Workforce Productivity - Best Practices
Steps to improve IT workforce productivity include:
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Develop a strong team orientation - Effective teams and the effective planning and execution provide the structure necessary to get the best from all team members. Well written job descriptions are a first step in that process.
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Align roles and performance objectives - Change causes by today's business environment causes misalignments of roles and focus of a significant number of the workforce. Job descriptions that are results and metric driven are an essential tool in the management process.
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Set performance goals and manage workforce with that as the focus - A majority of the workforce performs better if they have specific goals they must achieve. Good job description include measurable goals.
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Evaluate workforce based on defined objectives and goals - Review job performance based on job content and metrics to see how they can be modified to improved organizational productivity and minimize organizational dysfunction.
IT Best Practices News and Information
Cloud Process Benefits Defined
The benefits that that come from Cloud Processing and the associated infrastructure transformation include:
- Improvement in application performance
- Hardware reduction
- Reduce system administration overhead
- Reduce carbon footprint
- Power savings
- Savings in software licenses
- Faster job submissions
- Downtime avoidance
- Reduce compliance and ISO 9001 validation time
- Single path to support
- Warranty savings
Janco also points to other less tangible advantages that cloud processing achieves, such as: higher employee productivity, better performance across its infrastructure and avoided costs of outages. Additional savings and efficiencies, such as from virtualization, casn be expected as the cloud process continues to expand.
- more infoFirefox releases 4.0 Beta
Mozilla has launched the fourth beta of Firefox 4, adding bookmark and password synchronization, and revamping how people wrestle tabs.
The latest build supports the first attempt at accelerating Firefox 4's page rendering by tapping the graphics processor. The hardware acceleration, available only in Windows Vista and Windows 7, is disabled by default.
Trends in Browser Market Share
Firefox 4 Beta 4's most visible addition is "Panorama," a new name for what Mozilla had been calling "Tab Candy." Largely driven by the work of Aza Raskin, creative lead of Firefox, Panorama lets users collect tabs into sets, graphically displays those sets, and when users open a tab, shows only those tabs within the group.
Mozilla, which calls Panorama a tab manager, has argued that it's the next step in the evolution of tabs.
- more infoWindows 7 takes off
Windows 7 is success
A major finding in the report is that Microsoft's new Operating System, Windows 7 has 17.39% of the OS market less than 13 months after its availability. That is a major factor in Microsoft's improved record earnings. Janulaitis said, "The last time that an OS was accepted as quickly the market was XP. Vista's market share has peaked and is in the process of being decommissioned in most enterprises."
- more infoNew IT Metrics Program and Benchmark Program
Most IT Managers understand the importance of collecting, reporting and acting on performance metrics, but few put this knowledge into action in a meaningful way. Our partners at Janco Associates' recommend that all IT organizations develop and maintain a metrics program by focusing on simple metrics that address specific business issues like spending and staffing justification or performance improvement.
To help you identify and launch a metrics program that is meaningful to your specific business, Info-Tech has assembled the Metrics for the Internet, Information Technology, and Service Management HandiGuide. It is a collection of metric reports and tools designed to get your IT team's metrics program up and running quickly and easily. You will be given simple steps to creating a metrics program including the most important step: How to act on the results and improve IT performance to better serve the business.
- more infoMainframes and server farms are sources of productivity improvements
In the post-recession environment, the demand and supply mismatch between IT departments and the businesses they serve is growing. Business demands on IT are increasing while IT budgets have been cut.
The needs that IT can't address as a supplier, it can
address through other means. CIO can be a facilitators connecting the business
units to the services they need, whether internally or externally, such as from
a cloud or software-as-a-service provider.
IT is becoming more responsive, not because it can do more, but because it can acknowledge and help the business with more of their operationals needs. Productivity levels have improved
The path to value is taking some familiar and some new directions while also running into age-old issues.
Company have saved millions, mostly in cost savings, by putting new applications into a mainframe and on stand-alone servers environmens. The savings came from the smaller physical footprint, reduced cooling and power needs, and reductions in networking and systems administration work.
- more info