CompTIA Blog

We received a lot of interest yesterday in the ‘Cloud Calculus’ post, and I’d like to follow up with a couple more thoughts.Our IT Infrastructure Director made a good point after reading the post that there is an inflection point where SaaS starts to makes sense, at least for us and potentially others.  An inflection point is described as “If one imagines driving a vehicle along a winding road, inflection is the point at which the steering-wheel is momentarily "straight" when being turned from l ...

Information Week published a thorough article on how to evaluate SaaS, written from the perspective of the CIO's decision to present it as an option to her CEO or Board of Directors. The core bullets:1. Manage Expectations2. Partner Internally3. Vet Your Vendors Well4. Be Careful About Cost5. Confront the RisksI'd like to address point 4, specifically around the costs of the Cloud and Saas.  I personally believe that the subscription model is the most powerful in business.  Insurance companies a ...

Greetings!  As the new vice president of Public Advocacy for CompTIA, I am really excited to be leading the reorganization of CompTIA’s public policy and advocacy efforts to better serve our more than 1,500 members and thousands of tech entrepreneurs who are creating jobs and powering the U.S. economy.Small and medium-sized (SMB) technology firms - and the many policy issues that concern them - have long been underrepresented in Washington.  The status quo is not acceptable.  So CompTIA has refo ...

I’ve had the opportunity to work with many innovative business owners over the years and, while their technological and service knowledge is vast, most are quick to acknowledge their understanding of business law is limited. Recognizing this problem is the first step, with a call to a reputable lawyer the typical response when a need arises. But what about the companies that have limited resources or those that wish to learn more about legal best practices on their own? While there are websites ...

I wrote a draft post last week that will never see the light of day.  In it, I sought to pay tribute to someone I respect very much for their intellect and world experience.  When I started my CIO gig, they imparted the following maxims:Think DefensivelyThink DeceitfullyProceed with Caution – at All TimesIt is good stuff that promotes great questions and discussion - I have had them printed out at my desk since Day 1.  In the post, I wrote a couple of points on each bullet, and thought I had som ...

So spoke Strother Martin in his role as the sadistic captain in the movie Cool Hand Luke, having just delivered a wicked beating to Paul Newman. Not that I have any greater interest in beatings than anyone else (not sure you get health insurance coverage for sadism around here), but today I am thinking about a form of abuse that is growing with the near-universality of Microsoft PowerPoint.™ Some of us nodded with smiling familiarity at a recent New York Times article about the overuse and abuse ...

I have a Google News Alert set up every day for the term ‘CIO.’  Besides the inclusion of AFL-CIO news (a topic on which I am now unintentionally well informed), there is a rotating series of articles around the role of the CIO that make the rounds.  From the last week, here are some of the articles relating to the job role of the CIO:CIOs ceding power to CFOs, survey finds Global CIO: Even Oracle & SAP Agree: The Tactical CIO Is Dead CFOs driving the IT spending bus, study says The New CIO ...

Saying that one’s head is in the clouds suggests that he or she is isolated and detached from the realities on the ground below them.  I suppose it could be interpreted as taking a high altitude view of something, but that wasn’t the impression I got when my teachers (and later, bosses) encouraged me to come back down to Earth. In that context, the clouds represent unrealistic ideas and expectations rather than high ideals and a visionary point of view.In tech parlance, the cloud refers to non-c ...

Note: This is the third of eight blog entries in which I examine managed services best practices identified in CompTIA MSP Partners’ 2010 market research.In a classic Simpsons’ episode Homer exclaims “Oh! I haven't changed since high school and suddenly I am uncool.” Ah yes Homer, things change over time even if we don’t! Our second managed services best practice counters that common mindset; Best-in-Class MSPs develop and deploy new technology solutions to keep pace with the industries their cu ...

There is more to following best practices than just using common sense.If you ran a restaurant, you’d certainly follow best practices pertaining to the cleanliness of your food prep areas - as the last thing you want is for the Health Department to close you down!If you ran a brokerage house, you’d certainly follow best practices pertaining to trades, disclosures, and more - as the last thing you want is for the SEC to close you down!If you ran an accounting firm you’d certainly follow best prac ...

I was recently asked to contribute to an Information Week piece on the state of the US IT industry - which got me thinking about the United States’ technological strengths and weaknesses relative to the other players in the global IT landscape.  The US hasn’t been the dominant base for IT production for many years.  We still don’t graduate all the engineers and PhDs we need, we don’t have the fastest or furthest reaching broadband nor do we have the most Internet users per capita.However, the US ...

After 21 years in the IT industry, first as president and CEO of CompTIA and then as president and CEO of the CompTIA Educational Foundation, John Venator retires today. Instrumental in founding the CompTIA Educational Foundation in 1998, Venator led the program to help more than 1,500 military veterans, individuals with disabilities, youth at-risk, women, minorities and dislocated workers launch their careers in IT.Venator passes the leadership torch for the CompTIA Educational Foundation to Ch ...

During CompTIA’s first Annual Member Meeting in Chicago earlier this month, heavy hitters from the IT industry described the current and future opportunities they see from their corner offices.  The panel session entitled “A Word From the Big Guys” was moderated by CompTIA CEO Todd Thibodeaux who guided the panelists through a candid discussion on the economic landscape and where the IT channel is headed.The panel consisted of the following IT industry visionaries:Steve Dallman, VP & GM, Wor ...

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with the leaders of a company that you will be hearing more about in the coming years. The company is Knowledge Factor and what they are doing in learning and assessment theory is game-changing.Traditional assessment theory concentrates on a binary mode of responses that boil down to “correct/incorrect.” Since Mrs. Jones’ 2nd grade geography class, that’s been pretty much the way things go in assessment theory. What Knowledge Factor has done is add a diffe ...

A colleague passed on a recent blog post by Eric Dishman at Intel -- "Think Big" as We Engage Patients & Families in a Healthcare System for the 21st Century -- and asked me to write a reaction to it. As background, my youngest child was born in 2006 with a number of acute and chronic conditions. Developmental pediatricians, ENT docs, gastroenterologists, cardiologists, neurologists, plastic surgeons, therapists – all of them had thoughts, directions, and diagnoses. The sub ...