Janco has captured IT compensation statistics since 1996 and publishes its IT Salary Survey semiannually. The IT Salary Survey is based on Janco Associates, Inc. IT Professionals compensation database.  Compensation benchmark hiring and salary ranges are established for each position surveyed. In analyzing the study data, the upper and lower quartiles are eliminated to determine benchmark ranges. The benchmark ranges are then used to assess the alignment of a company's actual compensation to the marketplace for each job function. A summary of the most recent salary survey can be downloaded by visiting Janco IT Salary Survey at http://www.e-janco.com/Salary.htm.

The group of information- technology executives who are among the five highest-paid officers and those making over $1,000,000 per year at their companies has gotten smaller. The shift indicates that  salaries are falling in general and that technologists are being regarded more as functional workers than strategists.

Public companies are required to openly report compensation every year for their five highest-paid officers. Technology executives historically make a meager showing; typically, less than 6% of the Fortune 1,000 include them in proxy filings. Executives in more established roles - finance, operations, human resources - generally slip in ahead of information chiefs on the pay scale.

Technology executives salaries are suffering from a backlash against overspending and a poor economy that has forced budget cuts.

Many CIOs and people who evaluate CIOs equate productivity with cutting the budget.  CIOs thought they would change the world and that the whole business depended on I.T. But now the pendulum has swung in the other direction.

In preliminary results for the Janco 2009 Mid Year Salary Survey, Janco has found that fringe benefits like insurance, 401Ks, flexible hours, bonuses and stock options are being reduced by enterprises as they struggle to contain costs.  Janco has tracked this trend for several quarters.  The CEO of Janco, Victor Janulaitis said, "Over the first two quarters there has been a noticeable reduction in costs associated with employees.  Companies of all sizes freezing salaries, laying-off staff, making employees pay a larger portion of their insurance cost, decreasing bonuses, and cutting other benefits."

The 2009 Mid Year IT Salary Survey will be released at the end of June and more information can be gotten at JancoÂ’s websites.

(HP) A significant number of service disruptions are due to poor change processes including flawed impact assessment. The cost to the business of these self inflicted wounds is high. Poorly managed change results in many negative outcomes including:

• poor quality of service
• dissatisfied business customers
• unnecessary rework
• missed deadlines
• higher operating costs
• poor employee morale and infighting
• downtime of business critical services

It is no surprise to anyone associated with IT management that along with the increase in the rate and complexity of change has come a corresponding increase in the interest associated with using a best practice approach to change management. ITIL v3 says that changes should be managed to:

• Optimize risk exposure (supporting the risk profile required by the business)
• Minimize the severity of any impact and disruption
• Be successful at the first attempt
  While many

firms are investing in change management as a best practice, doing it well remains difficult. There are many hurdles that must be overcome to implement a change management process that not only follows a best practice approach but also yields outstanding results. The challenge becomes obvious when you consider that many changes within a large enterprise span multiple geographies, involve multiple teams and organizational units and include infrastructure elements that cross multiple domains—network, servers, storage, and applications.

The keys to sound security are often considered deployment of a sensible security risk analysis approach, compliance with a recognized standard such as ISO17799 or ISO27000 or BS7799, development of comprehensive information security policies and deployment of a detailed security audit program.

But where to start? The answer is easy -  Janco Security Policies and Procedures Template and the Janco Audit Security Program.  Risk analysis is often presented in a confusing and over-complicated manner, ISO 17799 or ISO27000 or BS7799 compliance can seem a daunting task, security policies can be totally ignored in practice, and security audit is sometimes less effective than it should be due to over-stretching of busy audit professionals.

http://www.e-janco.com/SecurityAudit.html is intended to provide a launch pad to help alleviate these difficulties. Janco has an approach that works.

Whether you need a security risk analysis method/product, guidance on how to achieve compliance with ISO 17799, ISO27000, BS7799 or your own IT security policies, or whether you simply wish to increase the productivity of your security audit team, the resources at Janco should help.

The IT Security Manual Template provides all the essential sections of a complete security manual and walks you through the creation of each step. Detailed language addressing more than a dozen security topics is included in a 220 plus page Microsoft Word document, which you can modify as much or as little as you need to fit your business requirements.

Participate in IT Salary Survey and get a free copy of the study when it is released in July. 

The Janco Associates, Inc. salary survey draws on data collected throughout the year by extensive interviews, internet-based survey data, and survey forms completed by businesses throughout the United States and Canada.  The database contains over 50,000 data points for each reporting period.

Are you paying too much or too little to your IT staff? Do you have IT job descriptions? Are you earning what you're worth? Whether employer or employee, it is important to know what other companies are paying in total compensation for a similar position in your area. Learn how your company compares in the area of compensation.

In order to manage IT costs' effectively CIOs need to review their existing IT operations with an eye towards doing more for less.  The first areas to review are:

• Utilization (Equipment and Personnel) - IT utilization typically measures the capacity of the physical hardware that an organization is using to support its business. Generally, the most common metric is server utilization.  Despite only using a portion of the server resources, organizations are still paying for and supporting the entire device. The same is true of personnel.  Charge back systems should be set to cover 100% of the cost of all resources.  If a CIO sees that only 10% of a resource is utilized then that can be a candidate for consolidation.
• End-user support - Enterprises typically have an internal help desk. Generally, this internal help desk is responsible for supporting end users' client devices. When IT budgets get cut, one area that usually comes under investigation is the internal help desk. However, the internal help desk can be essential to providing support for the end users and marinating employee productivity.
• Maintenance and support budget - By far the largest component of the IT operations budget is for external support services. In many cases, organizations are either under or over supporting their IT environments and adding additional costs.

H-1B program is under fire in Washington.  The economy has finally gotten to the point that Congress is listening to the concerns of laid-off technology workers.  U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a congressional committee that ensuring that U.S. workers have jobs is one of her "top obligations," and she said that her agency is stepping up its enforcement of the H-1B program.

Napolitano said that the department has added fraud prevention tactics that were not being used previously in the H-1B program. Those measures include visits to work sites. Napolitano was responding to a question from Senators who have introduced legislation called the H-1B Visa Fraud and Abuse Protections Act (S.887). The reform bill includes a number of restrictions and enforcement provisions, including audits of employers.

Park City, UT - Janco and the IT Productivity Center have just released its May 2009 Browser and Operating System Market Share White Paper. The major findings are that Microsoft's IE browser market share has has fallen to 66.81% versus 73.23% in May 2008 and 76.40% in March 2008; Firefox has maintained its number 2 browser position and is used by almost 19.55% of all users; Google, with its Desktop and Chrome offerings, has just over 5.4% of the market; and acceptance of Vista continues to be below Microsoft's expectation.

Victor Janulaitis, the CEO of Janco said, "The major browser findings of the study are: Microsoft's Internet Explorer's market share has stabilized and GoogleÂ’s Chrome is a non-event." He added, "... IE 8 has been released but its acceptance is slow at best." The White Paper has a detailed historical analysis of browser market share since 1997. The findings are supported by data which is provided both graphically and in spreadsheet format.

On the Operating System front, Microsoft's Vista is installed on just under 1 in 5 desktops (17.34%) after over 30 months since Vista's first release (RC1). Janulaitis added, " Vista proves that large companies like Microsoft can and do make huge blunders in technology. Microsoft can no longer count on moving users to new products like Vista as quickly as they want."

A summary of Janco's white paper can be found on the JancoÂ’s web site (http://www.e-janco.com/browser.php) and the IT Productivity CenterÂ’s web site (http://www.itproductivity.org/browser.php).

CIOs need to hire programmers who know more than one programming language.  Americans have a reputation for only speaking one language. Small surprise, then, that the same is often true for American programmers. Today's computer science graduate often leaves school with a strong knowledge of only one programming language -- typically a major systems language, such as Java or C++ -- and goes on to a career based almost exclusively on that language.

On the surface, this makes sense. C++ and Java are both highly versatile, complex tools. Just learning the syntax of either one is nothing compared to the amount of study it takes to become familiar with the whole ecosystem of associated libraries and frameworks. Not to mention that both languages are widely used; if the CIO does not staff with programmers who know both they cut their enterprisesÂ’ capabilities dramatically.