IT Leadership
Three quarters (76.1 percent) of IT professionals in the UK do not feel guilty about carrying out personal tasks while they are at work, according to a survey undertaken by The IT Job Board The figure compares to 75.9 percent in Belgium and 81.6 percent in The Netherlands. This is the first time the online [...]
Continue ReadingI recently met with Mark Shirman, CEO and Founder of Glasshouse Technologies and had the opportunity to get another exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mark is uniquely placed to comment on the recent changes in the Data Center and Storage markets with particular emphasis on Green issues.
For many years Glasshouse has been the leading independent Storage [...]
Global research firm, Gartner Inc, has reported Cordys, a global leader in next generation Business Process Management, as the fastest growing of the leading BPMS vendors worldwide. According to a recent report issued by the research firm, Cordys grew 98.2% year on year in 2007 based on total software revenue.
The Gartner report states that the [...]
I met up with the Mike Klayko the CEO of Brocade last week in the restaurant of the St Regis Hotel in New York (famous for creating the best burgers, bar none, in the city) for an exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mr Klayko is an industry veteran with decades of experience starting at IBM, HP, [...]
One of the strangest things about IT people is that they often miss the obvious until it is explained to them (sometimes with the aid of a hammer). We are all so used to following the rules and doing what everyone else does. This particularly applies to IT Operations, also known as the Command Centre [...]
Continue ReadingMy little brother is in the news again with an article in The Times.
It seemed the most unlikely of joint-billings - the Star Warsdirector George Lucas and a modest Scots initiative to improve e-communication within schools.
In what must rank as one of the most heady compliments ever given to an education system, the film maker announced [...]
I have been catching up on press releases that have come in since I have been on holiday and picked up one from Secerno.
Perimeter application firewall requirement leaves customer data vulnerable to growing insider threat, claims database security expert
Secerno’s products are designed to protect the database by implementing a set of perimeter controls and rules [...]
When I read the headline for this press release from The IT Job Board, I just about fell off my chair laughing. After reading through some of the finding though some things started to hit home.
Research conducted by online recruitment specialist www.theitjobboard.co.uk revealed that of 500 IT workers surveyed for a report on working hours, nearly half [...]
The Daily Mail reports that a UK Government investigation was launched after the personally identifiable information (PII) of more than a million bank customers was found on a computer sold on eBay.
Highly sensitive information on American Express, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland customers was found on the disk array sold for £35.88 (about $72).
The [...]
Continue ReadingI bet that you came up with a big number? Some people I ask sit down and scratch their head and then start listing all of the products and services their companies offer. After a while most folks just give up, overwhelmed by the scale of the simple question I have asked. Try it for [...]
Continue ReadingMy colleague Christian Dalle Nogare lent me a book (embarrassingly many) months ago, The Toyota Way by Professor Jeffrey K. Liker and it has taken the extreme of lying by a pool in the Dominican Republic to get me to the point of reading it.
Like many educated and experienced business managers, I had thought that I [...]
Nearly three quarters of polled The Hot Aisle readers plan to purchase colocation data center capacity in the next six months.
Continue ReadingWhen I saw the most inspirational leader of modern times on the cover page of Time Magazine (July 2008) sharing his Secrets of Leadership, even though Nelson Mandela is 90 years old and retired last century in 1999, I had to pick it up and spend the €4.20.
I bought Time, not because I expected a great insight [...]
So we have a sub prime credit crisis that looks like it might turn into a global recession. IT is expensive and highly visible as well as often seen as non core. If you don’t get your budgets cut this year then you are very lucky and very unusual. I thought that you might like [...]
Continue ReadingFellow blogger Steve Duplessie at Steve’s IT Rants has picked up on the fact that Diane Green has left VMWare after a bad set of financial results. Steve writes a good article and it’s worth a read.
Diane is a victim of heroism via unexpected consequences. Pretty much single handed VMWare has raised the CPE - Compute Power [...]
I first heard this phrase from my good friend and sometime mentor, Danny McNulty, when we worked together at Cable & Wireless. You may have heard of the book What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School by Mark H McCormack, well, just like McCormack, Danny is full of tried and tested management techniques and [...]
Continue ReadingJon Pyke of Cordys has the boundless enthusiasm of a man in his twenties combined with over 30 years of experience at the sharp end of Business Process Management and software development. A rare blend and one I am sure is fueled by his appetite for double expresso, “extra strong please, don’t tell the wife, I am [...]
Continue ReadingAccording to a new online study from Reuters, evaluating the characteristics of 25,000 American adults, avid technology consumers tended to score highly in personality traits such as leadership, dynamism and assertiveness — but low in modesty.
Perhaps this helps to explain why technologists seem to think that every business (and world politics) problem has a technology solution, [...]
The way that most organizations run and manage their IT Operations is unscientific and somewhat random. This leads to overstaffing, poor performance, uncertain customer experience and unpredictability of delivery. It is worth comparing the way that IT Operations is organized with the older, more scientific and mature manufacturing industry.
The Industrial Revolution started in England in earnest around 1780 or so with machine based [...]
You may be very surprised to see that McKinsey believe that Data Center costs are 25% of all IT costs. Many CIOs will find it difficult to reconcile this view with their own budgets. There are a two key reasons why this is a difficult and badly understood process.
Within many organizations many of the data center [...]
Continue ReadingLarge Corporations innovate badly if left to their own devices. The attributes that make large corporates able to operate at scale effectively, mitigate against innovation. Too much bureaucracy, too many rules, and a culture of fitting in with the team make innovative action a rare event in a typical corporate. So how do companies like Cisco, [...]
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