Techies love taking nearly impenetrable phrases and turning them into completely impenetrable acronyms. HTTP, XML, RSA, and so on. Most of the time those outside the tech world can just breeze past these terms and move on, but occasionally one will catch on and become a part of everyday business speak. Lately, the acronym SaaS and the phrase ‘cloud computing’ have done just that.
At the start of this summer Borders revealed a new eCommerce portal, designed to help it’s flagging book and media selling business catch up to eCommerce giants like Amazon.com. The project has been sucessful, but that’s mostly because what borders has created is far more than just a website. They’ve overhauled their IT systems to fit in with every part of their business from marketing, to ordering, to sales.
Worried you might not be compliant when it comes to security and privacy regulations? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. According to “The Global State of Information Security 2006” survey conducted by CIO and PricewaterhouseCoopers, about a fourth of US executives admit to being in violation of Sox regulations. Meanwhile, two thirds of US companies are not compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and 42% of healthcare companies say they still aren’t in compliance with the 10 year old Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
The National Center for Policy Analysis has an interesting brief on the state of Telemedicine up on it’s website as late last month. What makes it especially interesting is it’s breif little case study on a interesting healthcare company called TelaDoc.
It’s easy just to think of disaster recovery as just a matter of rebuilding systems and data after a catastrophe. I’ll admit, that’s pretty much all I considered until about half an hour ago until I stumbled on this article on Emergency Notification Systems in the Disaster Recovery Journal.
Among the definitions of life is the ability for an organism to grow, to adapt, to respond, to reproduce, and to convert raw materials into energy. Organizations, it seems, fit the definition of life very well. So are there other qualities of life that the living organization can deploy to improve its success.
Is mass marketing soon to go the way of the dodo? That’s what CRM magazine suggests in a recent online article entitled The End of Mass Marketing. Author Georgia Hanias, founder, Cyrano Media looks at the world of mobile telecommunication to explore the issue, telling the story of Telenor SONOFON, a Danish phone company who’s found great success replacing mass marketing with something called Customer Life Cylce Managment (CLM), which Hanias describes as “Marketing on Demand.”
Web 2.0 is growing up fast. What started as a collection of tools for savy net users to upgrade their personal lives is quickly becoming a part of the enterprise system. Blogs, social networking (via sites like LinkedIn), and wikis have all found their place in the working world. Now all the hype is focused on the latest Web 2.0 child to don a suit and tie: the mash-up.
So, after being in technology for more or less all of my adult life I am embarrassed to say that I have NOT been on the leading edge of those trends collectively called ‘Social Networking’. In fact, I have been something of a Social Networking Pariah, having only recently moved myself (largely through threats from team members to continue calling me ‘pappy’ around the office) to dig in, study & learn and more importantly, begin to apply some of what social networking offers to my own professional and personal life.
With out-of-control flooding across parts of Iowa, lots of small businesses are finding themselves putting disaster recovery measures into action. The result is a sobering dose of reality that has shown many companies where their planning really prepared them, and where it really didn’t. “When you make [disaster recovery] plans, you never think it could possibly happen to you,” Wade Arnold, CEO of T8 Design, told Computerworld.com. “Going through this experience is going to make me look at those plans as something other than just an IT checklist.”
That’s the way it often is with things like disaster recovery planning; it’s hard to get the details right until you’ve been through a disaster and seen your plans break down. But luckily, you can still learn a lot from the experience of others. Here we’ve collected a short list of some often over looked disaster recovery tips and strategies.
- Count on Staff Shortages - Arnold of T8Design told Computerworld that his company is already changing their disaster recovery plan to account for staff missing work to deal with family emergencies and community volunteer efforts. For different reasons, companies in Atlanta dealt with an absentee workforce when a tornado hit downtown in early spring, making the streets unnavigable even for employees whose businesses hadn’t been damaged. After a disaster, lots of employees are going to have other things besides work on their minds, and some may never return to the job. Read more »
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