IT’s latest survival skill: Embracing risk

In today’s digital business world, IT has to stop playing it safe, as you can’t innovate without taking some risks. Still most IT professionals remain deeply risk-averse.

If you’ve spent your career in IT, you’ve probably gotten really good at making sure nothing goes wrong. Outages are unacceptable, even if they’re only a few seconds long. Cybersecurity is a constant worry. Success is measured in reliability and availability. Your most important skill is anticipating issues and fixing them before they occur.

There’s just one problem. In this time of rapidly changing technology and upstart industry disruptors, making risk avoidance your top priority will only help you get left behind. You can’t play it safe, because there’s no such thing as safe. In today’s digital business world, IT leaders must accept and even embrace a certain amount of uncertainty and risk. Even more challenging, they must help the people who work for them embrace it as well.

“Risk is always relative,” says Scott Buchholz, CTO of Deloitte Consulting’s government practice. “Getting out of bed in the morning and taking a shower is taking a risk. But when we talk about risk in IT, what we sometimes mean is doing things that have a higher than normal chance of failure. And the reason that’s important is that technology is changing very quickly and there are fewer and fewer people who understand all the implications. Being able to handle risk becomes increasingly important.”

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IT News March/April 2012

Creating culture of IT innovation includes rewarding failure – Computerworld lnkd.in/mfGKif

In IT Projects, More Needs to Be Less Too – Information Management Blogs Article lnkd.in/rFZ3CK

Personal and Enterprise IT Gains – Information Management Blogs Article lnkd.in/fu9VKq

Attention tech sales people: Don’t go around the CIO :: Editor’s Blog at WRAL Tech Wire lnkd.in/SbT5YF

IT Must Provide Enterprise Collaboration Tools Employees Will Use lnkd.in/nf6qa9

When Will the Offshore Flow of IT and Finance Jobs End? CIO.com lnkd.in/YcF2vP

Bring your own tech: IT’s missed opportunity | Byod – InfoWorld lnkd.in/sHUXmm

Offshoring Shrinks Number of IT Jobs, Study Says CIO.com lnkd.in/553iN6

CIOs Overcome Shortage of Business Analytics Talent lnkd.in/ukwwzv

India’s IT Firms Hire U.S. Workers As They Fight for Visas CIO.com lnkd.in/fDhir8

Small Business Data Backup Plans Found Lacking – Small and Medium Business IT – News & Reviews – Baseline.com lnkd.in/yHWPaZ

Execs to IT: Take these cloud services and manage them | Cloud storage – InfoWorld lnkd.in/t6AMGu

How to Get a Hot Job in Big Data CIO.com lnkd.in/DWHzEX

Getting A Recommendation From A Past Employer lnkd.in/AnAXJE

Offshoring Shrinks Number of IT Jobs, Study Says CIO.com lnkd.in/8RnBUz

Why the ‘personal cloud’ is no PC killer | Cloud computing – InfoWorld lnkd.in/7byGYH

Contract Backup Administrator Opportunity in Dallas, TX

We pay for referrals, so if this opportunity is not a good match for your skills or you are not available but know someone who is, please forward this email to them.

Contract Backup Administrator Opportunity in Dallas, TX

POSITION SCOPE: We are seeking an experienced Backup Administrator to define, design and implement ITIL-Compliant Processes for regular backup and recovery of Windows/Intel Servers. Manage execution, monitoring, and reporting of regular backup jobs and works with systems administrators to ensure reliability and integrity of installed equipment.

Experience:

5+ years as Backup Administrator or Systems Administrator in a Windows environment

3 years experience with VMware

3 years experience with Symantec Net Backup or Tivoli Storage Manager or Commvault

Education:

BS Degree or Equivalent Experience

If you have this experience, feel you are a fit for this position, and are interested, please answer the questions below:

1) Do you have an updated Word copy of your resume?

2) What is your availability to start?

3) Are you open to a contract position?

4) What is your current salary or pay rate?

5) Are you currently eligible to work for any employer in the US?

6) When is the best time to contact you and what # can you be reached at for this opportunity?

If this opportunity is not a good match for your skills or you are not available but know someone who is, please forward this email to them as we pay referral fees for anyone you refer that we place with a client.

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IT Staffing, IT Recruiting – Dice: US IT Hiring Set to Rise in 2011

The story “Dice: US IT hiring set to rise in 2011,” has been clarified to indicate that results cited were from two separate surveys. It was not clear from information provided by the company that the results were from two surveys. The first, second, fourth, seventh and 11th paragraphs have been clarified to indicate which results were cited. The paragraphs now read, in order:

IDG News Service — The story “Dice: US IT hiring set to rise in 2011,” has been clarified to indicate that results cited were from two separate surveys. It was not clear from information provided by the company that the results were from two surveys. The first, second, fourth, seventh and 11th paragraphs have been clarified to indicate which results were cited. The paragraphs now read, in order:

First:

Six in 10 hiring managers and technology recruiters expect to do more hiring in the first half of 2011 than in the previous six months, according to the latest Dice.com report on IT hiring plans.

Second:

Dice surveys human resource managers and recruiters of technology professionals across the U.S. every six months, and its parent company Dice Holdings also conducts surveys, the most recent of which indicates “slow gradual recovery in the labor market,” said Scot Melland, chairman, president and CEO of Dice Holdings, which operates the Dice.com IT and engineering jobs and recruiting services website. Nearly half of the almost 850 respondents in the most recent Dice.com survey say they expect to increase hiring by at least 10 percent in the first half of 2011, with another third expecting increases of 11 percent to 20 percent, and 15 percent forecasting hiring 21 percent to 30 percent more technology workers.

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Direct-hire Sr Desktop Engineer Opportunity with a Great Company in Grapevine, TX

If this opportunity is not a good match for your skills or you are not available but know someone who is, please forward this link to them as we pay referral fees for anyone you refer that we place with a client.

Location: Grapevine, TX

Sr Desktop Engineer

Required Experience

· Intimately knows the insides of Windows client platforms (XP, Win7)

· Must at least know how to script with VBScript

· Experience with a variety of client management tools in order to make educated recommendations (Ie, Antivirus, Patch Management, etc)

· Experience with OS deployment methods such as sysprep, ghosting, unattended install, etc

· Must be able to work with IT architects, support staff, server & network engineering, DBAs and developers in order to solve complex problems that span multiple disciplines as well as lead projects or architect client solutions that require support from multiple teams.

· Must know how to do basic SQL queries

Preferred Experience

· Programming experience such as with VB.NET, C#, etc

· Intermediate to Advanced SQL query experience

· Experience with MDT imaging technologies

· Experience working with locked down end points such as public facing systems (kiosks, library systems, digital signage, etc)

· Experience designing and implementing client solutions that meet regulatory requirements such as SOX, PCI, etc.

· Administration experience in products that GameStop employs today (Remoteware, BigFix, MDT, EPO/AntiVirus, Service Desk Express)

· MCSE with at least an educational knowledge of Server technologies if not working experience

If you have this experience, feel you are a fit for this position, and are interested, please answer the questions below:

1) Do you have an updated Word copy of your resume?

2) What is your availability to start?

3) Are you open to a direct-hire position?

4) What is your current salary or pay rate?

5) Are you currently eligible to work for any employer in the US?

6) When is the best time to contact you and what # can you be reached at for this opportunity?

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Mike Hanes
ProVisionTech

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IT Job Satisfaction in a Rut

It’s getting tough out there for IT employees facing long workdays, short tempers and limited career options.

Computerworld — The Jet Blue flight attendant’s dramatic de-planing last week says a lot about workplace frustration, a problem that may be increasing in IT.

A few days before flight attendant Steven Slater released a rear chute and exited his career with a couple of cans of beer in hand, an organization of IBM users meeting at the Share conference in Boston held an informal discussion entitled “The Mythical 40-Hour Week.”

It wasn’t a gripe session as much as a chance to share notes about what’s going in IT workplaces since the Great Recession. What emerged was an insider’s view of the frustrations building among tech workers as work days lengthen, pay remains stagnant and career growth appears thwarted.

Those taking part in the discussion asked that their names not be used so they could speak frankly.

“You don’t know how many hours you work – it’s all about getting the job done,” said one IT worker. “There are lots, lots of people in IT who are expected to work far more than a 40-hour week,” said another. Sixty hour weeks are common.

Yet another worker described bosses who expect their employees to work late into the night if need be to fix problems and then be on the job the next day at the usual time. Even vacation time is no longer sacrosanct: one person said he expects to be contacted “more than a half dozen times” during his time off.

Even if companies are getting more unpaid hours from their workers in today’s climate, the companies themselves may be getting hurt in other ways, according to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) in Washington, D.C. The CEB conducts ongoing behavioral surveys of employee attitudes, and many of its clients are Fortune 500 firms.

The willingness of employees to “exert high levels of discretionary effort” — or put in the extra effort to get a job done — remains at low levels, the CEB found in its most recent survey, completed in the second quarter.

This willingness to put in extra effort fell from about 12% of workers in 2007 to about 4% last year. It was the lowest level in 10 years. The latest CEB survey of nearly 20,000 IT workers said that percentage had changed little and is now at 4.6%.

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IT Job Satisfaction in a Rut


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IT Departments: Bridging the IT Generation Gap

Older generations learned tech. The younger generation lives it. Organizations that want to succeed need the skills of both.

InfoWorld — IT pros who grew up in the Baby Boom are dinosaurs who just don’t get it. Generation Y is full of Facebook-happy slackers with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. But beyond these broad generalizations lie some real differences between the generations of geeks who do tech for a living, from Boomers to Generations X, Y, and the Millennials.

“Today’s generation was born into a world where technology is about interaction, whether it’s playing video games or using social media,” says Larry Johnson, age 62, co-author with daughter Meagan (age 40) of “Generations, Inc.: From Boomers to Linksters — Managing the Friction Between Generations at Work” (Amacom, 2010). “They spent hours at it, the way I spent hours watching ‘Rin Tin Tin.’ So their brains are structured to interact with technology in an entirely different way.”

[ Looking to get the most out of your IT investments, see InfoWorld’s “20 more IT mistakes to avoid” and “16 ways IT can do less with less” | Find out which of InfoWorld’s IT personality types best fits your tech temperament. ]

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Mike Hanes
ProVisionTech

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