There are many ways to take advantage of the rich set of collaboration tools provided with Microsoft Lync. IT leaders should consider a cap-and-grow strategy where investment dollars in legacy systems are capped and the financial and IT resources are reallocated to grow Lync. Once the company has a cap-and-grow Lync strategy, IT leaders should consider retirement of legacy infrastructure and h…
The major IT initiatives of today – data center consolidation, cloud computing, unified communications, virtualization, and disaster recovery – share a common theme: they all presume a well performing Wide Area Network (WAN). The reality though is that most WANs are unable to compensate for the increased packet loss, latency, and bandwidth problems endemic to publicly shared infrastr…
What if you could save money while developing high- quality training, technical documentation and even online help, all at the same time? You can! It’s called single sourcing and it’s all about eliminating duplication of work and ensuring consistency across your entire product suite. Simply by writing all the documentation for your product in one file, you can deliver a user manual and a…
IT organizations are under increasing pressure to meet the business goals of their companies. This challenge can be particularly daunting because it involves complying with regulations, such as the Sarbanes- Oxley Act (Sarbox) and Basel II. Compliance requires strong corporate governance capabilities that are demonstrable to outside auditors. Because IT plays such a major role in business proce…
For today’s small and mid-sized businesses, the risk and effects from any unplanned outage (downtime) grow with each additional critical application, network enhancement or system upgrade. We don’t have to look back very far to see the consequences of sudden or unexpected disasters affecting the IT infrastructure of major cities and businesses of every description. Consequently, IT man…
Enterprise software changed the face of business over the last decade. However, afters of aggressive enterprise software buying, corporations are now saddled with a large portfolio of solutions that are expensive to upgrade and have become equally expensive to maintain and support.
According to Gartner Dataquest* IT Operations Management software consumed $12.9 billion in spending in 2007. Of this, $4.3 billion, or 33%, was spent on availability, performance, and network management, representing the largest portion of IT Operations Management software spending. Just over $3 billion of this, or 70%, was spent amongst only four vendors: BMC, CA, HP, and IBM, also known as …
Imagine.that.you’ve.been.tasked.with.improving.the.corporate.patch.management.process..Would.you.know. what.the.ideal.patch.process.looks.like?.This.white.paper.breaks.down.the.patch.process.into.its.basic.pieces,. and.recommends.a.simple-to-use,.best.practice.approach. After.talking.with.many.IT.organizations.and.surveying.the.state-of-the-art.in.Change.Management.approaches,. we.documented…
Independent Software Vendors and Application Service Providers have become increasingly pressured by external market conditions in developing an offshore sourcing strategy, yet few succeed in designing a strategic, not just tactical cost-savings approach.
Virtualization is a way to abstract applications and their underlying components away from the hardware supporting them and present a logical or virtual view of these re- sources. This logical view may be strikingly different from the physical view. The goal of virtualization is usually one of the following: higher levels of performance, scalability, reliability/availability, agility, or to cre…
Many people and organizations today have a new—or renewed—interest in project management. Until the 1980s, project management primarily focused on providing schedule and resource data to top management in the military, computer, and construction industries. Today’s project management involves much more, and people in every industry and every country manage projects. Project management…
This work is intended for the enjoyment and education of individuals that are just entering the world of Information Technology. It is intended to give a brief, high-level overview of the technologies in use today, their history, and their use in the world of business. As a result of trying to cover a very large and diverse topic in under two hundred pages, as well as the author’s attempt t…
The future of many organizations depends on their ability to harness the power of information technology, and good project managers continue to be in high demand. Colleges have responded to this need by establishing courses in project management and making them part of the information technology, management, engineering, and other curriculum. Corporations are investing in continuing education t…
There is growing international interest in the use of assistive and ambient technology to support people with a range of impairments, whether developmental, acquired or age- related, in being able to function independently in the modern world. A particular focus has been on the potential for mobile technology to act as a technical adjunct to compensate for a range of cognitive limitations. Sinc…
There is definitely a lot of hype regarding online marketing in today's Digital Mobile Age. In fact, the hype is so thick that you can cut it with a machete. Many online marketers and social media marketing firms throw a lot of jargon and buzzwords around. Still, at the end of the day, you don't really know what they are talking about. It seems they are simply throwing lots of complex-sounding …
The goal is to use myths about innovation to understand how innovations happen. Each chapter discusses one myth, explores why it’s popular, and then uses the history of innovations—recent and ancient—to explain the truth. Although debunking and demys- tifying does take place, the intent is to clarify how innovation hap- pens so that you’ll better understand the world around you and can …
This book explains information security concepts in lay terms. The target audience is beginning users. At the same time, we also describe some of the concepts in detail in order for the content to be of interest to people in the information security field. With the increasingly connected world revolving around the revolution of internet and new technologies like mobiles, smartphones, and tablet…
The mobile application business model is essentially the new get-rich-quick scheme. There are many who put out their app on smartphone platforms, and begin to start receiving profits from users, advertisers, and shops within their applications. There is, of course, a lot of work involved before the developer can simply sit back and watch the money roll in. This was certainly the case for iOS du…
problems underscore the shortfall in our understanding of many issues related to large-scale IT systems and their applications. They suggest that achieving the promise of IT will require new research efforts. Drawing upon a recent report from the National Research Council (NRC) Computer Science and Telecommunications Board on the future of IT research (2000), this article argues for an expans…