The New IT Alignment Gap (part 2)

To close this gap, CIOs must take a multidisciplined approach that involves proactive planning.

Optimization of Current Infrastructure: By optimizing your current infrastructure, you can reduce operations costs—typically by 10 percent to 30 percent a year. The challenge is to do this while ensuring the infrastructure continues to meet performance needs for at least three to five years.

Common Platforms and Standards to Improve Agility: The use of common platforms and infrastructure standards enables organizational agility, allows optimization of capacity, and can shorten recovery time in the event of a technology failure. Plus, you will shorten the development cycle and make it easier to maintain cost-effective IT services.

Business Portfolio and IT Management Planning: Understand the initiatives in the business portfolio. Consider what the production turnover will be, what the end-to-end infrastructure requirements will be across all lines of business, and what you will need to support these initiatives on an ongoing basis.

Most IT departments don’t have in-house staff to handle all these initiatives, so it’s important to examine your IT staff’s strengths and find any weak areas that need to be supplemented with outside resources.

Data Center Planning: The average data center was not constructed to handle the power and cooling needs of today’s technologies. Your best strategy for achieving success is proactive evaluation and planning. Ask your team: How many data centers do we need? How will our current data center(s) meet our future business needs? How do we source them?

Skills and Organization: Ask yourself: What skills do I need, and what organizational principles am I going to incorporate in order to establish the best possible IT organization? Where can I look for training opportunities? How can I establish a big-picture approach so I can be more proactive and productive?

Be sure to include application development and IT operations management in each other’s planning initiatives. An open, interactive and proactive environment will yield more efficiencies, greater transparency and optimized performance.

Assessment Summary Scorecard: One way to gain a better understanding of where the gaps are in your IT department is to use a scorecard. (See chart below.)

source by:www.baselinemag.com

The New IT Alignment Gap (part 1)

The gap between application development and IT operations management is escalating. With the rise of new technologies, the lack of energy spent on maximizing existing IT infrastructure, the lack of coordination between application groups and operations, and the lack of retiring legacy systems and older software, the IT alignment gap is showing signs of being widened by IT itself.

CIOs are continuously challenged to partner effectively with the enterprise’s business side. At the same time, the gap between application development and IT operations management is escalating at an alarming rate. In many organizations, this gap results in a staggering amount of unplanned cost, risk and business disruption. Here’s why:

• Businesses expect new business functionality (using new infrastructure) to be introduced at an increased pace.
• New technologies continue to emerge at an increased rate, and are often selected by the application development group with little or no input from operations management.
• Little time is spent assessing and maximizing existing IT.
• Application retirement is almost impossible, so operations must continue to support both aging legacy environments and new infrastructure and technology.
• Budget cuts and department reductions require IT staff to work harder with fewer resources.

Most IT organizations are running too fast to evaluate and plan for the substantial changes needed to adequately support ongoing IT operations. Take, for example, the introduction of a new custom application to drive revenue or an upgrade to an ERP system.

Each requires introducing new hardware or operating systems; upgrading database management software; integrating with existing storage and network infrastructures; and establishing appropriate service levels and monitoring services.

In addition, you must address business continuity/disaster recovery and security considerations, and ensure that the data center has adequate power and cooling to support the new capabilities. And you must establish the interdependencies of new software and tools, and develop and scale the skills needed to support the new infrastructure.

source by:www.baselinemag.com

CES Preview: Putting the New in Notebooks (part 2)

by Cisco Cheng

We all know netbooks are taking the world by storm, but how will PC makers raise the bar at the show? Design is going to be significant, since many of the current netbooks – the MSI Wind, the Acer Aspire One, the Lenovo Ideapad S10 – have the same general, lackluster look. There are glimpses of those who have already upped the design ante, like the Asus eeePC 1002HA, which uses a brushed aluminum frame. Intel is expected to launch a Classmate PC convertible tablet, and someone will have a netbook that will blow CES attendees away.

Multi-touch has been the buzz word ever since Apple launched the iPhone. With laptops, the HP Pavilion TX2 was the first convertible tablet to showcase multi-touch capabilities. Expect at least one other player to launch a multi-touch screen. In the meantime, almost every vendor is incorporating multi-touch functionality into their touchpads. Like the ones on the MacBook and MacBook Pros, you pinch, enlarge, and scroll through various file formats by gesturing with two fingers.

Secondary displays, not Vista's SideShow technology, will show up on a few systems at CES 2009. Fujitsu already announced the Lifebook N7010, with a secondary touch display right above the keyboard. And Lenovo is advertising a secondary display that slides out of the Thinkpad W700.

Is this the year that Blu-Ray will go mainstream? Part of it will be up to laptop manufacturers. The Acer Aspire 6930G-6723 is already shipping with a Blu-ray drive for under a $1,000, and others will follow.

DisplayPort is out to make its presence known, competing against the HDMI format. Apple and Lenovo are already shipping with DisplayPort technologies in their laptops. Others will offer that, or both: DisplayPort and HDMI technology in one chassis.

Is this finally the year WiMax will take off? Sprint and Clearwire recently rolled out their WiMax network in Baltimore, which promises speeds of up to 7 Mbit/s, a range that covers an entire city, and prices that average households can afford. Well, PC Makers aren't waiting for more roll outs; they've seen enough. Expect announcements of numerous WiMax-enabled laptops at CES 2009.

source by:www.pcmag.com

CES Preview: Putting the New in Notebooks (part 1)

by Cisco Cheng

As you might expect, notebooks will be where the action is at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year.

Sales of notebooks continue to increase, while desktops decline. As a consequence, OEMs continue to drive this market toward new and emerging technologies, all the while competing aggressively on price.

Here's what we expect to see at CES this January. Want to read about the rest of the show? Check out our CES overview.

New form factors for notebook screens will dominate the show, moving from the older 16-by-10 ratio to a 16-by-9 one, as is common in HDTVs. We've already seen a handful of them in the past few months, including the 16-inch Gateway Mc7803u, the HP HDX16t, and the Acer Aspire 6930G-6723. Since they are also cheaper and more efficient to make, laptops with screen sizes such as 14-, 15.6-, and 18-inches will become the de facto standards at CES 2009.

Nvidia is making a huge play with its integrated ecosystem, which is likely to take a decent chunk of market share away from Intel. The Apple MacBook 13-inch and the MacBook Pro 15-inch dual-graphics machine are already utilizing this ecosystem, reaping the rewards of enhanced 3D graphics without the power draw. The Toshiba Portege A600 is another laptop that uses Nvidia's integrated chipset; expect companies like Acer, Asus, Dell, and HP to jump on board. Recently, Nvidia announced its Ion platform, transforming traditional Atom-based netbooks into somewhat gaming-worthy machines. Expect to see the Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset in future netbook designs as well.

source by:www.pcmag.com

RIP, VHS

Brennon Slattery

Dec 23, 2008 10:07 pm

The VHS format has finally died. Even though most of us probably thought it was already long gone, its death certificate was signed when Distribution Video Audio of Palm Harbor, Florida--the last major supplier of VHS tapes--shipped the last of its saleable stock.

Distribution Video Audio made $20 million per year selling tons of tapes for cheap, but now the business has vanished. Leftover stock will either be given or thrown away--perhaps even meeting a landfill fate just like those millions of copies of Atari's ET videogame.

VHS stuck around for more than twenty years and may be the longest running survivor of any format war. Even the DVD format may not last as long, says Ryan Kugler, the president of Distribution Video Audio: "The DVD will be obsolete in three or four years, no doubt about it. Everything will be Blu-ray." Depending on who you ask, though, three or four years may be a bit premature--Blu-ray still has a long road ahead.

The end of the VHS era may be sad, but all tech eventually goes obsolete. Look at the floppy disk and its desperate struggle for relevance after the emergence of CDs. Look at the CRT monitors choking the shelves of Salvation Army stores and plugging landfills. You can't help but wonder what be the next to go. DVDs? CDs? MP3 players? Non-touch screen monitors and laptops?

source by:www.pcworld.com

How Hijaab Came To Being (part 2)

The Quranic tafseer (commentary) upon these mentioned verses can be read within this booklet.

There are more than 70 invaluable ahadith which are concerned with matters regarding Hijaab. From amongst the 7 Quranic verses, scholars are unanimous upon the fact that the verses within Surah Ahzaab were revealed before those of Surah Noor.

Hazrat Umar (R.A) once suggested to the Holy Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam that the wives of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam should observe the veil as many differing persons of differing manners and natures visit the houses of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. The Holy Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam himself found this a desirable suggestion however, he was unable to turn the suggestion into a practicality as the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was in wait of divine revelation. Shortly afterwards the revelations of Hijaab were revealed successively.

The first of the revelations concerning Hijaab is as follows :

“Do not enter the houses of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam unless you have been granted permission.” Surah Ahzaab.

How Hijaab Came To Being (part 1)

Islam being an eternal religion has thus catered for man’s life upon this world in the most stringent of ways and so Islam has not only defined the lawful from the unlawful, however, it has also made unlawful all acts/objects which would resultantly procure unlawfulness, i.e. The act of drinking alcohol has been defined as unlawful, in conjunction to this any acts/objects which could lead to the consumption of alcohol are also defined as unlawful for example the selling of alcohol, working within a brewery etc.

In the same manner adultery is unlawful within Islam and so in view of this any such acts which may lead to this e.g. Lustful gazing have also been defined as unlawful. In order that such acts are ruled out the revelations governing Hijaab were ordained upon mankind.

These revelations were revealed unto mankind within the actual era of Prophecy. This era was a period of time which held many highly ranked and pious households whom, through their piety did not allow free mingling of the opposite sex. Thus, the people of this era were the refined and decent of man however, from the very beginning the free mingling of the opposite sex was an act which held dislike and opposition.

The actual date of the revelation governing Hijaab is one of differing opinions however, Hijaab was ordained as compulsory within 3.A.H or 5.A.H.

The Holy Quran contains 7 verses altogether concerning Hijaab, 3 of these are featured within Surah Noor and 4 in Surah Ahzaab.

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source by : msuyanto.com