Opinion

Keeping leadership, adulthood and oversight in balance

Dear Bob …I agree with most of the points you made in "Encouraging Adulthood," (Keep the Joint Running, 2/6/2006), [which suggests that holding employees accountable is the opposite of leadership and of asking employees to act as adults].

Higher Availability Future: Autonomic Computing or Recovery Oriented Computing?

IT security podcasts you can’t miss

Get the latest news and opinions on malware, network security, and more from six top podcast picks

Rogue IT may be a blessing in disguise

CIOs could benefit from hidden tech spending, but only if they learn to work with the "bad boys of IT"

Microsoft whacks Symantec, more Sony antics

Grumpy gossip hound has Google on the brain

Clarifying confidence vs accountability

Dear Bob …So here I am on day three of having agreed to demonstrate to the owner of the company that leadership can exist within our organization, if he allows it to.An uphill battle with a reluctant boss.I have grappled with accountability vs. con

Three lessons for successful e-mail archiving

Some process changes — and outsourcing options — will help your company be better prepared for legal challenges

ROI: Debating the value of metrics for IT management

Is an ROI metric an essential tool for project management or merely smoke and mirrors?

Microsoft extends SMS 2003’s reach into Windows

More than just patches, Service Pack 2 also yields key console changes

Speeding retrieval with in-memory data management

Though often overlooked, memory is a great place to store databases for fast search and retrieval

Virtualization-oriented architecture takes SOA to the next level

VOA builds on a combination of system, storage, and infrastructure virtualization

How Quickly Will Your Organization Adopt SOA?

Been checking out a lot of Blogs pertaining to how you get people within an organization to adopt SOA. The truth is, there is no one single approach, it's really dependent on the organization you're dealing with. There are a few organizati

Another Mr. Know-it-all

Dear Bob …I'm facing a situation similar to the one Not screaming yet is handling. This guy is an exact replica of George. However, I don't have the luxury of losing him either to another project or to another company. I want to explain h

Debugging Versus Troubleshooting

For banks, security compliance goes only MSSP-deep

Vetting managed security services providers for compliance with federal mandates just makes sense

Krugle unveils a search engine for code

Startup's new tool for locating open source code could help developers stop reinventing the wheel

The open source answer: An interview with Bruce Snyder

Industry insider says open source tips the balance toward the build side, thanks to shorter development times and increased possibilities for reuse

Inside MCI’s decision to build or to buy IT applications

At MCI, a routine series of questions helps IT managers decide how to best meet their needs

Is the offshoring trend ready to reverse?

Economic forces overseas could bring offshore development projects back home

A slim market for certified open source?

Companies such as Red Hat, SourceLabs, and SpikeSource offer fully validated open source software stacks, but are customers buying?

Handling Mr. Know-it-all

Dear Bob …We hired a guy recently who I'm having some struggles with.  Let's call him George. I like George a lot; he's young, energetic, and full of ideas; he's not afraid to tackle something really imposing or to dig

Adding “mainframe discipline”

Dear Bob …I just inherited a team of folks that run a rather large financial notification system for a couple of big players. These is strictly an operations team. No development work.Where do I find out what "mainframe discipline" is and

SOA and Web 2.0 Convergence Continues…Thus I’m on Too Many Planes

SOA is hot, but now the Web 2.0 is hotter, and now both are coming together in some kind of technology cocktail. One of the guys who have been evangelizing this is Dion Hinchcliffe who's come to the correct conclusions that the new stuff that is

The raw data on greylisting

This should be self-explanatory, allowing that TEMPFAIL is a greylist flag: [root@mail log]# for i in `ls maillog*gz`; do echo -n "$i: "; num=`gzcat $i | grep -c TEMPFAIL`; echo $num; totnum=$(($totnum+$num)); done; echo $totnum maillog.0.g

The security grab bag: Is Treo hacking overrated?

Tech security education courses, the best security newsletter, and more in this week's missive

Handhelds give way to “telephony” devices

Voice is still the killer app that’s going to loosen up the purse strings

EarthLink gets wormed, Google takes desktop turn?

On the case of the mysterious disappearing White House e-mails

Network Appliance’s growing ambition

Alacritus acquisition bears fruit as NetApp extends data protection offerings and adds services to its portfolio

Microsoft continues to nibble at security

ISA service pack leverages WAN links, while OneCare Live service tidies up desktop protection

Plugging in to voice apps

Phone services via speech-enabled software from companies such as Nuance and TuVox are taking off

Customers don’t have to hate interactive voice apps

Keeping customers on the line with IVR systems requires careful planning and monitoring of the voice response interface

When the boss doesn’t know what went wrong

Dear Bob … IT here (as in any sizable organization) is divided up into various groups, whose managers report directly to the IT Director. Over the last several months we've had morale and retention issues in a couple of areas – a string of dep

The hills are alive

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Sonos, makers of the eponymous Sonos Digital Music System. As a musician and obviously as a geek, the concept was intriguing, so I agreed to take a closer look. I received two ZP100s, which are about the size of an

The browser as orchestrator

Modern Web browsers can be powerful tools for composing services

BlackBerry handsets will thrive for years to come

Despite the company’s patent hassles, its peerless handsets and ardent fan base will see it through

New Podcast Up There. . .Show 25: Bob Brauer CEO StrikeIron

New Podcast Up There. . .Show 25: Bob Brauer CEO StrikeIron Bob and I talk about the concept behind StrikeIron, Web 2.0, and the future of the Global SOA. You can find the Podcast here…

Accountability vs Coaching

Dear Bob …I was handed your article "Confidence or Accountability."  I thought that the article was good approach to better understanding what helps trigger human response.  The only caveat I have is that in a Fortune 50

Bringing software development back in-house

To hear one CEO tell it, the tide may be turning against offshore outsourcing

Watch out for billing scams … and slimy managers

What can you do when a slightly sleazy deal starts to slide deeper into the fertilizer?

Will SOA Reduce the Need for Developers?

There is a lot of talk out there this week about how SOA will save us from having to use outsourced/overseas software development, indeed by lowering the need for developers. I'm not sure this is reality right now, and we're making a huge

Clean house, clean data

Developers must consider data logic before writing the first piece of code

Itanium stakes its future on openness

An industry consortium says Intel's beleaguered chip offers choices, but will that be enough to win it market share?

SOX, Accountability, and Responsibility

Dear Bob …In response to your Keep the Joint Running titled "Confidence or accountability – pick one" there's a new wrinkle — SOX. With all of the new audits, policy and procedure drills, the mindset of Control just flourishes.&

iWay Goes Towards the ESB Light

iWay, the maker of over 300 adapters is now going the way of ESB as well, like many others, but is this really a good move long term?…

Microsoft pushes cells, MPAA defies itself

Crusty columnist sprains brain doing rapid reversal on Google

Winning the password-probability game

Applying a little logic could help professional password crackers figure out which passwords occur most frequently

Dream of telecommuting may become more elusive

Wary of slackers, the corner office holders appear to be rethinking the wisdom of letting folks work at home

I’m on Cold Medication…Tips on SOA Performance

Lately I've run into a few people who are just getting their SOA sea legs and are a bit concerned about scalability and performance. Indeed, many of the pilots that are tossed together these days are not blowing the doors off of the hinges in t

Finding a home for metadata

Organizing data about data is essential for master data management. But where do you put the metadata repository?

Microsoft injects more smarts into Windows Storage Server 2003

Forthcoming Release 2 will include goodies such as the handy single-instance storage feature