Posts tagged IT

What are the best IT Certifications to get?

Nov 16th

Posted by Scott Coughlin in Business of IT

No comments

Today, I am posing a question to the field:  What Information Technology Certifications do you think are the best to get today?  There are simply so many of them, it is very hard to decide what to counsel young IT Professionals to pursue.

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Personally, I am torn on the subject.  I routinely recommend that people go for the CISSP (Certified Information System Security Professional), but now I am starting to question that.  As the years have gone by the cost of obtaining and renewing that cert have continued to go up.  Many people recommend the millions of Microsoft ones that are out there, but again it is very hard in the field to tell the difference between a Microsoft Certified Professional and a Microsoft Certified Software Engineer.

What I dislike most is that some people have these laundry lists of certs in one field – Microsoft, Oracle, CISCO – but know absolutely zero  about Apple or LINUX or UNIX products.  How many of you actually work in a homogeneous environment that has only one operating system? What cert tells you that the person is an IT Ninja and not just a poser?  That is what I want to know.

Anyhow, here are some links on the subject to get you thinking:

Please share your thoughts on IT certs with us.  I wonder if the group thinks as little of them as I do….Thanks.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for November 16, 2009  by Scott Coughlin.

Image Credits: bp.blogspot.com

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How Much Should Information Technology Integration Cost?

Nov 10th

Posted by Scott Coughlin in Business of IT

No comments

Today, I am struggling with explaining to stakeholders that they need to pay for capability integration into systems. I deal with a lot of situations where a number of computer and network elements have been cobbled together to just get to a minimal functioning capability, but no more. As soon as that state is achieved, they all immediately begin asking for each of these disparate elements to function smoothly and intimately in a finely tuned integrated system. Unfortunately, they usually do not want to commit additional or significant funds to create that seamless, integrated environment. As a professional systems engineer, I find it very hard to explain. The best that I can come up with is that there seems to be a prevailing idea that you can herd cats without paying any cat herders.

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So I turn to you and ask, how do you determine the cost for integrating software solutions on your network? What is return on investment (ROI)? How do you show and demonstrate it. It is like paying for preventative health benefits, right? You only know what you spend, not what you would have spent to fix the maladies if you had not! As far as I know, there is no way to prove what the opportunity cost was for a lack of integration funding. Do you know of any?

I went online and did some searching and found two good articles on the subject. I recommend them to you for thought:

“So Many Tools Today…

We have so much technology infrastructure underpinning software development today that, for the most part, remains unseen. Have you ever wondered what it takes to hold it all together? Have you any idea of the costs involved when it fails?

When we look at the average development organization we usually find a heterogeneous collection of tools from a variety of vendors. Some are modern {sidebar id=1} state-of-the-art technologies and others are legendary tools that we invested in years ago and which contain vital historical data about our development history.”

“Of course, if the textual merge does detect a conflict, the risks are far greater. An automated merge won’t get tired or make a typo. A human can and sometimes will. If the conflicts are nontrivial, as in the case of two engineers rewriting the same code, merges can be some of the most dangerous changes of all.

So far I’m not really saying anything new here. It’s pretty standard advice that engineers should commit code no less than once a day, even if only to reduce the risk of losing code by accident. Also, there is a lot of literature on the benefits of “continuous integration” as opposed to “Big Bang integration”, or on releasing your software “early and often.”"

While both are excellent in their own rights, neither really scratches the itch with a proven method to calculate the real cost for integration nor the return on investment for that expenditure. I will continue to search.

Do have any best practices, industry norms, rules of thumb, or case studies on this topic? Have you ever seen an effective presentation, book, article, or lecture on this topic? Do you know of a term for this study? Are there any presentations from IT consultants available that sell their integration services to an enterprise? If you know of any, please share.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for November 10, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin.

Image Credit: JBA Systems

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What is a Global Address List (GAL) and Why Is It Important to You

Nov 2nd

Posted by Scott Coughlin in Business of IT

No comments

This week, I thought that I would try something new.  I am going to focus on a single topic and produce a series on a single topic.  This week’s topic will be on Enterprise Email services’ Global Address List function or GAL for short. 

This is what “The GAL” looks like to all of you Microsoft Exchange Clients out there:

gal

My plan for the week follows:

  • Monday (today) – What is a GAL via an Information Technology (IT) Vocabulary Builder.
  • Tuesday – Why is this important to both Enterprise users and individual users.
  • Wednesday – Why the concept applies to more than just Microsoft Exchange users.
  • Thursday – What I wish was possible using today’s GAL services and what might be possible shortly.  Basically a  GAL wish list.
  • Friday – I will reserve for topics yet to be named based upon the community’s feedback and comments!

As a reminder to new readers, The Information Technology (IT) Vocabulary Builder series aims to deliver a very concise summary of a currently relevant topic to Information Professionals.  It is done mostly by collecting a small number of highly relevant web links to save you the time of combing through search results yourself.  It differs from sites such as Wikipedia because it includes opinions, forecasts, and detractions in addition to just facts.

So today, we focus on Global Address Lists (GAL),  This is how Wikipedia defines the Global Address List:

The Global Address List (GAL) also known as Microsoft Exchange Global Address Book is a directory service within the Microsoft Exchange email system. The GAL contains information for all email users, distribution groups, and Exchange resources. Digital IDs certificates generated by Microsoft Exchange Server Advanced Security IIS or by Microsoft Exchange Key Management Server (KMS) are automatically published in the Global Address Book. Users of Microsoft Outlook can publish to GAL their externally generated PKI certificates that are used for secure e-mail.

Essentially, it provides a directory service for an entire Enterprise.  If you use Microsoft Exchange at work, then the GAL is where you go to find the way to contact, collaborate, and interface with other users.  You find their email addresses, Instant Messaging names, phone numbers, office addresses, mobile phone information, points of contact, etc.  At least that is the idea, in practice, it can be a very frustrating tool for most users to employ successfully.  When you now someone’s name, exactly how to spell it, and which department they work in, it will work like a champ.  Unfortunately, it is next to useless, when you are trying to get in touch with “That guy from accounting with the black hair and glasses who does billing reviews for our West Texas division.”  Making it go from what a bunch of programmers at Microsoft think is best to actually effective is what I would like to focus on this week.

Here are some of the best links on the subject that I found in my search of the web:

Obviously, if you are an Enterprise level Information Technology Professional, then Microsoft Exchange Server and its Global Address List directory functionality are key tools in your productivity set.  I hope that this week’s discussions offer your value.  Please come back tomorrow for more and feel free to comment, make recommendations, and provide feedback via my contact button above or comments below.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for November 2, 2009  by Scott Coughlin.

Image Credit: Microsoft Outlook via Stanford.edu

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