
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In This Issue:
 How Indiana cleaned up its big IT mess
IT worker shortage
 We’re not it Palo Alto anymore...
 The new science of hiring
Choose your weapon
Inc. 500 the complete list
 Microsoft to lock pirates out of Vista PCs
The other Google search site
Google offers mini applications to other sites
Climate demands rapid energy conversion, experts say
 Steve Jobs knew of backdating
 Managing IT for a flat world
Best (hiring) practices
 How software platforms revolutionize business
 Five lessons in leadership
The ten commandments of project management
How indispensable should you be?
 Instant Manager etiquette
 Managing competing IT priorities
 The age of technological transparency
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How Indiana cleaned up its big IT mess
CTO says: "The vendors were running wild."
In 18 months, the state of Indiana has gone from disarray to discipline in its
IT infrastructure. Brought in by Governor Mitch Daniels, an experienced IT
management team has cut 230 jobs, consolidated hardware and services,
renegotiated contracts and saved the state $25 million in annual costs. Network
World Senior Editor Carolyn Duffy Marsan interviewed Gerry Weaver, CTO of
Indiana’s Office of Technology, about how he pulled off this remarkable turnaround.
What was the state of Indiana’s IT operations and infrastructure prior to the election of Governor Daniels?
I had just taken early retirement from [Electronic Data Systems]. He brought in
a new management team as you normally do when you change administrations. There was
Karl Browing, who is the CIO, and myself. The first thing we did was assess what we
had. We found a pretty dismal situation. In one of my past lives at EDS, my job was
to go around and fix major problems we had with our biggest clients. Quite frankly,
I have never seen anything in quite as bad of shape as what we had here. Our service
to other government agencies was very poor but at a high price. The management team
was weak. They used the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. There were no
metrics. There were no real business processes in place. They had no strategic plan.
The data center was in complete disarray. There were cables all over the place. It
was a mess. Each agency had its own infrastructure groups supporting PCs, doing
LAN management and server management. The vendors were running wild. We found
some terrible contracts that had been negotiated. There was no disaster recovery.
The statewide network was a huge problem. I don’t want to call it abuse, but there
was definitely misuse of state money...
Read the article. Back to top
IT worker shortage
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CIOs struggle to staff their departments with the right mix of technical expertise and business skills.
For Ed Albrigo, vice president of enterprise programs at Freddie Mac, the talk of
a coming shortage in IT workers is more than idle chitchat. It's already here. In
fact, Albrigo's IT staffing challenges date back three years. Most of the $36.5
billion mortgage financing provider's operations are in McLean, Va., an offshoot
of being chartered by the federal government 35 years ago. "Here in the
Washington metropolitan area, we see a real squeeze for talent given that the
federal government is here, as are a lot of telecom companies and Internet
companies," says Albrigo, who now spends half his working hours on hiring issues.
To cope with the tight labor market, Freddie Mac decided this year to hire from
other locations for its 300 to 400 open IT positions. About 1,600 staff in IT
operations and development, or one-third of the company, will stay in the
Washington, D.C., area, where they have always lived and worked. But Freddie Mac's
new IT hires are likely to come from - and operate out of - Chicago, Dallas and
Atlanta, where the company also has offices. This major change in Freddie Mac's
IT hiring strategy reflects how hard it has gotten to find the right people with
skills such as network infrastructure and
application development,
Albrigo says. "We've decided to look to these other markets to tap critical IT skills and do more of a distributed IT development," he says.
Freddie Mac piloted the strategy in Chicago by hiring a vice president to create
the application-development arm for the loan prospecting group. With six new hires
in Chicago, Albrigo expects to end the year with 150 developers situated there.
The pendulum has swung again. IT professionals who just recently began to breathe
easy in their jobs after the bruising downturn at the beginning of the century
are waking up today to find themselves hotly pursued once more.
Salaries are up.
Signing bonuses and competitive offers are back...
Read the article. Back to top
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We're Not In Palo Alto Anymore...
Nicole Dun made her way through customs at Bangalore International Airport, then
onto a bus bound for Mysore, India, 86 miles away. She was understandably nervous.
A freshly minted 22-year-old computer-science graduate of the University of
California at Davis, she was leaving the United States for the first time and on her
way to her first serious job.
It wasn't at Google, or Cisco, or eBay. Along with about 300 other American
college grads over the next year, Dun has signed on as a software engineer with
Infosys Technologies, the red-hot Indian engineering firm that plans to add
25,000 employees to its 58,000 over the next year. She'll train in Mysore for six
months before joining Infosys's Fremont, California, office...
Read the article. Back to top
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The New Science of Hiring
Care to dramatically enhance your chance of finding great employees? Trade in
your gut instincts for a systematic approach to interviewing, testing, and
evaluating job candidates.
What was her company missing? Susan Bowman asked herself that as soon as she
plopped into her chair at Tri-anim, a medical-supplies distributor in
Sylmar, California. It was two and a half years ago. Bowman had just joined the
company as head of human resources, and her highest priority was improving
the company's hiring. When she arrived, the HR department was basically shut out
of the hiring of salespeople. Bowman wanted to make it more useful, especially
after she noticed some hires were fantastic and others were disappointments.
What Tri-anim was missing--and Bowman fortunately recognized this--was something
most employers in America have been missing: Conventional job interviews don't work.
A typical interview--unstructured, rambling, unfocused--tells the interviewer
almost nothing about job candidates, other than how they seem during a couple
of meetings in a conference room. But what are these people like late at night
and under pressure? What motivates them? How smart are they? Have they handled
tough projects? Do they prefer working alone or are they better with a team?
Regular interviews assess barely any of this, and in fact are miserable predictors
of job success. In technical terms, they have a .2 correlation with predicting
success. Discouraging, isn't it? It would be--except that industrial and
organizational psychologists are on the job, seeking the best ways to evaluate
job candidates. A focused three-part approach can make the hiring process
as standardized and objective as possible--and can help predict the best
performers. The system starts with what is called behavioral interviewing, in
which candidates are barraged with tough questions about how...
Read the article. Back to top
Choose Your Weapon
Remember that not all employee evaluation tests are suitable for hiring. (Myers-Briggs, we're talking to you.)
Here are 10 extensively validated, highly respected tests that are...
Read the article. Back to top
Inc. 500: The Complete List
From iPod accessory makers to health-care service providers, they represent the fastest-growing private companies in America. Browse all 500 rankings
and profiles...
Read the article. Back to top
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Microsoft to lock pirates out of Vista PCs
Windows Vista will have new antipiracy technology that locks people out their PCs
if the operating system isn't activated within 30 days after installation.
If Vista is not activated with a legitimate product registration key in time,
the system will run in "reduced functionality mode" until it is activated, said
Thomas Lindeman, a senior product manager at Microsoft. In this mode, people will
be able to use a Web browser for up to an hour, after which time the system will
log them out, he said. The new technology is part of Microsoft's new
"Software Protection Platform," which the company plans to announce on Wednesday.
It will be part of future versions of all Microsoft products, but debuts in
Windows Vista and Windows Server "Longhorn," said Cori Hartje, director of
Microsoft's Windows Genuine Software Initiative. Vista, the successor to Windows XP,
is slated
to be broadly available in January...
Read the article. Back to top
The other Google search site
Google has created a search site without any Google branding to test new features.
The site, SearchMash,
has a simple blue and white interface with a search bar and
an option to click on "popular searches." Once keywords are entered, the results
page features links to results running down the left side of the page and the top
three image results on the right side...
Read the article. Back to top
Google offers mini applications to other sites
Google has made it easier to add hundreds of miniature programs to third-party
Web sites, in a move that brings features to people instead of making people come
to the search giant's site.
The move means that Google has suddenly jumped ahead of rivals--such as Apple
Computer, Yahoo and Microsoft--that offer small application modules when a person
has installed special software on individual computer desktops. The modules are
called applets, widgets or in Google's case, gadgets.
Google Gadgets--which
have previously been
available for people to add to their personalized Google home page
or to their own computers via Google Desktop software--are now available for Web
page owners to add to their own sites, the company said Tuesday...
Read the article. Back to top
Climate demands rapid energy conversion, experts say
"This is no longer about science. This is about risk management."
--Nathan Lewis, professor at the California Institute of Technology
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--A panel of energy experts called on industry and the
U.S. government to rapidly embrace technologies that reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, including renewable energy, energy efficiency and carbon sequestration.
The Technology Review's
Emerging Technologies Conference at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday hosted a panel titled
"Innovation and the Energy Crisis," where speakers cast global warming as an
urgent problem. Growing energy demand, notably from developing nations such as
India and China, coupled with climate change caused by global warming, have created
a situation that requires both technology and new government policies,
panelists said...
Read the article. Back to top
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Steve Jobs knew of backdating
Apple CEO apologizes after internal investigation shows he was aware of the company backdating employee stock options.
Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs apologized to shareholders Wednesday after
an internal investigation found that he had been aware of the company's practice
of "backdating" employee stock options...
Read the article. Back to top
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Managing IT for a Flat World
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| David Goulden is Chief Financial Officer of EMC |
In the age of the level global playing field, companies will need to rethink the
way they compete, collaborate, and communicate. Our world is flat. According
to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, it became that way around the
year 2000. A convergence of technologies and political events in the late 1990s,
aided in part by a massive investment in information technology, in effect leveled
the playing field and enabled people all over the world to work together.
The "flattening" created a global platform that let more people plug and
play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than ever before
in history. Any business in a flat world, large or small, will have to adjust to
the new realities. In my daily interactions with business and IT leaders around
the world, I often hear about the new competitive rules for the Flat Business era.
Here are a few examples:
• Knowing why is better than knowing how: 24/7 Customer, a customer
life-cycle management company based in Los Gatos, Calif., has successfully
implemented an integrated "multishore" global delivery model from call centers
in India, the Philippines, and Guatemala that handles more than 8 million
customer transactions per month.
Using their own algorithms and analytical models, 24/7 Customer continuously mines
the information generated by its operations to discover better ways for its
customers to interact with their customers, to provide optimal access to resources
such as talent, language skills, and infrastructure, and to enable
faster implementation of customer management processes.
• Extreme collaboration drives extreme performance: Opting for a radical
lightweight design for its next-generation 787 Dreamliner, Boeing (BA) put 80%
of its fabrication in the hands of outside suppliers, compared with 51% for
existing planes. Coordinating the work on three continents of 43 suppliers, some
of them fierce competitors, is an information-flow and communication challenge...
Read the article. Back to top
Best (Hiring) Practices
In today's tight job market, recruiters should avoid alienating potential candidates—who may share their bad impressions with others.
When Sarah Breiner interviewed for a prestigious post-college program at
General Electric (GE) in the fall of 2004, she figured she'd spend the majority
of her on-site meeting discussing her internship and academic experience. Boy was
she wrong. One recruiter she met with asked hardly any questions about her
and, instead, arrogantly talked about his own work experience and how he achieved
his career goals. "He was tooting his own horn," says Breiner, a graduate of New
York University's Stern School of Business. "I got a bad taste in my mouth.
So throughout the day, while meeting with other people, I asked more probing
questions." Because of Breiner's negative interviewing experience, GE lost her
to investment bank JPMorgan Chase (JPM). At JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs (GS),
where she currently works, Breiner feels that teamwork and her background were
valued more highly during the interview process. SELLER'S MARKET. Contrary to
popular belief, the employer isn't always in the driver's seat. And, as the job
market continues to improve and more candidates receive multiple offers, companies
have to work harder to attract a large, high-quality pool of applicants...
Read the article. Back to top
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How Software Platforms Revolutionize Business
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Even the best product design will end up subordinated to the best multi-sided platform.
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You can't see them, but we've all used "software platforms" over the last
few decades, whether they are embedded in the Windows operating system, a cell phone,
or game machine.
In a new book, the authors term software platforms "invisible engines that have
created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past
quarter century." Think of software platforms as ring leaders of ecosystems in which
a few or many companies can participate to reach users. These core products,
like Windows, for example, offer software services that can be used as the basis
for independent developers to build new features. The cell phone has become a
lucrative platform for more than handset makers—also in on the party are makers
of digital cameras, music services, and organizer software. Not only are
existing industries being transformed and sometimes toppled by software platforms,
but new industries are also springing up around them...
Read the article. Back to top
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Five lessons in leadership
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| John Dick, CIO of
Regions Financial Corp |
Five Top CIOs share what their careers have taught them.
The best leaders take their lessons wherever they find them — whether in the hard
knocks of experience, the generosity of mentors or the clear gaze of their employees.
We asked CIOs of five major organizations to share their most important leadership lessons. Here’s what they told us.
The lesson: It’s important to push decisions down into the organization.
Ninety percent of the time, people know what the right answer is, but they may not
have the confidence — particularly when they’re junior-level — to make the call.
Having decisions made lower in the organization provides a more powerful organization.
How I learned it: The “Aha!” moment for me was when I worked at a Big Five
public accounting company. The emphasis there was on coming to the table with a
whole body of work — the term was “completed staff work” — that was a result of
your analysis. That included the situation, an examination of the likely
alternatives and your recommended solution. Rather than stop halfway, you were
expected to provide the client with the right decision.
When I first arrived at Regions, when something needed to be decided — say the timing
of the rollout of a program — some people would come to me and say, “Here’s
the analysis, and here are the alternatives.” And then they’d kind of look at
me, waiting for the decision. To really leverage the power of the organization and
of the people in it, you have to push the decision back to them...
Read the article. Back to top
The Ten Commandments of Project Management
They'll lead your company to the promised land of project-based culture.
In our increasingly project-centric world, the productivity to be gained by good
project management is far too promising to ignore. But for most companies, shifting
to a project-oriented management structure represents great change, and people
resist change, regardless of the benefits that it may bring. Rules and guidelines
are needed, so I’ve devised these commandments. By following them, your company
can position itself to enter the promised land of project-based culture...
Read the article. Back to top
How Indispensable Should You Be?
After World War II, the vacuum cleaner began its meteoric rise as an American household appliance.
It was sold as an amazing labor-saving device to liberate women from the dreary
chore of rug beating. And with that promise, it quickly became a fixture in the
homes of the rapidly growing middle class. For years afterward, it was assumed
that vacuum cleaners did just what we expected: saved labor. But more recently,
scholars have reinterpreted their true effects. It seems that rather than saving
time for other pursuits, vacuum cleaners merely raised the standards for
home cleanliness. Women didn’t spend less time on household chores; they were
just expected to tolerate less dust than before. If they saved time, it was
devoted to other cleaning tasks or vacuuming more frequently. As I watch the
march of personal communication technology, I imagine scholars 50 years from now
coming to much the same conclusions. We may not be getting exactly what we expect
when we adopt these appliances, especially as tools of management. I’m not saying
that these things are useless, but that we don’t really appreciate what’s
happening. Let’s think about it for a moment...
Read the article. Back to top
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Instant Messenger Etiquette
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Office communication just isn't what it used to be.
For folks over 40, the following instant message may look like nothing more
than gobbledygook: "#s look gd… lnch @ 1/ back l8r." But for younger employees,
it's just simple shorthand for: "The numbers look good. I'm leaving for lunch at
1 p.m., and I'll be back later. "Instant messaging isn't just a new technology,
it's also a new language. One that's especially easy to over rely on, misinterpret
and misuse. That goes for co-workers of all ages. The recent crop of grads, those
born in the early 1980s, a.k.a Generation Y, has marched boldly into the adult
workforce over the past four years. They've brought with them a set of
technological tools that makes fax machines, voice mail and spreadsheet software
look positively quaint. They've grown up with scanning, text messaging and Googling,
and they're not about to stop once they've hit the working world. Nor should they.
Those skills are big assets when it comes to multi-tasking and productivity. But
they're also a nightmare for many of their bosses, those over 35 who understand
that while technology is a useful tool, it doesn't replace relationship building
as a primary means for doing business. Today's bosses can't understand why their
young recruits, for all their brains and technical acumen, hardly ever come over
and actually talk to them...
Read the article. Back to top
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Managing Competing IT Priorities
Got too much on your plate? Most IT executives do. Here are a few tips for getting priorities under control.
Alpha Corporation depends on IT to drive revenues through technology enhancements.
Yet the CIO is in a difficult position. She has six lines of business clamoring
for attention and arguing over whose project comes first. To make matters worse,
IT staffing levels remain constant while expectations rise. The pressure to
perform, along with the competing demands from customers, creates a stressful
and confused environment. Project managers are pulled in multiple directions, fitting
in projects for their favorite customers, ignoring other projects and working
long hours. Nothing seems to get done properly and staff is on the verge of
burnout. Luckily, there are ways to manage multiple priorities effectively. Here
four of the most effective actions you can take to manage your organization’s priorities...
Read the article. Back to top
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The Age of Technological Transparency
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Posted by Zonk on Thursday October 05, @04:07PM
from the turn-off-chat-logging dept.
endychavez writes "Executives and politicians may be starting to realize that
privacy is dead and secrets can no longer be kept in the information age.
There is always a technological trail, and transparency is pervasive. Just ask Patricia Dunn and Mark Foley. In a piece at eWeek, Ed Cone from CIO Insight talks about
the specific technologies that brought them down."
From the article: "Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether
as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and
his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival. We
talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web, and hold it up
as a marketing technique and a better way to run an enterprise. Sun's blogging
CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is lobbying the SEC to allow more financial information to
be disclosed online. Corporations are using all manner of web-techs to speak
more directly to stakeholders. But transparency needs to be understood as more
than a slogan or a strategy. It's a reality. It can be imposed on you by the
Internet, whether you want to be transparent or not."...
Read the article. Back to top
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