By Margo McCall

 

The information technology industry may be mature but it’s also changing rapidly. That may sound like an oxymoron, but IT workers who don’t work with these rapid changes in the next few years could see themselves left behind. IT workers and especially chief information officers face a host of disruptive technologies that require them to play a bigger role in the business framework of the companies they work for. Information technology and research group Gartner has identified what it expects will be the top 10 disruptive technologies over the next several years, including the use of multicore and hybrid processors, virtualization and “fabric” computing, social networking, cloud computing, Web mashups, user interfaces, ubiquitous computing, contextual computing, augmented reality, and semantics.

By Margo McCall

Application developers, e-commerce experts, and operating systems gurus might find themselves less popular these days, but demand remains strong for individuals with management, methodology, or process skills, as well as those with expertise in databases and messaging and communications. In its quarterly survey of 22,550 IT professionals in the US and Canada, Foote Partners found significant salary gains in the areas of architecture and project management, IT security, and networking.
 

By Margo McCall

Scott Ambler hasn’t seen too many places where data and quality intersect. One exception from the real world is the intersection of Data and Quality streets in the city of Sacramento, California. However, even that intersection features a prominent stop sign. Ambler, the outspoken expert on software process improvements, believes the database community needs to acknowledge its “huge blind spot” and make the fundamental changes need to resolve the major challenges it faces. “The database community needs to come up to speed on this big whack of stuff it’s chosen to ignore,” he says.
 

 

Name: Deborah Cooper

Title: Computer security consultant

Academic degree: B.S. University of California Los Angeles

CS Activities: IEEE Division Director V (2008-2009),

Committees: IEEE and TAB Strategic Planning, IEEE Alternative Membership Model, MGA Society Membership Marketing, IEEE Public Visibility Initiatives, Coordinator for the IEEE Fellows and Information Technology Transition Ad Hoc Committees, IEEE Computer Society 2006 president, 2002 secretary. Former member IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors; Executive, Audit, and Security & Privacy committees; Conferences and Tutorial, Technical Activities, Press Activities, and Publications boards. Guest editor, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and IEEE Software; editorial board member, IEEE Security & Privacy.

 

The Georgia Institue of Technology will transform 30 Georgia IT workers into high school teachers under a program called Operation Reboot. Enrollees in the program will co-teach at least two computing classes for one year with an existing high school teacher. Co-teaching will teach the IT professional the ins and outs of a classroom and educate the teacher about IT. The IT worker will receive a teaching certificate and a computer science endorsement, a special area of expertise for teachers to add to their certification. The program will utilize Georgia Tech’s high school computing teacher training program and the Georgia Teacher Alternative Preparation Program. Operation Reboot aims to improve the computing education of 4,600 students over the next three years by increasing the number of well-trained computing teachers and computing classes being offered. By creating engaging curricular materials, improving the content and educational knowledge of computing teachers, Georgia Tech expects the number of students receiving a computing education to increase by at least 30 percent.

 

 

For complete information and to post or view resumes, go to http://careers.computer.org

Guest editor: Wes Chou, Cisco

 

Summary: Get the definitive overview of the typical data center and learn how to set the foundation for intelligent tradeoffs when analyzing a Web site's specific scaling and application needs.