Skype, Coming to an Office Near You

Do you use Skype – the free (or at least inexpensive) VoIP Web-based phone system? If you do, you’re certainly not alone. More than 400 million Skype accounts have been created, and as many as 17 million people are online with it at any given moment. People sure do have a lot to talk about.

Of course, Skype’s main attraction is it’s dirt cheap. That begs the question: Why doesn’t your company start using it? CIO Insight’s David F. Carr has taken a look at Skype implementations in corporate settings, and it’s worth reading before the CIO or CEO in your firm sends you a note asking about the possibility of installing cheap VoIP.

Although Skype and corporate VOIP systems share the goal of avoiding phone company toll charges by routing voice and video calls over Internet-based data networks, they don’t automatically work together. Corporate IP PBX phone systems typically employ a standard called the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to set up calls, whereas Skype uses a proprietary protocol. Now the two worlds will be linked with a new product, Skype For SIP for Business Users, which is entering beta testing.

This means users at their desks can call out via Skype for 2 cents/minute to any phone in the world, and calls will be free to other participating Skype users. Think of the savings.

What Would You Do to Save Your Job?

Would you rather take a severance package and go on unemployment, or take a pay cut to save your job? How about a furlough or unpaid vacation? A recent survey sponsored by consultancy firm Work+Life Fit found 94 percent of adults employed full-time would prefer a pay cut or reduction in hours rather than lose their positions entirely.

Some specifics, as reported in CIO:

• 78 percent would adjust to a compressed work week.
• 59 percent would accept additional unpaid vacation or up to two weeks of unpaid leave.
• 48 percent would share their job with a co-worker.
• 47 percent would work fewer hours for less pay.
• 41 percent would change their employment status from a full-time to contractor.
• 41 percent are willing to work the same amount of hours while taking a pay cut.
• 31 percent would take an unpaid sabbatical of one month or longer.
• Only 5 percent would prefer a layoff over the above.

Did I hear someone say American workers aren’t flexible?

Finance: Stable IT Spending, Less Hiring

With all the gloom around shrinking technology budgets in the financial sector, the news that trading firms are likely to at least keep IT spend in line with last year is a surprising bit of good news. Even more improbably, some areas may actually be growing.

Tech firms Sybase and Financial Insights took in responses from 200 investment banks, broker-dealers, fund managers and hedge funds and found that the majority planned to keep IT spend on a par with last year.

The old favorites, risk and compliance, are expected to see an increase in technology spending this year. Other areas are also set to see a slight up-tick in IT investment – market risk, security and fraud management, enterprise SOA, server virtualization, network management, collaboration technologies and CRM.

Sean O’Dowd, capital markets senior analyst at Financial Insights, says: “While capital markets firms are confronted with an extremely difficult market environment, the study’s evidence suggests that they are diligently working to position themselves for future success.”

However, while this is good news and gives you an idea of at least some areas where there could be job opportunities going forward, sadly recruitment is not on the agenda yet.

The one area where firms are pulling back is hiring staff.

– Paul Clarke

Support Yourself By Blogging? Not Really

For refugees from an intellectual and real-time-oriented business – like many aspects of tech, for example – the notion of blogging for profit has natural appeal. An ex-colleague of mine blogs for a living, and a few professional acquaintances in transition have at least toyed with the idea.

How achievable is it? Not very – unless you’re able to get by on $22,000 a year even after putting in enough work to attract what’s considered a large audience for a blogger (100,000 unique visitors every month). That’s what evidence from a widely cited survey indicates. And it’s reinforced by anecdotal evidence from individual bloggers.

The economic potential of blogging is suddenly a hot topic, due in large part to an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by guest columnist Mark Penn (better known as one of the nation’s leading election campaign strategists). Penn cobbled together statistics from disparate surveys to argue that some 450,000 Americans rely on blogging as their main income source – more numerous than computer programmers or firefighters, and almost as numerous as lawyers – and those with substantial readership earn $75,000 on average.

Figures Don’t Lie, But….

Other authorities – who apparently have greater respect for the numbers and sources they quote – call Penn’s conclusions suspect (to be polite).

“This article is ABSURD!,” one well-known financial journalist and blogger e-mailed me in reply. “My blog gets more than 100k unique visitors and was earning $200/year before we removed the ads (no point in having them).” He goes on to cite a friend whose site also draws heavy traffic, is highly targeted to a well-defined group… and brings in about $6,000 a year in ad revenue.

“No one is living off this money!” my contact concludes. “The notion that half a million people make anything near subsistence on blogging is total crap. I’m used to bad statistics, but this is really beyond the pale.”

(For a rigorous dissection of Penn’s methods, see Waldo Jaquith’s post in the Virginia Quarterly Review.)

– Jon Jacobs

Still in Demand: Java, .NET, Linux Skills

Researcher Foote Partners’ newest IT skills and certification data shows that IT professionals with expertise in Linux, Java/J2EE, unified communications, Microsoft .NET, virtualization should see their pay increase, according to Foote Partners’ IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index. These skills increased in value during 2009’s first quarter, the company found, as did ERP and business process management/modeling and improvement.

As for certifications, CIO magazine reported:

… the Sun Certified Programmer for Java Platform, HP Certified Systems Engineer and Cisco Certified Security Professional certifications rebounded in value during the first quarter, after having experienced declines during the final months of 2008. The three certifications that remained in demand from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of this year are GIAC Certified Incident Hacker (GCIH), HP Accredited Systems Engineer and EMC Proven Professional Technology Architect – Expert.

In general, Foote research found that pay for IT skills fell by 0.5 percent overall during the first three months of this year. But while 60 skills and certifications declined in value, 46 increased in value, according to the latest quarterly update of Foote Partners’ IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index.

California Streamlines Its IT Hiring Process

About 50 percent of the California government’s IT workforce will be eligible for retirement in the next five-to-seven years. So state IT executives like Christy Quinlan, the chief deputy director of  the information technology department, expects the government to be hit with an IT talent shortage.

How is the Golden State preparing to handle the challenge?  For one thing, state officials are streamlining their hiring process, which in the past could take three to nine months to put out a job offer. That didn’t put the state in a strong position to snap up IT talent.

Interested job applicants now can take the required statewide open civil service exam online, click to get their results, then go to California’s site to apply for a job. In the past, retrieving test results took two months, and you needed them to look for a job. The new system is expected to reduce the hiring time considerably.

Quinlan says addressing the issues is particularly important to recruiting Millennials to replace workers opting for retirement.  Millennials – also known as Generation Y, or those born between 1980 and the mid- to late 1990s – aren’t known for waiting. “Kids are not patient,” says Quinlan. “We want to recruit new people, new talent and new blood. Historically, we haven’t had an easy hiring process. We are now competitive with the private sector.”

Ex-Employers Enforcing Agreements

If you signed an employment or non-compete agreement with your previous employer, either as a condition of employment or in exchange for a severance package, better check the details before starting a new job. Nowadays, companies are taking steps to protect client lists, intellectual property and trade secrets when they see former staffers sign on with a competitor.

Enforcement of these agreements vary by state, the specific language of the agreement and each situation. This means every laid-off worker must do their homework in order to know their rights and limitations.

On his blog on InjuryBoard.com, attorney Dan Frith warns Virginia workers about signing non-compete agreements in exchange for severance pay.

Many terminated employees are provided a “severance package” of benefits. Say, one month’s salary and benefits BUT they are asked to sign a non-compete agreement in return for the severance package. Be very, very careful if you are asked to sign a non-compete agreement.

Each state looks at non-competes differently, and my home state of Virginia has its own approach to the legality and enforceability of these agreements. In Virginia, if the agreement is reasonable in terms of geographical scope and duration (length of time) most courts will enforce the agreements.

In Charlotte, N.C., Bank of America is sending letters to former employees as GMAC gears-up local hiring. Reporter Mark Boone from NewsChannel 36 references the advice of a local attorney in an article on the station’s Web site.

Steve Dellinger, a Charlotte attorney specializing in employment law, said contracts which include disclosure agreements are common for top sales people, executives, and technology employees who have access to sensitive information about their company.

Companies will often remind employees about the contracts when a worker with proprietary information leaves their job, Dellinger said. With thousands of recent layoffs, businesses are especially concerned about company secrets getting into the wrong hands, he said.

Disputes involving former employees and the leaking of trade secrets to a competitor can lead to a lawsuit, Dellinger said.

In some cases, a judge can order ex-workers to pay damages to their former company, he said.

Dellinger suggested anyone with an employment agreement review the contract carefully before taking a new job.

Measure the ‘Greenness’ of Your IT

Green IT. It’s the buzzword of the year, and it’s something with which you should acquaint yourself no matter what your specialty in the wide world of IT happens to be. Herman Chan and Greg More of GreenerComputing, pretty much the best online resource for learning Green IT strategies, have laid out the basics of how to measure the “greenness” of various data center strategies, and they say it’s important to get up to speed.

Based on the simple premise that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” data centers are undertaking steps to measure device-level power consumption. No longer do rule-of-thumb estimates suffice — because they can turn out to be just plain wrong, leading to unnecessary and sometimes quite substantial costs. Devices that were thought to be consuming very little power may be consuming quite a lot, even while simply sitting idle doing no useful work.

The writers go into detail about “power usage effectiveness” (PUE), the ratio of the total energy used by a data center, including IT equipment, and the energy consumed by the IT equipment only. The total energy includes lighting, cooling and air movement equipment and inefficiencies in electricity distribution within the data center. The IT equipment portion is that equipment which performs computational tasks. A ratio of 1.0 would be perfect, but it’s impossible to achieve. Generally speaking, the closer you can get to 1.0, the better.

Then Chan and More go on a tour of a data center, pointing out all the things that can and should be measured. It’s an interesting and enlightening exercise, well worth a read.

Does ‘Dominant’ Equal ‘Competent?’

Want to look competent? Get in touch with your dominant side. In a recent study, University of California, Berkley researchers found those who act more dominantly are perceived as more competent, even when they aren’t.

Organizational behavior and industrial relations Associate Professor Cameron Anderson and doctoral candidate Gavin Kilduff tested their “great pretender” theory on 17 four-student teams. They gave each team 45 minutes to design a mock non-profit environmental organization or a for-profit Web site. The winning team would receive a $400 prize. More importantly, the experiment required each participant to rate his or her colleagues’ level of influence on the group, and each participant’s level of competence.

The results: Team members with the most dominant personalities were rated the highest for such qualities as general intelligence, dependability, and self-discipline. Less outspoken workers were perceived as having less desirable traits, giving them high scores for being conventional and uncreative.

To be fair, Anderson and Kilduff wanted to give the alpha standouts the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps these newly anointed leaders were indeed more competent. A second experiment left no debate. In Round Two, researchers asked the teams to solve computational problems taken from old versions of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT). Participants reported their previous SAT math scores before trying to solve the GMAT problems.

When it was time to reveal the answers out loud, the people who spoke up more were, again, the ones teammates deemed as leaders of the group. It didn’t matter if the chosen leaders offered the correct answers, only that they offered more responses.

What’s more, the leaders didn’t even have to provide their solutions to be exalted as the top of the heap.

Anderson and Kilduff’s work redefines what it means to be dominant in the context of influence. Past studies have aligned dominant behavior with aggressive, heavy handed tactics. This study found dominant people attain influence by displaying competence, they said.

While the findings may trouble some, they may be helpful to managers who want to look a little closer when judging their employees’ true productivity and value. The s results may also help individuals achieve improvement in their own reputations – just by speaking up, the researchers conclude.

– Dona DeZube

Go (Mid)west, Young Man

If you want to work in a data center, the Midwest is the place to be. Microsoft says it wants to build a facility in Iowa while Google has one up and running in Council Bluffs. Companies like Con Agra Foods and First Data Resources have centers in Nebraska.

Local schools have taken notice. Ted Tucker, an instructor with the Metro Community College in Omaha, says institutions like his are building up their IT curricula to focus on the types of expertise – like virtualization, heating/cooling monitoring, networking, and security – that companies will need to keep their data centers running.

Metro Community College is constructing a 1,900-square-foot data center, scheduled to be completed next winter. The idea is to five students hands-on training along with their degrees. To to work in these future, state-of-the-art data centers, Tucker says, new graduates will need a broader-based knowledge and skill-set, and that’s what schools are positioning themselves to provide. Understand the new technologies is important, sure. So is understanding how data centers are powered, and how they’re secured.

“What we are finding is that students have to be generalists,” says Tucker. “They have to have a broader knowledge base. It’s a totally different career than it was years ago.”