New with this version are updates that specifically define the mandates of most recent federal (Gramm-Leach-Bliley) and state (Massachusetts and California).

Skills with a high demand

• Project Management - especially large projects with short time frame for delivery
• Security -  focus on mandated compliance issues
• Network Administration - wireless and cloud administration
• Virtualization (Cloud) - new applications and management of the IT infrastructure
• Business and Operational Analysis - focus on business change
• Productivity Improvement Analysis - metrics and operational analysis
• Web 2 - interactive applications that add value
• Database Management - applications that leverage enterprise assets
• System Administration - Windows and UNIX management
• Desktop Support - standardization and change management

Skills with a declining demand

• COBOL
• HTML
• System Network Architecture - SNA
• Siebel
• Rapid Application Development - RAD
• ColdFusion
• Wireless Application Protocol - WAP
• Visual J++
• Novell NetWare
• Asynchronous Transfer Mode - ATM
  

As of last October, IBM employed 105,000 workers in the U.S., compared to 115,000 in 2008. In 2007, IBM had 121,000 U.S. employees. It employs about 400,000 globally.

IBM isn't commenting on its latest round of cuts and information about it comes from the Alliance union which gathers its data directly from IBM employees.

"IBM is clearly offshoring things where they can," said one IBM employee who received his notice and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he didn't want to jeopardize his severance. A 10-year veteran and UNIX administrator, this employee said his customer support team once had 15 U.S.-based workers. That staff was reduced over time to just three workers in the U.S., with other members of the customer support team now in Brazil, Argentina and India.

The employee said he was not given a good reason for his layoff. "Higher ups made a decision that a certain percentage had to be cut - it was not performance-based at all," he said. Although the employee said he's uncertain about the job market, "my sense is that it is not horrendous but I'll have to assume that I'll have to take a cut in pay."

The guide is delivered electronically and is available in MS - Word and industry standard PDF.

Service level agreements are set however costs need to be reduced.

The only areas where cost savings can be made are in hardware and software maintenance.

• Implement a  Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan. This is the traditional solution for mitigating exposure to information loss. However it has grown more complicated as 24/7, global economy, and open source have become standard business mantras. Of paramount importance is overcoming the hurdles associated with backup window requirements, application performance, reliability and consistency, and recovery time.
• Streamline IT Infrastructure and Increase Productivity. As staff and resources become overburdened, companies are refocusing on infrastructure management. Easing critical pressure points is often the catalyst to surviving a difficult fiscal climate.
• Manage Storage and Server Costs  Closely. Controlling cost of operations has become a top priority for many organizations. With data growing at exponential rates, these costs can easily mushroom.
• Support IT Infrastructure Consolidation. Today's data protection architecture seems to be intrinsically broken - as characterized by slow backups, complex recoveries, compromised application performance, and difficult resource administration. IT infrastructure consolidation including server virtualization magnifies the problems and elevates the rearchitecture of storage and data protection as a priority. Finding high performing, easy-to-use, scalable data protection remains a key imperative. Further, system migration of production servers and critical applications to a virtual environment are likely to be costly and painful unless an easy and minimum-impact solution to migration is built into the rearchitecture.

	High Growth Companies	Low Growth Companies
Are members of most-senior management team	62%	46%
Integrate business and technology to innovate	64%	33%
Focus  time on enabling the business and corporate vision	28%	15%
Focus your time on providing core technology services	23%	40%
IT team uses collaborative tools	53%	33%
IT team provide collaborative tools across the enterprise	41%	22%
Aggressively turn data into actionable information	58%	36%
Give customers excellent data integrity and transparency	68%	44%
Seek active input from your customers	87%	70%
Co-create business strategy with fellow execs	74%	61%
Co-present business strategy to senior management	66%	53%
Part of the team setting the organization's strategy	62%	46%
Business models unique and hard to imitate	63%	49%
Business models include partnering alternative sourcing	60%	52%
Create IT centers of excellence	44%	26%
Data readily available for relevant users	67%	51%
Data reliable and secure	81%	66%
Manage change successfully	61%	43%

This bundle contains the following policies:

• Backup and Backup Retention Policy
• Blog and Personal Web Site Policy
• Internet, Email, Social Networking, Mobile Device, and Electronic Communication Policy
• Outsourcing Policy
• Record Management, Retention, and Disposition Policy
• Sensitive Information Policy
• Service Level Agreement Policy
• Telecommuting Policy
• Travel, Laptop, PDA and Off-Site Meeting Policy

Many federal employees were 100 percent on BlackBerrys during the outage.  With power losses to homes car chargers were the only way to keep the devices charged.

This is a strategy that gained attention during the one-two punch of blizzard conditions and multiple power outages in the Washington area. For three days in a row, the federal government and many local governments are closed while a second major snowstorm blew through on the heels of a historic snowfall Feb. 8. Utility companies in Washington and Baltimore reporting about 17,000 homes without power in the afternoon.

Many federal employees are relying on their BlackBerrys haven't slowed down one bit.

The Obama administration has proposed increasing the number of major IT projects. Last fiscal year, the administration proposed handling 781 major IT projects with $40.3 billion. In fiscal 2011, it's proposing 809 major IT projects at $40.4 billion, according to the budget proposal.

Despite modest increases in the budget request, Obama wants IT efforts related to open government and technology modernization to continue in 2011.

For example, work on the General Service Administration’s Citizen Engagement Platform would continue under the 2011 request. Designed to be a resource for all federal agencies, that platform is a collaboration between GSA and the Office of Management and Budget. It is intended to increase the government’s ability to interact and collaborate with the public and provide a cost-effective way for agencies to access tools and guidance related to engagement.

The Metirics HandiGuide is delivered electronically as a PDF document that is fully bookmarked.  It is over 300 pages in lenght and has detail definitions of metrics as well as example reprorts for over 240 metrics.  A full table of  contents and selected pages can be download at http://e-janco.com/metrics.htm.

Encryption software is commonly referred to as the computer security fall back. In the event that a computer protected by organizational policy and physical deterrents is stolen, sensitive information on the laptop is made unreadable by encryption. For encryption software to be effective however, laptop users must consistently and accurately follow company encryption policy. Even more worrisome is the fact that more than 30% of companies believe employees are actively involved in the theft of company computers. Armed with the necessary passwords and encryption keys to access data, disgruntled or dishonest employees represent a threat that cannot be addressed by encryption alone.

The common failing of these laptop security measures is the fact that they are heavily reliant on the diligent action of laptop-using employees to remain effective. If a cable lock is not used, an authentication password is taped to the keyboard for convenience or a regular encryption process not completed, organizations remain unnecessarily vulnerable to public data breach. By the same token, complex, expensive and ultimately productivity-dampening security measures may be effective but greatly reduce the benefits of laptop computers. Endpoint security solutions complement other security measures by providing a final, user-independent layer of protection.

To reduce the risk of a data breach or theft, organizations must adopt new tactics.  In addition, companies must address e-mail and Web security along with employing a functional data loss and prevention strategy.  The application of multiple security techniques is required to reduce risk. For example, there must be a way to control spam and block the downloading of malicious software from poisoned Web sites.  In today's open Web 2.0 and social networking environments, companies need a way to defend against attacks and protect secret or sensitive data.  At the same time, they must maintain a flexible and responsive infrastructure to support today's business working habits.

The Janco Security Manual Template has helped over 2,000 enterprises world-wide to  meet these requirements.

Although the issue has been raised before by various ISPs and network carriers, recent worries have focused on securities firms that depend on third parties to clear trades and process payments over the Internet, according to the GAO.

"Internet congestion during a severe pandemic that hampers teleworkers is anticipated, but responsible government agencies have not developed plans to to address such congestion and may lack clear authority to act," the GAO warned.

Internet backbone congestion from a pandemic is not a major concern. The larger problem may be with the network "edge" or "last mile" in the residential portion of the Internet. Janco says that work-at-home strategies for organization may not work as advertized as residential Internet access may not be sufficient.  This is true both from a capacity and bandwidth at work at home sites.

Often many residential DSL users could share a single DSLAM connection at the carrier's switching office to reach the backbone, contributing to congestion problems. Last-mile DSL and cable modem networks are where remote access falls apart.

While the network edge impact would vary by neighborhood, the Centers for Disease Control planning guideline that assumes 40 percent of the workforce might not be in the workplace for an extended period of time during a pandemic.

CIOs and IT departments design the organization's infrastructure with continuity of business operations in mind. However, most organizations are not doing enough to protect mission-critical data, applications and systems from unexpected disruption and potential loss -- volatilities, such as viruses, power outages, natural disasters, corruption, human error and media failures can't always be prevented. Environments today are characterized by rapid data growth, complexity, stringent business requirements and the increasing government regulations, making it difficult for organizations to get their arms around their data protection strategies. In many cases, the focus is on just protecting data - not necessarily on recovering it. And when there is a focus on recovery, it usually involves just making data available to an application.

The results are supportive of the term audit fatigue, that unmanaged IT Audit efforts within regulated organizations have a negative business impact on IT resources and reduce IT efficiency. However, respondents are largely aware of and interested in tools to automate audit processes and controls as a means of overcoming audit fatigue and freeing up IT budget and resources for innovation rather than compliance. This results in the following:

• Compliance impact is increasing, resulting in high audit frequency and number: As can be expected, larger organizations must satisfy a number of IT audits. Small to mid-sized enterprises (SMB’s) are also subject to an increased level of compliance requirements - resulting in higher than expected IT audit engagements. Given the lack of consistent IT standards across industries and geographies for audit criteria and reporting, compliance efforts - i.e., IT audit and remediation - are largely manual.
• Audit costs are unmanaged, resulting in increased cost: Many respondents conduct audits on an ad-hoc basis rather than as a scheduled effort of an enterprise risk-management program. Given the inability to forecast audit and remediation, spending, budgetary control is lost - exacerbating the perceived impact of compliance efforts.
• Lack of controls automation, limited process maturity: Audit fatigue can be attributed to lack of controls automation and unmanaged IT Audit processes. Limited controls maturity - i.e., repeatable and sustainable controls enforcement and audit processes -  constrains IT innovation due to uncontrolled costs associated with IT Audit and issue remediation.
• Security Policies and Procedures missing

As that process proceeds Janco suggests that CIO then do the following to control costs in the new year:

• Justify hardware and applications - Underutilized or old systems should be taken out, and workloads should be shifted to more-efficient hardware. Rationalization and consolidation programs can reduce the number of servers deployed.
• Consolidate data center sites and server farms - Financial savings often follow consolidation of multiple sites into a small number of larger sites.
  Manage energy and facilities cost. Tools and techniques include raising the temperature of the data center to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, using outside air when possible as an alternative to air conditioning, setting up hot aisle/cold aisle configurations and deploying server-based energy management software tools to run workloads the most energy-efficient way
• Manage the employee and contractor costs - Workers remain the single largest cost element for most IT organizations, accounting for as much as 50% of overall costs.
•  Eliminate or defer procurement of new assets - Servers' useful life often exceeds their amortized life, so monitor the condition of hardware carefully.
• Monitor energy consumption - Advanced monitoring, modeling, and measuring techniques and processes are essential to the adoption of many new technologies and going green.

The electronic document includes proven written text and examples for the following major sections of a disaster recovery plan:

• Policy Statement
• Safety Rules - including a check list of standard proven rules
• Accident Investigation Process
• Hazard Recognition and Control
• Safety Committee including membership and procedures
• Training including guidelines for orientation, job instruction, Supervisor training as well as specialized training
• Communication including for management and employees
• Record Keeping including inspection; accident investigation; training and coordination with Safety Committee.
• Job Description for Safety Director (ADA compliant)
• Technical Appendix including definition of necessary phone numbers and contact points; and sample forms:
  • First Report of Injury
  • Safety Audit Checklist
  • Alternate Work site Safety Checklist (i.e. work at home)

There is an extensive description that shows how a full test of the Safety Program can be conducted. 

The Janco Security Manual template addresses these issues and is a quick way for CIOs to overcome these issues.