First of all, do your best not to handle any credit card numbers if you can help it. For example, if you use a shopping cart such as 1AutomationWiz and you never handle any credit cards in person, then your PCI compliance is much easier. In this example, if the number of cards you process is small enough that you can use a self assessment questionnaire, the number of questions you need to answer drops from 224 to just 15 questions—a huge simplification of the amount of work you need to do to become PCI-DSS compliant!

Before you invest a lot of time making your organization PCI–DSS compliant, first take time to simplify how you accept and process credit cards. You may find that changing some of your business practices, without causing more work for you or inconveniencing your customers, can make PCI compliance even easier.

For example, at one time, I sold books and CD learning kits in the back of the room while speaking. I’ve stopped doing that now to simplify meeting PCI-DSS regulations. If I ever decide to accept credit cards again at events, my compliance will be more complicated.

Have you changed your business processes to be more PCI compliant?

Please post your comments on this blog.

It is also important to have adequate ventilation and fans to circulate the air through the servers so that the temperature inside the computer chassis remains cool as well.

Additionally, it is useful to put monitors in the server room so that if the air conditioning fails at night or over a weekend, alerts will be automatically generated to notify appropriate personnel who can come in to fix the problem before the servers are damaged.

While you are at it, lock your server rooms to prevent intrusion, monitor for floods if that is an issue in your building, and use appropriate power filtering to prevent electrical surges and spikes from damaging your servers.

Please post your comments on this blog.

Between two back-to-back engagements in the East earlier this year, the best transportation option was to charter a private flight since other transportation options were more costly in both time and money. I booked the charter under the stipulation that the pilot allow me to sit in the copilot seat rather than “in the back” as long as I promised not to”push any buttons.” The charter service agreed, and it was 2 hours of the beautiful scenery and enlightening conversation!

The weather was beautiful and I was able to increase my knowledge of flying, navigating, aviation radio communications, and the procedures pilots use every day. My experienced and highly capable pilot spoke of how he flew Apache helicopters in the service and we discussed human multitasking—which is important when piloting an Apache. I learned later that a pilot in the book Apache by Ed Macy reports his cockpit video even showed the pilot’s two eyeballs looking in two different directions regularly during times that required multitasking!  I am unsure if the Generation Y employees have the same level of intensive training as Apache helicopter pilots.

Even my pilot, whom I hold in the highest esteem and feel enormous respect for his rotor and fixed wing piloting abilities, transmitted incorrect information through an air traffic control hand-off during our flight. I noticed it as he was transmitting, and the air traffic controller did too because they immediately asked for clarification. The point is, no matter how good we are, we are all humans. Adding multitasking requirements increases the chances for errors.

We live in a day of social media, text messages, e-mail, and constant information being “fed” to us at sometimes an alarming rate. I would find it difficult to use the Internet and e-mail at all without good spam and web content filters to eliminate the data I’m for sure not interested in anyway.

Scientific studies in controlled environment show humans who multitask suffer a precipitous drop in productivity with an associated increase in errors.  Why would we do this to our employees, especially if they are paid by the hour?

Scientists discovered that, rather than multitasking, the brain must perform rapid task-switching. On top of that, the brain must now also monitor to see which task needs attention in the next moment.  This leads to each important task only receiving the partial attention of the human.

On top of that, do you enjoy talking to someone who is not making eye contact and they type furiously while you speak? Most employers want their workers to provide full attention to work-related tasks while on the clock.

Can you or anyone you know effectively do more than one thing at the same time? Please post your comments on the blog.

When CNN ran the story, Study tracks effects of interruptions on doctors, I immediately thought about the effects of interruptions on the “doctors” who take care of your IT—your IT professionals!

If you have seen me speak, or experienced an IT Vital Systems Review audit, you have heard my soap box spiel about how IT professionals all need at least one 45 minute period of uninterrupted time each day to accomplish tasks. My preference is that they get even more than one of those periods.

When solving an IT related issue, planning the next upgrade, or focusing on some other IT related process, it is crucial for the IT professional to be balancing multiple ideas and multiple subjects around in their brain simultaneously. One unnecessary interruption can throw the IT professional back to “square one” again in a nanosecond.

The CNN article says doctors did not even return to almost 20% of the tasks they were doing when interrupted.

Interruptions are dangerous to medical professionals in hospitals, pilots in aircraft, and IT professionals in your organization.

Save them time, and yourself money, by allowing them to work quietly from time to time.  If you have them on staff, IT developers are the same way. Writing code is a thought intensive process.

I was interrupted twice while writing this article. How many times were you interrupted while reading it?

For that matter, some of the CEO’s and other key executives that read these blog postings can benefit from some uninterrupted time as well!  Please post your thoughts on this blog.

Without getting into the technical details, robust virtualization technology exists today that allows your operating systems and applications to be easily portable from one computer to the next, and even delivered to a machine quickly through the Internet.

This means that if a disaster strikes your main office—even a power failure that exceeds the capabilities of your standby power generator—your servers can basically migrate themselves to servers operating in one of your other offices or a safe data center of your choosing.  Keeping this in plain English: your users will still be able to get their work done as if nothing happened.

In the past, this kind of protection was very expensive, and now the prices are spiraling down. Some of the technologies you put in to save money on servers today, like server virtualization, come with this DRP advantage as a “side benefit” if you use it.  As you add technology to support remote users or simplify the IT management in your organization, like Terminal Services or Citrix Xen, also add the possibility for robust DRP.

As you upgrade your systems—be sure to get advice from a qualified professional about getting your Disaster Recovery Plan in order!

I’m always ok with it when a CEO, President, or owner is not an IT professional. In fact, it is often easier for an IT professional to do their job if the leader of their organization is not always getting in their way!

IT changes so fast, even faster than clothes go out of style. Perhaps executives need to check in with their peers, or even better, IT professionals to be sure their “IT fashion” is not out of date. Sure, LinkedIn is alive and well today, but will they be the CompuServe of tomorrow? Twitter and Face Book are all the rage, but some fear MySpace is on the way out. Google has plans to make all of them obsolete with Google Buzz.

Many of the executives I work with are NOT experts in IT—and I think that is just fine. That’s why they have good IT professionals they trust on staff and/or outsourced.

When I use a tool that easy, it is so refreshing.

So much better than the usual, “What do you want? Enter. Are you sure? Are you sure you are sure?” etc. Additionally, think of recent changes Microsoft implemented in their interfaces. On the downside, many people are less than impressed with the new Microsoft Office ribbon menu system. On the upside, Windows 7’s interface has many features I find much more appealing than XP’s interface.

Many people rave at the engineering Apple puts into their products and almost everyone can see why. Xerox shipped the first mouse but Macintosh made it famous. The iPhone definitely made a permanent mark in personal IT history.

One of the next biggest advancement opportunities is voice recognition—and that’s better than you think already. I wonder what the next widely adopted user friendly interface change will be? If you want to, post your ideas and comments in this blog.

The theory is that, if the “online banking only” computer is only used for online banking and nothing else, the computer is less likely to be infected with viruses, key loggers, and other malicious software.

Having two computers comes at a huge cost to convenience for the people in your office that need to perform online banking. That means they need to have two computers at their desk. They could use a KVM switch to use their same keyboard, monitor, and mouse to switch back and forth between the computers.

Your IT professional might be willing to set up a virtual machine on the regular machine to use for online banking, but IT will still need to keep that virtual machine current with patches and protected with anti-virus. The end-user may become confused using the virtual machine and reject the idea completely.

Controls would probably need to be put in place to limit access to banking web sites to the single machine so no employees ever “cheat” and use their own workstation to access online banking.

On a positive note, an inexpensive computer would be more than enough to handle the online banking, and there are tools like Microsoft’s Microsoft Steady State and Deep Freeze (http://www.faronics.com/html/deepfreeze.asp) that can help lock the machine down to a single purpose and help protect from infections.

Do you dedicate a single computer for your online banking tasks? What is your response to the ABA’s advice? Please add your comments to the blog.

IT professionals naturally, as most of us would, gain a great feeling of satisfaction when they swoop in to save the day. The real question I ask of the IT team during an audit is, “Why did the problem develop to begin with?” I’d rather there never be a problem and, when you see your IT professionals, it is to talk strategically about your IT systems rather than to solve another emergency.

Some of the IT professionals at the companies who’s executives bring me in to audit their systems say, “Thank you Mike. You taught us to drain the swamp so we could stop killing alligators. Once the swamp was drained, most of the alligators left.”

Some of the biggest encouragement you executives can provide your in-house and IT professionals are to focus on the following areas:

• Strategic—IT professionals who are too bogged down in tactics fail to discuss important decisions with executives. A perfect example is whether or not the company wants to use full disk encryption on some or all of your computers. Too often the first the executives ever hear of full disk encryption is when they learn it is not installed and they are about to have to mail a letter to all the clients since a laptop was lost or stolen.
• Automation—Servers can, when configured properly, do a lot of the work automatically that your IT professionals may be wasting time doing manually.
• Central Management—IT professionals can configure the network so they can use one quick tool on one computer to take care of every computer in your organization—without having to visit every computer. The money savings and increased security can be staggering.
• Metrics—IT can provide you with useful information such as most common help desk requests so you can reduce the causes, statistics on what web sites your employees visit most often so you can control bandwidth, and can sometimes bring information from two different programs together using business intelligence tools to give you important metrics related to your sales, processes, or even client demographics.

These are all a much better use of time and money than for your IT professionals to be fixing the same old problems they keep fixing every week.

Dual monitors can pay for themselves quickly with increased worker productivity.  If a worker’s productivity is increased even only 9%, and you calculate 9% of their yearly pay, you can see what a bargain the dual monitors are as long as the employee is busy.

Another way of looking at this is that if you have a $50K/year employee who is overloaded and frequently flips between windows on their screen during the day to get work done, your choices to improve their work production at least 9% include:

• Hire a new part time employee for $4.5K/year, plus HR costs, plus find a place for them to sit and work, buy them a computer and monitor, and spend time and money training them.
• Or, get the first employee a second monitor for $300.

The prices are much lower than ever before. You can find high resolution 25.5-Inch widescreen LCD monitors for less than $300 each.  Most modern workstations support dual monitors—even many laptops.

Would you consider working on a desk that was 19″ or smaller diagonally? These days, the computer screen is your “desk.” Most desks are huge compared to the size of a single computer monitor.

Users who try two monitors and see how productive they can be never go back.