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Impose decent standards to stop
discrimination
Sam Boote
In relation to the discussion about discrimination in IT
recruitment, your anonymous recruiter (Letters, 1 August) blames
employers for asking recruitment agencies not to send foreign or
older candidates or those without a clear accent.
However, if agencies made it clear that such unwarranted and (in
many cases) illegal discrimination was unacceptable, the employers
would have no choice but to accept the conditions or else come out
into the open and do their own recruitment.
The solution is in the hands of the recruiters - impose decent
standards and expect the rest of the industry to respect them.
Would you phone your local surgery and ask to see only a young
white doctor? Would you expect your request to be agreed? So why
should IT be any different?
Long-term survival of the mainframe is safe
Ron Grevink Attachmate
Clive Longbottom's inventive analogy "In the beginning was the
mainframe" (Computer Weekly, 18 July) gives a generally good
description of how business IT has evolved. However, I think his
views on the future of the IT organisation are a little off
target.
Longbottom suggests that "the mountains [mainframes] are
ill-suited to long-term survival". However, the debate about the
death of the mainframe has been going on for years. The fact
remains that in certain industries the mainframe is king and an "if
it is not broken, do not fix it" mentality is firmly in place.
The global insurance industry, for example, has been using
mainframes and green-screen applications for more than 20 years.
The system works and supports the business, and most end-users are
used to the green-screen interfaces. More importantly, customers
are happy with the services provided, especially since the use of
modern wrapping technology and HTML front-ends offer the ability to
hide the complexity of the green-screen interfaces.
The long-term survival of the mainframe must, therefore, be
considered safe. In the beginning was indeed the mainframe, but for
some stories it is likely that in the end there will be the
mainframe.
Publish reviews to avoid repeating mistakes
Tim Holyoake, Consultant, Software AG
I would welcome a move to make Gateway Review reports available
to the public (Computer Weekly, 25 July).
It is no secret that the tried and tested way of achieving best
practice is through sharing of experience, frank discussion and
learning from mistakes. Continuing to keep problems and issues
behind closed doors will simply lead to exactly the same mistakes
being made again (and unwittingly) in a different department down
the hall.
At a time when the public sector is pursuing the worthy goal of
joined-up government and increased efficiencies, the current
approach to IT project reviews seems very odd.
In many areas the government's approach to modernisation needs
to evolve. It must take constructive criticism on board and make
best use of public funds, and I look forward to seeing government
CIO John Suffolk's progress in this arena.
Big Question misses the real issue on
monitoring
Simon Ratcliffe, Business Systems Group
Your Big Question results looking into e-mail monitoring
(Computer Weekly, 25 July) made for interesting reading. However,
the numbers fail to tell a complete story and the context provided
by the IT professionals interviewed all miss out a vital
perspective: that of the users themselves.
Staff are, on the whole, smart enough not to send offensive,
obscene or sensitive material via e-mail. This is rarely a matter
of technology, but one of the culture and management within the
firm.
From a director's perspective, the need to address compliance
may mean that there is support for e-mail monitoring, but checking
every outbound e-mail is not only a technical and logistical
nightmare, it also demotivates staff and induces a climate of fear.
Spot checks are thus a far more practical and effective method.
There is often the perception from staff that they have a right
to chat about personal issues. There is, however, a big question
mark over whether or not e-mail is suitable for this task. Enter
instant messaging and its obvious suitability.
However, here is the real next concern over monitoring: with so
many firms relying on publicly available instant messaging systems,
there is nowhere near the right level of monitoring or auditability
available. As a result, the need for monitoring may yet remain,
albeit in a different state to that currently under discussion.
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