Fortunately, this sort of thing could never happen today

Posted by Mike on Thursday, August 19, 2010 - 33 views

It’s the mid-1970s, and this programmer pilot fish works for an IT service provider that supports several big insurance companies.

“We ran a huge (at that time) mainframe and a nationwide network and, of course, a large computer room,” says fish.

Read the rest of the Shark Tank here.

Eight Signs You’ve Been in IT Too Long

Posted by Mike on Thursday, August 5, 2010 - 53 views

Are you an old-school techie? In a world where IT workers are hip, the old image of geeks without a shred of modern sensibility has been shattered. The invisible nerds of yesteryear, eating leftover pizza in the middle of the night at their cubicles, have been replaced by 21st Century technorati, a legion of iPhone-toting, night-clubbing, courier bag-carrying, California cuisine-eating fashionistas.

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Lessons learned from a long IT career

Posted by Mike on Thursday, March 25, 2010 - 368 views

* When something goes ‘blooie’, check the physical layer first!!

* As a programmer, I was under the mistaken impression that not documenting something amounted to job security. No more. Document, and keep it updated!

* As good as your skills may be, working with your peers will make everybody better.

WAIT! There is more to read… read on »

Much Work to be Done Before the Boomers Bolt

Posted by Mike on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 1 views

Though more marathon than sprint, insurers are indeed in a race to glean as much as they can from a graying IT workforce possessing increasingly rare skill sets and a vast amount of institutional and system-specific knowledge.

Considering the stakes, carriers need to make tactical considerations, including shifting internal staff and outsourcing certain functions, in order to maximize the effectiveness of these workers. READ MORE

Trying to save money through outsourcing? Why you should think again

Posted by Mike on Monday, February 22, 2010 - 130 views

In the realm of IT outsourcing, disengaging from a multiyear, multimillion dollar agreement can be so difficult and costly for customers that it makes a Trump divorce seem like a tea party. But that’s exactly what Kellwood did last year, despite the upheaval the company anticipated from ending its 13-year IT outsourcing arrangement with EDS.

And it turns out, the move to insourcing increased flexibility and saved money. READ MORE

Trickle-Up Economics: How Consumers Turned Corporate Technology on its Head

Posted by Mike on Thursday, February 18, 2010 - 92 views

To reduce operating costs and to get a leg up on their competitors, corporations and businesses have historically been among the first to evaluate and adopt expensive new technologies. With their deep pockets and hefty IT departments, large businesses often work closely with hardware and software vendors to get the newest, fastest, and most whiz-bang technology on the market. Tech-savvy executives, like the rest of us, also enjoy the bonuses and bragging rights they get for implementing a new IT platform or a game-changing information process. READ MORE

Mainframe Computing: Not Sexy, But Essential to US DoD IT

Posted by Mike on Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - 139 views

While it might be more thrilling to imagine US Special Operations Forces getting critical intelligence about enemy movements through a laptop computer in the field, the bread and butter of US Department of Defense IT are mainframe computers. They have the computing power necessary to process the huge amount of information generated by the sprawling DoD bureaucracy. MORE

Entrepreneurs need to help California’s IT systems

Posted by Mike on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - 149 views

They run under operating systems like CICS and IMS.” There was a time when there was a big difference between these enterprise systems and the PC and Web applications that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs build. …

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