The main idea behind many of the technologies today has two parts:

First, users can have icons on their desktop, click on an icon, and the user is able to work.

Second, it is irrelevant to that user whether that program they launched is:

• Installed on their own PC
• Being pushed down to their PC from a server
• Running on a server on their corporate network
• Being provided by a different company over the Internet.

It is up to the IT professionals to handle the details—the users just have the information and tools they need to take care of your clients and their needs.

Running applications in the cloud normally refers to applications that run through the Internet. Executives sometimes call their internal servers their own personal cloud, and who am I to argue? This especially makes sense to them when their servers are at a data center in a different location than the offices where the users work.

Read more about the pros and cons of computing in the cloud. Please post your comments on this blog.

This company, like many, had separate networks for e-commerce and for administration. The IT professional had been telling his CEO that the organization was “compliant” based on the security of the office administration network—not the IT systems that actually process, store, and transmit credit card information.  He pretended to be shocked that he needed to secure the computers and network that actually handle the credit card data.

As IT professionals, it is important to know what we are talking about when we answer a CEO’s question. Especially if a wrong answer could lead to the CEO facing fines, lawsuits, and even the failure of a business. If we don’t know, the proper response is, “I do not know but I will find out.”

As a C-level executive, business owner, and as a manager, it is important to understand that, unfortunately, some IT professionals will tell you that you are compliant with specific regulations when they really don’t know.

I want to extend my gratitude to the IT professionals who do act responsibly!

Please post your comments on this blog.

Fortunately for the CEO, after our conversation, he decided not to terminate the IT professional and keep him on board. The CEO will arrange management training for the IT professional.

In my experience, not all of the very best IT professionals are also excellent leaders and managers. Expecting all IT professionals to also be good at management reminds me a little bit of the flying cars, or amphibious vehicles. Those vehicles are pretty good at both, but not excellent at either.

Although I have met a few, should we expect IT professionals to be good managers? Many of the C-level executives I speak to feel this is a reasonable expectation. Please post your comments on this blog.

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.

While I was presenting in May, a CEO in the audience related information about a productivity expert promoting human multitasking and providing “Generation Y” with the distractions they want while at the office. You may have followed my blog postings the past two weeks about the disruption of interruptions and the idea of human multitasking.

There is indeed literature promoting what I would call the “distracted work environment” in an effort to attract the “best and brightest” young employees.

I guess I’m old-fashioned, and I’m taking the stand that the “best and brightest” employees will not want to be distracted while performing their duties on the job. From an IT security perspective, this access can be devastating to your business.

The CEO in the audience feels that in order for Gen Y employees to be happy, employers need to provide them access to social media all day long to use at the worker’s discretion. He cited examples of the work environments at Google and other Internet companies. I wonder how many other employers tell themselves it is “ok” to provide distractions to workers.

For Google, and even the marketing professionals at your own organization, it makes sense—even to me—for them to access social media at work since that is part of their job!

To me, promoting social media for non-work-related tasks makes as much sense as keeping a carton of cigarettes readily available and constantly restocked at the desk of someone who is trying to stop smoking.  Sounds more like temptation and torture than being supportive of someone achieving their goal.

I believe in workers feeling happy based on a “job well done” and my appreciation for their accurate and productive work. I believe there are members of Generation Y who take pride in their work and perform to the best of their abilities. I feel it is the employer’s responsibility to provide them with a productive work environment—free of distractions.

Isn’t it enough that the employees can have their own smart phone or other device right next to their desk and use that for their distractions? Need we, as employers, provide the same distraction using a larger screen on company owned equipment? No, you do not—at least not in the summer of 2010. The inappropriate access for non-work-related social media access results in too much lost productivity and too risky for IT security.

You may have seen the short comedy video a wonderful video production firm created for The Foster Institute, Inc. demonstrating the internet misuse that may be going on in your organization. The theme of the video is an office romance gone awry.

One of the more enjoyable parts of blogging is stirring up some controversy, so please post your comments on the 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.

Well said!  A lot of executives have expressed a similar concern, though in my 20 years none of them tickled my funny bone so much as that creative question!

There are communication barriers in many organizations, and the “Executives vs. IT” challenges are quite common. The language barrier between “IT terminology” and “plain English” is only the beginning of the problem. The results of so called “personality surveys” are often vastly different. Executives are often visionary and strategic in nature and IT professionals can be very tactical in their thinking.

It also surprises many executives to learn that the IT professional’s deepest concern is often “The boss will be disappointed in me and I will lose my job!”

In my experience, the executives are worried, “If I make the IT professional angry, they may delete all the data on the servers and then quit their job and leave the organization in shambles!”

With IT and the executives both being concerned about the power the other holds, and wanting to remain in the “good graces” of the other, it is easy to see how the communication boundaries can develop and have tall, strong walls.

Another symptom of the barrier is that IT projects often tend to go over budget and finish late.
If you have something you want to tell your IT professionals, tell them! If you want my help, ask. Open up communication and solve some of those lingering problems!

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.