A short week before the Easter holiday still left enough time for contestants to weigh in on some hard-core enterprise IT issues in ComputerWorld Canada’s Blogging Idol competition.
Tania Samsonova looked closely at a study conducted by Microsoft and the University of California to examine the transition of new IT talent into the workforce. In a post called “What’s most important in enterprise IT?” she highlighted challenges faced by developers as an example:
Developers often have difficulties to know “when they don’t know” something. Because there is so much new infrastructure to learn, it becomes the norm to have only partial knowledge of a tool or some code. While this is their reality, it also leads many of them to fail to recognize when they are truly stuck and should ask for help.
The original ComputerWorld Canada Blogging Idol, Don Sheppard, took up the challenge of last week’s suggested theme, “Defining the Cloud,” and wrote a post where he coined a new term, “open services infrastructure.”
I started to wonder…..are clouds going to become one of the many “tools of the IT trade” or are this just another over-hyped concept that will fade away? To me, one measure of longevity is whether the industry is setting vendor-neutral standards.
And that brought me right back to the good old days of OSI (Open systems Interconnection). Could we now have Open Cloud Interconnection (OCI) instead? Google already has lots of references to Open Cloud Computing. Or, what if we changed the OSI label to “Open Services Infrastructure” – does that sound like what clouds are?
Chris Lau, meanwhile, decided to look at the impact of social networking services on large organizations, and took Ford as a textbook case study worthy of an IT professional’s attention:
Putting it all together, Facebook was a social enabler for Ford. Advances in the “mobile office” by Ford re-defined mobile Internet technologies. The Facebook fans page is small in the grand scheme of things, but Ford is embracing new things. It is this comfort for new technology that continues to define this company.
Blogging Idol continues to run until early May, and it’s not too late to enter. Register now to get blogging.