Human Resources

The most cost-effective way to dramatically improve your IT organization's implementation of a new system, app or upgrade is to make sure you fire the right person. Nothing boosts morale or heightens concentration quite like the public firing of an individual who everyone knows is a persistent obstacle to discipline, collaboration, quality and ethics during an implementation.

Companies find it convenient to single out employees as the main threat to internal network security so they can put a face on the problem. But unwanted intruders, not employees, pose the greatest risk to organizations.

Proactive IT managers need to make sure their retention weapons are loaded

Lack of focus on soft skills is the chief career inhibitor not just for CTO or CIO aspirants who want to straddle business and IT but also for technologists who want to stay firmly in IT.

Today, insiders represent the single biggest security threat for the simple reason that we haven't addressed the problem. That's because IT designed to prevent intrusion from the outside cannot handle the task of keeping confidential data inside the organization. Yet according to Gartner Inc., 84 per cent of high-cost security incidents occur when insiders send confidential data outside the company.

Lasha Dekker, vice-president of developer and platform evangelism for Microsoft Canada Co., says it was mostly chance that led her to a career in IT

Success, they say, leaves clues

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has hired head-hunting firm Russell Reynolds Associates Inc. to help it find a new chief executive officer (CEO) following the departure last week of former chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina. The search will be conducted with the "highest level of confidentiality," HP said Thursday, adding that it will not comment further on the hunt for a new chief executive.