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Revenue CIO faces an uphill struggle
The challenges facing Steve Lamey, CIO at HM Revenue &
Customs, will be of no surprise to anyone who has worked in the
private sector and then in the public sector.
As mentioned by Dennis Keeling (Letters, 21 June), there is a
"culture of denial" in the civil service. But can we blame civil
servants for this? The old adage that pets look like their owners
comes to mind. How often do we hear of a government minister being
sacked or disciplined?
If there are any problems they either resign to "spend more time
with their family", or move to a job in the EU or some large
quango, only to come back into politics after a couple of years
when they think everyone has forgotten what they did.
We see a similar scenario in the civil service: how many
high-ranking civil servants are ever disciplined? Be they mid-grade
civil servants in a government department, top-ranking police
officers or judges, we see the same old tricks pulled: they retire
on ill health grounds or are moved to another department. In the
civil service and politics the default state seems to be to deny
everything.
Lamey will find things very difficult. He will face opposition
at nearly every turn, especially from middle-rank civil servants.
He may get some support from a few at the very top and probably
more from those at the bottom, but it will be a battle. I hope he
succeeds, but I think he will fail.
Kerry Hoskin, PC network manager, Plymouth Marine
Laboratory
Changing from AC to DC power can cool
blades
Correspondents Iain Davie (Letters, 7 June) and Ian Jenkins
(Letters, 28 June) have pointed out the salient facts about blade
servers producing too much heat for a confined space.
A typical 42U cabinet, fully populated with such servers, could
pump out 14 kilowatts, and two rows of 10 cabinets would need 280
kilowatts of cooling. The proposition that we resurrect liquid
cooling, similar to that used by IBM mainframes in the 1970s and
1980s, would require a considerable investment in the equipment to
supply chilled water.
However, if the blade servers were to produce less heat, the
datacentre's normal air conditioning would probably cope. This
nirvana could be achieved if the servers used low-voltage DC power
instead of 240 volt AC.
When you consider that the most inefficient part of computer
equipment is the transformer/ rectifier, eliminating these
components will result in better power and heat efficiency.
One company, Rackable Systems, has already taken this approach
and promises high-density blade computing without the environmental
problems. I suspect that other manufacturers will follow in due
course.
Gareth Williams, senior infrastructure analyst, Alliance
& Leicester
Figures stand up for cutting software
piracy
Following Terry Billany's query (Letters, 21 June), I would like
to clarify the source of the statistics that I quoted in my letter
(7 June).
The figures in question - that a reduction in illegal software
use by 10 percentage points would create 40,000 additional jobs and
contribute £2bn to UK tax revenue - were the findings of the
largest ever study into software piracy, conducted by the Business
Software Alliance and research group IDC in 2003, and would be
achieved over a four-year period. The research spanned 57 countries
and can be found in the archive section of IDC's website.
John Lovelock, director general, Federation Against Software
Theft
The real meaning of ITIL and better
practice
Jason D'Silva's answer to the Next Move question "How can I get
back into the private sector?" (Computer Weekly, 21 June) made some
good points, but I would like to clarify the comment on ITIL. He
wrote, "It would be wise to train in the ITIL project management
methodology."
ITIL is not a project management methodology, but the IT
Infrastructure Library, which is a framework of best practices that
helps an IT organisation to develop process over the various
disciplines.
With better-defined and efficient processes, the IT organisation
is able to meet governance requirements, show defined and
documented procedures, and better align IT with the business.
Azard Omardeen, principal consultant,
Consulting-Portal
Retaining girls' interest in IT is right way
forward
In response to Mel Richardson's letter about the girls' clubs
website, www.cc4g.net, sending
out the wrong message (Letters, 28 June), I mention the following
extract from the website FAQ:
"This project attempts to tackle this gender imbalance through
retaining girls' interest in IT at the age at which it is usually
lost." That says it all. If this project attracts some young women
into IT, of which only a few stay because the rest find it not what
was expected, it will have done its job.
I worked in structural engineering before moving to IT, and I
have friends or associates who have worked in more "interesting"
industries like publishing, music and even modelling. These
industries have an image that is often glamorous and yet, like IT,
have a full complement of dull, boring jobs as well as the
interesting ones.
Nobody has complained that they are attracting people under
false pretences. You join, and if you don't like it, you move
on.
Neil Haughton, Reading
Web can provide the mobile answer for SMEs
Deploying mobile technology across the workforce can
revolutionise the way a smaller business operates (Computer Weekly,
14 June).
However, your article fails to mention "zero-client" technology,
where mobile devices use a built-in client: the web browser.
Connecting to the back office live across the internet means
real-time data, no client software installation during deployment
and upgrade, and no data stored on the device.
Martin Taylor, Impact Applications
Government advice to beat Trojan attacks
It was with disappointment that I read your article on the
government's latest proposals to beat the recent wave of Trojan
attacks (Computer Weekly, 21 June). While direction from the
government is welcomed, its suggestion that companies need to patch
and patch again to defeat Trojan threats only scratches the surface
of the problem that organisations face.
The more fundamental issue is the software industry's attitude
to the products it designs and sells. Why should companies be
forced to take remedial action every time a new security threat
emerges based on flaws in rush-released software? This would not be
tolerated in any other industry. Telling companies that they need
to institute a patching regime adds insult to injury - it is like
sticking a plaster over a gaping wound.
The software industry needs to take a long, hard look at the way
applications are created - it does not have to be like this. New
methodologies such as agile programming exist to help developers
overcome the problem of creating insecure, buggy software. Unless
the software industry mends its ways, it will begin to lose both
business credibility and customers - this is the message the
government should be giving.
Sean Hanly, director, Exoftware
Using 'unreliable' IT to boost efficiency
Although products that intentionally incorporate "unreliability"
may not exist yet, the principles underlying Gartner Dataquest's
notion that "unreliable" technologies deliver better computing
performance (Computer Weekly, 28 June) have in fact been in
operation in many businesses for years, not least because they
allow organisations to avoid a great deal of expense and
ill-affordable downtime.
The Google model, whereby large quantities of cheap technology
are able to provide an effective service with the added safety net
of high redundancy, certainly applies to the systems I work
with.
My fellow geeks may understand the comparison with Star Trek's
Borg, but real-world examples can be viewed in many a street-corner
cybercafe, in which a room full of people are able to do everything
they need using obsolete 400MHz desktop PCs that are available in
such profusion that individual reliability becomes irrelevant.
Roger Thomas, Words About Media
Pushing up cost of data storage
Despite the falling prices for storage hardware, the cost of
managing storage has gone up, thanks to complexity, volume of data
and regulations.
Companies are not willing to bear the high costs, excessive
business risks and regulatory penalties associated with chronic
back-up failures and poor system performance. Crucially, spending
on software driven by compliance also focuses on the primary
culprit behind data storage costs - the high cost of managing
systems.
The focus of the storage industry has shifted to providing
controls and tools that reduce the cost and improve the
effectiveness of data management. In a sense, the traditional
category of "storage" does not encapsulate the breadth of the
storage industry.
In April, Gartner released an industry segmentation and
definitions report for the storage management software market. It
categorised data protection management as a new, fast-growing
segment of the storage industry. The advent of global regulations,
such as Basel 2 and Sarbanes-Oxley, have brought regulatory
concerns about operating risk to the top of the corporate agenda.
Organisations need to manage complex, distributed data in order to
be compliant.
Drake Pruitt, Bocada