| If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. |
|
| Volume 8, Issue 2 |
|
In This Issue:
 Six quick projects for IT career advancement
Nine consumer technologies CIOs fear
 IT career paths you never dreamed of
Microsoft posts new Windows XP SP3 build for public download
Hands-on: The MacBook Air beyond the hype
 Keep Windows XP until 2009, analysts tell Microsoft
Time to dump Windows?
 Google finds evil all over the web
 Smugglers return iPhones to China
Silicon Valley starts to turn its face to the sun
Patterns: A video game, an M.R.I. and what men’s brains do
 7 ways to get the most out of Millennial employees
 How to kill morale and start an exodus
 Scuttling [your] scut work
|
|
|
 |
Six quick projects for IT career advancement
|
People want to know what's happening and why" |
|
Want to move ahead? These simple tips will help you maximize your ROI on everything from management to hiring practices to job changes and more.
In Praise of Praise
"IT has a lot of risky projects and activities, and many don't go as well as planned," says KeyBank CIO Steve Yates. For many IT executives, that's (unfortunately) an understatement. IT staffers are usually the first to hear about
failures and the last to get credit for success. But CIOs can change that. "People work to be appreciated, not just paid," says Yates. Expressing your appreciation isn't about taking employees out to lunch or giving them bonuses (although the
stomach and wallet are tried and true ways to employees' hearts), but honesty from the boss, leavened with compassion, is the coin of the realm when it comes to rewarding reports. Yates suggests taking 20 minutes every Monday morning or Friday
afternoon to write down your staff's accomplishments—or lack thereof—from the last week. Then walk over and, face to face, thank the people who made good things happen or try to figure out why they did not. "People want to know what's happening and
why," Yates says. "Good performance feedback is a necessity." Yates says people simply do not do their best when working for bosses they don't trust...
Read the article. Back to top
Nine consumer technologies CIOs fear
Some of them get it, and some of them don't. That's what our consumer technology survey found when we polled 311 IT decision makers about their views on consumer technologies in the enterprise.
The survey found that 54 percent of respondents believe consumer applications are "inappropriate for corporate use," while more than a third say they take the draconian measure of shutting down any unsupported technology as soon as they detect
it. So we drilled down and asked them what consumer technologies make them cringe the most. The question was very simple: Which of the following consumer technologies pose the greatest threat to your organization? The respondents were allowed to
select only one. And while there was a clear consensus on the number-one threat, other technologies struck notes of anxiety for survey respondents. Read on to see what they found worrisome...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
IT career paths you never dreamed of
|
If you’re a heads-down programmer, you’re at a terrible disadvantage.” Patti Dodgen, vice president, Mosaica Partners |
|
Your cube is in finance or on the shop floor. Your title has been scrubbed of all geekiness.
Think you want to be a CIO or CTO? Think again. What you might really want is to be a chief delivery officer or chief process officer. Software developers eager to advance should consider looking for product architect roles. Network and security
administrators may want to start looking for positions as electronic privacy specialists. If business analytics is your area of expertise, your next promotion might be to the job of information architect. And one more thing: Don't expect to be
part of an IT department. As a 21st century technology professional, your future -- and most likely your desk -- will be deeply rooted in the business, and your title will likely be scrubbed of any hint of computers, databases, software development
languages or data networks. "We'll see new and made-up titles come about," predicts David McCue, CIO at Computer Sciences Corp., a global consulting, systems
integration and outsourcing company. "I've already seen new cards and new titles like...
Read the article. Back to top
Microsoft posts new Windows XP SP3 build for public download
Release notes, Vista's pattern may hint at SP3 wrapping soon.
Two weeks after it last handed a new build of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) to several thousand invitation-only testers, Microsoft Corp. today posted that version for public downloading. "We're broadening the availability of the release candidate
in order to receive further user feedback prior to the release of Windows XP SP3," a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail Tuesday afternoon. "Windows XP SP3 RC2 will be made publicly available today at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time." On Feb. 7, Microsoft
seeded Release Candidate 2 (RC2) with the 15,000 or so testers who had been working with SP3 for several months. At that time, the company said nothing about taking the version public...
Read the article. Back to top
Hands-on: The MacBook Air beyond the hype
The MacBook Air next to the MacBook Pro.
|
Apple Air has a slim and sexy form factor, but we found some function there too
By now, you've read all about the wildly hyped MacBook Air, the slenderized version of Apple's MacBook line that looks like it's been run over by a steamroller. I had a chance to bang on one of these for awhile, and I'm here to report that Mac-centric
road warriors used to lugging around a 5-lb. MacBook or a 6.8-lb. MacBook Pro — count me in the latter camp — will find the 3-lb. Air to be just what they've been waiting for. This ultralight (if not exactly ultrasmall) laptop comes with a heaping
helping of Mac OS X, a full-size keyboard, a 13.3-in. backlit LCD and even an optional state-of-the-art solid-state drive. What more could you want? Well, how about more than one...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Keep Windows XP until 2009, analysts tell Microsoft
Chances are good that Microsoft will respond if customers keep pushing.
Microsoft should keep Windows XP available until at least 2009, not end the majority of sales on June 30 as currently planned, said analysts at Gartner and The Burton Group. "A good rule of thumb in any OS transition is that you have to have the
original and new products available for at least two years to handle customer [migration] needs," said Richard Jones, a Burton Group vice president and service director. But Microsoft gave customers just 11 months in its original plan, in which
new XP licenses would have ended on Dec. 31, and even the additional six months that Microsoft granted when it changed the date to June 30 is not enough, he said. "It would be wise for XP to be available until the end of 2008," concurred Michael
Silver, a research vice president at Gartner. Even though Microsoft does a good job of addressing application compatibility, those efforts miss homegrown applications and applications from minor and defunct software companies. That's why a two-year
transition period is more sensible, Silver said. [ Learn whether you can get XP after the June 30 cut-off sales date ] Jones said Microsoft may have pushed a too-aggressive transition schedule because of how long it took to release Vista, a
delay that deprived it of new earnings. "Microsoft is up against a rock, with Vista coming out seven years after XP's release. But it's their fault it took seven years,
not my fault," he said, adding that users should not be forced to rush their transition because of Microsoft's internal delays.
Microsoft says it's listening
Microsoft has not rejected the possibility of extending XP's availability beyond June 30, saying it will listen to customer and partner feedback. "That's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially and what will
continue to guide us," a Microsoft spokesperson told Computerworld Australia when asked the company's reaction to InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition effort asking that XP be kept on sale indefinitely. That petition has gathered more than 79,000
signatures. (Microsoft has not responded to InfoWorld's request for a reaction to that petition.) "It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft...
Read the article. Back to top
Time to dump Windows?
|
Can it be done? Is it the right time? Find out what it'll take to finally switch to desktop Mac OS X or Linux.
InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP available indefinitely, not end most sales on June 30 as currently planned, has prompted many readers to suggest that maybe the best answer for those who don't like Vista is to
switch to another operating system completely. "Don't be afraid. Just switch to Linux and become a member of a really free society," wrote Carlos Raul Gutierrez.
[ Find out the deployment secrets of early Vista adopters ] "Windows Vista was the reason I bought a Mac mini. I didn't want my only choices to be an operating system that
would soon be obsolete (XP) or one that was buggy and would break much existing hardware (Vista), and I'm not enough of a geek to use Linux (do things from the command line? Puhleeze...)," wrote "Jack." How realistic is a switch to Linux or
Apple's Mac OS X? For some users...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Google finds evil all over the web
The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.
The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000
Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google. These Web-based attacks, called "drive-by downloads" by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better
security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Smugglers return iPhones to China
|
After China Ships Out iPhones, Smugglers Make It a Return Trip. Factories here churn out iPhones that are exported to the United States and Europe. Then thousands of them are smuggled right back into China.
The strange journey of Apple’s popular iPhone, to nearly every corner of the world, shows what happens when the world’s hottest consumer product defies a company’s attempt to slowly introduce it in new markets. The iPhone has been swept up in a
frenzy of global smuggling and word-of-mouth marketing that leads friends to ask friends, “While you’re in the U.S., would you mind picking up an iPhone for me?” These unofficial distribution networks help explain a mystery that analysts who
follow Apple have been pondering: why is there a large gap between the number of iPhones that Apple says it sold last year, about 3.7 million, and the 2.3 million
that are actually registered on the networks of its wireless partners in the United States and Europe? The answer now seems clear...
Read the article. Back to top
Silicon Valley starts to turn its face to the sun
CAN Silicon Valley become a world leader in cheap and ubiquitous solar panels for the masses?
Given the valley’s tremendous success in recent years with such down-to-earth products as search engines and music players, tackling solar power might seem improbable. Yet some of the valley’s best brains are captivated by the challenge,
and they hope to put the development of solar technologies onto a faster track. There is, after all, a precedent for how the valley tries to approach such tasks, and it’s embodied in Moore’s Law, the maxim made famous by the Intel co-founder
Gordon Moore. Moore’s Law refers to rapid improvements in computer chips — which would be accompanied by declining prices. A link between Moore’s Law and solar technology reflects the engineering reality that computer chips and solar cells have
a lot in common. “A solar cell is just a big specialized chip, so everything we’ve learned about making chips applies,” says Paul Saffo, an associate engineering professor at Stanford and a longtime observer of Silicon Valley. Financial
opportunity also drives innovators to exploit the solar field. “This is the biggest market Silicon Valley has ever...
Read the article. Back to top
Patterns: A video game, an M.R.I. and what men’s brains do
Why does it often seem that men enjoy playing video games more than women? Perhaps because they do.
A new study finds that when men play the games, a part of the brain involved in feelings of reward and addiction becomes much more activated than it does in women.
This may explain why men are more likely to report feeling addicted to video games than women are...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
7 ways to get the most out of Millennial employees
In today’s workplace, many supervisors have to manage people from four different generations, all of which respond to different kinds of carrots, sticks and management styles.
The breakdown: Traditional workers: born before 1946 Baby Boomers: 1946–1964 Generation X:
- Traditional workers: born before 1946
- Baby Boomers: 1946–1964
- Generation X: 1965–1979
- Millennials: 1980–1995
According to anecdotal information and research (see box below), managers in U.S. organizations are having the hardest time managing the newest entrants to the work force. Millennials—also known as Gen Y or the Entitlement Generation—carry the...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
How to kill morale and start an exodus
|
Fewer people doing the same amount of work places a lot of stress on everyone" |
|
The story you're about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. My purpose for writing this is so that by reading it, people might learn what not to do.
Zoe is the departmental director for a 45-person department. Her employees are highly-trained and regulated. Working two different shifts in three locations, they're responsible for making highly-sophisticated components. Although for years
the department was tightly knit with high morale, it wasn't due to Zoe's leadership; she was known as a task master. It was her department supervisors that kept the gears of teamwork well-oiled. Scheduling people to cover two shifts at three
locations is rather tricky. Fortunately, the locations are within fifteen miles of each other, so if one location is short-handed, it's easy for someone else to be
there in just a few minutes. The first crack in Zoe's dam occurred without notice about three years ago...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Scuttling [your] scut work
 |
|
How Much Work Can You Off-Load? Pfizer conducted internal studies to find out just how much time its talent was losing on menial tasks and how much of that work it could outsource
|
|
Pfizer devises a new kind of outsourcing--just for the time-wasting parts of your job.
Come 3 p.m. each day, workers staring at computer screens everywhere share the same dream: a magic button that says click here, and someone else will do this annoying project for you.
ps: by 9 a.m. tomorrow.
Starting this month, that button will become a reality for 10,000 Pfizer employees, though their button actually says oof, short for Office of the Future. "Our Harvard MBA staff was spending a lot of time doing 'support' work, not their actual jobs,"
says Jordan Cohen, senior director of organizational effectiveness. "These are people we hired to develop strategies and innovate. Instead, they were Googling and making PowerPoints." Who is at the other end of that magic button? Two outsourcing
companies in India. Their existence is an extension of the booming Indian outsourcing market, which already handles customer-service and computer programming for U.S. companies, as well as concierge services for executives too busy to answer
email and arrange for dry-cleaning. But Pfizer's move is an acknowledgment that companies are wasting resources by saddling their most-prized workers with their own support work. OOF was born of a financial crisis. In 2005, Pfizer announced a $4
billion annual budget cut to counterbalance the expiration of lucrative drug patents. The company later laid off 10% of its workforce. "It was going to be pretty traumatic," Cohen says. "Were we just going to tighten our belts, or work
differently?" At the time, Cohen was reading Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which profiles India's virtual-assistant companies. After analyzing the activities
of Pfizer employees, he learned that they spend 20% to 40% of their time on four activities...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
Forward to a Friend:
Do you have a friend that would like to receive TechWatchsm?
Perhaps you know a peer within your organization, or associate at a partner company that would
benefit from applying to receive this publication. Inviting a friend to experience the benefits
of joining the BusinessWatch Network is easy! Just FW: this newsletter to the person you know who
may have an interest and ask them to click here http://www.businesswatchnetwork.com Your friend will be glad you did!
|
|
|
If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from TechWatchsm
simply change your status,
or send a letter requesting opt-off to:
The BusinessWatch Network Privacy Mailbox, 1321, Marblehead, MA. 01945
DISCLAIMER: TechWatchsm and the BusinessWatch Networksm are service marks of DMS.
All other trademarks or service marks contained in this email are the property of their respective owners.
At the time of publication, all links in this e-mail functioned properly. However, since many links point
to sites other than businesswatchnetwork.com, some links may become invalid as time passes.
DMS Inc. supports the DMA Privacy Promise and
Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice. We are committed to the proper use of
email and to protecting consumers from fraudulent or inappropriate
offers. Privacy Policy
|
|
|
| |
