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Brett's Blog
Top Concerns
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 07:22

CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives cite business productivity and cost reduction as their top business concern, according to the 2009 IT Industry Trend Survey, commissioned by the Society for Information Management (SIM). IT and business alignment, the No.1 concern in 2008, fell to No. 2, which annually provides important benchmark data in areas including spending, salaries, job scope of IT professionals, and technical/business trends.

Rounding out the top 10 concerns are:

3.) Business agility and speed to market

4.) Business process re-engineering

5.) IT cost reduction

6.) IT reliability and efficiency

7.) IT strategic planning

8.) Revenue generating IT innovations

9.) Security and privacy

10.) CIO leadership role

"The successful IT organizations are those working aggressively with their business partners to ID opportunities to reduce the cost for business units," said the survey's author Jerry Luftman, former SIM VP for Academic Community Affairs and executive director of Graduate Information Systems Programs and Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at Stevens Institute of Technology. "This is very different than in previous downturns."

Nearly 250 company responses were gathered from senior IT leaders within SIM's membership base and the community at-large. Respondents indicated the No.1 application/technology of importance is business intelligence (BI). It was followed by server virtualization, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer/corporate portals, enterprise application integration/management (EAI/EAM), and continuity planning/disaster recovery.

"If you take (BI and server virtualization) they are way out in front of the others" as far as he number of respondents interested in or deploying them, said Luftman. "The thing that's interesting, you'd think that with the activity that server virtualization is getting, that things like SaaS, and Cloud computing and grid computing and utility computing would be showing up high on the list also and they're not, they're very, very, very, very far down."

The why ties directly back to infrastructure. Very few are spending. Since 2008, infrastructure spending is off by 10% or more and there is no indication this will change in 2010. This says to Luftman that CIOs are only spending on quick return, high ROI projects―like server virtualization―where the payoff is too good to ignore. If, however, the payoff from these other offerings―that could be many months or even years down the road; requiring in-house systems to be shut and business processes re-worked―CIOs are going to be far less likely to change what works now for the promise of a better tomorrow. "The worst seems to be over but ... nobody's quite sure if the recovery's going to a U, a V, or a W so they are cautiously optimistic," said Luftman, "But, clearly to be safe, (CIOs) are not allocating their spend on infrastructure. They are reluctant to open their budget gates until they see what's going on."

Looking Up in 2010

On the bright side most CIOs believe they will have more money to spend in 2010. In 2009, 52% of respondents said their IT budgets decreased compared to 2008, but looking ahead to 2010, 27% expect budgets to increase and another 45% expect them to remain the same; practically mirroring pre-recession levels. Where CIOs are spending, cautions Luftman, will remain pretty much the same as this year. "So, it looks like next year is another bad year for hardware vendors."
 
Gartner's Survey
Tuesday, 22 September 2009 07:17

Gartner's annual survey of CIO's.

Please see the link below; this is an excellent piece by the Gartner Group about how your customers can leverage Content Management in a tactical manner.

Respondents to Gartner's annual survey of CIO’s indicated that their top 3 business priorities for 2009 were:
1. Improving business processes
2. Reducing enterprise costs
3. Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness

http://www.gartner.com/it/content/787300/787313/top_five_tactical_content_management.pdf

 
Verizon Billing Errors
Thursday, 27 August 2009 14:09

Some Verizon Customers Find $1.99 Bill Errors
By The Associated Press
WirelessWeek - August 26, 2009

CLEVELAND (AP) — The nation's largest wireless carrier says it will pay refunds to customers erroneously charged $1.99 per month for Internet data services they didn't use.

Officials with Verizon Communications don't know how widespread the problem is but say they believe it's nationwide.

After a columnist wrote about a six-month ordeal fighting the charges, more than 400 readers of The Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland responded with similar complaints about being billed for "data usage."

Four Verizon executives were at the paper's offices for more than 90 minutes on Monday. Roger Tang, the company's regional president for Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, said Verizon is investigating every complaint, because it doesn't want to "zing" customers on their bills.
 
The Cellular Carriers
Tuesday, 21 July 2009 13:12

How are the cellular carriers doing, what are they up to? For someone who enables me to get more done, why are they difficult to deal with? First let me start with my basic premise on Cellular. The number one goal is confusion. If that does not work settle for frustration. To explain your landline company is a monopoly and is regulated. Based on your location you have one choice. For cellular you have choice. This leaves your cellular carrier with two options.
     1. Compete on Price
     2. Confuse or frustrate you in order to be more profitable and not compete on price
Which option would you chose? Which do you feel your carrier has chosen? My goal is to take a few quick minutes and give you a few strengths and weaknesses of the major carriers. We do consulting for corporations on managing celllular accounts, so we deal with each of the carrriers on a daily basis.

Tmobile, surprisingly good customer care, usually customer focused, they offer strong international calling, the best plans for large companies who use few minutes. They also have good support for blackberry and a better than average cost for blackberry. They tend to be more consumer based than average and coverage can be a challenge.

ATT has probably the most extensive international coverage, with Tmobile second. They have the I-Phone and extensive rural coverage. We are often surprised by the lack of support and difficulty in correcting a bill with ATT. In our opinion their pricing and discount structure is the most needing of improvement. For Data they have some high speed markets and some very old technology out there. In the larger high speed markets you can now receive data and be on a call at the same time.

Sprint has a good data network that is consistent throughout the United States. The simply everything plan is a good choice for those who use lots of data and voice. Customer care can be very challenging as much of it has been outsourced. Resolving billing issues can be incredibly difficult. They are usually the best choice for the credit challenged.

Nextel and Sprint are one company for now, but they have unique issues. The have technology issues like Text Messaging delays and coverage quality has been degrading as can be noted be large scale defections. When a company has large customer losses in a growong industry I beleive that says it all.

Verizon has extensive coverage options and a dramatically improved international program (using one of a few international capable devices) For customer care, billing, and support Verizon ranks at the top. They can be inflexible and have higher priced devices.

This is designed to give a high level view of the carriers. More in depth info should be reviewed before making a decision. I hope this takes a little confusion out of the market place.