Many articles have been written about the information technology employment market, but few have focused on what motivates an IT professional to aim for and stick with an IT career, when there are many other career choices.

This article discusses the important career motivators for IT professionals.  read more »

New "green" initiatives are reinventing the world of buying and leasing technology, primarily because technology that nears the end of its useful life must be disposed with-and there is a burgeoning cost for that.  read more »

Planning a Datacenter Migration

Moving your IT operation to a new datacenter is an enormous and intimidating proposition. Whether you are moving from one in-house location to another or plan on outsourcing your datacenter to a third-party hosting facility, planning and preparation are key to a smooth and successful transition.  read more »

Recently, a Washington State ferry service employee was searching for a new home for one of their ferries.  The employee utilized Google earth to zoom in on some potential sites and stumbled across a nuclear submarine with its propeller showing.  This is prohibited in military intelligence and sparked a wave of sensitivity over the use of mapping showing military bases.  However, there is a bigger story from this.  read more »

Virtualization is already considered a mainstream technology among IT professionals. According to Forrester Research, within the past two years, the number of enterprises and small- and mid-size businesses in North America using virtualization has increased from 29 to 40 percent.  read more »

Year after year, technology and market conditions accelerate and IT finds itself scrambling to stay on top of project loads. Proactive strategizing helps to anticipate rapidly changing technologies and business conditions--but it also helps to determine where trends are likely to accelerate fastest.  read more »

The Inupiaq village of Qikiktagruk (named Kotzebue by a Russian sea captain in the nineteenth century) is thirty miles above the Arctic Circle, 200 miles from Siberia and 1,000 miles from the North Pole. Not surprisingly, the town is over 75% Eskimo. More unexpected is that 40% of the population is under 18. Kotzebue, Alaska has one of the highest incidences of
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The old Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days had Phileas Fogg racing around the world in boats, trains, balloons and elephants through parts of Europe, India, and China to traverse the globe within a couple of months. In this article, you are being taken on a tour of the global world of IT outsourcing, in the space of a few minutes.  read more »

In last month's column, I was commenting on how new net neutrality groups appear every time I surf the net on this topic. This month is no exception. Even musicians are getting into the act (sorry for the weak pun). Many musicians are finding out that decisions made by Congress on Net Neutrality could impact their livelihoods.
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Voice Commands in the New Millennium

By now most of us have encountered speech recognition systems on the phone. I am not vehemently opposed to the use of speech recognition in messaging systems, but I have very little patience with systems that fail to get it right the first time. Nothing reduces me to quivering fury like experimenting repeatedly with an automated phone receptionist or phone banking system, trying to find that one perfect combination of volume and pronunciation that will allow the system to recognize my voice in a quiet room saying the simple word 'yes.' “You had no problem with “Courageous George's Corgi Kennels,” I explain loudly to the heartless machine. “So why is 'yes' a problem?”  read more »

It is no secret that the benefits of mobile business solutions continue to show their value in the enterprise. In fact, IDC predicts that $52 billion will be spent on all mobile services by 2010, with $1.5 billion of this being spent on mobile device management and security.
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Managing the Risk of Lost Mobile Devices
By Mary Shacklett  read more »