Did you know May is National Bike Month and today (May 18) is Bike to Work Day? In support of that effort, I did just that and rode my bike to the office today:
Yes, even telecommuters can bike to work!
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Service Assurance Weekly Reading List
Did you miss these six stories this week? Get caught up now:
- Twitter Tech Support: How Effective Is Tweeting a Tech Problem?
Comcast pioneered Twitter support and others are starting to follow the lead. Does your company offer tech support via Twitter? - The IT paradox: A diminished role in technology, but greater clout in the business
As technology becomes easier to use, it becomes more complex internally, and IT is less necessary in some ways, yet more essential in others. - Oracle / Google Verdict Suggests Open-ness Must Be Licensed
The battle over Java licensing results in some interesting implications over licensing “open” software. - Application performance management tools: A must-have for the cloud
As organizations move apps to the cloud, APM tools become more important. - Sides dig in as FBI warns of ‘going dark’ in online era
Privacy and civil liberty advocates argue the FBI has not established the need to amend wiretap law to create online ‘back doors’ to track crime. - Where is the energy spent inside my app?
A whitepaper from Microsoft that shows what drains a smartphone battery.
What’s on your reading list this week? Leave a comment below or tweet your response to @CASvcAssur.
IT Employees Engaged But Not Married to the Job
Are your IT employees happy on the job?
The good news is that three quarters of IT workers surveyed by Randstad Technologies are engaged on the job and loyal to the organization they work for. The bad news is, despite the stated loyalty and happiness, just over half of the same employees said they plan to look for other employment when job market opens up a bit more.
You read that right: Despite feeling engaged at work and loyal to the company, the latest Randstad Engagement Index shows that IT people are a restless bunch and are willing to jump ship for a grass-is-greener opportunity. With 59% of surveyed workers believing the job market will improve in 2012, it won’t be long before some of your key workers start sharpening their resumes, pressing those interview suits and looking to move on.
Service Assurance Weekly Reading List
Six items you might have missed this week that we think are worth reading:
- The ‘Occupy IT’ Movement of Organizations
Business units and its constituents are now employing an “Occupy IT” movement due to, in part, the belief (whether right or wrong) that IT has morphed into the 1%. - Time to Host a ‘Hackathon’ of Your Own
Mike Vizard says companies should have business people and developers sit down together to hack code. Does your organization do this? - BYOD policy bites vacationing CEO
Mimecast CEO Peter Bauer recently found himself at the intersection of consumerization and IT management, falling victim to personal data loss as the result of the internal management policy he himself helped establish. - Cloud Could Cut $12 Billion from US Government Annual Deficit: Study
The cloud won’t prevent the government from buying $400 hammers, but the technology could save taxpayers a few bucks. - Cracking Classic Technology: The TRS-80 Model 100
The “Trash-80” was the computing platform of choice at my junior high school. Even then they were outdated. - Yesterday The Boston Globe ended all your tomorrows
This might be more inside-journalism but is yet another example of how the digital age is changing the way we communicate.
What’s on your reading list this week? Share in the comments below or tweet us @CASvcAssur.
Service Assurance Weekly Reading List
Five items you might have missed this week that we recommend reading:
- Meet Google’s secret weapon for fighting Apple and Microsoft
TechRepublic editor Jason Hiner tells the back story of Motorola’s Webtop software, which just may give Google a big advantage in the brave new world of post-PC devices. - The upside of shadow IT
Rather than standing in the way, some of the savviest CIOs are embracing and even encouraging so-called rogue IT. - Five Cloud Trends That Will Impact Your Business
It’s no secret that cloud computing is transforming the technology landscape. The notion of shifting all or part of a company’s IT resources to a cloud provider is forcing CTOs around the country to re-examine their IT shops. - IPv6 Home Networking Pilot Market Launch Begins
If you’re a Comcast customer, IPv6 could be coming to your home router sooner than later. As this ComcastVoices post notes, the company has begun rolling out IPv6 for home routers in a number of test markets after successfully rolling out single-PC IPv6 support back in November. - Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week
There’s a century of research establishing the undeniable fact that working more than 40 hours per week actually decreases productivity.
What’s on your reading list this week? Please leave a comment here or let us know via Twitter @CASvcAssur.
Bevy of Tools to Keep Remote Workers in Touch
One of the perks of working for CA Technologies is the ability to work from home full-time. I’ve been doing this for almost a year now and while I don’t miss my old commute hour-each-way commute, I sometimes miss the people. (No offense to my dog, Henry, who is great company here at the house.)
Thankfully, there are a number of tools and technology to keep me connected with my colleagues around the country. We use Microsoft Communicator for instant messaging and I can dial in to the corporate phone bridge without looking at the keypad, both of which I rely on for the connection to the outside world. But sometimes you miss actually seeing people.
Measuring Service Quality in the Cloud
Quantifying business service performance can represent a bit of a challenge for IT organizations supporting sophisticated environments and relying on external service providers in part to deliver IT services to end users and customers. The Service Measurement Index (SMI) could be the answer for high-tech organizations struggling to understand how services perform across hybrid cloud environments.
The growing popularity of cloud computing and the trend toward sending services outside of the company is causing some to wonder how they can gage performance off premise. Some companies are opting to develop private clouds, others rely mostly on public cloud offerings, but many are choosing the third option: hybrid cloud environments. That means not only are IT organizations providing business services across an internal infrastructure, but they are also depending upon third parties to deliver services to end users and customers. While there may be obvious operational, cost and other benefits, monitoring and measuring the performance of these services across disparate environments could stump some IT leaders and prevent them from realizing the full value of cloud services.
This problem certainly isn’t new, even if it is taking a fresh form under the cloud moniker. Applications teams have long worked toward better understanding application performance, in particular, from the end-user perspective. Efforts put into measuring how an internal user might encounter an application versus someone logging in remotely help those teams design better applications. And network teams would have to determine how an Internet service provider impacted the speed of the network across multiple locations from the local-area to the wide-area network. These types of measurement efforts and performance metrics now must be applied to the cloud.
Rolling Out a New App? How to Avoid 3 Performance Pitfalls
New applications bring the promise of increased productivity, happier end users and better business benefits. But if the new app stalls on the network, IT managers will only be hearing about the problems the technology causes.
Casey Louisiana, sales engineer at Network Instruments (a CA Technologies partner), meets with customers regularly as they work to deploy applications and keep the network running smoothly. He says there are a few common situations that happen frequently, which could be easily avoided. Here he offers a few fixes for these often overlooked areas when rolling out a new application.
Configuring Quality of Service
Often when IT departments are looking to add, say, voice over IP, to their application mix quality of service sometimes becomes an afterthought. With different management metrics for traffic (for instance, voice and data behave differently) and various prioritizations for some application traffic, IT managers don’t always configure routers, switches, servers and the like to optimally handle the traffic.
Dell Set to Acquire Wyse Technology
Dell Monday announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire for an undisclosed sum Wyse Technology and its “cloud client computing” technologies. The pending acquisition would extend Dell’s desktop virtualization capabilities and strengthen its cloud strategy, according to a press release.
Can Hardware Vendors Make the Switch to Software?
Dell intends to use the Wyse Technology purchase to offer customers “tailored solutions to meet their needs.” Specifically, Dell plans to tap into Wyse’s thin client technology to extend its own desktop virtualization offerings. Wyse also offers cloud software that provides management, virtualization and mobility capabilities. The Wyse portfolio includes thin, zero and cloud PC clients with management, desktop virtualization and cloud software for desktops, laptops and mobile devices.
Service Assurance Daily Weekly Reading List
CA CTO: Don’t Just Complain About the IT Skills Crisis, Do Something About it
ComputerworldUK reported on the e-skills Information Technology Management for Business (ITMB) degree program in England, with commentary from CA Technologies CTO and e-skills advocate Colin Bannister. He says, “The success of the degree is down to it filling a gap in the market for graduates that understand both business and technology.”
Case Based in China Puts a Face on Persistent Hacking
The New York Times technology section shared the details of a hacking case based in China that points to the persistent number of attacks originating in China and targeting other countries. The article also includes data from a report by Trend Micro, which has offices in Tokyo.
Despite a large technology partnership, Apple and Samsung are battling it out in court, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. While products like the iPad and iPhone depend upon Samsung parts and Apple is Samsung’s largest customers, the two vendors continue to go to court over what Apple calls copycat products.
Making Mobile Happen in 2012
Consumer-driven IT is here, and a majority of CIOs recently polled either already offer a mobile application or plan to do so in the coming year.
According to data collected by Robert Half Technology, 27% of some 1,400 CIOs polled said their organizations already offer a mobile application. Another 22% reported that they plan to offer a mobile application in 2012. The survey, conducted by an independent research firm, asked CIOs about their plans to offer mobile applications and also revealed that 43% don’t intend to develop or provide a mobile application in the next 12 months. Nearly 10% weren’t sure of their plans.
Planning to offer mobile applications introduces its own problems to the organization, CIOs say, with concerns ranging from cross-department collaboration to in-demand skills sets. When asked what the greatest challenges IT teams encountered, 29% said collaborating across departments. Twenty-eight percent pointed to finding and hiring IT professionals with the necessary expertise as their greatest challenge. Nearly one-fifth said that keeping the application up-to-date was the biggest hurdle, and 16% reported that getting approvals from the app store posed a problem.
- The Paradigm Shift: Software Defined Networks, Software Driven Networks and OpenFlow
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Bringing Innovation Back to IT
- Rolling Out a New App? How to Avoid 3 Performance Pitfalls
- More Tech Jobs Coming to a City Near You?
- Invest in End-User Education, Save Time and Money
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Supporting Bike To Work Day
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Analyst: APM a Must-Have for the Cloud
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Is Your Network Ready for the Video Deluge?
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IT is the Best of Times and the Worst of Times
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Letting You In On The Best Kept Technology Secret
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Ann Bednarz: You're a dork, but it made me laugh. Wish we coul...
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