Optimize Magazine > Trendspotting || December 2006

Trendspotting

What's up, what's down in IT?

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December 2006, Issue 62

Nucleus Research offers these insights . . .
THOSE DRIVE WERE MADE FOR WALKIN' As if CIOs didn't already have enough to worry about, it turns out that all those USB ports on the backs of workers' PCs pose a significant security risk. When employees connect flash drives to these unregulated entry points, proprietary data can move off the enterprise and malware can move onto it. Luckily, RedCannon Security offers a way to better manage external storage devices. Designed to ensure that only secure thumb drives attach to the enterprise, the RedCannon solution can make any thumb drive enterprise-friendly. A big ROI benefit here is eliminated hardware costs. By using RedCannon technology to control how your enterprise works with an employee's PC, you avoid having to issue the worker a new computer.
SHOW THEM THE MONEY If you're a CIO, doing a good job isn't enough. You have to prove you're doing it, and in two areas: innovation and operations. Regarding innovation, act as a partner to the business functions by showing them the new things that technology can do. If IT can't bring something new to the table, what's the point of being there? Build business cases for all technology decisions, and show ROI. As for operations, make sure you have appropriate metrics in place. In addition, streamline users' interactions with IT. You'll get better and more consistent feedback if you make all forms simple, solve help-desk problems quickly, and follow up with users to have them rate the service. Remember, operations don't stop at meeting internal service-level agreements.
STOP THE HIDE-AND-SEARCH With content hiding in multiple locations and repositories, seeking enterprise content has become a frustrating game for employees, making them far less efficient than they need to be. It's time to re-evaluate your content-management strategy to boost productivity. A Nucleus Research study found that two out of three users are overwhelmed by the amount of information they must search through in order to do their jobs. In fact, 25% of employees spend more than five hours a week trying to retrieve, update, deliver, and analyze enterprise documents and information. At this rate, users by the time they retire will have spent a year of work searching an organization's myriad repositories and document locations. While electronically storing content will help businesses reduce administrative costs, adhere to regulations, and increase accessibility to enterprise files, users will find little advantage to this if it takes them hours to retrieve information. To avoid further searching shenanigans, companies should consider migrating enterprise content to fewer repositories, look to middleware or service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategies to integrate repositories at the application layer, invest in enterprising and index search tools, or buy a lower-cost content-management system with the necessary search and integration tools.
MINING FOR GOLD Data mining lets companies analyze surveys, call-center notes, E-mail, Web chat, and other types of structured and unstructured content to identify relationships in large sets of data that explain how customers, partners, and employees respond to events and interact with one another. Key benefits include lower costs, increased productivity, improved customer service, greater visibility, more robust fraud prevention and detection, and better decision making. Although many organizations start with a small deployment, most quickly find other opportunities to leverage the technology. The key to maximizing ROI lies in selecting a solution that can support current and future needs, deploying the technology rapidly to achieve value, and then extending the technology to additional projects that can deliver incremental returns.