Baseline: Yet another nail in the coffin laying to rest the premise of Carr’s famous article in the Harvard Business Review asserting that IT is a commodity that doesn’t yield competitive advantage will be driven home Monday. That’s when a new research study from the Hackett Group will be released showing that companies that have mastered the use of information technology to provide maximum business value achieve significantly better financial results than their peers.

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"After a big tumble in 2002, IT salaries have been climbing steadily. But for IT workers trying to regain their financial footing, a string of 3% increases makes the going tough."

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"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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ComputerWorld has an article geared for IT professionals desiring another job.

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.

I'm personally happy with my own job and don't really plan to move anywhere.  The fact is the grass usually does appear greener on the other side then it actually is.  Though, I can  still dream.  No more IT security reports.  Lots more money.  Flexible shift hours.  A position as a CEO knowing just as much about IT as the CIO.   An organization that understands the the true value of IT in strategic planning.

Ugh...now I'm so unhappy.  Stupid IT dream...

There are a couple new articles at ComputerWorld that peaked my interest and may be something you too will be interested in reading.  The first is an opinion piece by Frank Hayes, "Frankly Speaking: Rewiring Respect for IT".

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.

On a different subject, Bruce A. Steward has written an article to remind us that supporting our customers is more than just improving the business process.

"What's disturbing about these numbers isn't just that one group is more or less represented than another in IT, but how the IT workforce got to these numbers. Over the past 6-1/2 years, while the IT ranks swelled by 1 million to 3.6 million, the number of women in IT fell by nearly 8 percent and the number of African-Americans in IT plunged by more than 25 percent."

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An excellent article at CIO Insight in their "Expert Voices" column concerning IT security.  The article is titled, "IT Security, Reconsidered":

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.

This year at work I have spent close to half my time dealing with a lot of IT security.  I have not only been kept busy with locking down the network but  also with way too much paperwork certifying that our machines are secure.  When you spend so much time making the paper pushers happy that you're following the latest policies it hard to actually really identify the true risks that don't show up on paper.  More importantly, spending so much time on IT security not only locks out the would-be hackers but also locks your IT staff out from adding potential IT value to the operations.  There has to be a balance somewhere...

"Have you spoken with a high-tech recruiter or professor of computer science lately? According to observers across the country, the technology skills shortage that pundits were talking about a year ago is real (see "Workforce crisis: Preparing for the coming IT crunch").

"Everything I see in Silicon Valley is completely contrary to the assumption that programmers are a dying breed and being offshored," says Kevin Scott, senior engineering manager at Google Inc. and a founding member of the professions and education boards at the Association for Computing Machinery. "From big companies to start-ups, companies are hiring as aggressively as possible."

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