InSys Views - February 2008

Volume 3, Issue 2 - February 2008

Greetings, all...

I have some great news to pass along this month, and it's exciting to tell you about it.

There's a great magazine for women business owners called Enterprising Women, and around this time each year they give out awards to honor some of the top women entrepreneurs in North America. To win, you need to meet some criteria for business growth, be involved in mentoring other women and girls, and be regarded as a leader in your community.

This year -- drum roll please -- I'm honored to report that I'm among the winners! And while it's my name on the list, the award is really going to the whole InSys team. Without our consultants, recruiters, tech staff and operations folks, we wouldn't have been in the running. So congratulations to all, and thanks to our clients, too. We wouldn't be much of a business without you!

I'll be going down to the awards celebration in south Florida at the end of the month, and am looking forward to meeting and networking with other women from around the country. Next month, I'll let you know how it went.

Onward and upward!

Linda Magnusson-Rosario, CEO

A Fine Line Between Life & Work

The easier it is to work anywhere, anytime, the harder it becomes to turn work off. Ellen Ernst Kossek and Brenda Lautsch started researching telecommuters five years ago and ran into some trouble. They discovered that their control group (people who kept regular hours and worked only in the office) existed only in theory. Read the article.

Increase in Successful SOA Implementations

According to a recent survey, 38 percent of SOA installations met their targets. and just 1.5 percent ended in failure – a figure well below the industry average for all software projects. Read the article.

Web 2.0: Unsafe At Any Speed?

According to InternetNews.com, some researchers believe the very nature of Web 2.0 technology begs for malicious software infection and is virtually impossible to secure. The list of complaints about Web 2.0 security can be boiled down to two distinct problems: not knowing all of your data sources, and having no control over what may be served up. Read the article.

A New Kind of Search Engine?

If you've been involved in IT long enough, you remember the days when you relied on books and magazines to find the information you needed. The Web has eliminated a lot of that paper, but it's also making it harder to find useful, relevant content. For substantive background information on technologies and trends, you need to wade through pages and pages of search results that have been aggregated automatically, rather than reviewed by people.

There's a relatively new search tool called Mahalo which includes some interesting cross-searching capabilities. Most important is the fact that it has human editors involved in evaluating and categorizing the results. Try entering a tech term (like Java) and you'll get a page that starts with Mahalo's "top seven" links, followed by videos, ads, tutorials, blogs, books, related searches and user-recommendations.

This blogger at Tech Republic thinks it's a real improvement in Web search, particularly for IT pros. Check it out!

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