But, on the other hand, how better to stay abreast of new developments, know who’s who and did what in the world of technology than to keep a vibrant social presence?

Software developer harmon.ie has compiled a list of Fortune 250 CIOs that are most socially active across LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+. They also considered the activity on the Interwebs about these people when calculating their impact on the social scene. How often were they mentioned on blogs? What were their Alexa scores? And, generally speaking, what happened when you Googled their names?

In the latest quarterly survey, 8 percent of chief information officers (CIOs) interviewed said they plan to expand their IT departments, and 5 percent expect cutbacks, for a net 3 percent projected increase in hiring activity. Most CIOs plan to maintain their current staff levels: 85 percent of those surveyed plan no change in hiring, up 15 points from the first quarter. 87 percent of technology executives were somewhat or very optimistic about their companies’ growth prospects in the next three months, and 77 percent felt confident in their firms’ second-quarter investment in IT projects.

The findings are based on telephone interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees. Executives are asked whether their companies plan to increase or decrease the number of full-time IT personnel on their staff during the coming quarter.

Key Findings

• Hiring has slowed, but companies are keeping their staff levels from the most recent spike last quarter. The net 3 percent increase in anticipated IT hiring activity is down seven points from a 10 percent increase in hiring activity last quarter. Eighty-five percent of CIOs plan to maintain their current staffing levels, up 15 points from the first quarter.
• Networking professionals are in greatest demand, with 16 percent of CIOs reported the greatest challenge in finding skilled professionals. They are followed closely by IT security (15%), and help desk/technical support professionals at 14 percent.
• Eighty-seven percent of CIOs are somewhat or very confident in their companies’ growth prospects in the next three months.
• Seventy-seven percent of technology executives expressed confidence in their firms’ second-quarter investments in IT projects.
• The Wholesale industry expects to do the most hiring at 12%, followed by 9% in the transportation industry. Manufacturing rounds out the category a 7 percent.

“Although hiring in the second quarter isn’t expected to be as robust as it was at the beginning of the year, the trend remains positive. Those in hot specialties, such as networking and IT security, will continue to be in strong demand,” said John Reed, executive director of Robert Half Technology. “Mobile media is an especially important area of growth right now.”

Stacey writes:

“Finally today we announced that Red Hat and Hyperic will be working together on the development of a common systems management platform.

……
As you know, back in 2005 was originally OEMed to create JON before the Red Hat acquisition. At the time, the software licensed was still closed and the software has not been upgraded since, rather JBoss and now Red Hat has been updating the software privately. The new project will update the software contributions from Hyperic to its latest software, contribute the additional code written by the JON team, and work jointly to create a roadmap of future features. And of course make it all open source! (GPL v2)

…….

This new open source project is meant to create a repository of common services to be used in future versions of Red Hat and Hyperic products. Both companies will work to maintain, govern and extend management capabilities within the new open source systems management platform project.”

Now, this is very cool news, and a great endorsement for Hyperic technology. The deal appears to position Hyperic as the de facto systems management provider for Red Hat customers. Choice is great, but it can sometimes work against OSS in the CIO’s mind.

The deal is also an endorsement of Red Hat’s community. Long-time readers may remember that I questioned the “endorsement of the JBoss community” when Exadel decided to move their development into the JBoss community. I questioned the endorsement because there had been funds exchanged, making this an acquisition rather than an endorsement of community A vs. community B.

This agreement, may lead to an acquisition in the future, but today, it’s about one independent company agreeing to join forces and communities with another independent company.

Kudos to Hyperic & Red Hat for making this happen.

Comments

Valleywag leads the pack, as always, wondering what the company means when it says he was fired “for violation of company policies”. They also suggest that Microsoft fired him while he was traveling to his sister’s funeral, in order to further embarrass him. Most of the speculation is in the direction of him being fired for cheating, or rather having an affair with an employee of his.

Valleywag talks about another firing at the beginning of the year, that of Martin Taylor, Steve Ballmer’s right hand man. Apparently the rumor mill has been spinning on that one, with company insiders saying Taylor was given the boot for charging the company for hotel rooms he charged the company for, rooms he used for weekend getaways as part of an affair with a coworker.

Seems to be becoming a pattern, or perhaps not. People are always having office romances, and some people are always cheating on their wives (just read InsideGoogle). Microsoft is just standing up and being willing to fire these people, no matter how important they are to the company. You’ve got to respect that, applying company policies to everyone no matter their pay grade, though having to hire a fourth new CIO in four years must be getting tiring.

Comments

Mary Jo Foley posted a compact statement from Microsoft regarding Scott’s firing: “We can confirm that Stuart Scott was terminated after an investigation for violation of company policies , and have no further information to share.”

Given the dramatically quick nature of Scott’s dismissal, certain speculation has been raised. Valleywag cited a tipster’s claim that Scott and a female VP reporting to him both took emergency family leave at the same time, suggesting an affair was taking place.

Valleywag also recalled the departure of Martin Taylor, a Microsoft executive who was out of the company a day after the debut of Windows Live Messenger, which he had a role in promoting.

Owen Wilson at Valleywag picked up on a tip about Taylor, which claimed he not only enjoyed an affair with a co-worker, but charged his weekend hotel trysts back to the company.

Yet lengthy delays in getting the Vista operating system to market, and Microsoft’s need to acquiesce to OEM demands that they be allowed to continue offering Windows XP to customers, hasn’t resulted in anyone being fired in the lofty peaks of the corporate apparatus.

CeBIT is the world’s largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work.

I’ve not paid as much direct attention to it as I have in previous years. I have a couple of RSS watches enabled via Google and Technorati and of course I’m seeing what some of my favourite bloggers are saying.

One news item in my RSS feed did catch my attention today, an article in CIO magazine which begins:

Company leaders are being urged to embrace blogs and other “web 2.0″ technologies to improve their businesses, but some executives say it’s easier said than done. Peter Sondergaard, global head of research for Gartner, told chief executives at Cebit that blogs and online communities like MySpace may have started in the consumer realm but they’ll have a big impact on businesses in the coming years.

Many executives already use blogs to talk with customers, CIO magazine says (which is true enough), and companies like Microsoft and IBM are offering tools to let employees work on projects using blogs and wikis.

There is plenty of commentary out there about executives who blog and the pros and cons of their doing so. At the same time, there’s really little that addresses some organizational realities which CIO magazine illustrates well with quotes like this:

“He’s a consultant and I’m a CEO. He doesn’t have to worry that if you have a community network in your organisation and you disclose financial information, you go to jail,” said Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of BT Group.

And this about HSH Nordbank, a credit investment bank in Luxembourg, where Manfred Reif, a managing director, asked his IT department a few months ago to create a blog where the company’s 130 employees can discuss how the bank is run:

[…] Labour laws in Luxembourg have required him to go to the employees’ union for approval before the blogging can begin.

Mr Reif has a pragmatic view about some of the regulatory and other barriers affecting companies operating in his industry sector:

[…] Reif said he must think about ways to innovate first and consider the compliance implications second. “If you think first about regulations, you’ll never do anything,” he said.

I wish there were more with a mindset like Mr Reif’s!

Speaking of mindsets:

A top executive with a management consulting company in Germany said his clients, which include traditional manufacturing companies, are not using web 2.0 technologies today. Manufacturers don’t have the right mind-set, he said, because they are too focused on products rather than services. “It will be at least 10 years before they are ready,” said the executive, who preferred not to be identified.

And a lot will have changed in ten years, so they’ll miss a boat or two.

The article concludes with Gartner’s Sondergaard’s view that most chief executives today are “digital immigrants,” struggling to understand consumer technologies that are being popularized by the young and creeping into business:

“The digital natives are the 16-year-olds, your sons and daughters,” he said. Companies need to experiment with web 2.0 technologies internally today, he said, because in a few years they will determine which companies those digital natives want to work for and do business with.

CIO magazine | Chief execs grapple with web 2.0

Comments

We have heard about all the spamming that happens in these systems, but a larger question posed by CIO today is:

    For YouTube, and quite possibly the Web 2.0 paradigm itself, matters came to a head this week when Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against the Google-owned Web site. One question on the minds of many people watching the fallout from the Viacom suit against YouTube is whether a business can function legally if it allows unregulated user contributions. Source: CIO Today

Most sites at this point have someone who monitors what is being said on a web site that allows folks to comment. I have four web sites, and the majority of the comments that I get on them are all about selling some thing like drugs, or other materials. I delete them because I do not want to get black holed by Google or any other search engine. It takes about 30 minutes of my day, and some I am so familiar with seeing that I have inserted block words, or black listing words that I know I will not use. Like the formal name of a drug like cialis.

YouTube faces a world of unregulated user content. We want to share, the popularity of Peer-to-Peer networks, bit torrent, and others are all based on our ability to share. When people post to YouTube or otherwise, we are sharing something that we think is funny, or touched us in some way that we need to share with others.

While YouTube started off as "broadcast yourself", it is now a fundamental repository of video clips from copyrighted materials and works. There are hundreds of thousands of works on YouTube that the copyright belongs to someone else, and the owners of the copyrights are willing to enforce those copyrights.

Beyond the idea of sharing, is the idea of what is the benefit of someone posting a video to YouTube? More people watch or listen to a TV show that they might have missed otherwise. Word of mouth can make a TV show or movie more popular and possibility lead to more sales.

The flip side of this is that the secondary market is unregulated, it also has no direct monitory benefit to the maker of the work. And that is the crux issue of the whole web 2.0 phenomena, we will share regardless of what the copyright holder wants. We will repost the minute it is taken down, because we can.

The odd part about unregulated user content is that you can devote staff to remove things that you know are copyrighted. Alternatively, if you are unsure, wait to see who comes along and asks for a take down.

We already regulate user content, IT Toolbox regulates user comments, in a web site that according to alexa gets roughly 29,000 unique IP’s a day as visitors. YouTube gets roughly 8.5 million visitors a day. If we were getting that kind of traffic, we would have a way to regulate user content.

Moreover, we would have to because users are often unpredictable, and information security dictates that user input is not trustworthy.

YouTube obviously makes deals with the media companies, and sports outlets to post their stuff. Why Viacom is the hold out right now along with the billion dollar lawsuit needs to be watched by anyone with a Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 mind set. The security implications are also there in the control of intellectual property.

While information security understands unregulated user content is bad, and while many sites also have ways of regulating user content, YouTube and others like it seem to still not have gotten the idea of the same thing. That is what makes this so interesting in the longer run, what we understand we act on, what we do not understand we won’t act on. We know that unregulated user content is dangerous, Web 2.0 needs to learn the same lesson that we learned in Web 1.0.