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Record Management, Retention, and Destruction Policy

    
 
Record Management PolicyA record is essentially any material that contains information about your company’s plans, results, policies or performance. In other words, anything about your company that can be represented with words or numbers can be considered a business record – and you are now expected to retain and manage every one of those records, for several years or even permanently depending on the nature of the information. The need to manage potentially millions of records each year creates many new challenges for your business, and especially for your IT managers who must come up with rock-solid solutions to securely store and manage all this data.

The Record Management, Retention, and Destruction is a detail policy template which can be utilized on day one to create a records management process.  Included with the policy are forms for establishing the record management retention and destruction schedule and a full job description with responsibilities for the Manager Records Administration.

Record Retention Requirements

You areas included with this policy template are:

  • Record retention requirements for SOX sections 103a, 302, 404, 409, 801a and 802.
  • Policy
  • Standard
  • Scope
  • Responsibilities
  • Record Management
  • Compliance and Enforcement
  • Email Retention and Compliance
  • Job Description Manager Record Administrator
  • 12 forms for Record Retention and Disposition Schedule

You can download the Table of Contests and selected pages for this policy template.

   

 

Other Individual Policies

All of the policies that are provided here are contained within one or more of the templates that are on this site. These policies have been added as individual documents in WORD format (WORD 2003 and WORD 2007) for those clients who just need this particular policy.  All policies are Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and Patriot Act compliant.

 

Backup and Backup Retention Policy

Backup Policy & Backup RetentionThe Backup and Backup Retention policy is an 11 page sample policy that is a complete policy which can be implemented immediately. 

The document is provided in both Word 2003 and Word 2007 formats and is easily modified.  This policy is included in the Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template.

  

 

Below is a table from the policy.

Type of Data

Minimal Backup Policy

Backup Retention Policy

System software

Latest Version plus patches
 At Least Weekly

Annual (verified) Backup
Monthly Generations
Weekly Generations

Application software

Latest Version plus patches
At Least Weekly

Annual (verified) Backup
Monthly Generations
Weekly Generations

System data

Daily

Annual (verified) Backup
Monthly Generations
Weekly Generations
Daily Generations

Application Data

Daily with real time transaction files

Annual (verified) Backup
Monthly Generations
Weekly Generations
Daily Generations

Software licenses, encryption keys, & Protocol Data

Weekly

Annual (verified) Backup
Monthly Generations
Weekly Generations

 

  

 

Individual Policies

All of the policies that are provided here are contained within one or more of the templates that are on this site. These policies have been added as individual documents in WORD format for those clients who just need this particular policy.  All policies are Sarbanes-Oxley compliant.

 
 

Internet, E Mail, Mobile Device, Electronic Communication, and Record Retention Policy

This policy is is compliant with all recent legislation (SOX, HIPAA, Patriot Act, and Sensitive information), and covers:
  • Appropriate Use of Equipment

  • Mobile Devices

  • Internet Access

  • Electronic Mail

  • Retention of Email on Personal Systems

  • E-mail and Business Records Retention

  • Copyrighted Materials

  • Banned Activities

  • Ownership of Information

  • Security

  • Sarbanes-Oxley

  • Abuse

Included are these ready to use forms:

  • Internet & Electronic Communication Employee Acknowledgement

  • E-Mail - Employee Acknowledgement

  • Internet Use Approval Form

  • Internet Access Request Form

  • Security Access Application Form

 

Sensitive Information Policy
 

This policy covers the treatment of Credit Card, Social Security, Employee, and Customer Data.  The policy is 15 pages in length. This policy complies with Sarbanes Oxley Section 404.

 

The policy applies to the entire enterprise, its vendors, its suppliers (including outsourcers) and co-location providers and facilities regardless of the methods used to store and retrieve sensitive information (e.g. online processing, outsourced to a third party, Internet, Intranet or swipe terminals).  CLICK on image to get the full table of contents and a sample page

 

Travel and Off-Site Meeting Policy

Protection of data and software is often is complicated by the fact that it can be accessed from remote locations. As individuals travel and attend off-site meetings with other  employees, contractors, suppliers and customers data and software can be compromised.  This policy is four page in length and covers:

  • Data and application security

  • Minimize attention

  • Shared public resources

  • Off-site meeting special considerations

Outsourcing Policy

This policy is eighteen page in length and defines everything that is need for function to be outsourced.  The policy comes as a Microsoft Word document (Word 2003 & Word 2007) that can be modified as needed.  The template has been updated to include a HIPAA audit program definition:

  • Outsourcing Management Standard

    • Service Level Agreement

    • Responsibility

  • Outsourcing Policy

    • Policy Statement

    • Goal

  • Approval Standard

    • Base Case

    • Responsibilities
       

Note: Look at the Practical Guide for Outsourcing over 110 page document for a more extensive process for outsourcing

 

 

 

 

 

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Latest News

What Should CIOs do Today to Meet Future Needs

CIOs face some of its greatest challenges they have ever had. All IT Managers are under intense pressure to cut costs, and that pressure is significantly increased by the current grim economic outlook. Everywhere CIOs look there is study after study indicating that IT organizations are looking at reducing headcount, as well as their overall spending in 2009. In addition, many business areas are relying on IT more than ever before to help them deal with the increased competition and reduced funding. This budget crunch creates a greater need for improved efficiency and higher productivity.

 

IT Median Salaries January 2008 vs. June 2009

Salary Survey Summary

 

It seems counterintuitive in a time of budget tightening; companies must continue to make strategic investments in IT. It is contrarian to think of investing in IT when normal reflexes would cause a CIO to consider hunkering down and focusing on survival until business conditions improve. Survival is clearly important, but by making survival your primary focus, you risk missing opportunities.

 

CIOs and IT organizations that position themselves for the eventual upturn will look at IT as an enabler of business efficiency and growth. In fact, in this turbulent economy, it becomes more critical to invest differently in IT. The key is to invest in areas that really improve IT efficiency and discipline. This focus will enable IT not only to survive this difficult financial period, but also to quickly shift its profile toward enabling true business growth.

 

- Read on

Disaster Recovery Planning & Business Continuity Planning Quick Action Steps Defined

Disaster Planning Template

The must do things that your company must do to make sure the disaster recovery and business continuity plan will work when they are need are:

  • Distribute the disaster recovery and business continuity plan or a HandiGuide® to all decision makers and key operating employees who will need access to it when the event occurs.

  • Define the chain of command with single leader but do not limit the people who would have to implement the disaster recovery business continuity plan when the event occurs if that leader is unavailable.
  • Conduct frequent tests and address all areas where shortcomings are found.
  • Conduct the tests in an unannounced mode
  • Validated that mission critical data is at sites other than the primary data center
  • Establish a communication plan that can be implemented after the disaster.

Disaster Planning Security Template

 

HandiGuide is a Janco Associates registered trademark 

- Read on

Zogby Finds US Will Thrive With Technology

Job Descriptions

U.S. adults have largely given up on manufacturing and traditional industries as the focus of the U.S. economy, according to a joint Zogby 463 Interactive survey. Instead, they see technology and the service sector as where the nation should target its efforts.

That was one finding of a survey of 3,030 adults, which also found people:

  • Increasingly dependent on and concerned about uses of the Internet;
  • Optimistic that the U.S. will not lag behind the rest of the world in recovering from this recession;
  • Ambivalent about the ability of the U.S. to produce the next wave of technology innovators on the level of Microsoft founder Bill Gates;
  • Overwhelmingly believing that the average 10-year-old knows more about the Internet than their Congressperson.
- Read on

Compliance Impacts on Small and Mid-sized Companies are Great

Small and midsize companies are faced a deluge of requirements and standards from government agencies, industry groups, customers, suppliers, and employees.  Companies of all sizes require full visibility into these requirements, as well as into the resources they are deploying to meet them.

The compliance issues most commonly occur in reporting, auditing, and brand image. Additional compliance efforts may be directed at meeting industry terms (PCI-DSS), standards, and guidelines, as well as applicable government mandated requirements. In addition, failure to meet standards for quality, environmental friendliness, or social responsibility could damage an organizationÂ’s brand in the marketplace.

The challenge businesses face is with limited resources and infrastructure conflicts. Compliance often places a large burden on small and midsize companies. Many of those organizations struggle to keep their heads above water in their effort to find the resources to complete the necessary paperwork - to say nothing of the auditing processes necessary to avoid the heavy penalties of non-compliance, such as fines, work interruptions, and seizure of assets.

Regulatory compliance, whether it’s the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in the US, the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law (also known as J-SOX) in Japan, CLERP 9 in Australia, the LSF in France, or generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), has placed a disproportional burden on small and midsize companies compared to their larger brethren. In the US, for example, SOX compliance has smaller companies nation-wide up in arms. From the 2006 SEC Advisory Committee Report: “We believe that the problem of improper scaling for smaller public companies has existed for many years, and that the additional regulations imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act only exacerbated the problem and caused it to become more visible.”

Many industries, in addition to government authorities, impose standards and reporting requirements. Thus, small and midsize companies need the capacity to back up their claims with a complete, accurate view of information in a timely fashion.

With the complexity and breadth of all these requirements, it is incumbent upon CIOs and CTOs to serve as facilitators in order to reduce the overall organizational strain of standards and compliance. Indeed, if the proper systems are in place for tracking and reporting, it is possible to leverage compliance as a driver for improvement, rather than an organizational burden.  These improvements include credible financial statements, high quality products and services, and shortened product development lifecycles.

CIOs and CTOs support standards and compliance by capturing and enforcing industry standards, adapting standards to the companyÂ’s technology infrastructure, provide real-time information, allowing management to track performance, and implement need changes quickly.

- Read on

Disaster Recovery Planning is Required for Business Continuity Planning

Disaster Recovery Plans are part of a larger, more extensive planning process known as Business Continuity Planning. Disaster Recovery plans should be tested frequently so that the as many individuals as possible are familiar with the specific actions they will need to take when a disaster occurs. Disaster Recovery plans must also be adaptable and updated frequently, e.g. if new people, a new branch office, or new hardware or software are added to an organization they should promptly be incorporated into the organization's disaster recovery plan. Enterprises must consider all these facets of their organization as well as update and practice their plan if they want to maximize their recovery after a disaster.

Types of Disasters

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning are the process an organization uses to recover access to their enterprise operations; software, data, and/or hardware that are needed to resume the performance of normal, critical business functions after the event of either a natural disaster or a disaster caused by humans. While Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans, or DRPs & BCPs, often focus on bridging the gap where data, software, or hardware have been damaged or lost, one cannot forget the vital element of work force that composes much of any organization. A building fire might predominantly affect vital data storage; whereas a pandemic or epidemic illness is more likely to have an effect on staffing. Both types of disaster need to be considered when creating a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans. Thus, enterprises should include in their DRPs & BCPs contingencies for how they will cope with the sudden and/or unexpected loss of key personnel as well as how to recover their data.

- Read on

Microsoft Snubbed by EU's Competition Commission

When Microsoft submitted a several-hundred-page written response to the EU allegations, it was also given the June dates for a possible hearing. The company immediately asked the commission to reschedule according to Microsoft. The commission refused and the commission informed Microsoft that June 3-5 are the only dates that a suitable room is available in Brussels for a hearing.

The dates the commission selected for the hearing, June 3-5, coincide with the most important worldwide intergovernmental competition law meeting, the International Competition Network (ICN) meeting, which takes place in Zurich, Switzerland. As a result, many of the most influential commission and national competition officials with the greatest interest in the Microsoft case will be in Zurich and will unable to attend the Microsoft hearing in Brussels.

As a result, Microsoft said it had canceled an oral hearing set for early next month over EU antitrust allegations that it "shields" Internet Explorer (IE) from competition, saying that senior regulators won't be attending.

- Read on

SOA and ITSM are the Wave of the Future

Enterprises choose SOA and ITSM to increase agility, simplify their IT infrastructure, and reduce cost pressures. This can be difficult with solutions that are delivered under a "closed source" model. According to industry analyst Janco Associates, 82 percent of companies are using open-source software, and the remaining 18 percent are expected to do so within the next few years. Sun's philosophy of free and open-source licensing is not to necessarily favor any one license or category of license but to make decisions that match the project or community with the license that best supports it. In this way, enterprises can truly have the best solution that fits their needs at any given point in time.

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Microsoft May Be Giving Up On Vista

Microsoft has not yet disclosed the pricing for Windows 7's editions, although Microsoft will reportedly offer free or discounted upgrades to users who buy Vista PCs after July 1. According to those reports, people who buy Vista Ultimate after that date will be upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate.

Ultimate Extras was one of the features Microsoft cited in the months leading up to the early-2007 release of Windows Vista Ultimate to distinguish it from lower-priced versions. A Windows Vista Ultimate extra was to provide regularly cutting-edge programs, innovative services and unique publications only to Ultimate users.

Many users took Microsoft to task for too few add-ons and a too-slow release pace. The last time Microsoft delivered Extras was in September 2008, when it released a puzzle game, some sound effects and three screensavers.

Last February, in fact, Microsoft announced that it would drop the concept from Windows 7's Ultimate edition. MicrosoftÂ’s said that the new approach to planning and building Windows does not have the capacity to continue to deliver features outside the regular release cycle

Some have suggested that Microsoft give users a free upgrade to Windows 7 for Vista Ultimate owners. - Read on

New H-1B Bill Causes India's Outsourcing Industry Concern

India's outsourcing community has reacted harshly to H-1B legislation introduced in congrass calling it protectionism. India feels that new legislation will raise the cost of their product: IT services.

The legislation includes a provision that "prohibits companies with having more than 50% of their workforce using H-1B and L-1 visas," according to statement this weekend from India's largest IT industry group, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM). "This provision unfairly stacks the deck against foreign companies operating in the U.S. because U.S. companies are highly likely to have a high percentage of America employees."

The 50% visa restriction in the bill will impede the ability of Indian firms to bring largely young and mobile workers into the U.S. The restrictions will force them to increase the size of their permanent U.S. workforces, which will likely increase costs and hurt their ability to compete against U.S.-based IT services vendors. 

- Read on

Internet Taxes are on the Upswing

A growing number of states are considering laws to tax digital goods, such as iTunes songs, Amazon MP3s, and electronic books. Government say it wants to encourage broadband adoption and the development of a low-carbon economy but taxing digital goods sends exactly the wrong message.

At least 18 states claim they have the authority to collect taxes on digital goods, and more are likely to join the march.

·         Mississippi (on July 1) imposes a sale and use tax on specified digital products--including digital audio-visual works such as movies, digital audio works such as ringtones, and digital books.

·         North Carolina general assembly is considering a measure to modernize the sales and use tax statutes by treating music, movies, books, and computer software that are delivered electronically the same as those that are purchased in a tangible medium.

·         Minnesota House of Representatives is considering a bill that could raise the state more than $8.2 million in 2010 through 2013.

·         Other states including Washington and Vermont are also considering such measures.

- Read on

IT and Tech Jobs Do Better Than The Market

Software services in the U.S. helped temper the overall sequential decline in technology jobs during the fourth quarter, allowing the industry to minimize jobs losses compared to the private sector, according to a TechAmerica.

Tech jobs, overall, dipped 0.6 percent, or by 38,000 positions, sequentially in the fourth quarter, while U.S. private sector jobs declined 1.3 percent during the same period.

Software services aided that performance by growing a modest 0.7 percent, or by 12,600 jobs, during the fourth quarter, compared with the previous quarter.   Other sectors, such as high-tech manufacturing and communications services continued to struggle, posting negative sequential job growth in the fourth quarter, according to the report.

- Read on

Email as Legal Evidence

As detailed in the Record Management, Retention, and Destruction Policy (published by Janco Associates – www.e-janco.com), to meet the requirements of a good business record and reliable legal evidence, email must have the following qualities:

  • Authenticity: You must be able to demonstrate the origin of a business record including who wrote the original message and who added to or altered it. To be accepted as legal evidence, email must be authentic.
  • Integrity: You can prove that its content and meaning have not been altered since its creation. Hosted Managed Email Archiving Services guarantee email integrity. A good email business record has integrity.
  • Accuracy: To be legally acceptable, email must be accurate about the facts originally documented, and it must remain accurate throughout its life. In other words, you must be able to prove that the message has not been tampered with.
  • Completeness: It is essential for an email message and its metadata or parts (body, header, attachments, log files relating to transmission and receipt) to remain intact as part of a complete record.
  • Repudiation: In contract situations, it's easy for a party to claim that he did not receive an email message, or that he is not responsible for promises made via email. Protection against repudiation is a function of good email records and evidence. Protection against repudiation depends on the reliability of the process used to ensure email authenticity, integrity, accuracy, and completeness.
- Read on

Mobile Workers a DRP/BCP Security Challenge for CIOs

Experts expect mobile workers to make up 73 percent of the total U.S. workforce by 2011. Whether mobile employees in the field or at home, sitting in a satellite office or constantly on the go within a corporate campus environment, they are going to need an effective way to stay connected and productive.  This presents a challenge for Disaster Recovery – Business Continuity and Security for CIOs that needs to be addressed in the near term.

Mobility presents obvious benefits for companies and employees. First, worker flexibility is a powerful benefit in attracting and retaining top talent. Many companies offer mobile work plans alongside other benefits, such as salary increases or premium health/dental packages. Second, companies realize serious increases in productivity from virtual employees. That is because mobility enables companies to leverage different working styles or support employees in the midst of major life events, such as the birth of a child or a prolonged illness. This, in turn, reduces absenteeism and raises morale. Finally, implementing a mobile work policy reduces commuting costs for employees, thereby increasing employee satisfaction and retention. It also reduces carbon footprints, which is good for the planet. In addition, less time commuting often translates into more time working.

- Read on

CIO Face Compliance Challenges with E-mail

E-mail is a primary means for communicating with people inside and outside of most enterprises today. Many customers use e-mail to negotiate contracts and agreements and exchange invoice and payment information. Often, e-mail messages are the only record enterprises have of important transactions, and they must be protected and retained. In addition, if the e-mail system slows down or even goes down, the consequences to most enterprises are severe - especially if the outage causes them to lose e-mails that have critical information or attachments or that are needed to demonstrate compliance during an external audit.

Using traditional backup solutions that restore systems, if there is an outage, are now no longer sufficient. Many backup solutions do not allow enterprises to easily search through thousands of e-mails to find, for example, the messages outlining the payment information that another enterprise had agreed to. In addition, many enterprises only backup e-mails in single location, so if something happens at that site, they risk losing your archived e-mails and documents. Add the need to make sure that the documents and information in these e-mails are available for external and internal audits or to meet compliance requirements and it is easy to see that CIOs face significant challenges.

- Read on

What the Cost of Password Inflation
Security Policies and ProceduresPassword inflation and the password fatigue that comes with it increasingly frustrate not only end users but also the support teams that deal with the fallout of strict password policies. Power users and even rank and file knowledge workers simply have too many usernames and passwords to remember, or, the length and complexity of each password hinders a productive work flow. Therefore, employees often violate prudent password standards. Since an increasing amount of business-critical data is being made available online, balancing end user convenience and effective security and password policies is more important than ever. Company executives have to balance the free-flow of information against the nightmare of a major security breach. - Read on

It Will Be Harder To Terminate Employees In the Future

Many enterprise managers have expressed serious concern with the changes in workplace regulation that may result from our countryÂ’s new administration. According to the Society of Human Resource Management [SHRM], it is widely expected to become much more difficult and costly to terminate underperforming employees.

 

IT Hiring IT Job Descriptions Salary Survey  IT Salary Survey

Earlier this year the Director of

Government Relations at SHRM, stated, “A raft of worker-friendly bills are now teed up for one of the most active congressional cycles for HR public policy issues in the last 30 years.”

- Read on

Productivity is key to CIO success

With the slowdown in business activity, most IT organizations are cutting budgets while being asked to provide better service.  Managing the portfolio of IT projects is in this environment is complex, costly and resource intensive. Given the conflict of budget reduction and service requirements many CIOs are not getting much sleep.

Metrics for Productivity

To keep up with the competition, meet growing needs, and protect critical data, an organization must make investments in new systems to realize business and financial imperatives within the realities of shrinking IT budgets and fewer resources. However, slowing economic growth has reduced IT spending as CIOs have imposed across-the-board budget constraints.

With limited budget come limited resources. Different groups within every enterprise continue to make demands of IT. Past investments in hardware and software approaches often are too expensive to scale to meet shifting business needs, may be require extensive upgrades and maintenance costs to support new demands and to combat risks arising from new sources and emerging technologies, may be inefficient across the span of the enterprise IT infrastructure, and may not conform to business governance standards or compliance requirements. Beyond the cost and resource requirements to support these legacy investments with less resources and declining IT budgets, businesses may compromise their competitive position by using tight budget dollars to invest in high cost, high maintenance assets that may be subject to increasing taxes, flows from capital expense budgets, and a reduction in headcount.

- Read on

Disaster Recovery is Area of Cost Cutting Focus

Disaster Recovery Planning and SecurityDisaster Recovery (DR) is a tough game. It's a critical component of IT and risk mitigation strategies, and compounded in difficulty by ever growing data volumes, distributed computing, and new technologies. Unfortunately, DR is often one of the first line items hit by budget cuts. How can you get creative in protecting more data, recovering more swiftly, but also saving some money at the same time?

According to an AT&T Survey of 100 Chicago firms (revenues <$10M), 81 have DR plans, but only 43% have fully tested their plans within the last 12 months and 12% admitted they have never tested their business continuity plans.

Next to personnel, data is your most irreplaceable asset.  Networks, application hosting platforms, and end user computing environments can be replaced quickly.  However, without your customer lists, product catalogs, inventory, financial records, and other operational data your business cannot recover.

A disaster recovery is a response to a declared disaster or a regional disaster. It is the restoration or recovery of an entire Agent computer. A disaster recovery plan describes how an organization is to deal with potential disasters. Just as a disaster is an event that makes the continuation of normal functions impossible, a disaster recovery plan consists of the precautions taken so that the effects of a disaster will be minimized, and the organization will be able to either maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions. Typically, disaster recovery planning involves an analysis of business processes and continuity needs; it may also include a significant focus on disaster prevention.

- Read on

Downturn Hits Industry Giants

Microsoft will eliminate up to 5,000 jobs in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, legal, HR, and IT over the next 18 months, including 1,400 jobs today. These initiatives will reduce the company's annual operating expense run rate by approximately $1.5 billion and reduce fiscal year 2009 capital expenditures by $700 million.

IT Job Market

This is yet another verification of the IT job market findings published by Janco Associates.

 

- Read on

Internet Continues to Change

According to a blog post by Jeffrey Oldham, a software engineer at Google Inc., and Fred Leach, the company's quantitative marketing manager, the top Google queries sought live inauguration coverage and streaming videos. The Google bloggers noted that 12% of inauguration-related searches came from outside the U.S.

Internet Changing

"During the last nine years, the growth of the Internet has changed the way the world seeks information," they blogged. "From President Bush's first inaugural address in 2001 to his second in 2005, the number of inauguration-related searches increased by more than a factor of 10. From 2005 to [now], the number grew even more. Few of the 2001 queries requested 'video,' and none requested 'streaming.' By 2005, a few queries such as 'inauguration audio' and 'streaming video of inauguration' appeared. Today, technology has become so prevalent that queries such as 'YouTube live inauguration,' 'live blogging inauguration,' 'inaugural podcast' and 'Obama inaugural speech mp3' formed one-third of all inauguration-related queries."

- Read on

Are You Ready for Terroist Attack
Disaster Recovery - Terroist Attack

Are you Prepared for a Terroist Attack?

According to an AT&T Survey of 100 Chicago firms (revenues <$10M), 81 have DR plans, but only 43% have fully tested their plans within the last 12 months and 12% admitted they have never tested their business continuity plans.

Next to personnel, data is your most irreplaceable asset.  Networks, application hosting platforms, and end user computing environments can be replaced quickly.  However, without your customer lists, product catalogs, inventory, financial records, and other operations data your business cannot recover.

A disaster recovery plan is way to response to a declared disaster or a regional disaster. It is the restoration or recovery of an entire computer network. A disaster recovery plan describes how an organization is to deal with potential disasters. Just as a disaster is an event that makes the continuation of normal functions impossible, a disaster recovery plan consists of the precautions taken so that the effects of a disaster will be minimized, and the organization will be able to either maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions. Typically, disaster recovery planning involves an analysis of business processes and continuity needs; it may also include a significant focus on disaster prevention.

- Read on

Job Description Bundles

IT organizations turn to outsourcing in order to reduce costs, to offload application maintenance, offload help desk operations, or obtain expertise. The typical outsourcing engagement  is governed by a contract setting the terms and conditions between the client and outsourcer for the duration of their relationship. To measure whether that relationship is working, and how well, Service Level Agreements are established.

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a critical component of any outsourcing project. It defines the boundaries of the project in terms of the functions and services that the service provider will give to its client, the volume of work that will be accepted and delivered, and acceptance criteria for responsiveness and the quality of deliverables.

At the heart of an effective SLA are performance metrics and they are driven by key members of the IT staff.  The tasks associated with that are included in the Metrics, Service Level Agreement (SLA), and Outsourcing job descriptions bundle.  The positions included are:

  • VP Administration
  • VP Strategy and Architecture
  • Director IT Management and Control
  • Manager Contracts and Pricing
  • Manager Controller
  • Manager Metrics
  • Manager Outsourcing
  • Manager Service Level Reporting
  • Metrics Measurement Analyst
  • Quality Measurement Analyst
  • System Administrator Unix
  • System Administrator Windows
- Read on

IT Layoffs and Hiring Freezes are the Story of the Day

IT Salary SurveyLayoffs and cut backs continue in the IT world.  The next to see layoffs will be Microsoft according to the Wall Street Journal.  Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO said, "The fact of the matter is, this is not a downturn, this is a bit of a reset. Those are quite different and we're trying to really understand what we think that means for us."

Microsoft has already cut costs including expenditures with vendors and contractors as well as having a "mini" hiring freeze in place.

Some analysts predicting layoffs of anywhere from 10 percent to 17 percent of Microsoft's 95,000 employee workforce, but Janco feels those numbers are too high.

At the same time Google has not only implemented a hiring freeze it has eliminated 100 recruiters for its staff.

- Read on

Reasons Why Companies Outsource

Oursource ManagementIT organizations turn to outsourcing in order to reduce costs, to offload application maintenance, offload help desk operations, or obtain expertise. The typical outsourcing engagement  is governed by a contract setting the terms and conditions between the client and outsourcer for the duration of their relationship. To measure whether that relationship is working, and how well, Service Level Agreements are established.

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a critical component of any outsourcing project. It defines the boundaries of the project in terms of the functions and services that the service provider will give to its client, the volume of work that will be accepted and delivered, and acceptance criteria for responsiveness and the quality of deliverables.

At the heart of an effective SLA are performance metrics and they are driven by key members of the IT staff. 

- Read on

January 2009 IT Salary Survey Released by Janco Associates

Janco has just released its January 2009 IT Salary Survey.  One of the major findings of the study is that the MEAN compenastion for IT Professionals has gone done as a result of company closures, lay-offs, outsourcing, and hiring freezes. 

Information Technology  Median Salaries January 2008 vs. January 2009

 

January '08 Mean

January '09 Mean

 

 

Base

Total

Base

Total

Percent Change

Executives

$128,491

$144,645

$128,314

$142,914

-1.20%

Middle Managers

$76,111

$79,869

$75,151

$78,530

-1.67%

Staff

$63,294

$66,545

$62,871

$65,956

-0.89%

Large Enterprise

$77,126

$82,197

$76,490

$81,128

-1.20%

 

 

 

 

 

 

Executives

$116,666

$131,793

$113,004

$126,031

-4.57%

Middle Managers

$70,986

$74,711

$68,657

$71,830

-3.86%

Staff

$58,647

$60,736

$58,536

$60,279

-0.75%

Mid-Size Enterprises

$71,378

$75,814

$69,826

$73,607

-2.91%

 

 

 

 

 

 

IT Averages All

$74,252

$79,005

$73,158

$77,367

-2.07%

- Read on

 

©  2001 - 2009 Janco Associates, Inc. - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED --  Revised: 06/16/09.