November 2006 Archives

We tend not to do big, noisy site launches around these parts, so I wanted to make sure Datamation blog readers knew about the latest addition to our growing group of IT management sites: bITa Planet.

The new site, which went live on Tuesday, focuses on one of the most important challenges facing IT today: how to align IT with the goals of the business.

Our editors, writers and developers have put a lot of work into the site since planning began last summer, and it shows. Topic areas range from alignment advice and strategies, business optimization, IT governance and compliance, and business/IT alignment software and services. In other words, the kind of stuff you need to know to help your organization succeed in today's competitive environment.

Here are some headlines from the site:

The Changing Dynamics of the Data Center

Alignment Is The Engine of Toyota's Growth

Regulatory Compliance Starts with Software

What’s Your Role In Business Model Innovation?

What’s Your Technology Center of Gravity?

So take some time (if you have any!) to check out the new site. We think you'll find lots of information that will help you align IT with your business, thus making you a star in the organization and catapulting your career to new heights. Or something like that.

In many ways, the problems facing Yahoo spelled out in an internal memo published in the Wall Street Journal are byproducts of a growth and longevity experienced by only a handful of Internet companies.

In his internal memo, company executive Brad Garlinghouse argued that Yahoo, whose financial performance has flagged in recent quarters, has lost its business focus and identity.

As described here:

Garlinghouse said that Yahoo's problems stem, in part, from trying to do too much, saying his company lacks a cohesive vision, is reactive and is separated into silos that frequently don't talk to each other and fight to protect their turf. "We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it," he said.

"I've heard the strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world," Garlinghouse wrote. "The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular."

As I suggested at the top of this post, part of the reason for Yahoo's current predicament is that it has been around since 1994. That's 12 years of crushing pressure to grow revenue and keep up with lightning-fast changes in a hyper-competitive and unpredictable market. In an environment like that -- especially if you have a talented and adaptable workforce -- it's tempting to lay bets all over the table.

The trouble is, sooner or later you lose track of what you're betting on and how you're doing. Yahoo is like a gambler in a casino, where they don't have clocks. OK, Yahoo really isn't like that. I just wanted to bring up the clock thing because I've always thought it was weird. Haven't the casinos ever heard of watches? Besides, if you're serving people free drinks, after awhile you could plant Big Ben next to their slot machine and they wouldn't notice.

But back to Yahoo. Garlinghouse merely wrote what many investors and tech pros have long believed: Yahoo needs to rediscover its focus, dump the extraneous business lines, and buy a casino.

There are a couple of good pieces on CIO Update about how companies can become more environmentally aware and how IT can help lead the way.

Regular CIO Update columnist (and Symantec CIO) David Thompson argues that "CIOs have a unique opportunity to strengthen their companies’ green efforts through a variety of measures." For example:

CIOs can start by putting pressure on vendors to use less toxic substances in their PCs, storage, servers, and other devices in order to make it easier to properly dispose of these devices.

Do they count votes for no toxic substances in our PCs and other networking equipment? Geez, the Blue Screen of Death is disturbing enough.

Also on CIO Update, via internetnews.com, Andy Patrizio reports that this year's annual TechNet conference featured serious discussion about energy issues and the role of corporations in protecting the environment. Here's Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy at a panel session:

"We feel every company should take a huge eco-responsibility. Energy does cost money, there isn't a CEO who doesn't understand that."

Give Microsoft credit for having some fun with its reputation as a purveyor of shoddy code.

But I'm not sure this spoof of Windows' infamous Blue Screen of Death is destined to provide endless moments of mirth for IT pros -- or any computer user.

Here's how CNET News.com describes the experience:

BlueScreen v3.2 simulates the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, an unexpected freezing of Windows caused by software error that has plagued IT administrators and users for many years -- and that has provoked no end of criticism of Redmond's software-coding skills. The BlueScreen application cycles between different Blue Screens Of Death, providing a simulated boot every 15 seconds, based on the actual configuration of the PC on which it is deployed.

Is it me, or would this get tired fast?

The prank screensaver wasn't cooked up in Redmond; it was created by Sysinternals, a provider of Windows system utilities. Microsoft bought the company in July and recently launched a TechNet site featuring Sysinternals tools, thus raising the screensaver's profile enough to become mindless blog fodder spark a spirited online debate.

Other than lining up job interviews on K Street, the lame-duck Congress reconvening today isn't expected to generate a whole lot of activity, according to a story by internetnews.com's Roy Mark.

However, once the new, Democratic-controlled Senate and House gathers on Capitol Hill in January, prospects for a network neutrality provision, designed to prevent broadband carriers from charging extra fees to content providers based on bandwidth consumption, should improve considerably.

Indeed, according to this article on CNET News.com, "the outlook for technology-related legislation has changed dramatically overnight," thanks the the Democratic win.

On a wealth of topics -- Net neutrality, digital copyright, merger approval, data retention, Internet censorship -- a Capitol Hill controlled by Democrats should yield a shift in priorities on technology-related legislation.

The CNET News.com piece is far too long and detailed to get into here, but it's worth a read if you want a quick primer on how a new majority in Congress might address technology issues.

No sooner had the polls opened in the U.S. on Election Day, problems began with electronic voting machines.

From USA Today:

Election machine glitches caused delays and jangled nerves in a half dozen states today as voters began turning out for midterm elections that could set the tone for the last two years of President Bush's term in office.

Election officials in Delaware County, Indiana, planned to seek a court order to extend voting after an apparent computer error prevented voters from casting ballots in 75 precincts.

Apparently the order was granted, but now there's a fight to determine if ballots from votes cast during the extended poll hours will even be counted.

In suburban Pittsburgh, some precincts opened late because workers couldn't zero out voting machines, raising concern that votes from previous elections had not been purged.

And how about this nightmare in Denver?

Colorado Democratic Party officials said they will ask a state judge to keep Denver polling places open for two extra hours Tuesday night, saying computer problems forced some voters to wait up to two hours while others were turned away.

Lines of up to 300 people formed at some Denver polling places.

Remember, delays and long lines mean lost votes as some people have to go to a job or care for children and can't wait any longer. But if Election Day were a national holiday or voting was extended over two or three days, these kinds of snafus would rob far fewer voters of an opportunity to cast their ballots.

I'm just saying.

If you're a conscientious American, you'll vote on Tuesday. And when you go to your local polling establishment, there's about a four in 10 chance that you'll cast your ballot not on paper, but via an electronic machine.

How and whether your vote will be counted, well, I'm not sure what those odds are. For there are many legitimate, non-partisan reasons to be concerned about flaws in electronic voting machines adversely impacting elections.

I don't say this in a paranoid, "there's a plot to steal the election" kind of way. I say it in a "I've been around techology long enough to know it's far from perfect" kind of way.

Over at BusinessWeekOnline -- not exactly known as a bastion of left-wing conspiracy theorists -- columnist and author Avi Rubin lays out several logical reasons why electronic voting may not be ready for prime time:

If wringing the bugs out of the systems were my main concern, I would be optimistic about the future of electronic voting. After all, eventually we could produce a stable system. Unfortunately, there are three problems with electronic voting that have nothing to do with whether or not the system works as intended. They are transparency, recovery, and audit.

Regarding transparency, Rubin says, "There is no way to observe the counting of the votes publicly, and you can't even tell if the votes are being recorded correctly." He's absolutely right.

His second reason involves something IT managers face constantly -- crashing equipment. A power outage, a corrupted file, malicious code -- all unanticipated disasters that could wipe out votes and render them unrecoverable.

On the last point, Rubin argues:

Finally, and I believe most seriously, there is no way to independently audit a fully electronic voting system. While it is true that many of the machines keep multiple copies of the votes, these copies are not independent.

My opinion: If elections are so important in this country, we can afford to spring for a little sheet of paper for each voter to serve as a voting receipt. And while I'm at it, let's boost turnout by either making election day a national holiday or by allowing voting at the polls to be spread over two or three days.