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Category: IT Management
November 20th, 2009
Research paints ugly IT employment picture: Almost 2 million jobs gone in 14 years
The Hackett Group reports that 300,000 IT jobs have disappeared in 2009, a spike that will translate into nearly 2 million eliminated technology positions between 2000 and 2014.
In a report, Hackett notes that IT is taking the brunt as companies cut back-office jobs. In 2009, 630,000 back office jobs will be lost at the world’s largest companies. Overall, there’s an “extended jobless recovery” in “IT, finance, procurement, HR, and other general and administrative (G&A) areas.
Hackett reports:
Longer-term, Hackett’s research estimates that nearly 3.6 million G&A jobs in North America and Europe will have been eliminated between 2000 and 2014. More than half of these losses, or nearly 2 million of these jobs, are in IT, making it the largest back office area to be hit by a wide margin.
Hackett researched 4,000 global companies with $1 billion in revenue.
Also see: TechRepublic’s IT Training Directory · Career management blog · IT leadership blog
The underlying trends behind these job losses are well known. In a nutshell, companies need to keep improving profit losses, jobs are going offshore, outsourcing and process improvements. In a report, Hackett writes:
Hackett’s analysis of close to 4,000 large (over $1 billion in revenue), publicly held companies reveals that as a result of efficiency gains made through automation, process improvement, outsourcing and offshoring, G&A functions cost approximately $333 billion less to run in 2007 than in 2000 for this group of companies. However, these improvements have come at the cost of 1.4 million net back-office G&A jobs at these companies. This job loss occurred despite average annual economic growth of 2.2% during this period, which offset a portion of the jobs eliminated through efficiency gains. On balance, the pre-crisis years showed a healthy trend for an increasingly knowledge-based, industrialized economy, modest net declines in lower-value-added jobs, and net creation of higher-value-added jobs elsewhere in the economy. However, the current economic downturn has disrupted this trend. In order to protect margins in the face of declining revenue, companies have been forced to accelerate G&A cost take-outs.
Here’s a chart of the IT job losses in context of other positions:
November 20th, 2009
CIO Sanity Savers: Five ways to become a more effective executive
This episode of CIO Sanity Savers looks at some time-tested tips that leaders can use to be more effective with their time.
November 19th, 2009
FAA hit with network glitch; Flight plans go manual
Updated: The Federal Aviation Authority is looking into a networking problem that threatens to delay flights across the U.S.
FAA spokesman Les Dorr said that there’s a “problem with the telecommunications network that’s affecting automated processing system” for things like flight plans.
“Anything controllers normally have done automatically have to be done manually,” said Dorr. Indeed, the FAA has a ground stop. Atlanta is the hub that appears to be most affected, reports CBS News.
According to the FAA, the problems reside in the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure, or FTI for short. FTI provides the voice, data, and video communications that support operations and mission support functions at more than 4,000 FAA and Department of Defense (DoD) facilities. Add it up and the network provides for more than 20,000 services such as switching and routing, network monitoring and control.
The FAA is currently investigating the problem. Dorr reiterated that the FAA can track planes with radar and have communication with pilots, but there’s an efficiency issue: You can only keep tabs on so many planes manually.
November 18th, 2009
TR Dojo: Common habits of superstitious computer users
From avoiding upgrades to refusing reboot requests, Bill Detwiler takes a light-hearted look at superstitious end-user habits IT pros should debunk. Once you’ve watched this TR Dojo video, you can find a link to the original TechRepublic article and print the tip from our TR Dojo Blog.
November 12th, 2009
Leading CIOs speak out on hottest IT trends and 2010 budgets [video]
The Society of Information Management hosts a great event every fall to bring IT leaders together for information sharing and inspiration. One of the best things about SIMposium is the opportunity to chat with some of the smartest and most influential CIOs in the world.
I was at SIMposium 09 in Seattle this week and I asked six of the best world’s best CIOs the same two questions:
- What new IT trend is on the top of your radar right now and why?
- What do you think IT spending will look like in 2010?
Here are the CIOs I talked to
- Larry Bonfante, CIO of U.S. Tennis Association
- Curt Pederson, CIO of Oregon State University
- Patricia Coffey, Vice President of Technology for Allstate
- Ed Trainer, CIO of Amtrak
- Tony Scott, CIO of Microsoft
- Peter Whatnell, CIO of Sunoco
Watch their responses in this 15-minute video:
November 10th, 2009
No more servers? Rackspace says IT workers are tired of them
Who among IT workers has never been involved in a mad scramble - a crisis situation, if you will - because of server failure? Maybe it caused your site’s home page to go down or the e-mail system to become disabled or maybe the e-commerce system to crash. Whatever the problem, when a server crashes, it’s never any fun.
In today’s world of virtual everything, the idea of outsourcing server space is something that IT departments are seriously weighing. Today, Rackspace - which, of course, is in the business of providing the server space for businesses - launched a No More Servers campaign and released the results of a survey that found that half of all businesses surveyed would “love to never have to buy another server again.”
It’s been a week chock full of IT surveys. Yesterday, I posted some details on a survey that found that 40 percent of IT professionals (and an even higher number of executives) are still confused by cloud computing - and that could be delaying adoption in the enterprise. Jason Hiner has a posted some results as it relates to CIOs - a post yesterday that revealed that IT budget slashing, which was rampant last year, won’t be as bad this year. In a post today, Hiner revealed that 76 percent of CIOs time is spent on non-technical issues
We’ve written time and time again about how IT workers spend so much time reacting to issues and working to just keep the engine humming that there’s no time left for work that benefits the growth of the business. So what do they spend their time doing? The results of the survey paint that picture:
- IT teams said they spend about 60 percent of their time troubleshooting and managing servers.
- IT managers suffer from “server stress,” who cite the need to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as one of the leading causes.
- More than half (51 percent) admit to making mistakes in the server capacity planning - with 15 percent buying too many servers and 36 percent underestimating their needs.
When it comes to their thoughts on new technologies, 35 percent considered themselves to be “proactive and slightly ahead of the curve” while 28 percent tend to be “cautious and reactive.”
November 10th, 2009
SIM survey: 76% of CIO time is spent on non-technical tasks
One of the questions in the “IT Trend Survey” released on Monday at SIMposium 09 dealt with how IT leaders spend their time. On average, CIOs spend 76% of their time on non-technical stuff, as you can see in the chart at the bottom of this article.
This is a wedge issue for CIOs. They need to spend enough time engaged directly in IT to keep their technical knowledge sharp and maintain the respect of their staff, but they also need to establish themselves as business leaders, and not just technologists, with the company’s top brass.
The chart below provides a breakdown of how CIOs are spending their time, based on the SIM survey.
November 9th, 2009
SIM survey: 52% of CIOs reported diminished IT budgets in 2009, but only 28% for 2010
As part of the “IT Trend Survey” released at SIMposium 09 in Seattle on Monday there was a report from CIOs on budget levels for 2009, and projections for 2010. It was no surprise to see that budgets fell off a cliff in 2009, with 52% reporting 2009 budgets that were smaller than 2008.
The good news was that a smaller number of CIOs are projecting further budget cuts for 2010. Only 28% said that 2010 budgets would be less than 2009, while 45% project budgets as flat from 2009 to 2010. Check out the charts below.
Here is the chart comparing 2009 to 2008:
Here is the chart comparing 2010 to 2009:
November 9th, 2009
CIO top priorities: Productivity and cost reduction, according to SIM survey
A new list of top priorities for IT leaders was revealed on Monday at the SIMposium 09 event in Seattle. IT/business Alignment, a perennial top concern, was bumped out of its No. 1 spot from 2008 and replaced by “Business productivity and cost reduction.” We’ve got the list of the top 10 priorities plus the top six applications that are getting the most investment.
The data comes via the IT Trend Survey from the Society for Information Management, one of the largest and most influential professional organizations for CIOs, IT directors, and aspiring IT executives.
Here were the top priorities that CIOs cited for 2009:
- Business productivity and cost reduction
- IT and business alignment
- Business agility and speed to market
- Business process re-engineering
- IT cost reduction
- IT reliability and efficiency
- IT strategic planning
- Revenue generating IT innovations
- Security and privacy
- CIO leadership role
Here are the top six application and technology investments that CIOs reported for 2009:
- Business intelligence
- Server virtualization
- ERP systems
- Customer/corporate portals
- Enterprise application integration/management (EAI/EAM)
- Continuity planning/disaster recovery
ERP, Portals, and EAI/EAM were all new to the list in 2009. SIM noted that this points to a trend of IT leaders trying to quickly “deliver new services that can reduce the cost of doing business.”
November 9th, 2009
Survey: Cloud confusion among IT could slow enterprise adoption
When it comes to cloud computing, there are a number of people whose definition of it is, well, still in the clouds. What makes that worse is that those people who are still confused by what cloud computing is actual IT professionals, many of whom still see it as “more hype than substance.”
With “cloud computing” still bringing up a number of different definitions and perceptions in the IT community, there are concerns that the adoption of cloud computing technologies among the enterprise may be stalled, according to a survey of IT professionals released today.
October 27th, 2009
Will a flu pandemic really bring down the Internet?
The General Accountability Office has rapped the Department of Homeland Security for failure to plan for Internet congestion in the event of a severe pandemic that could overwhelm networks. The worry: Will the Internet hold up if everyone has to work from home under quarantine?
Here’s the nut of the GAO report (PDF, highlights, Reuters report):
Increased demand during a severe pandemic could exceed the capacities of Internet providers’ access networks for residential users and interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors, according to a DHS study and providers (see figure below). Private Internet providers have limited ability to prioritize traffic or take other actions that could assist critical teleworkers. Some actions, such as reducing customers’ transmission speeds or blocking popular Web sites, could negatively impact e-commerce and require government authorization. However, DHS has not developed a strategy to address potential Internet congestion or worked with federal partners to ensure that sufficient authorities to act exist. It also has not assessed the feasibility of conducting a campaign to obtain public cooperation to reduce nonessential Internet use to relieve congestion. DHS also has not begun coordinating with other federal and private sector entities to assess other actions that could be taken or determine what authorities may be needed to act.
It’s no small issue and I’m well aware of pandemics. My household has its own flu epidemic given we’re all a mess right now.
Is a pandemic—H1N1 or otherwise—a real problem for Internet congestion? Perhaps, but color me skeptical. We’ve heard this before. A few years back it was SARS. Then it was Avian Flu. Today it’s swine flu. The argument is usually the same. The masses work from home. We all start sending around PowerPoints. Things blow up. Read the rest of this entry »
October 26th, 2009
Enterprise IT's trust level of Google will increase
TechRepublic’s CIO Jury finds that IT leaders trust Microsoft more than Google as a technology partner, but tune in next year.
Jason Hiner outlines the latest findings in the TechRepublic CIO Jury. In a nutshell, it looks like this:
So why do I expect Google’s standing to look better next year? Last week, I was at the Gartner IT Symposium and you couldn’t escape chatter about Google and what it may be able to do for the enterprise. And here’s what caught my attention: The audience—not the analysts—were yapping about Google in the enterprise.
October 26th, 2009
IT Exec: iPhone builds goodwill with users
Bill Detwiler talks with James Brown from Talecris about how the benefits of deploying Apple’s iPhone far outweighed the hazards. The biggest perk: Better employee morale.
See also:
October 22nd, 2009
RightNow Technologies CIO talks datacenters, ERP and Windows 7
While attending Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2009, I spoke with Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow Technologies, about the company’s IT plans for 2010. Olson discussed RightNow’s plans to consolidate and rework its datacenters, an upcoming ERP implementation, and the company’s migration to Windows 7.
October 22nd, 2009
How to know when to send your email to the cloud
Email will ultimately move to the cloud/software as a service model, but the math may not add up for larger companies. How do you know when to make the jump?
Gartner analysts Matthew Cain and James Lundy went through the cloud vs. on-premise email conundrum, but what really made the presentation was a series of charts that serve as decision grids for making a move.
I’ve talked to a bunch of IT executives at the Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando and many of them were at least pondering moving email to the cloud. Gartner reckons that 20 percent of email seats will have a SaaS or cloud model by 2012. In addition, smaller companies will lead the cloud email charge, but large enterprises will tag along. Bottom line: Cloud email costs will be 50 percent less than their on-premise counterparts in 2012.
Here’s the comparison:
Lundy and Cain said that email will move to the cloud for the following reasons:
- Hosted models can deliver significant economies of scale. Most organizations don’t scale past tens of thousands of users, while hosts will ultimately provide services for millions of users.
- Browser-based email will lower costs.
- Storage will be cheaper for cloud email providers.
- And the offline access problem will be solved. Gartner expects hosts like Microsoft and Google to offer offline email access in a browser with a 30-day cache.
Nevertheless, cloud email won’t be for everybody. Enter the second useful chart from Lundy and Cain.
The big takeaway is that you have to consider cloud-based email in long-term planning. The challenge is that there are multiple players. Gartner also expects that Cisco will enter the hosted email game to join Google, Microsoft, IBM and a bevy of others.
October 19th, 2009
How did IT fall so far behind the tech curve?
Information technology departments are overloaded, missing the consumerization wave, and failing to use new developments to cut their budgets.
Those are some of the takeaways from a Gartner presentation at the IT Symposium in Orlando. The spiel by Gartner analysts David Mitchell Smith and Tom Austin revolves around the state of IT departments as technology is rapidly being changed by their users. How exactly did IT become so crotchety?
Here’s the scene setter:
October 19th, 2009
Failure as a springboard to success
Fail.
Fail.
Those of you who have been crawling through the undergrowth of the Internet over the last few years will have stumbled across this four-letter gem, typically slapped on a photograph of a dog chasing a Frisbee into a tree or an aesthetically-challenged gent of portly persuasion dressed as a Klingon. When the Internet made kittens playing guitars funny, the next logical step in evo-’lol’-ution was to illustrate and celebrate failure in its many forms. Failure, my friends, should also be embraced in your communities.
Communities are fundamentally networks of people; people with emotions, passions and insecurities. When we connect these people together, particularly in an online environment, the core of the human condition is laid bare. One such element is our attitudes towards failure, particularly when combined with a sense of pride. No one likes to fail, screw up, or get it wrong, and this in-built sense of pride often causes us to internalize these failures and prevents us from embracing and learning from them in our communities. In other words, if we ham-fist something, for many of us our natural inclination is to grit our teeth, wish it had never happened, and step-around said balls-up.
This is particularly tempting for leaders. With many collaborative communities being meritocracies (in which you develop respect based on good work as opposed to driving a Bugati Veyron), the reputations of our leaders are forged out in the open. Our leaders know that this respect can be lost in a heartbeat, and there is often a reluctance to admit to, embrace and work on the opportunities that surround failure. Read the rest of this entry »
October 19th, 2009
Stinks to be the CIO: The 2010 IT budget may spike to 2006 resource levels
Welcome to 2010 with the same resources you had back in 2006 and 2007 (if you’re lucky). Now go out and be useful to the business.
That cheery outlook was delivered by Gartner in its 2010 CIO Agenda talk. Some pep talk, guys. Gartner analyst Mark McDonald opened the talk with some entertaining riffs, but the overall message was clear: Budgets aren’t coming back quickly and CIOs need to evolve or they are screwed.
McDonald took an applause poll of CIOs who are seeing a budget increase of 15 percent, which would only get you back to par from a few years ago, and about three people clapped (in a room with probably 400 IT execs). These three people are likely to be attacked by vendors later today.
The reality: In 2009, 88 percent of enterprises cut their IT budgets. The good news: Even with strong increases in 2010, CIOs will face the future with essentially the same resource levels they had in 2006 or 2007.
Put it into a graph, the IT budget picture goes like this (Gartner updated these figures to a decline of 6.9 percent in 2010 on Monday):
October 19th, 2009
Wither Silicon Valley? IT will be driven by emerging markets
Gartner is projecting that the “worse year ever” for IT spending—down 6.9 percent in 2009—will be followed up with dead-cat spending bounce in 2010 of a meager 3.3 percent. Does this dead-cat IT spending bounce mean traditional tech power centers—notably Silicon Valley—are no longer in the driver’s seat?
Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner, said at the research firm’s Symposium in Orlando that 2009 was the worst spending cycle ever (including 2001). And half of companies will face no budget increases or a decline (see Gartner’s projection).
But his main point is that Silicon Valley will no longer be in charge of the rebound. To wit: The U.S. has trust issues, spending declines and increasing technology risks. Sondergaard said that previous rebounds were led by emerging markets. And given that effect will be magnified going forward, “Silicon Valley is no more in the driver’s seat,” said Sondergaard. As emerging regions resume strong growth and IT spending accelerates there will be “a culturally different approach to IT.”
In the near future—2011, 2012 and beyond—emerging markets will increasingly shape how IT is deployed.
The point is an interesting one. We’ve heard about the death of Silicon Valley forever and Sondergaard is pitching that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) will drive IT spending and how it’s deployed. In the future, the tech centers may be India and China.
Among other key themes from Sondergaard and his merry band of analysts:
- Things are so bad that federal spending on IT is the new emerging market.
- There will be a continued shift from capital spending to operating expenditures.
- Equipment is getting older. In 2010 will be dominated by old equipment. The point: Enterprises have to prepare for increased failure rates. CFO comments like “it still works why replace it” will be the norm.
- A million servers around the world will have their replacements delayed. That’s 3 percent of the installed base. By 2011 that tally will be 10 percent.
- The application roster is bloated. Gartner analyst Andy Kyte noted that companies have a bunch of orphaned applications. When it comes to applications companies are interested in making babies (acquiring software), but not responsible parenting (having any discipline about their application portfolio). Get control of the application portfolio. Everyone is in denial.
- Top 2009 topics were cloud computing, cost and ERP/supply chain management.
- CIOs will need to have a budget based on a rolling forecast. The key will be to position for growth while still cutting expenses. 2010 will feature focus on improving applications and the processes around them.
- The aim for companies will be to create what Sondergaard dubs “pattern-based strategy.” In a nutshell, this approach means developing strategies that adapt and react to changing conditions automatically.
October 12th, 2009
How CIOs can instigate change [video]
IT leaders must know how to instigate change. This episode of CIO Sanity Savers discusses five key factors to help your change initiatives succeed.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.
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