Information Technology

"Why have IT report to accounting?  You show me a company where the CIO reports to the CFO, and I'll show you a company lagging in its industry in the use of technology."

- Benjamin Salzmann, Acuity CEO, Quoted in "CIO to CEO: If You Want to Move Up", ComputerWorld, December 18, 2006

This fork of Joomla to improve accessibility interested me

Accessible (a8e) Joomla! is a Joomla! fork that conforms to accessibility guidelines and web standards. A8e Joomla! will follow regular Joomla! releases. The project should implode when regular Joomla! finally conforms to the standards.

Accessibility of Internet sites is very huge within the federal government and addressed by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, 1998.

I have never really worried whether I was certified or not. This Computerworld article gets right to the point:

Depending on whom you talk to, certification programs are either borderline rip-offs that provide little useful knowledge, or valuable hiring tools that make it easier for IT execs to pick the most promising new employees.

Available from vendors focusing on their own products, or outside organizations offering multi-vendor training, these certificate programs are expanding to fill the many specialized technology subsets that have multiplied along with the growth of data storage and other IT areas.

Now this isn't to say that I don't have a few IT certifications under the belt and didn't receive some benefit from them. One of the most intensive IT certifications of recent years was in IT security and another to "please" the crowd was a certification for migration to Microsoft's Server 2003. By the time I was done with those certifications though, I didn't know enough to get the job done.

"Leadership. Communication. Strategy. Diplomacy. Money. Technology. Industry. These are the things IT leaders must master."

- Frank Hayes, "Frankly Speaking: IT Unleashed", Computerworld, December 11, 2006

Congratulations to the Ruby language folks for converting their CVS repository over to Subversion (SVN). From what the "experts" tell me, it is not easy moving your developers over to another version control system. At least that's what was hinted when I asked the question, CVS or Subversion?

"IT has no value whatsoever if you can't help people carry out their missions."

- Chris Niedermayer, "Go with the grain", Government Computer News, May 2, 2005

A few weeks ago, Federal Computer Week, had an article about the role Web 2.0 may have in the federal government. Is there a place for wikis and other tool now included in most modern content management systems in the federal government?

The article hints that Web 2.0 may have place more behind the scenes then in public view.

On a recent visit to Drupal's forum I found another post with both Joomla and Drupal in the subject line. Making comparisons between Joomla and Drupal are very common these days as they are currently considered the top two open source content management systems (CMS) out there. The forum post written by Steve Burge contains a link that takes you to a comparison table he did between Joomla and Drupal.

"In today’s global economy, a company’s success or failure may hinge on the ability to implement technology to remain competitive. The business managers of tomorrow must be able to see the big picture while also understanding the nuts and bolts that keep everything running. The type of thinking that was once left to technologists is now essential for business managers."

C.J. Kelly, "Can a Manager Be a Techie and Survive?", Computerworld, November 20, 2006

C.J. Kelly is the alias for a security manager that wishes to hide her real name and employer in her articles for Computerworld.

Those in IT with any ambition to move up the ranks need to understand their organization's business better, obviously. What isn't acknowledged so readily by management is the need for managers to know IT better.

The November 20, 2006 article "Spam surge linked to hackers" from eWeeks is a must read. Unfortunately, I can't find the actual online version of the article in print.

The article discusses the increasing complexity hackers are using botnets running on tens of thousands of hijacked Windows computers to spread spam. The article focuses on the research by SecureWorks regarding the malware trojan called Troj/SpamThru. Some scary unique features have been identified with this trojan including: