Cost centre vs. Profit centre – the debate continues!

Should IT be a cost centre or a profit centre?

This debate has been on-going for a number of years, and continues to be still relevant. The reason for this debate is rather simple, accountability. Business wants to know what they get for sinking millions of bucks into IT, and IT wants to prove that they are worth the money given to them. The debate starts when the return on investment and productivity of the IT department must be proven on the financial statements. In essence the core of this debate is to prove the performance of the IT department and to show that business gets a proper return on their investment.

What is a cost centre?

Security 101: Less painfull than identity theft

Twitter phisher?

One of the better commodities that hackers treasure is your authentication details. Your username and passsword is worth a lot in the black market. We all know the basic rules around passwords, having a strong password with numbers and characters, changing it regularly, etc. But what we neglect to do is to have multiple passwords, it is just too difficult to remember.

Social business, are we missing the point?

Is social business an enhanced collaboration tool, or will it be more?

Big vendors are spending a lot of money in either buying social business companies or developing their own social business software, and even more money convincing customers that they need social media in their companies to prosper. Some companies even go so far as trying to replace email with social business messaging, moving their employees forcefully onto their internal social business software.

There is a lot of focus on social business right now, but what is it all about?

Will social media replace news media

Explosive growth of social news media

Just about every online news outlet embraced social media extensively, making it possible for readers to comment on news stories using their social media, especially Facebook, logons. This also enables the readers to post interesing articles to their social stream, creating another area of commenting on articles, but ultimetaly expanding the news network’s reach.

Public ease

Road to the cloud

This week I signed up for Amazon’s cloud services, it is really easy! I haven’t signed up for any other public cloud services, so I can only speak here of the Amazon experience. Within minutes I had a full functioning cloud infrastructure with virtual machines, databases, load balancing and auto scaling. I had an exact price of what it will cost me, with the ability to factor in growth cost, and options available for growing and scaling.

How the cloud will shape the future of ECM

Information Technology as we know it is changing fast and these changes will have a direct influence on the future of ECM. There is a number of factors that is working together to change the way that individuals and organisations will consume software and services. The rapid adoption of cloud solutions and cloud based services, new levels in mobility and a big move to social anything work together to change the way that content will be managed and accessed. In this article I’m not going to touch on mobility or social interaction with content, I’m going to purely focus on the cloud influence. The reason for this is that the cloud infrastructure and services is providing new ways for content creation and consumption for individuals and organisations alike.

Social Content Management

These days it is easy to start a new trend in Information Technology, just add either “cloud” or “social” in front of any existing technology, and there you go. As I’ve already written a couple of articles on cloud computing of late, I decided to add the “social” keyword in front of ECM and came up with Social Content Management. What actually started this article is a twitter jam session I followed a while back on the topic of social content management. It was a more technical orientated discussion, and the view was that current content management systems are ready to handle social content management, as most systems can already handle email and collaboration needs. Social content is just a step further in this evolution. However, the sales people keep on telling us that we need to buy extra systems and functionality in order to manage social media.