Thanks by E-mail? No Thanks!
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A bit of seasonal advice - don't use e-mail to thank an employee if you can say thank you in person. According to a survey of 2,327 Americans over age 18, 68 percent of respondents believe that being thanked via e-mail is worse than getting thanked in person. 76 percent of Generation Y, the youngest and most tech-savvy in the work force, agrees that e-mail "thank you's" are worse than in person. Only 63 percent and 68 percent of the Silent's and Baby Boomers, respectively, feel the same way.Source: Harris Interactive, on behalf of staffing firm Adecco USA. |
CA's international alignment study says staff skills are the No. 1 obstacle to alignment. "Worldwide, 53 percent of respondents claim that the biggest barrier to improved alignment is shortfalls in staff skills. In the UK and Germany, however, only 40 percent see skills as the primary obstacle--while 37 percent indicate that their most significant challenge is inadequate technology integration." Surprisingly, addressing skills wasn't seen as the top success factor: 67 percent of respondents say the No. 1 success factor in IT business alignment is "standardization of policies and procedures." Which helps explain ITIL's growing popularity: 50 percent of U.S. firms have implemented ITIL or plan to in the next 12 months. Base is 300 CIOs and IT executives at companies with more than $250 million in revenues.
A Symantec study of data managers on green IT, conducted by Ziff Davis Enterprise, shows there's a high degree of support for green initiatives. According to a summary from Symantec, "Nearly three-fourths of respondents state they have interest in adopting a strategic green data center initiative; however, only one in seven have been successful at implementing a green data center." In addition:
68 percent of respondents indicate that reducing energy played a role in their decision to implement virtualization and server consolidation.
Most data center managers are at least planning to implement power management products, with 30 percent implementing on selected equipment, 13 percent on equipment throughout the data center, and 34 percent either planning to use or currently evaluating.
Slightly more than a third of companies based in the United States said they have corporate green policies, while almost 60 percent of companies from Asia-Pacific and Japan and 55 percent of European companies have them.
And while I'm on the subject of Green IT, The first ever list of 10 most energy-efficient supercomputers was compiled by the green500.org Web site. Topping the list is an IBM Blue Gene/P Solution supercomputer at the Science and Technology Facilities Council - Daresbury Laboratory in the United Kingdom, which manages 357.23 megaFLOPS per watt. However, the Daresbury machine is just No. 121 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers. The world's fastest supercomputer - an IBM BlueGene/L Solution located at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab -- can carry out 478.2 TFop/s ("teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second). The full list is available at the top500.org Web site.
