IT Median Salaries January 2008 vs. June 2009

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.

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.

HandiGuide is a Janco Associates registered trademark 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. 

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.