Search Results

Form your team; include the C-suite and any IT staff included in SAM to be sure that proper communications between members take place. Be sure and have buy-in from the C-suite as to what the situation is and what you will need to get the best outcome. It's important when providing documentation and required materials from the auditor to provide only the information requested.

In Guzman's mind, any comment-vetting method that gets in the way of full feedback should be a last resort. "I know that just making people register and have a user name doesn't help," she said. "Some of our most vicious commenters have user names. But as far as identifying themselves 100 percent? If somebody figures out a way to do it, that's awesome, but if you do that, you're going to have to staff for that process, and it's going to slow it down. It might be an hour or two before that comment goes up, and that's just unnatural for the Internet."

"What does this mean for Microsoft? It could and should follow with its own App Store, since customers will now understand that is how they extend their phone," Travis said. "However, having worked inside Microsoft as both staff and consultant, I can tell you that Microsoft has a hard time following."

Because policing has become so complex, corporations have turned to third party experts, such as iCopyright and MarkMonitor. These companies provide services like online trademark protection, antiphishing solutions, and online channel protection. In addition, companies are beefing up their IT staffs with individuals whose job is to scour the Web and protect the company's assets.

Instead, Astaro boasts 165 employees and a revenue draw of over US$50 million. About 50 of those workers staff the corporate office in Burlington, Mass. The rest take care of business from Astaro's dual main office in Germany and other countries throughout Europe Channeling fo...

This system puts instant audience response capabilities into the hands of presenters without a bank of high-tech equipment. For anyone who has to gather participant input, the ResponseCard AnyWhere system offers features not found in other audience polling systems. Perhaps its best feature is the ability to take it anywhere without a staff of technical experts to make it work...

Ineffective development execution, causing errors, rework, and poor performance. New requirements, short timelines, and varying levels of staff experience lead to rising complexity. Combine this with a loss in subject matter expertise as retirements set in and a loss of current documentation, and complexity becomes pervasive. Complexity can take many forms: Technical complexity: The sheer size of applications means that it is impossible for a single person, or even teams of people, to understand an application. This translates into poor understanding of where to start on a project and how to account for potential impacts. This problem is compounded by a loss of experts skilled in some legacy languages and the diversity of languages across the application portfolio. It is made still more difficult by the progressive degradation of workable software architectures over time. Business complexity: This decline in technical understanding is multiplied by a loss of business understanding. Globally distributed teams cannot bridge the communication gap between business users and development professionals. Business users cannot communicate what changes need to be made to reflect business goals and development teams are unable to respond effectively. This becomes especially problematic in companies with highly dynamic business models or globally distributed development teams. Disbursed intelligence and teams: Different users have and require different information about their applications. A CIO may need to know the availability, cost and risk of the application portfolio. She herself knows the value of executing certain development tasks to support a larger strategic priority. But are these priorities acted on from a daily maintenance perspective? A business analyst may need to know the adaptability of the application that runs a key business process. He also understands the structure and sequencing of business processes from an abstract level. But do development team members share that critical insight? This is especially true in outsourced teams that may lag in their knowledge about an application portfolio. Addressing the Challenge: Business Intelligence for Applications How can we overcome the challenges of complexity to improve maintenance activities? The answer is by collecting and using business intelligence for applications. By sharing information about application portfolios across global teams, users can better respond to the needs of the business. And they can start reallocating resources away from the daily firefighting toward higher value activities. Business intelligence for applications allows the following: Managers to better prioritize maintenance activities based on business needs Business analysts to better communicate change requests Development managers to better focus effort Developers to better execute necessary changes Improved knowledge transfer between development teams But what does business intelligence for applications entail? Let's look at its constituent parts. Technical Insights Development professionals must be able to understand the complex structures and behaviors of their enterprise applications. This requires visualizations of how data and other elements flow through a system. It requires the ability to probe an application for artifacts of interest, such as variables that require extra security, elements that will be affected by a proposed change, or code that is inefficiently architected. It requires the ability to measure the size and complexity of the applications to assess the size of a project and focus effort. To fully understand the reality of our application portfolio requires rich technical insight. Rather than relying solely on high-level scans of artifacts, users must be able to assess their applications to a level that is useful. A manager or architect may find summary analytics to be sufficient. A developer will require highly detailed analysis within programs. Similarly, users will require technical insight across diverse applications. Application portfolios consist of software from Cobol to Java. Technical analysis must be just as inclusive. Business Insights Over time applications tend to lose their connection with the business function they were designed to support. This is manifested in the creation of names for variables, programs, and other elements that are impenetrable to business users. This requires a shared lexicon that allows business analysts and development teams to speak the same language. Additionally, it is important for users to understand the logic of how a system behaves. This logic describes business decisions like "approve discount if customer status equals 'gold.'" Governance of this logic allows analysts to better communicate how a process must adapt to support new goals. It also allows development teams to focus immediately on adapting the correct logic. Stakeholder Insights As discussed, users have different information and information needs related to the application portfolio. Complexity can be reduced by collecting relevant insights and making them available where necessary. For example, a business user may have insight into the purpose and behavior of a business process. Mapping this intelligence onto software assets allows development staff to more readily understand how code modifications should be executed. Other kinds of information can also be associated with applications to provide a richer insight. For instance, executives can assign value and risk to portions of the application portfolio. Similarly, cost and business service data like availability could be associated with an application. This metadata requires a mechanism for associating it with the underlying applications. Stakeholders have different levels within and different functions across an application. This means that their information needs will be different. A CIO will need a portfolio-wide view of her applications. A developer will need a deep view of a particular portion of an application. Similarly, a manager of a business process will require information about, say, availability and complexity, to be process-centered. The manager of an outsourcing relationship will require information about adherence to service level agreements to be provider-centered. This mechanism for grouping intelligence and abstracting it to the appropriate level is business contextualization. This aids maintenance by providing the right kind of intelligence to the right user in the maintenance process. Each will consume information in a different fashion for different goals. Let's turn to the three ways in which the intelligence is utilized. Assessment and management reports: Summary inventories and assessments provide managers with a foundation for planning maintenance activities. For instance, management may discover that maintenance activities are focused on burning platforms or non-strategic applications. Priorities can then be reallocated. In this case, complexity is overcome through intelligence on what the contents of the portfolio are. Portfolio management dashboards allow managers to track KPIs (key performance indicators) over time. This allows executives to determine where misalignments exist between goals like availability or efficiency and the reality of their applications. Complexity is mitigated by identifying priority development tasks and redirecting resources away from uncritical activities. This kind of information can be made manifest via browser-based dashboards. Similarly, managing adherence to service level agreements is especially important for outsourced or globally distributed teams. Collecting business intelligence lets management better partner with remote locations. Development teams: As discussed previously, business analysts and development teams are heavy consumers of the collected intelligence. They use the always-current, always-shared information to better communicate business requirements and technical challenges. The information is also vital for executing daily development tasks and more sophisticated modernization initiatives. Developers can understand the targeted applications, locate potential impacts, create test cases, and more. This is very true for outsourced or global development, where knowledge transfer about complex application portfolios must be a priority. In parallel, development managers will want to ensure that developers are focused on the right tasks. By constraining analysis within a defined "context," developers can see and analyze a sub-set of their application portfolio. This ensures that maintenance professionals are equipped with the information they need to focus on. Third-Party Software: Enterprise software tools are made significantly more useful when they can be connected to business intelligence about applications. Software tools that directly relate to applications but ignore the reality of the application code itself provide specious information. However, when used in concert with business intelligence about applications, they provide an extremely powerful combination: Requirements management tools can link with underlying software to estimate necessary effort. Integrated development environments can provide query results, such as impact analysis, that focus on areas in the application as they are being maintained. A test or build management tool could invoke services from the business intelligence repository to determine where complexity has risen, and if so, then the build may be flagged to fail. A source code management system could invoke a service to determine how code quality measures have changed between versions. A SOA/BPM suite can link coarse-grained business processes the atomic logic hidden within. Application maintenance is a serious drain on resources and can impair operational flexibility. Companies must make the maintenance process as effective as possible to ensure that applications can adapt to business needs. This requires that the challenge of complexity is overcome. This requires business intelligence on the applications that you are targeting. Charles Dickerson is senior vice president at Relativity Technologies, a provider of enterprise application modernization solutions. He has 20 years of product marketing and product management experience in the software industry. ...

This new model might mean that major daily newspapers limit their publications to as little as one day per week. This would permit them to reduce staff to match their new mission. The fact is, hundreds of writers have been laid off in the last few years with no end to this trend in sight. As more and more younger people get their news online, there will be less and less of a need for daily newspapers.

Financial institutions and creditors must also enumerate certain steps to administer the program, including obtaining approval of the initial program by the board of directors or a committee of the board, ensuring oversight of development, implementation and administration of the program, training staff and overseeing service provider agreements, according to the agencies' final ruling...

"We realized the limitations of this approach and in 2004, when our partnership with RIM began, we sat down with them and said, 'Hey, BlackBerry is now the de facto platform for mobile enterprise users. How can we make it easier for end users and IT managers and staff, and also off-load some of the burden on SAP developers and software staff?'"...

For instance, Yahoo enjoyed a brief customer satisfaction lead over Google in 2007, but this year dropped 3 percent to 77 as the company grappled with the departure of key managerial staff and Microsoft's attempted acquisition. Microsoft's MSN.com's satisfaction score, meanwhile, remains stagnant at 75...

The Cisco network serves as the platform of a file-based workflow system for shot selection and editing and is now carrying live and on-demand video coverage of events that have never been seen before. It also enables staff at NBC Studios in New York to view and edit streaming online video content from Beijing in real time, avoiding the cost associated with transporting some 400 staff members to Beijing...

The biggest names in enterprise software -- Microsoft, Oracle and SAP prominent among them - are developing more powerful portable versions of their applications. Business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications are notoriously and somewhat necessarily heavyweight applications, however, and mobile enterprise users -- primarily salespeople and field service staff -- are looking for more than simply scaled-down, lightweight versions of them...

The Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force have considered delaying current activity and development for the Air Force Cyber Command (AFCC) in order to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the AFCC's mission and to synchronize that mission with other key Air Force initiatives, they said...

Kathleen Gilroy, cofounder of Swift Media Networks in Boston, eats, lives and breathes Web 2.0. Not only is her latest business venture focused on Web 2.0 services for conferences, but she's also used just about every Web-based tool there is to run her own various startups. With five full-time staff members, she has become a well-seasoned user of blogs, wikis, collaboration tools and just about any other free or low-cost service she can leverage.

For instance, more than 40 percent of IBM's workforce no longer reports to IBM on a daily basis; they either work from home or are based on a client's site. There are now 35,000 BlackBerry devices in circulation among IBM's staff, Dunderdale added, up from 5,000 a few years ago...

The specter of degraded network performance travels right down the line and may cause problems for enterprise networks and IT staff. It's not only streaming video coverage from the Games that enterprise business and IT managers need to be concerned about. They should be anticipating effects on employees' productivity as well, according to Patrick Murray, director of product management at Internet filtering specialist 8e6.

"Alas, I broke one of the cardinal rules of security and, but for the grace of the Black Hat conference staff, would have had my name added to the infamous Wall of Sheep," Prince wrote in a writeup of the incident for eWeek. Other than an automatic reply that noted Prince was at the Black Hat conference, he didn't immediately respond to e-mail from TechNewsWorld.

Depending on the business type, there are many ways to reduce energy usage. Energy efficient lighting and HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) upgrades, real-time management and metering of energy use, building envelope improvements (roofs, windows and insulation) and premium efficient motor upgrades are all relatively easy methods to assure that the operation is not paying for more energy than it needs. If you think about it, energy is a major cost for most operations, yet it is probably the only major expense that is bought without a purchase order. Every time an employee turns on a computer, prints a document, runs a piece of equipment, leaves the lights on or turns up the heat or air conditioner, they are buying electricity or therms from their utility company -- all unauthorized. That's why I call energy an unauthorized purchase order. Management needs to assure their building systems are operating most efficiently and the staff understands the ramifications on the cost side of each action...

Also, keep in mind office events, which have proven to be the downfall of many a determined dieter. "Make sure that you find out what they are serving at staff meetings, so you can plan ahead to bring your own," Jampolis says. "Better yet, suggest a healthier option for the whole office."