http://www.infoworld.com/columnists/off_the_record.html Lead With Knowledge, from InfoWorld.com en-us Copyright (C) 2007 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. Wed, 10 Oct 2007 04:01:13 PDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Kathy_Badertscher@InfoWorld.com webmaster@InfoWorld.com 40 http://images.infoworld.com/img/img_hdshot_82x74_off_the_record.gif http://www.infoworld.com/columnists/off_the_record.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/27/14OPrecord_1.html In the early days of the latest century, my pal Jesse and I found ourselves working as part of a systems programming team for a large corporation outside Palo Alto, Calif. One day, a brand new hire, let's call him "Frank," walked into the cube that Jesse and I shared. He needed advice. Tue, 27 Mar 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/27/14OPrecord_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/20/13OPrecord_1.html I’ve worked in IT for so long that whole segments of my career tend to blur out. But I can tell you exactly when it started. Tue, 20 Mar 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/20/13OPrecord_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/13/12OPrecord_1.html In the early 1990s I landed a job with "Strat-a-Gee," a hugely successful VAR (value-added reseller) on the East Coast. Our growth was enormous. By Y2K we had gone from 100 employees to more than 1,600 -- and nearly a billion dollars in sales. We carried tens of thousands of SKUs, and employed 1000+ sales professionals in my office alone. Along the way, we became experts in the service arena too, which gave us an edge on the competition. Tue, 13 Mar 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/13/12OPrecord_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/06/11OPrecord_1.html Every development shop has issues. Tue, 06 Mar 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/06/11OPrecord_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/27/10OPrecord_1.html Some years ago, I got a job doing network support for the District Attorney’s office in a large city that shall remain nameless. When I arrived, the network was a mess! Malware was rampant, Internet and WAN connections were saturated, and users were constantly complaining about slow computers and network performance. Even so, my attempts to enforce a mindful security policy were met with fierce resistance. The attitude among the legal staff was, “This is my computer and my network; you’re just a computer janitor.” Tue, 27 Feb 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/27/10OPrecord_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/20/09OPrecord_1.html Between the latest firewall technology and advanced intrusion detection systems, IT professionals are breathing a little easier. This is a big mistake. It may be easier to protect the network from external attack these days, but the greatest security risks still come from inside the DMZ. Tue, 20 Feb 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/20/09OPrecord_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/13/08OPrecord_1.html I was working for a small chain of electronics retailers in New Orleans when the head office in Memphis decided that we needed to replace our call center. Business had been expanding rapidly, and our home-grown call system was overwhelmed. We took bids from all the big telephony vendors for turn-key call centers, but in the end the top brass decided that it would be cheaper if we rolled our own. Tue, 13 Feb 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/13/08OPrecord_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/06/07OPrecord_1.html They don’t call it “lost wages” for nothing. In 2003, after a spectacularly unsuccessful stay in Vegas, I came back to Pittsburgh with no money and no job leads. I had been trying to break into IT, but my job skills were not that strong. I had taught myself to program, and I could design a Web site. But I had very little experience with servers or network administration. Tue, 06 Feb 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/06/07OPrecord_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/30/06OPrecord_1.html I’m the technical administrator at a large medical group in Canada. Among other things, I’m responsible for the LAN, the WAN, all the desktops, laptops, peripherals, and a medical-records application that’s at the core of our group’s operations. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been struggling to make that app perform more reliably. At the same time, our infrastructure has been growing fast, and sluggish performance from our overloaded servers had become a problem. Tue, 30 Jan 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/30/06OPrecord_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/23/05OPrecord_1.html Many years ago I had a job working for “Acme Codeworks,” a small mainframe software vendor. One day my boss asked me to evaluate a backup app as a candidate for acquisition. I installed it, and the mainframe promptly crashed. Off to the computer room I went, where my colleagues and I spent several hours bringing the system back up. (This fact should provide an approximate date for this story; these days, if an OS crashes, it usually restarts itself while you’re waiting for the elevator.) Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:00:00 PST offtherecord@infoworld.com,letters@infoworld.com (Anonymous)http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/23/05OPrecord_1.html