All in all, the environment is light-years away from that of the recent past, when Internet deals hinged on a hope and a prayer. The values of Net companies then were based on page views and other assorted metrics. Now the froth has been skimmed. The survivors are generating ad revenue. "Now it's about money."How does this sound for matchmaking? TheKnot.com and Target; or iVillage and Lifetime.
Sometimes it is the surprisingly small things that make big savings. The BBC, for example, put all its taxi bookings on the intranet, saving about £2.50 in administrative cost per booking. Though the BBC's annual taxi bill is still high, the intranet is helping shave an estimated £1.7m off costs.The value of the IBF is that it gives intranet teams a chance to see other organizations' intranets and talk to other intranet teams, which is a rarity because intranets by definition just aren't accessible to outsiders. It's also worth noting the IBF will be having its first U.S. meeting in March in New York.
If you didn't opt-in, delete. Unsolicited emails appealing for donations are almost always fraudulent. Don't be fooled by appearance -- emails can appear legitimate by copying the graphics and language of a legitimate organization. Don't click through to links -- links in emails can lead to "spoofed" Web sites that mirror the look and feel of a genuine organization.
Geoff Bennett, Director of Product Marketing at StreamShield insisted that the research proves that there is a clear difference between the male and female experience when online, suggesting that this may be due to the "two sexes may be using the Internet differently."Men get more spam, spyware, and viruses because of how they use the Internet, even though they know what the threats are. We know what that means.
In 2003, Visa led a series of discussions with MasterCard, American Express and other major card brands to establish a set of security standards and a timetable for complying with them. Yet only one-third of the 400 small and midsize processors, which together handle about 10 percent of all domestic transactions, can say they currently meet the industry's requirements, even though the standards took effect in September 2004. Less than 0.3 percent of the country's roughly five million merchants are known to have taken any compliance steps at all.Thanks to Bruce Schneier for the link. --Mike Pastore
...the Hype Cycle highlights the progression of an emerging technology from conception, to market over-enthusiasm, through a period of disillusionment, to an eventual understanding of the technology's relevance and role in a market or domain.There are three key technology themes for business in this year's Hype Cycle: Collaboration, Next Generation Architecture, and Real World Web. Among the technologies listed in the categories are applications that have already been hyped, and in some cases over-hyped. It's nice to see some of the themes we've been covering at Intranet Journal getting some recognition, such as podcasting, RSS, and corporate blogging. Gartner seems pretty bullish on wikis:
Gartner predicts that Wikis will impact ad hoc collaboration, group authoring, content management, web site management, innovation, project execution and research and development.--Mike Pastore
The software vendor, through a division it created two years ago to investigate cybercrime, provided the FBI with technical information and analytical support that was then shared with Turkish and Moroccan police.As it stands now, it looks like the suspects -- two males, 18 and 21 years old -- will be prosecuted in their own countries rather than being extradited to the U.S.
One thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse.You'll find me on the golf course tomorrow. Have a nice weekend. Thanks to Ed Bott for the link. -- Mike Pastore
Datamations James Maguire filed a thorough report recently on the good news in the IT job market:
The job market for tech workers has rebounded considerably since the dark days of 2000 and 2001, according to a recent report by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.John Challenger, the firms CEO, tells Datamation that hes bullish on tech hiring. Its a strong job market for IT, he says. Its picked up in the last two to three years -- quite heavily.
& Between the first and second quarters of this year, job hiring announcements spiked 184 percent, according to Challenger figures.
One (reason) is the media, everyone's favorite whipping boy these days. Let's face it (and I've been a journalist long enough to know), the press is hesitant to ever credit a Republican president for a strong economy for fear it might help the GOP win the next election and prove correct all of those absurd ideas like tax cuts.A second reason, I believe, is superstition. Not just economically, but psychically, we took a devastating double whammy from the one-two punches of the tech crash of 2000 and September 11, 2001. One of the greatest economic miracles of modern times is how the U.S. managed to come all of the way back from that multi-trillion-dollar loss in only a half decade. But no one seems to want to talk about that because, psychologically, I think we are still shell-shocked."
Lets hope this latest boom will produce many great products, lots of jobs, more media coverage & but fewer out-of-control venture capitalists and lame-brained entrepreneurs.
Given that India's been doubling its outsourcing operations every year for the past four years, Chohan said he's not too surprised by the current imbalance in the labor demand-supply equation as well as the onset of wage inflation and high levels of attrition.Outsourcing is going to follow the cheap labor. The Gartner report mentions the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Hungary and Poland, as those who can challenge India as the outsourcing capital of the world. --Mike Pastore
When I finally tried it on a fourth computer at work, I realized that the disc was a DVD, not a CD. Have I mentioned I can be a bit dim-witted? None of the machines I used had a DVD drive.And he felt compelled to include this in his review because... Ed did find a review he liked, and not only because it took a favorable view of Vista Beta 1, but because it had substance. It's in Government Computing News (you can find it here), and it talks quite a bit about the new security features in Vista. And since security is the most popular topic when Microsoft comes up, that seems like a good place to start. --Mike Pastore
It was not that long ago that Google reigned here as the upstart computer company that could do no wrong. Now some working in the technology field are starting to draw comparisons between Google and Microsoft, the company in Redmond, Wash., that Silicon Valley loves most to hate.And here's one of the article's money quotes:
"In the day, you'd hear that Microsoft was the evil empire, especially in Silicon Valley," said Brian Lent, president of Medio Systems, a start-up in Seattle working on mobile-phone-based search. "Google is the new evil empire, because they're in such a powerful position in terms of control. They have potential monopolistic control over access to information."That last sentence, if true, is pretty scary. It'll be interesting to see how things continue to evolve. But for many people in the tech industry who root for the underdog, it seems Google has jumped the shark.
While very powerful, e-mail is not inherently secure across organizational boundaries and provides very little structure for teams to work together. As the volume of e-mail increases, important items are increasingly lost in a sea of information. Keeping track of approvals or the latest version of documents is difficult if not impossible. The bottom line is that e-mail is an ineffective tool for team collaboration.The result, according to the author, is an increase in collaborative team spaces, including the new one Oracle (surprise!) unveiled this week. All of the familiar names are involved in the space. In addition to Oracle, IBM has its Lotus Workspace product and Microsoft has both its Groove and SharePoint products. There are some other names that have been doing the workspace thing for some time: SiteScape's Forum and WebWorkZone and Documentum's eRoom come to mind. I do hear one major concern about these workspace products, and that's the fine line they have to tread between letting the users have control and making sure the sites and forums don't proliferate out of control. As we've increased our coverage of SharePoint on Intranet Journal I've heard from several people with horror stories about Windows SharePoint Services sites getting out of control. Those who turn to collaborative workspaces have to ensure they don't repeat the problems of e-mail. Otherwise they have to go back to using the telephone. --Mike Pastore
As people walk past the posters they receive a message on their phone asking them if they wish to accept the advert. If they do, they can receive movies, animations, music, or still images further promoting the advertised product.This is all part of the cycle of technology where something fills an important purpose, then it gets abused and a backlash is created. It happened with the telephone, where marketers get much of the blame. It happened with cell phones, where rude people ruined it. It happened with e-mail, when it became a conduit for spam. Before you know it, you're perfectly willing to live without something you needed not all that long ago. --Mike Pastore
Since you don't have to put out a lot of capital to start, you're going to see a real creative wave of products.Low capital costs are, of course, a radical departure from the days when software start-ups spent like wild on technology using funds from venture capitalists. This is all possible, according to those in the article, because the quality of open source software has improved.
In the past, one had to have plenty of technical know-how and patience to use open-source software. Although tech know-how is still required, the programs have gotten much easier to use and the support much better.The anecdotes in the article seem to prove that using open source software and keeping hardware costs down can speed time to market. And I would assume the creativity increase comes from the low capital opening doors for just about everyone. We've been through this before, I think, back when anyone's good idea could become a stock market darling. But these entrepreneurs don't have to deal with VCs that think they know everything. We'll see if they do any better without them. --Mike Pastore
My company's research shows that roughly two-thirds of most IT staffers' time is spent on the installation, migration, patching, security and compliance work that, while clearly necessary, contributes little or no direct business value. In some organizations, the figure is closer to 90%.That's frightening. It's no wonder people are trying to place blame for viruses and patches. Many organization may turn to Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) to help solve complexity and redundancy issues, but that won't be a quick or easy fix.
In the short run, SOA actually increases system complexity and requires conceptual and architectural skills that many IT departments sorely lack. Most enterprises are still experimenting, and even the leading vendors talk about a relatively slow transition, with the real momentum for SOA not building until 2007 or so.Any organization spending 90 percent of its time patching systems and doing installations and migrations has deeper issues. And, as the article points out, reducing those issues is what's needed. Not more software thrown at the problem. --Mike Pastore
Despite our long hours and good intentions, content aggregators throw this site-centric idea out the window. They allow users to bypass a large portion of the design, whose sole purpose is to get them to target content. In this way the information architecture the designer envisioned may go unused, with users never clicking on the carefully crafted navigation links, never using the location-specific breadcrumbs, and in some cases never even seeing the much-fretted-over home page.The writer recommends that as part of their re-thinking designers follow a few steps: embrace Web standards, focus on the page level, design for different aggregator types, and move toward user-driven aggregation systems. Thanks to the daily headlines at Shore Communications for the link. If your role in your organization is at all related to content, it's a must read. --Mike Pastore
The most productive meetings are always with customers -- internal or external. Too many internal meetings are spent arguing about resources or the allocation of costs. The worst meetings are those that try to solve the conundrum of transfer pricing between internal organizations, like IT and manufacturing. Just remember that no company becomes great doing business with itself.He also advocates new ways to measure production:
Too many companies measure productivity on intermediate results, such as lines of code produced per day. What does that matter if the code is never implemented or accomplishes no real improvement in how the business runs?--Mike Pastore
Based on the fear of losing personal information, fewer consumers than last year are willing to provide personal preference and demographic information in exchange for personalized content, according to the survey. In 2005, 59% of respondents indicated a willingness to provide preference information, down six percent from 2004. Additionally, 46% of respondents are willing to provide demographic data in 2005, down 11% from 2004.Personalization makes it easier for online visitors to find things, and should, in turn, make them happier customers. At least, that's what happens when it's done properly. One thing is clear from the survey: Not only do organizations have to make visitors aware of their policies regarding personal information, they have to make sure the information is secure. --Mike Pastore
Key findings indicate that 36 percent of the firms surveyed were not yet archiving e-mail. More surprising, 20 percent said they were not even aware of the requirements. However, 80 percent of the firms that were not currently archiving have plans to do so.Then there is another group:
Even though their privacy was assured, more than half of the broker-dealers contacted refused to participate in the survey. These firms were not counted in the study results.Is there any wonder people don't trust Wall Street? --Mike Pastore
The important point here is that brand names get established because people want to sell stuff, and brands help them simplify the process of explaining what the stuff they're trying to sell is for.And, of course, Microsoft is not alone. There is a whole list of organizations that call RSS by another name.
Anti-phishing is the newest area of Internet security, says the [Anti-Phishing Working Group] APWG's Dave Jevans. There are a number of companies providing innovative products and services in this area, but it's still a new and evolving science. Also, internal education can be an important factor. This is especially true when educating employees about avoiding internal phishing, i.e., attacks designed to spoof IT administrators and steal access credentials to internal systems.We have already seen software to battle phishing scams. There is SpoofStick from CoreStreet and there are components to fight phishing in the next version of Internet Explorer. And there is more software to come. But how effective is this software if people don't know about it? It's a safe assumption that the readers of eSecurityPlanet are not the victims of phishing scams. A report that is almost a year old found phishing scams cost U.S. victims $500 million. You don't have to be a security software genius to think most of the victims are elderly or poorly educated. And here's another interesting fact about phishing:
The Anti-Phishing Working Group reports that more than 3,326 phishing sites were operating as of May 2005, with more than 107 trusted brands having been hijacked to perpetrate attacks.That's 107 banks, credit cards, online auction sites, and of course PayPal. I know my bank has a warning on its Web site about fraudulent e-mail scams. I know I've never read it. But I wrote a rather lengthy guide to identity theft that included information on how to detect a phishing scam. Where are the public service announcements on TV warning people and educating people about these scams? Yes, there are resources online, but how Internet savvy are the victims of these scams? We still have so many PSAs about drug use they have their own Web site. Where are the banking associations and the government? Five hundred million dollars bilked from Americans and we're relying on software solutions instead of spreading the word where the victims will hear it. The word needs to get out that when you're asked for personal financial information online, just say no.
The distribution dynamics of Flash versus browsers -- this lowest common denominator problem you have when you rely on features that are shared across browsers -- is a fundamental issue that is going to leave a lot of people dissatisfied with how far they can go with the AJAX technique.
The gatekeeper of the world's information could become one of the globe's biggest Internet providers and one of its most powerful ad sellers, basically supplanting telecoms in one fell swoop.There is a rather simple explanation why Google would get into the network business. Put simply, the company's oft-stated goal is to organize the world's information and make it accessible. And as I know from covering content management and intranet technologies, the amount of information in the world is growing at an astronomical pace. This presents a basic challenge for Google.
Every time a user performs a search on Google, the data is transmitted over a network owned by an ISP -- say, Comcast -- which links up with Google's servers via a wholesaler like AboveNet. When AboveNet bridges that gap between Google and Comcast, Google has to pay as much as $60 per megabit in IP transit fees. As Google adds bandwidth-intensive services, those costs will increase.Once Google has a network built, the article says, it could offer services to consumers. The company already took part in a project to add Wi-Fi to San Francisco's trendy Union Square shopping district. Google has already done a very good job organizing the world's information, perhaps this is how they make it accessible.
...boredom is a condition that can be more stressful and damaging than overwork, according to those who have studied the issue. "We know that 55 percent of all U.S. employees are not engaged at work. They are basically in a holding pattern. They feel like their capabilities aren't being tapped into and utilized and therefore, they really don't have a psychological connection to the organization," said Curt W. Coffman, global practice leader at the Gallup Organization, whose large polling group measured employee engagement.It says in the article that the busiest employees are the happiest. A survey by Sirota Consulting of more than 800,000 employees at 61 organizations worldwide found that those with "too little work" gave an overall job satisfaction rating of 49 out of 100, while those with "too much work" had a rating of 57.
"Those who are saying their workload is heavier rather than lighter are more positive," said Jeffrey M. Saltzman, chief executive of Sirota. "When you say you have too much work to do, other things are happening in your head: 'I'm valued by the organization. They're giving me responsibility.' That's better than being in the other place where you say I'm not of value in this place.The story, which I highly recommend reading, is full of interesting little anecdotes. It points out that airport screeners have a program in place to deal with boredom: they rotate positions every 30 minutes, which isn't something we can all do. There's a charming story about a bureacrat who sneaks off to the movies during the day and runs into a colleague at the theater; and another about a contractor with a soft spot in her heart for Tolstoy:
...she brought [sic] copy of "War and Peace" to work. She finished it in two weeks.The point is you have to keep your employees busy to keep them happy and make them feel valuable. All but unmentioned in the article is the fine line between busy and overworked to death. I personally like being busy, but your opinion may vary. A look at the related articles to the MSNBC story suggests boredom may be an issue at both work and home, despite our 300 TV channels, the Internet, gaming consoles, and satellite radio. Listed among the headlines: "Cheating wife says she's bored by husband."
"...blog publishers should benefit overall from its discovery that the blog audience is both richer and younger than the overall Internet audience."For those interested in the sniping and screeching among those with an inflated sense of self-importance (it is a Friday in August after all) the exchanges in the article between Jason Calacanis, publisher of Weblogs Inc. Network (WIN) and Nick Denton, the Gawker Media publisher who sponsored the study and likes its results, are pretty good. Says Denton:
"I know it galls Jason Calacanis that his sites are about as memorable as Burger King franchises, and that none register among the top blogs, except Pete Rojas's Engadget."As entertaining as the exchanges in the article were, it's important for IT managers to remember a couple of things about blogs and the underlying technolgy. 1) RSS has the potential to be a very useful technology in the enterprise for applications that don't involve blogging. Witness what KnowNow is doing in that area. 2) Corporate blogging has its own risks and benefits, and it would be wise to nail down an obective before you or your employees take it on.
Moti Tzur, a sales manager at Sakal Electronics Ltd. in Jerusalem, says the constant changes do little to confound manufacturers, sales representatives or consumers. "We get up and change the time on the VCR ourselves," Tzur said. "These things come with directions."And not with this one:
But while other countries have coped, Americans have largely become complacent and expect many clocks to change automatically because dates have been set for two decades, said Lauren Weinstein, a veteran technologist. "Missiles wont be launching but it's still going to cause a lot of hassle," he said. Risks grow when "things advance to the point where you expect things to happen automatically and you expect it to be correct."You want a hassle? Trying having no power at work in August.
Cancel your meeting if you think you no longer need to have it or if everyone is not prepared. Never, I repeat, never have a meeting just for the sake of having it.and
Start on time.There is also a tip about effective leadership. Many years ago I was part of a group organizing an event, and we held weekly meetings. It always seemed some of the participants couldn't make the meeting from time to time. But when they did show up, they would bring up issues we thought we resolved the week earlier. The leaders were unable to say those issues were settled and move on, but instead they would put them back on the table. That was the most frustrating meeting experience of my life. And yes, I know that anecdote was vague. And yes, I did that on purpose.
A quarter of current American employees will be retiring within the next five years. If the outgoing masses know anything of value and it is not being passed down to others in their companies, those organisations face a brain drain that could harm their ability to operate.Parkin points to an Accenture survey that found some pretty scary results:
...one-quarter (26 percent) of respondents said that their organizations will let them retire without any transfer of knowledge. Just 20 percent said they anticipate an intensive, months-long process of knowledge transfer prior to their leaving, 28 percent said they believe the knowledge-transfer process will last one or two weeks, and 16 percent think they will simply have an informal discussion with others in the organization prior to retirement.Common sense says this a potentially huge problem in IT departments because technology changes so quickly. It got me thinking about IBM's recent news coming from their mainframe business. In a few years, who exactly is going to know how to run a mainframe? As it turns out, EarthWebNews published a story just last month that asked the same question.
Clipper Group analyst Mike Kahn said the problems facing mainframe customers are legitimate concerns. "One of them is: 'Where am I going to get my next generation of systems programmers and analysts because the kids they are getting out of school used to do C and now they do Java, and what good is all of this going to do unless I'm running Windows and Linux?'"There's probably an opportunity here for some of those boomers to make a little extra dough on the side once their 9 to 5 days are over. But Accenture says companies aren't taking advantage of it.
Just one-third (34 percent) of respondents reported that their companies hire retired employees as contractors so those former employees can transfer their knowledge and skills to their replacements.Food for thought if your IT staff is getting ready to call it a career.
