Eight is enough: IT New Year Resolutions

It’s the New Year and after all the confetti is swept up and the hats thrown away, all that is left is the promises you made to yourself.  Well we know all those will be broken before the week’s end.  Hence, Wasabi thought we would help you by supplying some IT resolutions that not only can be held up, but may make your organization more productive.  So here are the more popular resolutions:

1. Mind over BYOD

This one is inevitable, so either get on board or step off and watch it happen.  70% of IT organizations are either supporting BYOD now or will be within the next 12 months, according to a recent Gartner survey. "Of the 70% of organizations that want to do BYOD, at least half are not ready," says Dionisio Zumerle, a principal research analyst at Gartner. "You need to change the way you think about security and the way you enable security in the organization. You can't just say to the users 'Please behave' and hope for the best”.  Mobile Device Management is probably the first step to take.  Just changing your policy to accept these devices will be challenging enough.  Organizations that assist companies in changing plans for the employees to a corporate plan takes on average 20 minutes per employee, and they are good at it… On average, corporate plans can be about $50 per user, while personal equivalent plans are about $80, so you can save roughly 360 per user for your efforts.  However, a firm policy and automated tracking would help in employee abuse.  Hidden costs such as transition, support, expense abuse, and help desk are things that need to be watched.

2. Strengthen your IT bench.

It may seem counter-intuitive to IT executives trying to retain their best developers and project managers, but employees who are trained and certified in emerging technologies usually choose to stay with the organization that paid for their training. "If you train and certify your IT staff, you will keep them," promises Terry Erdle, CompTIA's executive vice president for skills certification. "Training is the No.1 thing that causes your best-in-class IT professionals to stay, and that is because their company invested in them." Erdle recommends that CIOs provide training and certification to about a third of their IT staff each year so that the entire team's skills are current. Popular certification programs for 2013 include cloud and mobile computing, cybersecurity and project management.

3.  Buddy up to Marketing

"With trends such as social technologies, it's not about employees; it's about customers.'', a key challenge for corporations will be integrating data from the most popular social networks into back-end business systems.  Subsequently, Marketing is just one of the many to drive an increasing amount of IT spending in the future, Gens predicts. "Almost 60% of new IT investment in 2013 will involve Line of Business executives," Gens says. "About 25% of new IT investments are going to be where the Line of Business executive is the decision maker, and that 25% will go up to 40% by 2016. There's a tide rising where Line of Business executives are gaining more control over IT. This doesn't mean that IT is out, but IT needs to make those relationships with other executives work."

4.  Something As a Service

Look, it’s simple, we have learned over time and experience that building it is waaay more costly than buying it.  Yes, if you build it, they will come, but so does the upgrades, support, and inevitable obsolescence that goes with it.  So as Einstein would state, use the KISS rule, i.e., Keep It Simple, Stupid.  When in doubt, service it out.  A good example is your Enterprise Software, “When it comes to The time-to-market, SaaS is very helpful," says Shazia Mian, director of applications systems at Heidrick & Struggles, a Chicago executive recruiting firm that recently deployed popular SaaS offering Salesforce.com and its collaboration tool, Chatter. "There is truly much to be offered out of the box. These applications are pre-built and ready to go, and they meet our business needs. It's much better than starting from scratch and building it out,"

5. Mine that is Yours

Companies today struggle to find the golden ticket that will help them be more competitive; however, frequently, never look within their own house for the answers.  Facebook struggled to define how they can leverage their situation to increase the bottom line the members were their assets rather than their customers. .  They found that their real customers were the sponsors.  From that, they began a data mining effort to understand what they had.  Hence the privacy issues.  In short, look at your data carefully, not just finding ways to back it up or look up when a help desk question arises.  Data mine your own fields to see if there is any way to leverage that to better service, new offerings, or spawn a different business model to improve the bottom line.

6. Disaster Averted?

Have a plan, do the plan, test the plan.  So many organizations preach the mantra that Disaster Recovery is one of their priorities; however, the task is usually so horrendous that it’s the first casualty when budgets are to be tightened.  With today’s virtual public clouds, the excuses are over.  Disaster Recovery is now affordable and relatively straight forward.  Nuff sed…

7. Backup a Minute

Now far be it from us to lecture on the value of backups. However, time and time again, when rubber meets the road, people have difficulty extracting their backup data in a reasonable amount of time, for the system is seldom tested.  Oh, and for the record?  Multiple backups wouldn’t hurt either, and we don’t mean on the same software, same server, and same destination.  Have a totally separate solution to cover your bum, just in case the first one fails for whatever reason, e.g., full disk, damaged sectors, antiquated software, etc…

8.  Fix Your Face

Look nothing frustrates people more that phoning in an issue and getting the run around or some static ridden noise on the other end.  You spend millions on your reputation, yet let it all unravel when someone calls in.  The fact is the web does get more traffic, but the traffic that the phones get are valued prospects and customers, the real deal.  So why would you let these treasured patrons go through some Smithsonian Institute relic to get their information?  Spend the money and get a better phone system, or continue to sound like your organization is run on a potato farm with bailing wire and chewing gum.

Source(s):

http://www.itnews.com/cloud-computing/53614/best-it-resolutions-2013?page=0,3

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more

About Rick Ricker

An IT professional with over 20 years experience in Information Security, Telecommunications, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.

For more information, contact Rick at (800) 333-8394 x 689