Mary Jander of Internet Evolution takes a hard look at at what IT must do to survive the next few years of economic woes.  She has some sobering things to say, and while we might not like it, she is probably right.  For example, in her first step to IT surviving she says:

Staff levels must go down. Job cuts are now a fact of IT life. Recent announcements portend 5,000 layoffs at Microsoft; a projected 6,000 at Intel; up to 10,000 at IBM.
Cuts like these could decimate an already-pressed IT staff, unless
measures are taken to automate and virtualize more functions.

The idea of reducing costs in hardware and human resources through virtualization has been suggested before (many times). Now is the time to finally give it a try.

She also takes a look at at telecommuting, going green, Web 2.0, data management, and more.  Be sure to read her post.

"CIOs looking to hire skilled IT professionals will pay, on average, 5.3 percent more in 2008 than they did this year, according to the just-released Robert Half Technology's 2008 IT Salary Guide. As a comparison, the Consumer Price Index rose 2.8 percent this past year."

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Seven steps to take now for a better job in '08 - It's not the kind of thing you can cram for. If you want a better job in '08, now is the time to hone your skills, strengthen your social networks and boost your visibility in the office.

Why don’t IT people get more respect? On this Labor Day, things are actually looking better for people who work in corporate IT. Budgets aren’t quite so tight. Companies are hiring. Interesting IT projects are getting a green light. But when it comes to how our fellow employees think about us, IT work is a train wreck. Users break the rules we set up, ignore the proc­esses we develop and generally act as if we’re clueless in what we do.

Business people know risk and return are opposite sides of the same coin; you can't have return without risk. So successful companies learn to analyze, accept and manage risk…most kinds of risk, anyway. When it comes to IT risk, organizations tend to focus on avoiding risk instead of managing it, by preventing intrusions and preparing to respond to catastrophic events. But instead of protecting companies, this approach to risk has blindsided IT to a long stream of IT disasters, from system meltdowns (Comair, Jet Blue) and stolen credit card data (TJX, CardSystems Solutions) to pilfered laptops (Veterans' Administration) and stolen data (U.S. Department of Transportation). Putting IT security back in the context of risk management has been the focus of George Westerman's work.

Similar insights have been standard wisdom on the manufacturing floor for decades. Factory managers learn about bottlenecks through the formal discipline of queuing theory. That teaches them to keep a little slack in the system to handle the unpredictable -- but inevitable -- crunch times.

"After all, why is collaboration any more important now than it’s ever been? One argument is that now more than ever, businesses are all about their people. (Yeah, OK, that’s an inelegant twist on Microsoft’s “People-Ready Business” slogan.) But that’s not true—successful businesses have always leveraged the skills of their employees, and the so-called knowledge economy has been around seemingly forever, or at least several decades. So what’s new here?"

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There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out.

That's a dilemma for the many companies that are expanding their use of open source. Corporate developers and other IT professionals must get better at divining the winners and ignoring the losers. The wrong picks can lead companies down a rat hole of support problems and obsolete software.

"Opinion: Thornton A. May thinks the ingredients are in place for more CIOs to move into the top spot."

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"A new report from Forrester argues that the dismal accounts of a drained or poorly trained IT workforce are both irresponsible and inaccurate."

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"One of the endless challenges for a large corporate software engineering organization is to develop an effective process for handling the steady stream of small changes, fixes and enhancements that seem to accumulate around installed software, both custom developed and Commercial of the Shelf (COTS)—no matter how good it is initially. Typically, these changes can be handled by a single engineer, don't require much resource or elapsed time and are generally pretty well defined. Users know that they are not asking for much, and don't, therefore, expect to have to wait very long to get their change request implemented."

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