There are lessons galore to be gleaned from BP’s tragic Gulf oil spill, including some that IT leaders should heed. That’s the message from Patrick Gray, founder and president of Prevoyance Group and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology.
“The most dramatic parallel is that the Gulf oil spill is at its core a technical problem, requiring a technical solution,” Gray writes in a recent post for TechRepublic.com. “So, what lessons can IT learn from this incident?”
The key ones, he says, are accepting culpability, providing regular information updates, maintaining leadership appearances, and having sufficient back-up plan in case Plan B doesn’t work.
“For the IT leader, the spill provides the perfect example of what an outsider sees as you attempt to fix a technical problem,” Gray writes. “Just as you likely do not understand the nuances of directional drilling or blowout prevention, your constituents care little about firewalls and failed SANs. How you as a leader work with your technicians and CEO and inform the rest of the organization about your progress will determine whether you have the IT equivalent of the BP spill or a well-managed and effective remediation.”
If you’re interested in Gray’s complete column, “What BP Can Teach Us About IT,” click here.
EasyStreet managed server clients can avoid a headache that’s afflicting more and more IT organizations — the lack of documentation regarding upgrades and other changes to hardware and software. Consistent with ITIL standards, with control comes flexibility. EasyStreet’s Change Management Procedures are designed to control change while allowing flexibility for today’s rapidly evolving IT systems. EasyStreet’s Change Approval Board (CAB) meets every normal business day to review RFC forms submitted before midnight the prior day to review and approve customer-requested changes and changes to our own infrastructure.
According to a recent paper from IDC, infrastructure control is a growing IT challenge in this era of having to “just get it done.”
“This mindset has tolerated frequent circumvention of change-control policies and best practices and created ‘kludges’ to hardware and software,” the report states. “Network vulnerability and instability have become much more prevalent.”
“The IT manager and front-line IT defender rarely have time to document the ‘standard build’ or conform to all change-management policies,” the report continues. “As a result, it is extremely difficult to determine what the desired state of the system is today or what it should be in the future. In addition, because of this lack of a common reference point, firefighting is the norm in IT.”
And as we all know, uncertainty regarding any aspect of the infrastructure can greatly increase vulnerability for companies large and small.
Click here to read EasyStreet’s Change Management Procedure.
It’s no news that the recent economic downturn has been harsh on IT budgets overall, but a new survey has captured the direct impact on IT salaries. The third annual IT Skills and Salary Report compiled jointly by TechRepublic and Global Knowledge gathered pay information from nearly 20,000 participants.
“The recession has held salaries in check for the IT profession,” the report states. “The average salary for respondents was $82,115, up less than one percent over what was reported in the 2009 IT Skills and Salary Report. This is significantly less than the 10 percent gain seen between 2008 and 2009; however, it is consistent with broader salary trends in the United States.
“Less than half of this year’s respondents (43 percent) reported receiving a salary increase, down from 70 percent in the prior year. Two-thirds of those who reported receiving a raise indicated the primary reason was performance in their current position (65 percent). Over 46 percent indicated their salaries were capped without a raise.”
Eleven percent of the respondents reported that their salaries had been reduced during the past year.
Click here to download the report.
Outsourcing IT can be a strategic benefit as companies regain economic health, says Rudy Puryear, partner at global IT consultancy Bain. His premise is that IT costs were slashed during the recent economic downturn, but recovering companies now run the risk of overspending on IT. By overspending, he feels companies could end up adding unwanted levels of complexity to IT operations and further strain IT’s relationship with other parts of the business.
He recently told Network World magazine that CIOs need to have a game plan for taking advantage of IT outsourcing. He said IT should “use outsourcing as flex capacity to stay lean and mean themselves.”
“It’s critical to have the ability to address the bubbles of IT demands, and then potentially back off of that, without permanently adding to the organization,” Puryear says.
To read the entire article, “From the CEO: 5 Questions CIOs Need to Answer,” click here.
IT professionals have become much more positive about Windows 7 than they were a year ago. Systems security vendor Dell Kace polled about a thousand IT administrators in January and found 87 percent now plan to deploy the new OS, including 46 percent who aren’t even waiting for release of Service Pack 1.
“There’s been a real change in the mindset of IT administrators if we look at the trends in our surveys,” Wynn White, Dell Kace’s vice president of marketing, told IDG. “In April 2009, there was a lot of skepticism toward Windows 7.”
Survey results showed that more than 40 percent plan to roll out Windows 7 this year, with 16 percent having already deployed it. Another 21 percent say implementation is slated for 2011, while four percent plan to deploy it in 2012.
“Some of the biggest concerns with running the operating system are falling by the wayside, compared to a little less than a year ago,” White said. “Stability was a ‘gotcha,’ but it seems Microsoft has done a good job addressing that.”
