January 30, 2023/in Articles, Dallas IT News, dallas technology news, IT News, News/by admin
Keeping on top of the outlay of your cloud estate is more important than ever. These platforms will help you get a pulse on your cloud use and associated costs, which can add up rapidly.
It feels like just yesterday that we were promised that cloud servers cost just pennies. You could rent a rack with the spare change behind the sofa cushions and have money left for an ice cream sandwich.
Those days are long gone. When the monthly cloud bill arrives, CFOs are hitting the roof. Developer teams are learning that the pennies add up, sometimes faster than expected, and it’s time for some discipline.
Cloud cost managers are the solution. They track all the bills, allocating them to the various teams responsible for their accumulation. That way the group that added too many fancy features that need too much storage and server time will have to account for their profligacy. The good programmers who don’t use too much RAM and disk space can be rewarded.
Smaller teams with simple configurations can probably get by with the stock services of the cloud companies. Cost containment is a big issue for many CIOs now and the cloud companies know it. They’ve started adding better accounting tools and alarms that are triggered before the bills reach the stratosphere. See Azure Cost Management, Google Cloud Cost Management, and AWS Cloud Financial Management tools for the big three clouds.
Once your cloud commitment gets bigger, independent cost management tools start to become attractive. They’re designed to work with multiple clouds and build reports that unify the data for easy consumption. Some even track the machines that run on premises so you can compare the cost of renting versus building out your own server room.
In many cases, cloud cost managers are part of a larger suite designed to not just watch the bottom line but also enforce other rules such as security. Some are not marketed directly as cloud control tools but have grown to help solve this problem. Some tools for surveying enterprise architectures or managing software governance now track costs at the same time. They can offer the same opportunities for savings that purpose-built cloud cost tools do — and they help with their other management chores as well.
What follows is an alphabetical list of the best cloud cost tracking tools. The area is rapidly expanding as enterprise managers recognize they need to get a grip on their cloud bills. All of them can help govern the burgeoning empire of server instances that may stretch around the world.
• Anodot
• AppDynamics
• Apptio Cloudability
• CloudAdmin
• CloudCheckr
• Datadog
• Densify
• Flexera One
• Harness
• Kubecost
• ManageEngine
• Nutanix Xi
• ServiceNow
• Turbonomic
• VMware Aria CloudHealth
• Yotascale
• Zesty
Read more HERE
July 28, 2022/in Articles, IT Job News, IT News, News/by admin
All CIOs are leaders, yet only a select few are truly inspirational leaders. Here’s how you can become one of them.
All successful CIOs know how to instruct, motivate, energize, and even excite their teams. Yet only a relative handful of IT leaders can truly be described as inspirational figures, capable of leading their teams to goals that collegues at other enterprises can only dream about.
CIOs who are purposefully positive and responsible, with a focus on integrity, tend to inspire others, says Ola Chowning, a partner at global technology research and advisory firm ISG. “CIOs who show, through example and vision, those values and their own firm conviction and integrity to those values, will motivate team members to emulate their behavior and aspire to be like them,” she notes. Such CIOs also acknowledge, promote, and celebrate colleagues who either inspire them or can inspire their team.
Fortunately, most inspirational IT leaders are self-made, not born. Following are seven qualities to target as you begin your journey to leadership glory.
1. They roll up their sleeves and collaborate
2. They put people first
3. They cultivate a sense of purpose
4. They master soft skills, incorporating everyone into their vision
5. They are inclusive
6. They encourage ownership
7. They are authentic
To read more go HERE
February 1, 2021/in Articles, Dallas IT News, dallas technology news, IT Job News, IT News /by admin
A subpar interview process is a chief reason why IT pros turn down job offers. Here’s how your hiring team may be sabotaging its chances of landing top talent in a tight market.
If you were to call Sherlock Holmes to help you discover why top tech talent who you’ve interviewed declined your reasonable offer, he might call your mystery common. But the killer is not — as you might believe — the mercurial nature of candidates, a failure of education, or anything outside the room where the interviews happen. It’s more likely that your process or team are inadvertently undermining your own efforts.
“People blame the candidates, but the interview process is the main reason people turn down jobs,” says Barbara Bruno, author of High-Tech High-Touch Recruiting: How to Attract and Retain the Best Talent by Improving the Candidate Experience.
It could be the questions you ask, the people asking the questions, or a host of other missteps that telegraph a subtle message to candidates to move along.
I asked hiring managers, recruiters, and directors of talent what — specifically — hiring teams are doing to cost them those key hires they so desperately want.
You’re fishing with the wrong bait
Candidates end up in your interview room because they responded to your job description. That’s your bait. As with actual fishing, the bait you use has a lot to do with what you catch. You might want to check that you are targeting the right people and expectations.
“There seems to be a huge disconnect right now between traditional job requisitions — that are a laundry list of skills — and how candidates will be evaluated on the job,” Bruno says.
Bruno suggests ditching the laundry list and instead taking a hard look at what your team needs in this role. “I always ask employers, ‘Can you give me five performance objectives?’ or ‘How will the candidate be evaluated in six months?’” Bruno says.
Once they are forced to answer those questions, she finds hiring teams discover that much of their “must have” list won’t be needed in the position. Even worse? There are many more skills — like the ability to prioritize, problem solve, communicate, and ask for help — that aren’t in the job description but that anyone who hopes to succeed in the role will need to possess.
Step back from your shopping list and think instead about what success in the role would look like. Then come up with skills and experiences that would genuinely help.
Read more HERE
January 5, 2021/in Articles, Dallas IT News, IT News /by admin
Despite challenges, the pandemic has unearthed opportunities from both a technology and strategic standpoint and has introduced new ways to measure the business value of digitization projects.
The pandemic has had a dramatic and adverse impact on companies of all sizes and geographic locations over the course of the past several months, including lost revenue, reduction of staff and cuts in IT budgets and spending. However, as we look back, there were some positive aspects as well, and more to come as plans are put in place for a post-COVID recovery.
Most companies, for example, were able to quickly pivot to a work-from-home structure to support employee safety, sustain and even increase productivity, and for the most part keep business activities on track. The transition has been so successful that many organizations plan to keep a portion of their workforce remote for the foreseeable future, in part to provide resiliency in the face of uncertainties. Weaknesses in IT infrastructure, process, and resources also became very apparent during the pandemic, pushing many companies to reduce or eliminate legacy debt, improve security, and increase investments in cloud services.
One additional upshot of the COVID crisis is a significant increase in the pace of digital transformation activities that are rapidly changing business models and user behavior. The pandemic has not only accelerated digitization but has exponentially increased the adoption of a digital process. What we anticipated to happen in the next five years is happening now, and what we thought wouldn’t have worked in the past is now possible because of the pandemic.
Digitization becomes a must-have
The life insurance business, for example, often relies on face-to-face sales interactions. But the pandemic turned that business model on its head. While we were already working on digitizing the sales process, there were pieces that needed to be accelerated or there soon wouldn’t be a business model. For us, digitization activities moved from nice-to-have to must-have in a matter of weeks. If we can’t get data electronically, underwrite automatically, or deliver policies digitally we can’t do business in today’s world.
Since March, we have delivered in less than 30 days two key initiatives that would have taken months, if not a year, to deliver under normal circumstances. The first is an automated underwriting process that uses data to manage risk up to $3MM without requiring the invasive process of going to a client’s house to take and test blood samples. The second project allowed us to electronically deliver policies to our customers since we had a limited in-office staff who did not want to rely on ‘snail mail,’ and agents could not meet the client to deliver the policy themselves. We are now working on the third transformational initiative that was originally projected to span multiple years but will now be done in 18 months.
Read more HERE
December 11, 2020/in Articles, IT News /by admin
IT leaders are leaning on lessons learned from the pandemic to redefine IT cultures and refine IT strategies as they move toward a new year of uncertainty.
From the first days of the pandemic, IT leaders have had to grapple with wildly unexpected circumstances — from transitioning thousands of employees to a work-from-home (WFH) environment, to near overnight platform rollouts in support of virtual teams. And for many, culture has proved to be the key unsung factor in their organizations’ ability to navigate unprecedented times.
Companies that had not established a resilient, transformation-focused culture prior to COVID-19 have struggled in the face of global shutdowns that have disrupted business as usual. Organizations that either pivoted to or had already embraced a transformation mindset, however, have been better equipped to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing environment, and to protect the health of their teams and their bottom lines.
And with companies having to adjust to new approaches to collaboration and productivity, the pandemic has provided IT leaders an opportunity to rethink and refine IT culture moving forward. Remaining agile, adjusting strategies, nurturing new approaches to work — here’s how several high-profile CIOs have helped guide their organizations through the chaos, leveraging pandemic-related changes to establish a transformation-minded IT culture for the future.
Mitigating culture shock
Maintaining the culture and morale of individual teams and the organization as whole has added a unique layer to the challenges companies now face, and for many IT leaders, the pandemic has magnified the importance of communication.
Lisa Davis, senior vice president and CIO of Blue Shield of California, has always believed in leading with honesty and transparency. “At Blue Shield, the health and safety of our employees is our number one priority,” she says. “Understanding where they are and what’s needed for them to thrive and be productive is top of mind.”
But the pandemic has elevated the need to be present and accessible as well, as Davis says she’s made herself available to weigh in on decisions and take quick action in support of her employees and the mission of the organization.
“As leaders we need to set the tone,” she says. “We had a great company culture prior to the pandemic, so I think that made the transition a little easier, but open and transparent communication at all levels of the organization is essential.”
Davis says she encourages leaders to seek ways of building a sense of community and camaraderie throughout teams, investing in technology and collaboration tools to maximize the user experience and ultimately help employees feel connected.
Read more HERE
The pandemic has underscored the importance of thriving through hardship and uncertainty. IT leaders discuss how they’re adjusting their leadership practices to help foster this key IT trait for the long haul.
The word ‘resilient’ is cropping up a lot lately as a cultural cornerstone for coping with the pressures the pandemic has foisted on IT. CIOs have played a significant role in enabling organization-wide remote work strategies at speed while accelerating digital initiatives central to the business in uncertain times.
For many, the ability to shift gears, double down and navigate hardship has been a testament to an IT culture capable of withstanding and recovering quickly from difficult challenges. For others, rising to the occasion has been a crash course in resilience, offering hard-earned lessons in what it will take to thrive in IT in the months and years to come.
“The last few months have been a huge social experiment for every company around the world,’’ says Jacqui Guichelaar, CIO of Cisco, who adds that many leaders discovered their staffs can be just as productive working remotely as in the office. The upshot? Leaders must model certain behaviors in this new way of working, she says. “Traditional tactics don’t work in the new reality.”
Here, IT leaders discuss what makes an IT organization resilient, and how they are adjusting their leadership practices to ensure IT can foster this key trait for the long haul.
Put people first
Keep connected
Find common purpose
Foster career growth
Establish mutual respect
Take care of yourself as well
More Details HERE
November 18, 2020/in Articles, Dallas IT News, dallas technology news, IT Job News, IT News, News /by admin
Leadership has little to do with one’s title or seniority; it’s an attribute that’s earned over time through study, practice and commitment. Are you prepared to become a true leader?
Becoming a true IT leader — someone who inspires teams to consistently reach new heights — requires skills that can only be acquired over time through hard work and a commitment to succeed.
Transformational leaders are typically described as lively, passionate, engaging and energetic. Such individuals aren’t focused only on helping teams achieve their planned goals; they also work hard to help team members reach their full potential.
Becoming a respected and prized leader isn’t easy, but it’s a goal within reach of just about anyone who’s willing to commit to the task. Here are seven fundamental attributes every IT leader needs to possess — and how to acquire them.
- Agility
- Vision
- Empathy
- Steadiness
- Authenticity
- Accessibility
- Curiosity
Get the details HERE
November 14, 2020/in Articles, Dallas IT News, IT News, News /by admin
IT modernization is a key component for establishing an agile, responsive enterprise. IT leaders lend advice on how to transform legacy tech into digital assets.
This year’s extraordinary events have accentuated the need for a modern technology environment agile and responsive enough to meet rapidly changing business dynamics — whether those are emerging revenue opportunities or work-from-home mandates.
And that means having a strategic plan for modernizing legacy apps.
“Getting rid of legacy is a perennial issue, but modernization is a top issue now more than ever,” says Diane Carco, president and CEO of management consulting company Swingtide and a former CIO.
CIOs see modernization as critical for delivering better quality software faster, running IT with more controls and insights, integrating more security, and more quickly meeting the needs of the business, according to The State of Modern Applications in the Enterprise, a 2020 report released by cloud solutions provider Ahead.
IT has plenty of work ahead to achieve those objectives, as 26% of organizations are only at the beginning stages of IT modernization, while 19% have made only moderate progress, according to The State of IT Modernization 2020 report from IDG and tech company Insight.
To move your modernization initiative forward, Carco and other leading technologists advise keeping the following 10 tips in mind.
1. Know what you have
2. Prioritize projects based on business value
3. Calculate total cost of ownership
4. Create a business-backed modernization roadmap
5. Take an incremental approach
6. Elimination is a viable option
7. Don’t shortchange governance
8. Be selective with microservices
9. Skip ahead
10. Take a product-based approach
Read more HERE
With IT salaries dropping, some hard-earned skills still pay
Employers are still willing to pay highly skilled IT staff a premium — but certification is making much less of a difference than it used to, a study shows.
Even with more IT workers looking for jobs in the wake of COVID-19 than were prior to the pandemic, highly skilled staff are able to demand higher pay. Increasingly, however, it’s on-the-job experience and not certifications that employers are valuing the most.
The average premium paid for tech certifications fell to 6.8% of base salary in the third quarter, the lowest in 7 years, according to Foote Partners’ latest IT Skills & Certifications Pay Index, while non-certified skills earned workers an average bonus of 9.6% of base salary, the same as in the previous quarter — and the highest in the past 20 years.
Those bonuses are all the more important to employees when, as Foote Partners found in a separate survey of IT jobs, not yet published, salaries dropped over the past year for 41% of job titles. Among those titles hardest hit are jobs in mobile platform computing, business systems analysis, .NET, digital product development, IT architecture, enterprise messaging, web systems, and SAP. Overall, across the 516 certifications the company tracks, the average premium for certifications declined by 1.5% during the quarter, and by 6.7% over the year to Oct. 1.
In some categories, notably cybersecurity, architecture and project management, the decline accelerated in the third quarter, although there was a slight increase in bonus pay offered for some certifications in networking, communications, app development and programming languages during the same period.
Automation is increasingly seen as a key IT strategy for competitive advantage, but pitfalls await those who fail to heed precautions.
Across nearly every industry automation is fast becoming king. Whether it’s through IT automation, robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) or some other means of eliminating or reducing manual processes, enterprises across the spectrum seek to speed up all manner of functions to remain competitive — and IT is right in the middle of this movement.
The potential benefits of automating processes can be compelling: faster completion of tasks with fewer errors and at lower costs, for example. It’s not surprising then, that demand for automation tools is on the rise.
A September 2020 report by research firm Gartner projects that global RPA software revenue will reach $1.89 billion in 2021, an increase of 20 percent from 2020. Despite economic pressures caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the RPA market is still expected to grow at double-digit rates through 2024, the firm says.
Among the key drivers for RPA deployments is the ability to improve process quality, speed, and productivity, each of which is increasingly important as enterprises aim to meet the demands of cost reduction during the crisis, Gartner says.
The report predicts that 90 percent of large organizations worldwide will have adopted RPA in some form by 2022, “as they look to digitally empower critical business processes through resilience and scalability, while recalibrating human labor and manual effort.”
Automation can also come with risks, however, if organizations don’t take the needed precautions or if they fall into bad practices. Here are some issues and strategic misfires to look out for when deploying automation in the enterprise, so you can avoid unnecessary risk.
· Automating processes before optimizing them
· Allowing ‘automation complacency’ to take hold
· Poor communication among stakeholders
· Process automation misfit
· Overlooking end user input
· No consideration of interaction design
Read more HERE
Calculating the total cost of IT services has always been a challenge, but the changing nature of IT coupled with unexpected expenses revealed during the COVID-19 crisis could leave your organization exposed to even more surprises charges.
One of the biggest mistakes an IT organization can make when outsourcing is failing to consider the total cost of the relationship — including all the hidden costs that are likely to accrue. Historically, there has been little incentive for service providers to bring these looming financial risks out into the open, so customers must be diligent about identifying these additional expenses in order to manage or eliminate them.
“Motivated customers can take this a step further and press their potential providers for greater transparency in the sourcing process. If you want to avoid unexpected costs cropping up, push your vendor to be clear about what’s included and what to expect if the engagement flexes or scales,” says Phil Fersht, CEO of outsourcing advisory and research firm HfS Research. “More importantly, the whole industry needs to get past its transactional heritage and start pushing towards genuine partnerships that are invested in mutual success.”
Veteran IT leaders understand this. But these issues have only gotten thornier. Outsourcing customers and their providers have shifted from traditional software and infrastructure solutions to cloud and everything-as-a-service. Moreover, new ways of working have been adopted to enable agile digital transformation. Add to all that the unprecedented disruption of a global pandemic.
“As most of the hidden costs are more nuanced and exaggerated than they were two years ago, it is even more critical to ensure recipients understand the impacts, know how they manifest, and ensure there is familiarity with the desired outcomes,” says Craig Wright, managing director with business transformation and outsourcing advisory firm Pace Harmon.
As always, the onus is on the buyer to beware. To that end, here are some of the most common hidden costs likely to emerge during the course of an outsourcing engagement today.
Read more HERE
September 24, 2020/in Articles, Information Technology, IT, IT News /by admin
IT leaders turn to emerging technologies from strategic vendors and VC partners to help keep collaboration and innovation humming in a work world gone remote due to the coronavirus.
The coronavirus pandemic has spurred a proliferation of rapid-fire transformations, with IT leaders working through punch lists of priorities aimed at preserving business continuity. But with work from home (WFH) decrees eliminating workplace tête-à-têtes, CIOs are wondering what will happen to serendipitous innovation.
As much as CIOs like to boast about IT staff productivity since they were sent home in March, simulating the water-cooler conversation that can spark fresh ideas is difficult. And humans who have glazed through scripted back-to-back Zoom sessions all day are unlikely to pivot to an ad-hoc meeting to expound on The Next Big Idea. Frustration borne by Zoom fatigue and the lack of face-to-face interaction mounts.
“This is going to prove to be very challenging,” says Craig Williams, CIO of networking company Ciena.
The pandemic could have come at a worse time
It’s hard to argue that a pandemic is well-timed, but when the coronavirus gripped the U.S., CIOs, who had met with their C-suites and boards in late 2019 to strategize their IT roadmap for 2020, were already executing on their digital strategy, says Carol Fawcett, CIO of Golden State Foods, a purveyor of condiments, dipping sauces and other foods for McDonald’s, Starbucks and other brands.
Inspired CIOs and their teams executed on their digital strategy, accelerating moves to Zoom, Microsoft Teams or another equivalent, boosting VPN licenses and network capacity and accelerating migrations to cloud software. They reprioritized projects as needed, Fawcett says.
Fresh research from the 2020 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey suggests this momentum will continue, as 47 percent of 4,200 IT leaders surveyed say COVID-19 has permanently accelerated digital transformation and adoption of emerging technology.
Read more HERE
The coronavirus pandemic has IT leaders shaking up IT priorities, with innovation pilots shifting to areas and technologies best suited to set up their organizations for near-term success.
Tech spending is trending downward, with multiple studies showing IT is once again being asked to do more with less.
A July report issued by research firm Gartner said worldwide IT spending in 2020 will drop 7.9 percent from last year’s figure. IDC in May predicted a 5.1 percent decline in worldwide IT spending. And a survey of 100 IT leaders from Apptio found that 80 percent feel pressure to cut IT spend, while 50 percent have already cut budgets.
CIOs are clearly tightening budgets as the pandemic and its economic fallout have forced cost-cutting measures across many organizations. Yet these same events are also driving the need for new tech-enabled services. The Apptio survey, for example, found that 63 percent of the IT leaders report an increase in demand for IT capabilities. As such, CIOs continue to move forward with innovation-aimed projects — albeit more selectively.
Between the pandemic and the subsequent economic upheaval, these are challenging times for everyone. But the networking industry has some elements in its favor. Technologies such as Wi-Fi, VPNs, SD-WAN, videoconferencing and collaboration are playing an essential role in maintaining business operations and will play an even greater role in the reopening and recovery phase.
At the same time, it has become obvious that as enterprises continue to migrate applications to the cloud, data-center networking will cease to be a high-growth industry. So what are the most powerful networking companies doing? They’re diversifying, expanding into new product areas, and moving up the stack beyond nuts-and-bolts connectivity and into areas such as hybrid-cloud management and the automation of networking processes.
This year’s list of the 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networking includes traditional networking powerhouses, with an emphasis on the extent to which they’ve embraced these new approaches, along with pure-play market leaders in areas such as wireless networking and hyperconverged infrastructure. (Editor’s note: Power is a subjective quality, and this list is not a ranking based on simple, quantifiable metrics. Our list is ordered, with input from industry watchers, to reflect the companies that are making the biggest power moves and the broadest impact on the network industry.)
Read more here
Automation has IT leaders eyeing the possibility of environments
with no hands-on operations work. But this evolution of DevOps may be
more pipedream than practical reality.
Automation has become a widely used tool for streamlining IT
operations, and Mindtree is one such organization removing manual
processes from its infrastructure as it moves toward delivering a more
fully automated environment.
The consulting and managed service provider’s strategy follows an
ambitious goal prevalent in many tech organizations: To get away from
the conventional work of IT operations and let machines handle it
instead.
Such an environment, where there’s virtually no hands-on operations
work, could deliver a faster, more frictionless development and
deployment experience — meaning better turnaround times for business
requests for new functions and services, says Rene Head, global vice
president of infrastructure at Mindtree.
“It’s not just about IT delivery excellence; it’s a win for the business as well,” Head says.
That’s the promise of NoOps, an emerging IT trend that is pushing
some organizations beyond the automation provided by DevOps to an
infrastructure environment that requires no operations work.
What is NoOps?
NoOps is the idea that the software environment can be so completely
automated that there’s no need for an operations team to manage it.
NoOps, for “no operations,” is a concept that pushes forward a trend
that has been on the march for a decade or more.
To be clear, NoOps is not the same as outsourcing your IT operations.
It’s not about moving to SaaS or the cloud and expecting those vendors
to run operations — although both managed service providers, such as
Mindtree, and cloud companies are indeed on the NoOps journey themselves
to gain more speed and agility in their own infrastructure.
Read more here
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When it comes to transformation, tech expertise goes only so far. IT
leaders must look for and develop traits not traditionally required for
technologists in order to succeed in the years ahead.
As their companies seize on automation, AI and other leading-edge
technologies to remake themselves into digital organizations, they’re
finding they don’t have the skills they need.
Consider some numbers released by Gartner this fall:
The IT research firm found that 70 percent of employees have not
mastered the skills they need for their existing jobs while 80 percent
lack the skills they need now and for future career success.
Read more here
July 15, 2019/in Articles, Dallas IT Managers, IT Management, IT Managers /by admin
Sure, nobody’s perfect. But for those in charge of enterprise
technology, the fallout from a strategic gaffe, bad hire, or weak spine
can be disastrous. Here’s how to avoid (or recover from) big-time IT
leadership mistakes.
Everybody makes mistakes. Most are harmless, some are embarrassing
but forgivable, and some can take your career — or your company — down
with them.
Some of the most common IT gaffes include becoming trapped in a
relationship with a vendor you can’t shake loose, hiring or promoting
the wrong people, and hiding problems from top management until it’s too
late to recover.
When you’re in charge of enterprise technology, the risks are much
higher and the fallout from mistakes can be much worse. So we’ve ranked
them by order of severity: Level 1 (an embarrassing story you’d tell
over a beer, but maybe not right away); Level 2 (one you can recover
from, but don’t expect to be on the fast track for promotion); and Level
3 (you’re fired).
Read more here
Falling off track is easy when you make a mistake that can turn a career superstar into a bit player.
The moment typically arrives without warning. An IT career that
showed every sign of success — steady promotions, salary increases, a
better office — suddenly slams to a halt. You’re fired, demoted or
involuntarily plateaued. What happened?
It’s impossible to rebuild a broken career without first
understanding how it was derailed. The “Success Express” frequently
slips off the rails due to a mistake, oversight, offense or
miscalculation made in total innocence or ignorance. Often, the victim
doesn’t even realize that he or she has made a career-crippling move.
1. Not looking beyond IT
2. Failing to acquire critical non-IT skills
3. Neglecting business relationships
Read more HERE
In the world of IT and data management, certifications are important benchmarks that many organizations value when looking to hire people to fill various roles. And at a time when enterprises are especially hungry for certain skills, documentation that’s mapped to a specific skill set based on standardized testing is useful to employers as well as professionals.
The most in-demand data management certifications today reflect where many organizations are placing their emphasis as they look to leverage information resources.
Among the most popular certifications, according to technology staffing and consulting firm Robert Half Technology, are:
- Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert: Cloud Platform Infrastructure
- Java
- Microsoft SQL Server
- DevOps
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect
- .NET
- Agile and Scrum
- Cisco Certified Network Associate/Cisco Certified Network Professional
- VMware
- Certified Information Systems Security Professional
Read more here
Top Five Reasons Tech Pros Should Earn Professional Certificates
eWEEK DATA POINTS: New IT jobs will require adeptness in relatively new fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science. Better get prequalified.
It’s no secret that tech automation is poised to upend many traditional careers. The good news is that if you have the right technical background, your skills are in greater demand than ever. In fact, according to a recent survey by the Consumer Technology Association, 92% of employers reported that they’ll “need more employees with technical skills.”
Many of these jobs will require adeptness in relatively new fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science.
Read more here
What an IT career will look like in 5 years
Emerging technologies and shifting workplace demands are reshaping the IT career horizon. Here are the changes experts see unfolding for IT roles and how IT work gets done.
If you sketched out how IT roles will change in the coming years, you’d likely envision tech roles maturing around emerging and high-value technologies, such as AI, data science, and the cloud, as well as a continuing focus on security across industries and business divisions.
These topics frequently came up in our discussions with tech leaders about the near future of IT roles. But so too did surprising insights — including potential new positions that don’t exist today.
Read more here
7 ways to make IT operations more efficient
Chances
are your enterprise’s IT operations could use some improvement. Here are tips
for getting key services on the fast track to higher performance and cost
savings.
Read more here
6 soft skills IT needs to succeed in the digital era
When it comes to transformation, tech expertise goes only so far. IT
leaders must look for and develop traits not traditionally required for
technologists in order to succeed in the years ahead.
Read more here
10 bad IT hires to avoid
A bad IT hire can have a crippling ripple effect on team productivity.
Here, IT leaders share their IT hiring horror stories — and tips on how they
could have been avoided.
Tech leaders who’ve been in business for a while will
recognize this scenario: A new hire who looks great on paper (or LinkedIn) gets
a desk, an ID card and an attitude. Your promising new IT staffer is turning
into a bad hire horror story.
Read more here
9 career lies IT pros tell themselves
IT lifers who see promotions and bleeding-edge projects handed to their colleagues may end up telling themselves it’s just a fluke, when in fact, their career path is stalling. And while it pays to fight for good opportunities rather than take flight from a problem, being in denial about your career can hurt your chance to make a correction.
Read MORE
Essential traits of business-driven IT leaders
The CIO role is quickly transforming into one responsible for driving business change. Here’s how to shake up your approach and envision — and realize — positive business outcomes.
Read more
13 signs your software project may be doomed
14 top paying big data jobs | Information Management
Software projects can get derailed before you know it. Here are the subtle warning signs that your latest app dev initiative isn’t going quite as well as it seems. Read more…
Top IT salaries cluster around the current need
for data analysis, cloud, and security expertise. Let’s look at top
roles by salary
According to the Robert Half Technology 2019 salary guide (a trusted resource with data for more than 75 positions in the IT field), here are the top IT jobs by salary for 2019, ranked by national median salary:
1. Big data engineer: $155,000
2. Mobile applications developer: $143,500
3. Information systems security manager: $139,000
4. Applications architect: $135,750
5. Data architect: $133,500
6. Database manager: $129,500
7. Data security analyst: $125,500
8. Software engineer: $124,500
9. Wireless network engineer: $122,000
10. Data scientist: $121,500
Some other hot IT hiring areas worth mentioning include DevOps and cloud. DevOps salaries remain
competitive because employers are competing for people with experience
in a relatively new specialty. That means with some project work, you
can transition into a DevOps-oriented job from a more traditional role.
Some other hot IT hiring areas worth mentioning include DevOps and cloud. DevOps salaries remain competitive because employers are competing for people with experience in a relatively new specialty. That means with some project work, you can transition into a DevOps-oriented job from a more traditional role.
Read more HERE
Want faster IT? Stop thinking like an IT engineer
Engineers may build a race car when the user asked
for a bicycle. Here’s how IT leaders can encourage a more humanistic
approach to problem-solving
Read more HERE
