(from TechRepublic) There are several recurring debates in the IT management community. Most of us have read articles or perhaps engaged in debates over topics like IT “alignment,” the best way to implement an ERP, and that old favorite argument of whether IT should be a profit center or a cost center.

In most organizations, IT ends up taking its place beside logistics, order processing, and other back office functions as a cost center — the fancy accounting term for an entity that generally consumes cash rather than producing it. In these organizations, IT might be “the man behind the curtain,” putting in systems and processes that help the folks over in sales bring in cash or creating efficiencies that conserve cash, but at the end of the day, in this model IT is essentially a corporate expense.

Proponents of the profit center model point to the savings and efficiencies created by IT. This school of thought supposes that if a massive systems implementation is predicted to save $10M over five years and if it is successfully implemented, IT generated a “profit” of $2M in each of those years. (…)

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When you talk to IT pros and business managers about tablet computers, the first question they tend to ask is, “Looks cool, but what I do with it?” This conversation has been happening for a decade since Microsoft’s pen-based Tablet PC was introduced at Comdex 2001. There, Bill Gates declared, “Within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.”

That turned out to be a false prophesy. Microsoft’s tablet never attracted a mass audience, although it has gained some niche adoption in industries such as health care, field service, and hospitality.

However, the Apple iPad and the new breed of slate computers that are hitting the market in 2010 are looking to revive the tablet concept. They are doing it with a lighter, thinner form factor that uses a touch-based interface rather than pen computing.

It’s way too early to predict whether the new tablets will be successful, but it’s easy to imagine some of the usage scenarios for them in the business world. Here are five to consider: (…)

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(from Virtualization.info)  Network stability is a concept most system administrator instinctively know about: however, no organization actually had any need to willingly enforce it or even care about until recent years.
It’s only with the huge rise of mobile devices and their penetration inside enterprise environments that network – or better, infrastructure – stability has indeed become an issue.

What do we mean with infrastructure stability?

Stability is a property of any system behaving in a consistent, somehow foreseeable way. Most things in the world are somehow stable: you are not expecting your house to fall on your head, nor the hole in the wall you spent your Sunday fixing to pop open once again.
Just the same is true in networks, especially large networks. While new systems are being added on a rather regular basis, the vast majority of the infrastructure components keep running consistently until they stop serving their intended purposes and are then stopped forever. (…)

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(From Tech Republic) – I love following smartphones. From the incredible hardware to the innovative operating systems and the strange and tumultuous companies that create and market them, it is an industry that always seems to be in flux. Where desktop hardware and software have more or less reached a peaceful détente between the major players, the smartphone industry looks like a map of post-WWII Europe, with borders, influences, and alliances changing almost weekly. Many in the corporate space have a love/hate relationship with these devices. With a rapidly shifting industry with no totally dominant player to new employee expectations about what they should be able to do with “their” phone, smartphones are just as much a source of potential headaches as they are productivity tools.

With that in mind, here are four wild predictions about what could happen in the smartphone industry in the next eighteen months. These are purely hypothetical but plausible scenarios based on my observations, rather than any insider information or sources within these companies. Disclaimer out of the way, here we go: (…)

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