InformationWeek

It's not going to make it onto the New York Times best-seller list, but the IT Infrastructure Library just might save your job. If you've ever seen things go disastrously wrong, then come to the understanding it was going to happen again--that's the time to read the ITIL titles.

Looks like yesterday's rumors that bloggers might be required to register as lobbyists, or face jail time, turns out to be just plain wrong. U.S. Sen. David Vitter has a statement clarifying the proposed law.

If you didn't want crowds of people seeing you have sex, why did you do it on the beach with other people around? OK, I can't leave it at one sentence, so here's a little more.

New year, same problems. That's what I'm thinking. But if you haven't dealt much with these issues before now, some of the IT predictions for 2007 should provide you with the impetus for a much-needed sense of urgency. In the case of other issues, well, the longer they fester, the worse dealing with them is going to get. So address these truisms now, or be prepared to pay the piper.

Delta had to throw money at its problem of key IT staff fleeing. It's a reminder of one useful measure IT pros can take of their job security: How critical the projects and systems they work on are to end customers.

TechCrunch thinks it has, as Michael Arrington, a self-confessed former "die-hard Netflix fan," notes in a post explaining why he's canceling his Netflix membership. He says the recent announcement by Blockbuster that you can now return mail-order rentals at the store tips the balance. Also helping make Blockbuster more attractive: Allowing customers to use the free rentals for movies or games, generous free-rental coupons, and abolishing late fees.

We're learning the rules: If you're Internet-illiterate, the recording industry will back off of suing you for music piracy. Likewise, you won't be sued if your dad is president of a record company. However, if you're dead, you better watch out.

At a recent summit on "data leakage," which sounds like an unfortunate side effect to a prescription medication, Experian Corp. chief information security officer James Christiansen provided a very useful rundown of what to do before, during, and after a data breach or a court-issued subpoena for data.

The Internet is on fire with controversy There's been some interesting discussion around Craigslist's appearance at a financial analyst conference, wherein Craigslist flummoxed the assembled pundits by saying that they don't have any plans to charge for listings (beyond the limited charges they already make).

They don't plan to accept advertising support a la Google AdSense.

They don't have any plans to maximize revenues.

They just plan to keep doing what they're doing.

If you're selling information on the Internet, it doesn't matter how much people get for free -- the only thing that matters is how much you sell. The recording, movie, and commercial software industries don't understand that, but Jimmy Wales does. Wales co-founded both the not-for-profit Wikipedia and for-profit Wikia, which announced a bold new strategy to "give away—for free—all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites." Wikia will let people build sites using MediaWiki, the software that underlies Wikipedia, along with the hardware and infrastructure to run those sites. Publishers can keep the revenue; all that Wikia demands is that the sites link back to Wikia, which is advertising-supported.

2007 is shaping up to be a good year for IT professionals, but not necessarily for IT managers, unless they take some defensive measures now, to help lock in staff loyalty and bolster job satisfaction levels.

A coalition of companies including Intel, Wal-Mart, Pitney Bowes, British Petroleum, and two to six others, are working on a data warehouse to give millions of employees online access to their personal health records. Microsoft, Dell, and IBM are involved in similar projects. These companies are admirable in pursuing a path that combines social responsibility with increasing profitability by reducing healthcare costs. Yet it's a symptom of America's broken healthcare system that these companies find it necessary to take these steps.

That's a question posed to the New York Times's "The Ethicist" column. The columnist, Randy Cohen, has a completely insane response: The IT manager should remain silent.

The questioner writes: "I am an Internet technician. While installing software on my company’s computer network, I happened on a lot of pornographic pictures in the president's personal directory, including some of young children — clearly less than 18, possibly early teens. It is probably illegal and is absolutely immoral. Must I call the police? I think so, but I need my job."

Good Morning Silicon Valley has a snarky comment about the ex-employee suing IBM because the company fired him for hanging around in dirty chat rooms..

The ex-employee claims that his behavior was the result of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and he should have been offered therapy.

GMSV says: "If Internet porn is your 'self medication,' think of this pink slip as cognitive behavioral therapy."

Thanksgiving on the doorstep means December is just around the corner, bringing with it expressions of cheery good will to all buttressed by those endless, frantic holiday to-do lists. This year, though, before turning out the lights to hit the company party, IT is going to have to check off one more item, and it's a doozy.

Joel Spolsky writes that management consultants who hire on to big companies to improve IT are scamming the companies they work for:

A management consultant at Bain wrote me a nice email, that included the following sentence:

"Our team is conducting a benchmarking effort to gather an outside-in view on development performance metrics and best practice approaches to issues of process and organization from companies involved in a variety of software development (and systems integration)."

I didn't understand a thing he wrote....

WhoToTalkTo is a new social networking site for job hunters. If you know about a job, post to the service and get points. "Then you search the database of existing referrals for one that matches your interests. If you find one you like, you can 'spend' your point to see the full listing (which includes company/HR contact info, etc.)."

Would more Americans pursue technology careers if those students got their college educations for free? The Programmers Guild, an advocacy group for U.S. tech professionals, thinks so.

In fact, the guild is about to announce a new proposal advocating that the U.S. government provide "100% subsidies" of tuition and expenses for American students enrolled in degree programs in computer science, engineering, and other fields where there are U.S. skill shortages.

How would the U.S. pay for such a program, you ask? One source for funding could come from hiking government fees that U.S. companies pay to employ foreign H-1B visa holders to $5,000 per worker, per year.

There seems to be an extreme shortage of fun in many IT shops these days. Since happy employees are motivated to be really productive, it's no wonder that unhappy professionals are, in many cases, barely hanging on. These are the folks who can't wait for retirement, who complain about just about everything, and who take pretty much anything that happens as a personal affront.

Most people, I believe, are trying to do the best they can however difficult the circumstances. But long hours, the economy, and other factors have combined to make a kind of "time to make the donuts" mentality. It's not easy to be an optimist in many of corporate America's IT shops.

A few IT body shops seem to be coercing their H-1B visa-holding employees from quitting with the threat of legal action.

The great ones can change your life--teachers, coaches, advisors, and, yes, bosses. Our annual Chief of the Year recognition has spotlighted some incredible talents. But we don't know everyone in this industry, and we might not know enough about the person guiding your IT shop. If you work for an inspired leader, tell us, and tell us why.

It's official. Not only are Americans increasingly fleeing both right and left coasts in favor of the heartland in search of affordable housing, less traffic congestion, safer communities, and higher standards of living, but corporations are likewise moving their data centers to the middle of the country for many of the same reasons.

Indeed, there's ample evidence that we're seeing a leveling of technical infrastructure--both physical and human--across the country. What used to be concentrated in a few isolated meccas to which the faithful had to travel--often long distances--is now becoming ubiquitously available.

If you've got a well-paying IT job in one of the traditional centers of technology like Boston, New York, or San Francisco, you and your coworkers have had to withstand the increasing outsourcing of jobs to emerging nations in recent years. But it may be more likely you'll be losing your job to someone in Omaha, Neb.

"Can't anyone here play this game?" That's what Casey Stengel famously asked about his hapless 1962 New York Mets. The same question might be posed to those running big-time corporate and government IT projects, given the frequency with which such efforts end in tears. In Monday's InformationWeek, we put the spotlight on eight infamous tech disasters that resulted in major financial losses, damaged careers, and abrupt interruptions in business operations for those involved. Things have obviously gotten better for the Mets lately. But the winning percentage for grandiose tech initiatives remains anemic. What the heck is going on here?

In today's podcast, Symantec says the worm and virus problem is solved. We'll tell you what it says comes next. We're also taking a look back at the life of Ray Noorda, the "grandfather" of network computing, and we're looking at the wide-ranging reactions to the Google-YouTube marriage. A study tells us that teleworkers know, but ignore, security risks, and Yahoo is going to beam a digital time capsule into space.

Your host today is Curtis Franklin Jr.

Was it chutzpah or ignorance behind an ad posted on Dice specifically seeking H-1B visa holders to fill IT jobs in metropolitan Atlanta?

Since mid-2001, the number of IT managers in the United States has grown by 119,000. To get ahead in this crowded field, you must understand how corporate America is changing. Homa Bahrami spends a lot of her time thinking about this, and in this podcast the University of California organizational behaviorist explains why these changes are occurring and how you can take advantage of them.

Tom Olzak is unusual among today's 390,000 IT managers in the United States. The director of IT security at HCR Manor Care goes out of his way to share his knowledge about IT security to anyone who'll listen. Olzak blogs, writes security technical papers, podcasts, and earlier this year self-published a book, Just Enough Security: Information Security for Business Managers.

Which is more satisfying, managing people or technology?

Some people are lifelong staffers because they like to be hands-on with technology. They say they're never going into management, that they didn't get into IT so they could sit in meetings all day.

Other people choose to be managers. They say management is the place to be. Hardware guys have their heads in server cases all day. Software guys do nothing but stare at computer screens. The help desk spends all day talking to angry idiots. But if you're in management, you get to take a hand in shaping company policy.

Which are you? Management or staff? Which is better? Take our poll and let us know, and leave your comment below.

Being slow to define, build, and deliver new or enhanced systems is a long-standing criticism of many IT organizations and, increasingly, the antithesis of the speed and agility that are so vital to IT's ability to enhance business results.

This note starts out about a million miles away from information technology, but it all comes out in the end, so stay with me on this, OK? It's about some basic principles of designing tools, and how those principles apply to teapots as well as to IT.

Corporate America's efforts at data protection--in particular, protecting sensitive personal information about customers--have in many cases failed miserably. There's a long and dubious list of data breaches, losses, thefts, and mishandlings from the past 20 months, with the total number of records containing sensitive personal information involved in security breaches now topping 93 million. Time and again, we've taken to task those companies that have failed in their duty to lock down an asset that's critical to them, and even more critical to their customers.

Here are eight quotes that caught my ear during presentations and conversations at the InformationWeek 500 conference this week.

We've got an article this week on WAN optimization. Might not sound like the most emotionally charged topic--until you see comments like this from IT pros who faced network performance problems: "My name became mud as fast as you could spell it."

Just when you think the business and IT incompetence of bureaucrats can't get any more profound, they come roaring back to exceed our expectations.

Sure, skills and professionalism still count--just not as much as personality and "likeability," according to a new survey.

Of course, it's no surprise that human factors matter in a job search. But I always figured that between two candidates with equivalent skills, the job goes to the candidate who was more personable or exhibited better people skills or, in the right setting, just had a better time yucking it up with his or her interviewers.

I never imagined it would be the other way 'round: that between two candidates with approximately the same "likeability" ratings, the job would go to the one with more or better skills.

In this video podcast, Induslogic CEO Peter Harrison doesn't mind that his employees show more loyalty to their jobs and to the client than they do to the company, a provider of outsourced software product engineering. Harrison figures if employees are happy building products for clients, they'll hang around and not quickly seek new jobs elsewhere. Makes sense, doesn't it?

In this video podcast, Induslogic CEO Peter Harrison explains why he thinks companies like his--which employs hundreds of IT specialists in India and the Ukraine to help develop products for American software companies--help the American IT worker. Does his explanation make sense, or is it one more excuse business leaders make to justify offshore outsourcing? Let us know what you think by filling out the form below. Click here to view the podcast.

Look around your IT department. Doesn't it seem that every other person is a manager? That feeling isn't too far-fetched. The number of IT managers in recent years is way up. In mid-2006, the government classified 390,000 IT professionals in the United States as managers, up 119,000, or 44%, from mid-2001.

Another week, another preventable exposure of citizen data at a government agency. Last week's spillage in the spotlight came courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education. A glitch in a new software program created a situation where the wrong client data was being shown to people trying to update their student loan accounts. After a number of complaints, the ED shut down the affected Web pages. Then, apparently, they worked on stonewalling.

Buying supplies from women- and minority-owned businesses could benefit a company's bottom line.

A recent survey by jobs board Dice.com yielded what was to me a very surprising statistic: Some 94% of technology folks said they were as happy in their careers as those proverbial mollusks, expressing satisfaction with everything from the pay to the field itself, to the amount of creativity they use in their day-to-day work.

My response was something along the lines of: "Huh? And why are clams so dang happy anyway?"

IT services firms employ 1.27 million people, not even 1% of the nearly 135.4 million nonfarm workers in America. Yet the growth in IT services employment last month represented 10.4% of all new jobs in the United States.

Companies spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on elaborate software packages, security technology, servers, and desktops. We talk about "pushing the envelope" and "best of breed" when it comes to tech. But how often do we talk about our systems administrators in the same way? Come on, admit it. Rarely, if ever.

Should the U.S. Dept. of Labor provide public access to a government database that purportedly contains information about employers planning to hire H-1B workers for fiscal 2007, which starts on Oct. 1, 2006?

Kim Berry, president of advocate group Programmers Guild, says he wants U.S. tech workers to have the chance to more fairly compete for jobs that might otherwise go to foreigners.

U.S. workers should have the opportunity right now to look at requests employers have made to the DOL to fill IT positions with H-1B visa holders--before the foreign workers can legally begin the jobs starting on Oct. 1, says Berry.

If American workers can check out which employers are hiring for which jobs and at what wages, well, then maybe some interested (or out-of-work) American techies will have a shot to apply for those jobs before they're filled by foreigners.

Foreign tech workers who enter the U.S. with H-1B visas are paid about $25,000 a year less than American workers with the same skills, according to the Programmers Guild, an advocate organization for U.S. tech professionals.

And the guild's president, Kim Berry, is hoping that Congress will "correct" current wage rules that are supposed to keep the pay playing field level between American professionals and H-1B visa holders, but aren't.

Current regulations have loopholes that allow employers to hire H-1B workers at wages 25% or more lower than Americans earn for the same jobs, says Berry. And that's one of the big factors that make hiring H-1B workers so attractive, he says.

This is a story of politics and disarray in a couple of data centers that were allegedly combined over a year ago. That they still, to this day, have different cultures, operating procedures, and expectations this far along into things tells you much about what's very wrong with this picture.

And it serves as a powerful cautionary tale to anyone who may be tempted to play the game in a way that cuts them off from the rest of their coworkers. But I get ahead of myself.

If you're at all dissatisfied with your job, this is a tough week for you. You've got a four-day weekend behind you, and the height of the long, hot summer ahead of you. Plenty of time to sit and daydream about telling the boss to take a hike and making money doing what you love.

Many of you have personal Web sites you work on in your spare time, either blogs or little e-businesses or software-as-a-service applications. Wouldn't it be great if you could just make a living on that stuff and leave the paycheck-to-paycheck grind behind?

The subjects of our article on accidental entrepreneurs did just that.

Funny thing with numbers, they can tell much or little about the truth. Take, for instance, whether foreign nationals who enter the United States with H-1B visas in hand are paid the prevailing wage as the law requires.

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison is AWOL with his promised $115 million pledge to Harvard University. In a public relations nightmare for both sides, the University has gone public in an apparent attempt to embarrass Ellison and force him to pony up. Ellison's not returning the calls. Anyone got his cell phone number?

Holy cow! This is me she's talking about here:

A few weeks ago Jon and I gave an interview to an IT magazine for an article about accidental entrepreneurship. They wanted to know how this website now pays our mortgage...

Read on for more about what it's like to be interviewed by me for an article, and then visited by an InformationWeek photographer.

Note that the blog post is pretty raunchy, so if you're likely to be offended, it's best to just not follow the link. As a matter of fact, it starts getting raunchy right after the part I quoted.

The article referenced here is currently penciled in for the July 3 issue. I finished it last night and I think it's pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. It's about people who turned their online hobbies into their livelihoods.

Few issues generate more passion than H-1B visas. Many U.S.-born IT pros and those threatened or displaced claim that the program is costing countless Americans their IT jobs.

The latest word on certification is that the gap is closing between IT pros who have certain acronyms and initials after their names and those who don't. In fact, over the last year, pay for non-certified IT skills grew nearly 70% more than pay for certifications, according to a recent survey, which tracked the market value of 212 IT skills and certifications.

What goes around comes around, even in outsourcing apparently! A front-page story in a recent Boston Globe says Indian software companies are facing a labor crunch similar to what U.S. companies experienced five years ago and are responding in kind. To wit--companies like Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services are planning to recruit thousands of new workers from around the world over the next year--including from the U.S.

The message wasn't surprising, but the deliverer was. New Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz faced the music and announced that 4,000 to 5,000 employees will be dismissed at Sun over the next six months. What does this Schwartz have in common with the one who, upon being appointed a month ago, said he wasn't there "to take a whack to head count"?

My husband, the IT Guy, has had a mirthful week on the job. In reverse chronological order, here are a few of the things that have put a smile on his face. Or someone else's.

I've predicted before that failed outsourcing contracts will become commonplace enough that we'll find more and more companies dumping their outsourcers. The last example, cited just nine days ago, was Diebold dumping Deloitte Consulting.

Coming up with new approaches to battling the rising cost of operating enterprise-class data centers will require effort from throughout the IT industry, as well as from outside sources such as Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The university this week opened a new data center that will provide computing resources to the institution and its students and serve as a research lab that will target issues related to rising energy costs and, perhaps even more importantly, management costs.

Guy Goma, of the Congo, showed up at the BBC News for an interview for an IT job.

Instead, the Beeb mistook him for a Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, who was about to be interviewed for a piece on the Beatles' lawsuit with Apple Computer over the Apple trademark. It put him on the air for an interview about the subject.

Thing is, Goma did pretty well for himself. I've seen worse so-called experts interviewed on the TV news.

If the BBC is smart, it'll give Goma the job; he certainly displayed an ability to think fast in a crisis.

When Diebold Inc. announced Wednesday that it will take over--or more precisely, take back--an Oracle ERP implementation and some additional IT-related functions, resulting in a financial charge and an end to its contract with Deloitte Consulting, it didn't explicitly point fingers or assign blame.

As an addendum to my last Editor's Note, "Hacking: A Cautionary Tale," I direct your attention to this article from the Friday, May 12, edition of The Plain Dealer, "3rd Computer Breach At OU Within 3 Weeks."

There are dozens of valid answers to this question. Some are probably quite funny. The one that interests me at the moment: a chief privacy officer.

Microsoft has one, Peter Cullen. Google and Yahoo don't.

Google said yesterday it wanted to be more transparent. It would also do well to be more accountable. Hiring a chief privacy officer would demonstrate that commitment.

Feeling insecure? I'm not talking about that new comb-over hairstyle you've adopted or the big new SUV you just leased, the one that takes up two highway lanes. No, I'm talking about the security of your company's IT systems and data. It's time for you to channel any nervous energy you might have about the next spyware-borne keystroke logger, portable storage device mishap, or Patch Tuesday slumber party into InformationWeek Research's U.S. Information Security Survey 2006.

If you're a female tech professional, there's good news and bad news about pay, depending on your role and also how you tend to look at things.

In recent weeks, InformationWeek has produced loads of coverage on the benefits and pitfalls of outsourcing, career trends, and now salary trends. Despite the gloom and doom over outsourcing, particularly offshoring, there are some reasons for optimism, at least among those who are constantly advancing their skills and raising their value to their companies. In many ways, the job market is quite healthy.

Got an E-mail from the head of an IT workers' advocacy group who wonders how many non-Americans are among employed IT pros in the United States.

Numbers don't always add up. Take, for instance, the latest IT employment stats that show American IT employment at a record high.

A report from today indicates that software engineers have "the best jobs in America," as determined by a Money Magazine survey. Factors leading to this enviable designation included strong career growth prospects, high average salary, and potential for creativity.

One of the major objections to open source is that nobody's responsible for the code. Enterprise users need to be sure that the software they're deploying is secure. The way they do that for proprietary code is to bind the authors with contracts, requiring the authors to guarantee that the code has been reviewed for security. But you can't do that with open source because anyone can contribute to open source, and, ultimately, there's no single party that can be held responsible for the software's security. You don't know where it's been.

It's very satisfying to hear an observation that's both completely new and--once you hear it--blindingly obvious. Jason Maynard, a software analyst for Credit Suisse, did that for me at the InformationWeek Spring Conference this week when he observed that there's been almost no innovation in enterprise software for the past five years or so.

With the exception of the RIM BlackBerry, the enterprise software industry hasn't produced any tools in that time that have enhanced worker productivity, Maynard said.

Let's say you hate your job and want to get yourself canned so you can get yourself some of that sweet unemployment insurance. Experts on a panel on service-oriented architecture at the InformationWeek Spring Conference Tuesday offered some handy tips to ease you on the road to unemployment.

IT managers: Do you work and work and work all day, and still your partners in the business units aren't grateful? Get used to it, said a cheerfully cynical Rob Carter, FedEx executive VP and CIO, speaking at the InformationWeek Spring Conference Monday.

Reading over the tawdry details of a disgruntled employee's lawsuit against Morgan Stanley, any reasonable person is going to break out in a cold sweat and get a feeling that what happened to Morgan Stanley executives could happen to any one of us if we fail to follow some commonsense rules about doing business.

The word "outsourcing" has long caused many technology professionals to shudder. But 10 or 15 years ago, outsourcing still mostly meant moving your IT job from the payroll of one U.S. company to another American firm, like when Dupont in 1997 signed a megadeal to outsource 2,600 jobs to Computer Sciences Corp.

And for those people who transferred to IT outsourcing firms, the move frequently--although not always--provided a boost to the career. Often, the tech services firms not only invested more in training and professional development than the old employer, but the move also sometimes led to promotions, interesting new gigs working for other clients, fatter paychecks, and nice perks.

The theme of this week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference is "The Attention Economy," about tools and techniques for filtering all the demands we have on our time and attention. The scene as I walked through the hotel Tuesday morning, approaching the registration desk, was a perfect illustration of the problem. It couldn't have been better if the O'Reilly people had planned it.

I passed by a few clusters of people talking and far greater numbers of people sitting with their backs to the wall, hunched over their laptop computers and connecting to the Internet.

These people cleared off their schedules to go to this conference. Many of them took long, uncomfortable, and expensive plane flights. And then they spend time sitting with their backs to the wall, hunched over computer keyboards, physically alone but, presumably, connecting to others online. They'd chosen to focus their attention elsewhere.

Silicon Valley firms can’t get enough of highly skilled, creative tech pros. But the chances of grabbing a job at the epicenter of high tech has diminished if your skills are of the humdrum variety.

Do CIOs and IT managers dream of the opportunity to build a data center infrastructure from the ground up, with no regard for legacy requirements of existing equipment and software? Or is the bigger challenge in finding ways to improve existing infrastructures with incremental changes and additions?

When author Nicholas Carr says open source will revolutionize IT software use, he doesn't mean it in the same sense that open-source advocates do. He's still standing by his thesis in Does IT Matter? And his answer to that question remains, no, not for strategic advantage.

How much can customers of the big IT research firms trust what they read and hear? After all, analysts sometimes write reports that have been funded by technology companies, and they appear in Webcasts and at trade shows for fees. InformationWeek set out to answer the credibility question in a story we'll be publishing in our February 6 issue. We interviewed dozens of IT vendors, end users, and executives at the top analyst firms. The resulting brushstrokes from each conversation helped paint a picture of an analyst industry that's tapped into an almost desperate need that businesses have to stay on top of emerging technology and a community of IT vendors even more desperate to make the sale.

The word is out about the take-home pay for the top people at two of Silicon Valley's top companies, Hewlett-Packard and Google. Watch the video for a humorous take.

As I read Mitch Wagner's editor's note from Wednesday regarding reader responses to our outsourcing and India coverage, I thought what a perfect time to launch the ninth annual InformationWeek National IT Salary survey. In the past nine years we've heard from more than 125,000 IT professionals about their job satisfaction, salaries, compensation, what matters most in a job, what would make them change jobs, and how they feel about the impact of IT jobs being outsourced. Now it's your turn to weigh in.

We've received quite a bit of feedback to our recent outsourcing coverage, and two of our reporters' trips to India to write firsthand about companies there.

Jim Ball of Ball 5 Enterprises in Olney, Md., set the tone for many indignant readers, writing: "I, along with all of those now unemployed because of outsourcing to India, have absolutely no interest whatsoever in reading about all those folks that are enjoying the jobs we all once held."

Prepare for the worst. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina reminded corporate chieftains that they must be ready to implement a systems recovery plan when disaster strikes. The latest government payroll stats suggest business leaders are adhering to that advice.

It's a new year, and you know what that means - once more into the breach! Your budget may be set, your staffing approved, and key projects scheduled throughout the months, but you want to make sure that all the political in-fighting, PowerPoint presentations and number crunching pays off. And it won't, if you let IT basics get away from you.

Ever wonder what goes on inside the mind of an Internet entrepreneur? James Haft, CFO of upstart U.S. Condominium Exchange, explains in a revealing video interview how the Web serves as a business platform that can take a relatively one-dimensional business--real estate brokerage, for instance--and truly make it a multi-industry enterprise. USCondex, as Haft says, is neither a realty nor technology business but a digital and media business.

And, it's those kinds of businesses [see this week's InformationWeek story, Capital Ideas From The Internet] that attract funding from venture capitalists and angel investors.

Click here to listen to an audio version of the Haft interview.

In today's podcast, we analyze the latest cell phone developments, the most recent trends regarding Microsoft and security, and ask readers to weigh in on best practices for managing customer data.

Background Music "Tattoo" by dilvie, under Creative Commons License.

One of my lasting impressions of 2005 will be the seemingly endless parade of breaches, missteps and other blunders in handling customer data.

CIOs are a happy bunch of men and women.

More than four years after 9/11, and nearly three years after the formation of the Homeland Security Department, we still haven't progressed past the problem of data sharing between the public and private sectors. Companies are worried that their closely held information could become public if citizens or the press file for disclosure under the federal Freedom of Information Act or state Sunshine Laws. But that's not enough of an excuse for the lack of progress made in data sharing when you consider that the private sector owns more than 80% of the country's critical infrastructure, including energy utilities, manufacturing and transportation facilities, telecommunication and data networks, and financial services networks. Several key figures in federal and state government weighed in on this topic Wednesday at the InfoSecurity conference in New York. Here's what they had to say.

Well, it looks like the wacky gang at Sony is at it again. Sony BMG Music Entertainment said it shipped 5.7 million CDs with anti-piracy technology with a security vulnerability that requires a patch.

No, this isn't the same security vulnerability we wrote about weeks ago. This is an entirely new one, involving a different copy-protection technology.

And that's not all. The blog Freedom to Tinker reports that Sony's patch is itself insecure; the blog recommends users avoid the patch. Freedom to Tinker provides details about the vulnerability, noting that you're infected even if you decline Sony's terms of service. Simply putting the CD in your PC opens up the vulnerabilities.

Women comprise about 29 percent of the professional IT workforce. But there is concern among technology companies the number is shrinking, according to Lucy Sanders, chief executive officer at the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

Sanders said non-profit organizations, universities and businesses such as Wal-Mart, Cisco and IBM are working to reverse that trend. IBM and Cisco, for example, are sponsoring studies to gather base line data they will use to develop mentoring programs for women.

Podcast: Click on link to download or hear Lucy Sanders.

Numbers never tell the whole story. Take, for instance, Friday's Labor Department's payroll report, which lumps together companies offering ISPs, search portals, and data processing hosting services. That segment experienced its second consecutive monthly decline in November. That's strange, considering increased Internet use and the popularity of Google and other portals.

Mike Meranda, president of ECPglobal Inc. U.S., said the non-profit organization spearheading radio frequency identification technology adoption will rollout in early 2006 the Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS). EPCIS is a collection of standards that will enable companies to share data and information electronically. It also will give software vendors a platform in which to build features into their products.

But that's not the only project EPCglobal has in store for the RFID community in 2006.

Click here to listen or download the podcast.

For anyone (or should I say EVERYone) who's lapping up our latest coverage of Sony Rootkitgate, here's some mandatory--and eye-opening--reading. Michael Robertson, the man who founded MP3.com (and sold it to Universal in the early days of the digital music push for a cool $372 million), and later took on Microsoft by bringing a hybrid Linux/Windows operating system to market, has weighed in on the fiasco, and his take is quite enlightening.

Let's face it, most of the IT stories we'll write and you'll read in the next year aren't likely to be all that surprising. Oracle will buy some more companies. Consumer data will be compromised at several big companies. Microsoft will hastily patch security hole after security hole. Chips will get smaller and faster, displays will get bigger and clearer, and lots of software will get offered as Web-based services. But every once in a while, some surprising, or even shocking (one can hope!), development will spice things up.

Our video camera and I recently visited the brand-spanking-new California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a/k/a Calit2. Check out video of robotics research, digital cinema, clean rooms, interviews with director Larry Shaw and Sony robotics researcher Fumihide Tanaka, as well as a very cool statue.

Download the video here. Size: 12 MB. Duration: 3 minutes 23 seconds.

This is my second-ever video, and I'm pretty pleased with the way it came out. The sound levels, and pacing are ok, and I did some fancy things--well, fancy to me--like overlaying audio tracks from one video segment on another video entirely, and creating my own audio tracks to narrate parts of the video. Still, there are a couple of mistakes that I'll be looking to correct next time around: As with my first video effort, I had difficulty composing shots with human subjects; Larry Smarr is too far away and, in the shots of me, my head is touching the bottom of the frame where it should be touching the top.

The close-ups of me are, arguably, too close, but that's a function of how I did them. Lacking a cameraman or even a tripod, I just put the video camera in my hand, stuck out my arm, and pointed the camera back at my face. I positioned myself so that the very cool statue (mentioned above) would be visible in the background while my face would be in closeup. I think the effect worked out pretty cool.

Now to get to work cutting this down to under a minute for The News Show.

A new study on the productivity of the white collar workforce by training organization IBT-USA begs for commentary and further discussion. IBT-USA collected information over a five-year period on the work habits of over 1,000 employees at 30 companies.

Like many of the nation's airlines, United Airlines has been hard hit by rising fuel costs, increasing competition, lower fares and declining travel. The endless cycle of cost-cutting that the airlines have found themselves locked into did not save the company from heading into bankruptcy almost three years ago.

The carrier is still operating under Chapter 11, but one of the interesting things about United today is where the cash-strapped enterprise is spending money. Yup, on IT. Interesting, because the business side, after cutting the IT department to the bone, came to the realization on its own, that IT was actually the answer to a lot of its problems, and at the heart of many proposed solutions.

Call me a worrywart.

I'm troubled that reports about offshore outsourcing means many young people don't think they can make a career in IT and related fields, such as engineering. This attitude will damage our competitiveness as the world shrinks, making it more likely that more jobs requiring a high degree of tech know-how will end up overseas.

Enrollments are down at colleges offering many technical fields, and that troubles educators leading many of our top schools.

Recently, I caught up with Kristina Johnson, dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. She feels educators must and can do more to attract talented students to engineering and other technical careers. Globalization is a fact, and programs like Duke's are addressing that reality. Listen to what Johnson says.

Can you smell it? There's something in the air, but it's not the autumnal hearth. A smoldering anger, something I'd call "code rage," is everywhere, spilling over into, permeating, and often dominating every discussion we've had with readers this year about the state of the IT industry, IT careers, and education. For each commentator who loves the industry and offers upbeat advice, you'll find 10 or more cynical, resentful, and seething posts.

If CIOs think they have a challenging job today, look what's on the horizon.

In the fourth of a five-part interview, the IT innovator and futurist Ray Kurzweil sees the Internet rapidly evolving to a world-wide mesh, tied together by an unimaginable number of devices, including ones embedded in the environment, on our clothing, and inside our bodies. Devices now spokes on the network, such as cell phones and wireless PDAs, will become nodes. Search engines of the future won't wait for us to ask; they'll anticipate the information we'll seek.

Will such massive networking ensure job security for future CIOs? I ponder what Kurzweil's cyrstal ball says about that.

* * *

Earlier Podcasts of the Kurzweil interview:

* Singularity explained.
* Thinking machines with emotions.
* Civil liberties for machines.

Later Podcast:

* Privacy threatened. Check out the Podcast Directory at InformationWeek.com on Friday.

I received lots of sharp, thoughtful, and sometimes funny feedback to my last blog, Seeding IT's Future." Some readers applauded, some snorted and some wanted to know what I was smoking, and whether they could have some too. In between, some interesting questions were raised, and points posited, that I'd like to address, along with what I think are some erroneous assumptions about where my blog was coming from.

Ask me as a journalist who inspires me and I'll have a list of answers: Edward R. Murrow, who broadcast from London's rooftops during the Battle of Britain and later helped bring about the downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy; Tom Friedman, whose columns in the NY Times on globalism and foreign affairs, particularly the Mid East, never fail to educate and impress; and yes, even Barbara Walters, mostly for the impressive roster of folks she's been able to interview in the course of her career.

The burning question of the moment for our readers, columnists and vendors seems to be that while salaries and job openings are at their highest peak in years, fewer and fewer kids are showing an interest in IT. We've written a number of blogs addressing the whys, which I think we all know by heart, so I won't repeat them here. You can instead go here or here, or even here to read lots of the commentary on that.

InformationWeek writers have been getting a blog-ful of reader responses about why people are leaving the IT fold and why new talent is so slow in entering.

Readers are saying that, among other things, outsourcing, long hours, and bosses' unrealistic expectations have proven deadly to morale. And who wants to suggest a career path to young people--their own kids or others'--that they wish they themselves could escape from? You can read more about what readers have to say in the blog entry of my colleague, Mitch Wagner. He shares some of the email he's gotten on the subject, and points to a few other editors' blog entries on the topic that have received related feedback.

Leaders of U.S. businesses that depend on IT, if they do indeed believe in the IT profession, need to put more effort toward the tech-talent pipeline. It's not just that IT-related college enrollments are down sharply (they are). IT leaders need to admit how big a cloud outsourcing is casting over IT, and how the profession is losing its image for both lucre and cool, even as young people embrace technology like never before.

From what I've been hearing from some IT employers and IT workers a like, it sounds like the tech job market has finally improved enough that people who are interested in changing jobs (for more money, better work environment, more challenges, etc.) actually have more and better options to do that now.

Our editors and writers have been spending a lot of time thinking about IT excellence these days. Many of us do this on a regular basis as part of our jobs, of course. But it's even more timely now, given this week's launch of the InformationWeek 500--a look at the companies that best use technology to business advantage. We also hosted the InformationWeek fall conference in California this week, where many of the industry's leading lights shared their knowledge and experience on the topic.

This week I got one of those "holy crap" numbers thrown in my face that makes me seriously evaluate how I live my life. It didn't come from my savings account, cholesterol test, or bar tab. It came when I got a pop-up warning saying my E-mail system had exceeded capacity. So I cleaned out my Sent file, doing a select-all function. And there was the evidence: I sent 4,270 E-mails at work between February and July. That's 711 per month. At 22 working days a month, that's 32 E-mails every day. Four every hour, spewing out an E-mail every 15 minutes I'm on the job. And the calculation gets much, much worse.

My teenage stepdaughters watch one of those so-called reality shows on a cable TV station. The most interesting aspect of this show, at least to me, is that all is not as it initially appears--just as with IT.

Further evidence that America's dominance in engineering and science is diminishing can be found in a working paper by a noted Harvard University economist.

I wasn't at all surprised to read that American workers admit to spending as much as two hours a day surfing the Internet, according to a survey released this week by AOL and Salary.com. (Now there is a site that probably gets a lot of hits...)

It seems incredibly silly to me, after 25 years of covering the business of IT and the technologists who make it happen, that we're still having to discuss, pitch, survey, or reaffirm the idea that CIOs have a role to play at the C-level of any company, never mind on a board of directors.

Nowadays, besides having a good merger strategy and an international presence, what could possibly be more competitive and strategic then IT? In fact, it's often IT that makes the other two variables--mergers and global branches--doable. I've actually seen mergers hinge on the technical synergy between companies mulling the plunge. IT matters all right--a whole lot.

Perhaps America no longer is the land of opportunity for many highly skilled foreigner workers.

This should make CIOs and HR professionals in our industry shudder: The population of potential IT workers is shrinking before our very eyes.

Summer is here, and many of us are making a checklist of items to bring on our vacations. Don't forget that Blackberry. We just can't stay away from the office. Sad, isn't it?

It proved to be one of the more challenging projects in their professional lives; Jim and Lisa McCoy--50 years in IT between them--had a new job: wedding planners. As the new proprietors of The Mercersburg Inn in rural, south-central Pennsylvania, the couple turned to the skills that made them successful IT managers to lead their staff in preparing and pulling off a wedding reception for 150 guests.

There was a front page story in The Wall Street Journal the other day about how Japan, because of its rapidly aging population, is facing an impending severe shortage of workers. According to the report, 20% of Japan's population will be at least 65 years old by 2006. The United States won't hit that milestone till 2036.

It’s a given: Most IT pros expect to work long hours. But as our salary survey shows, a plurality of business-technologists believe they’re fairly compensated for their efforts. Given the choice of more job flexibility or a healthy boost in income, what would you choose?

Beware paraskavedekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th)! As noted by yourDictionary.com, “Paraskavedekatriaphobia is among the leading causes of loss of productivity since many sufferers avoid coming to work on that day."

True, IT systems may be crashing all around you, hackers may be pounding at the gateway, patches maybe leaking new vulnerabilities and Wi-Fi may have gone wacko, but really, doesn’t it seem like just another day at the office? Of course it does.

The government this week begins accepting petitions for an additional 20,000 H-1B visas to let into the United States foreign nationals who earned graduate degrees from American institutions. Information Builders Inc. CEO Gerald Cohen and University of California at Davis computer-science professor Norm Matloff disagree on whether the government should issue H-1B visas, but both agree on one thing, which is, as visa proponent Cohen puts it, that the idea of requiring an advanced degree is “nutty.”

Bill Gates isn’t the only leader of a high-tech firm having problems recruiting talent. It’s a worldwide problem. Among CEOs who manage the fastest-growing high-tech companies, about one-third in North America and one-quarter in Europe-Middle East-Africa and Asia-Pacific say finding, hiring, and retaining qualified has become a major challenge.

Uncertainty seems to haunt IT professionals no matter how much they like their jobs. The fact is, regardless of how ubiquitous technology becomes, there's that nagging sense of not being quite fully appreciated and a gnawing fear that no matter how up-to-date your skills, you can be outsourced, laid off, or bypassed in the blink of an eye.

This week, InformationWeek comes out with its annual National IT Salary Survey, and an interactive Salary Adviser based on the data. Through this week, we'll ask questions about the IT career path and highlight data that relates to it. Today: Is IT a career path you'd recommend to a teenager? The average computer-science or engineering grad will make $13,000 more than the average marketing major this year. Yet two-thirds of working IT pros in the InformationWeek survey don't consider it as promising a career path as it used to be. Why so glum?

What’s the most grueling job in IT? My vote goes to CIO of Homeland Security. And the job is open as Steve Cooper revealed Wednesday that he's resigning as the department's first CIO.

All IT job categories--from the CIO to the computer-support specialist--have rebounded to varying degrees from the employment slump that hit the profession a few years back.

Is Hewlett-Packard trying to become GE, at the same time GE is acknowledging the limits of its metrics-driven approach when it comes to sparking innovation?

Certifications sure look nice when properly framed and hung in your office. They can also provide a lot of heft to a resume, something that a potential employer can easily pick up during a quick scan of your professional history. But how much is a certification worth when it's essentially sold to you by a vendor like Cisco, Microsoft, or Novell? It's an ongoing controversy in the tech world that's grown a bit more complicated by the emergence of Linux certifications. Some criticize the concept of open-source software certification as being oxymoronic. Others note that they're just trying to find the best talent they can in a market they're just beginning to understand.

Two studies this week raise doubts about companies' faith in IT departments to deliver innovation and business value.

The list of CIOs who move into top executive jobs keeps growing. Alan Biland, longtime CIO of Snap-on Inc., this week moves into the job of president of Snap-on Tools Co. LLC.

The job market is growing, but that fact doesn’t calm the nerves of many IT pros looking for work.

Great sympathy exists for qualified IT workers who can’t find jobs, especially at a time when the government will let in 20,000 extra foreign workers this year, many of them IT professionals. The government will shortly post new rules to allow employers to hire the additional alien workers under its H-1B visa program.

Ever had a problem with a product, couldn’t get help from the vendor, and wished you could let the company’s CEO know of your frustration? Chuck Smith got his chance as he came face-to-face with Symantec CEO John Thompson.

Hey job seekers: Being an IT professional in the federal government needn’t be a life sentence.

When it comes to managing your IT career, the fact that IT salaries rose last year after a three-year slump might not be the most important fact in this week's report by Foote Partners LLC. The more important finding might be the increasing number of "hybrid jobs" that combine IT and operations responsibilities.

Arch Ventures Partners has made investments in companies producing radio frequency ID tag and grid computing products, but may next put its money in companies developing products that exploit the nascent dual-core and multicore chip.

General Motors' IT strategy ?which is, in a nutshell, that GM managers are responsible for IT strategy and performance but they outsource all its implementation ?is going to be thrust into the spotlight over the coming year, with this week's news about EDS an early indication.

"If you're getting into open source because you see it as a career path, you're doing something wrong." It's not that Linux creator Linus Torvalds thinks open-source programmers should work for peanuts (he doesn't), but rather that they should be properly motivated. Call it software with a soul, if you like. Only the truly passionate need apply.

Your additions to a column on IT-related words that deserve to be banned show your passion for protecting the language from abuse.

We can't let down our guard.

Why's it so important to curry favor with the academic world? Some of the IT industry’s star pupils this week went back to school, offering gifts.

J.P. Morgan Chase's decision to in-source the bulk of the IT operations it recently outsourced points to what could be one of the great career-planning hazards over the next couple years: Divining what direction IT strategy is headed.

Jim Collins changed the way a great many people think and talk about business with his books "Built To Last" and "Good To Great." Monday he shared an idea that just might join these two mega-sellers in a trilogy.

For a group that promotes the benefits of offshore outsourcing and the need to import foreign workers under the H-1B visa program, the nation's largest IT trade group seems to be providing fodder for the John Kerry campaign. The Information Technology Association of America issued a report Wednesday that shows a meager 2% growth in tech employment this year. More discouraging, American employers will hire 270,000 fewer IT workers in 2004 than they did in 2003. The ITAA all but concedes that offshore outsourcing is a contributing factor.

Each time my colleagues at InformationWeek write about employment-related issues, we receive E-mails from readers who mostly contend that good IT jobs are vanishing in America. Here's an E-mail exchange I had with a reader named Joanne who responded to an article I wrote about undergraduate computer science programs at American colleges and universities. Let us know what you think.

Call me a glass half-empty guy.

Since the bubble burst on the dot-com boom, I've been looking at the impact of technology on the economy and vice versa. The numbers look better; nearly every economic indicator the government has published tied to technology this past year--except for employment--seems stronger. Yet, things just don't feel right. Perhaps a survey issued this week by the National Association of Business Economists explains this malaise.

At first glance, it seems that IT organizations are becoming too top heavy with managers.

Is it time to wrap the "business analyst" job in the kind of formal certification clothing there is for, say, project management? Or is it time to embrace the idea that the best IT jobs are the ones that are hardest to define?

How much do American businesses that send IT jobs overseas care about criticism of their offshore outsourcing practices? Not very much. That's the conclusion of a just-released client survey conducted by Patni Computer Systems, an Indian IT services company. Among the scores of diverse companies Patni calls its clients, according to its Website: Ann Taylor Retail, Bendix, Coca Cola, GE, Metropolitan Life, and Gillette, as well as tech vendors AMD, EMC, HP, and Oracle.

It's not going to be easy, what with offshore competition, IT automation, tech-industry consolidation, and the like. Career counselor Nella Barkley tells IT pros to ask themselves whether they really love their job enough to fight for it: "Is this really what you want to be doing, or are you just hanging on because it's lucrative—or at least relatively lucrative—and you're having your fun when you go home at 6 or 7?" she asks.

Connecticut CIO Rock Regan is guilty of association. His crime: being a decades-long friend of a disgraced governor who quit July 1. His punishment: banishment from state government. Regan's been fired, but he isn't shedding any tears over his ouster. You shouldn't either.