Happy New Year: Greetings one and all – I hope your Christmas Day and Hogmanay was everything you hoped it would be.
As we enter 2014 with recharged batteries and new ambitions to conquer, I was wondering what IT New Year’s resolutions you might have either set for yourself, or for your company?
If memory serves, I seem to recall that last year I was going to dedicate more time to learning about licensing, and whilst I am a little more comfortable in my own skin around that topic, I know I could be trying harder (naughty Rory!)
Bearing in mind the increasing influence the Cloud and Virtualisation is going to have, I need to brush up on those scenarios in regards to licensing.
I also have a pet project on the go where I want to learn Visual Basic, and specifically its interaction with MS Excel.
Looking forward though, I suspect more than a few Software Asset Management professionals are going to have to get schooled up in contract law (at least as it pertains to IT). If we think for a moment on how a CIO may place a list of demands on the IT department to deliver goals and objectives for the business, then we have to transpose those demands to our cloud providers – these goals then become service level agreements that become embedded into a contract. Blind faith in supposing a cloud provider will automatically have all the answers to allay your company’s doubts is NOT management – it is hope. We are not paid to hope – we are paid to manage.
Start working with those sections of the business that address business continuity management and/or disaster recovery if you have not already done so. Look at the kinds of questions those people ask when it comes to other sections of the business, and start to apply them to IT. This should offer some very searching questions to ask of a cloud provider if SaaS, PaaS or IaaS are on the horizon.
So what hopes and ambitions do you have for 2014? Please feel free to share.