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| Volume 8, Issue 6 |
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In This Issue:
 What I wish I knew before I became CIO
Four secrets to becoming a rising IT star
You used perl to write WHAT?!
Six free BlackBerry downloads you don't want to miss
 5 easy ways to commit career suicide
Three rules for entry-level hiring
RFID and Wal-Mart: It's all about [your] money
 7 dirty secrets of the security industry
 Eight ways to bridge the IT skills gap
 OK, just admit that Outlook's lame--and fix it, already
Steve Ballmer's letter to Jerry Yang
How to make Yahoo great once again
Tesla Motors opens doors to the rich and famous
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What I wish I knew before I became CIO
CIOs share on-the-job leadership lessons from communication to delegation.
Mentors can be great. But sometimes experience is the best teacher. Five CIOs talk about leadership lessons they learned the hard way -- on the job.
1. How to let go. "I learned this very early in my management career. I had moved from the technical side into management. I was trying to hang on to all my...
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Four secrets to becoming a rising IT star
To make sure your climb up the career ladder goes fast and easy, you'll need to earn the trust of your colleagues and demonstrate your promotability.
Success is not easy or simple. Even in the best of times, workplaces are fraught with changing conditions, political jockeying and limited room for advancement. And these are not the best times. Yet some IT staff manage to get noticed—and in all the right ways.
What are the secrets of their success? How do some IT leaders manage to shine? Beyond the basics—energy, enthusiasm, passion for the work—four important behaviors can help catapult you to success, say CIOs and executive recruiters...
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You used perl to write WHAT?!
Every programming language has its strengths...and its weaknesses. We identify five tasks for which perl is ideally suited, and four that...well, really, shouldn't you choose something else?
We all know that when faced with a job to do, we usually tend to reach for the most familiar tool in our belt. And while perl is certainly a versatile tool, it isn't the right tool for every job. Perl is the granddaddy of the open-source scripting languages,
with the 1.0 release seeing the light of day way back in 1987. By comparison, PHP wasn't released until 1994, and Python didn't have its 0.9 release until 1991—only the Unix shells themselves have an older pedigree. The O'Reilly "Camel" book (Programming perl)
been a ubiquitous presence on cubicle bookshelves for decades. Like any language, perl has its strengths and weaknesses. With that in mind, here's some recommended uses and abuses of the elder statesman of scripting...
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Six free BlackBerry downloads you don't want to miss
Get the most out of your RIM BlackBerry smartphone without ever opening your wallet. Check out the following six free downloads.
One of the best things about Research In Motion (RIM) BlackBerry smartphones is their ability to download and install external applications. Every download adds a new level of value and customization to the devices, and BlackBerry users who don't take advantage
of this functionality simply aren't getting the most out of their smartphones. But like most things in life, the best BlackBerry downloads don't come free--with the exception of the following six applications. They include...
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5 easy ways to commit career suicide
Watch out for these career-derailing missteps.
BANG! Without warning, the rifle discharged, tearing a hole through the floorboard of the car of an Army colonel. The rifle belonged to a young lieutenant who had been invited to go hunting with the colonel. Though no one was hurt, the incident left
everyone in the car shaken. Worse, the lieutenant hindered his own promotion, according to executive coach Bruce Sillers, who was a member of that same battalion at the time of the incident. You may never have committed as grave a faux pas as this lieutenant, and
if so, be thankful. Nonetheless, we're all capable of making mistakes that can send us straight to the career doghouse. Here are five big no-nos to watch out for...
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Three rules for entry-level hiring
What could be easier than filling an entry-level job opening?
You just match the skills you need, narrow the candidates down to those you click with in the interview and then go with a youngster — someone who might stick around for years. After all, you have real work to do. Easy, yes, but wrong on just about every
count. If that's been your approach to filling entry-level positions, you might want to re-examine your assumptions. Here are three hiring guidelines I always keep in mind...
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RFID and Wal-Mart: It's all about [your] money
What if you threw a technology party and nobody came?
Wal-Mart is in that position with RFID. In 2003, the retail giant said it wanted its 100 largest suppliers to put an RFID tag on every pallet of merchandise delivered after
January 2005 -- and the rest of its suppliers to join the party soon after. But as Computerworld's Sharon Gaudin reported last week, it hasn't worked out that way...
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7 dirty secrets of the security industry
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If software were perfect, we’d still have viruses, Trojans, etc., that don’t need software flaws to work."
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Insider tells Interop attendees what to look out for.
Corporate IT executives need to beware the seven dirty secrets of the security industry that can undermine the safety of business networks, a security expert told attendees at Interop Las Vegas. It’s best to have a healthy level of skepticism about what security
vendors are trying to tell you,” says Joshua Corman, principal security strategist for IBM/ISS, which itself is a security vendor. He called his talk "Unsafe at any speed: 7 Dirty Secrets of the Security Industry," harkening back to the 1960s’ Ralph Nader book
about automobile safety, Unsafe at Any Speed. Nader’s book took car makers to task for worrying more about cosmetic improvements that upgrades to make cars more safe. Security vendors have at times invested development money in management GUIs rather than new
security features. And they have a tendency to add features only when customers demand them, he says. “The goal of the security vendor is not to secure, it’s to make money,”
Corman says. He says that is his “zeroth” dirty secret of the security industry. These are the other seven:...
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Eight ways to bridge the IT skills gap
Tips for getting the workforce you need in the skills you lack.
One of the biggest problems CIOs face today is that of workforce development. Though the existence of an all-encompassing IT labor shortage is debatable, many in IT leadership struggle with specific gaps in skills within IT at large. “We consistently hear that
companies and hiring managers have a really hard time finding quality people with the right skills,” says Frank Han, vice president at Robert Half Technology. “There might be a good volume of available candidates, the problem is finding those of high enough
quality to do the job.” Fortunately, there are plenty of ways IT managers can tackle the existing gap in skills and develop a staff that can provide their business with a
competitive edge. The following tips provided by experts in recruiting, workforce research and education offer a good start down that path...
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OK, just admit that Outlook's lame--and fix it, already
Smart e-mail may be a contradiction in terms, but let's get a show of hands: how many of you believe Microsoft is going to supply the answer? I didn't think so.
When the company brain trust repairs to the Ballmer Bunker to chew over its next big idea, post-Yahoo, I've got a suggestion: how about doing something to deal with e-mail and its discontents? Something grand--like bringing Microsoft Outlook into the 21st
century. I don't mean a tweak here and there; I'm talking about a top-to-bottom overhaul. The product debuted in 1997 and has improved very little since. Given the absence of real competition for most of the last decade, you shouldn't be surprised at
the glacial pace of improvement. We saw the same thing in the browser market after Microsoft...
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Steve Ballmer's letter to Jerry Yang
Here is the text of the letter Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent to Yahoo chief Jerry Yang after talks broke down on Saturday.
May 3, 2008
Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.
I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time
that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible...
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How to make Yahoo great once again
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)
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To: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang
From: Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com
Re: Getting your company back on track
Now that Yahoo appears to be on its own path, it's time for the company to find in its past what could again make it great.
Contrary to popular opinion, the key to the future isn't becoming a technological marvel to rival Google. Instead, Yahoo should home in on what made it special before the dot-com bust: The Yahoooooo! (cowboy twang inserted) of yesteryear. Yahoo was an
Internet media pioneer. The company built or bought every massively popular feature on the Web today--think Broadcast.com (video), Launch (music), and Groups (social networks). It also developed an advertising engine that could deliver on the dream
campaign of any marketer with the data to back up that promise. You could argue that Yahoo failed to take advantage of many of those assets in recent years, but the
shortcomings haven't been in vision, they've been in execution. So how does Yahoo move forward? It needs to...
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Tesla Motors opens doors to the rich and famous
Tesla Motors opened its first dealership in Santa Monica, Calif., on Friday, attracting a gaggle of reporters.
The location of the site in the tony Westwood neighborhood reflects the high-end shopping experience it intends to create for the flashy $109,000 Tesla Roadster. The next store, slated to open in San Carlos, Calif. in a couple months, will be set up to appeal to the Silicon Valley tech elite. The company told the Associated Press that it is impressed with demand:...
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