Category: ITEE

Next ITEE Meeting will be on November 13, 2009. Main topic of meeting is “Security – What you need to know to stay off the front page of the WSJ”.

On any given day the Wall Street Journal contains sad reports of firms that have permitted data breaches, been victims of computer crime, or in other ways have suffered from insufficient computer security. Declining stock prices, dropping consumer confidence, monetary and trade secret losses, civil and criminal penalties—consequences can be dire. Come share with your peers information about how you perceive the latest threats and what you are doing to combat them. Please RSVP to Paul Evans at pse2@zips.uakron.edu.

The topic for the next ITEE meeting is: New communication methods – aggregation and the use of social networking tools to foster new communication methods.

Location: CBA 258, CBA, The University of Akron

Time: 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

The IT Executive Exchange group met on June 12 to discuss business and technical issues related to Cloud Computing.  Few members in attendance have experience with cloud computing. As per the discussion, some of the benefits of cloud computing include minimizing hardware and running applications off site with ownership and management still available. Other motivations involve cost savings of shared servers and a minimal security issues. Potential drawbacks relates to security & data transfer and it becomes clear that firms remain tethered to the cloud as it attempts to share data internally. The primary utilization of cloud computing of some of the companies present currently consists of e-mail. Although there remains no formal definition of cloud computing, an informal definition is obtainable by applying the purpose of the model to an active definition. The model of cloud computing implies capacity on demand such that the cloud can add or subtract servers as necessary to meet demand. Consequently, the user pays for only that capacity which is necessary. The complexity of the entire IT industry is rapidly advancing. In sum, industry CIO’s face a mosaic of both long and short-term choices entailing critical decisions. It is entirely possible that the term “cloud computing” is a mere buzzword to drive increased revenues. Only time will tell if the large IT firms gamble pays off.

Open Source Software (OSS) is developed when the efforts of programming are distributed to multiple parties to improve an application. During this process, code is open to a wider development community to freely exchange ideas among a vast knowledge pool. Successful applications survive by continually being developed while others that the communities are not interested in remain unchanged. Many firms are looking to solve similar business problems therefore this approach decreases the cost of development and increases quality, reliability and flexibility. The ITEE focused on companies’ and clients’ top concerns about OSS: security, availability of applications and ongoing support costs.

In this roundtable discussion, each high-level IT executive was asked to comment on benchmarks that he or she regularly uses to gauge IT success. Some that were mentioned included end-user surveys, users per IT professional and IT expenses in capital as percentage of revenue. No one set of metrics is right for all firms, but developing, incorporating, and tracking metrics over time is an essential management tool. Many local companies have improved individual and team goals by linking small proportions (anywhere from 2% to 10%) of annual compensation with IT metric outcomes. Other approaches link customer satisfaction surveys to compensation; sometimes a certain number of surveys must be reported before a bonus will be awarded. Companies have reported improvements in IT benchmark measurements after compensation was linked to metrics.