IT Project Management » IT project management

Management Information Systems, Skills needed by IT Managers

ITKE — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:02:20 +0000

What is the difference between Management Information Systems (MIS) and Computer Information Systems (CIS)? MIS is a business major based on IT curriculum deigned to equip students with the latest skills in programming and networking coupled with business skills to manage modern work place.

CIS is 100% technical; it’s designed to give students the necessary programming, networking, hardware designing and troubleshooting skills.

Most CIS graduates spend their careers working on technical fields and never advanced to management positions, while most MIS graduates move quickly to management positions.

In general, MIS majors start with a higher salary than CIS majors and that because of the lack of management training for CIS majors.

In today’s corporate environment, IT managers must have the necessary management skills to run their department; MIS is the way to go for those who want to make it to the leadership positions in IT industry.

Batch processing and ActiveBatch 7.0

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:57:51 +0000

If you are a business manager or IT consultant, you know that there is not enough time, time is your biggest killer, so many tasks that need to be executed in the shortest possible time.

The concept of batch processing (in its simplest form) is to have a software program (script) run a task for you. For example: each morning you launch your web browser and navigate your way to your chosen financial broker website to get the latest activities on a stock, with batch processing, you can automate this daily activity so at certain hour of the day, you will have the stock(s) activities displayed on your screen or even e-mailed to you.

Batch processing is to automate repetitive tasks by writing scripts (codes.) In my early programming days, I had to write scripts to run tests on website, they idea was to have the script send thothands of page requests to a particular website, to simulate the actual users. Writing the script was time consuming and error prone.

Since that time, lots of improvement is being made in the automation of batch processing. Several software vendors are offering solutions to ease task creation under batch processing. One the vendors’ solutions that I had the privilege to review was Activebatch 7.0 by Advanced Systems Concepts. Using tele-conferning and web conferencing, Jim Manias from Advanced Systems Concepts, gave me a great overview of the new ActiveBatch 7.0 release.

On of the main features of ActiveBatch 7.0 (which I try to discuss more in the coming posts), is significantly reducing the need to write scripts, most of scripts writing is already done for you, you only have to chose the task and click.

In the next several posts, I will try to get into more details of ActiveBatch 7.0 features.

Do you turn off your computer at night?

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:22:14 +0000

As in IT consultant, I am sure you were asked this question many times “Should I turn my computer off at night or when I am not suing it or should I leave it on?”

I think the world is divided on this issue, some tech would tell you to turn if off and other would say, including myself, if you are a heavy computer user, never turn it off.

Turning the computer on and off each time would wear out its components, just like a car, if you turn it off each time you stop at the red light, you would harm the engine and other components.

But now, there is the issue of reducing energy use and green IT, is it better to turn off the computer when is not in use, or is it better to put it on standby mood or sleep mood? What would consume less energy? And if we have hundreds of computers, how much energy we would save verses how much tear and wear these computers would suffer for each start up procedure?

I don’t know the right answer, but I leave my laptop on most of the time, I still believe that power on procedure or start up takes a lot of energy to complete.