Change is in the air
Having changed hosting provider, I am now in the process of redoing a number of the articles on this site in order to increase the readability and achieve better delineation of topics. Some of these have filtered through already, and more are on the way.
This article runs over a few web pages, and in total should take no more than six minutes to read. Invest a bit of time, and see what you can gain. If you are really pressed for time, read these two things:
It is common for parts of an enterprise to achieve incredible peaks, yet for the organisation as a whole to fail dismally.
Having spent almost two decades working in large organisations ranging across private enterprise, government and higher education, I have seen that a great many expensive mistakes are common to them all. I have invested much time evaluating the research of others into this, and my business focus is to apply the results.
If everything is going well in your organisation and you have no issues, then stop reading here and rather work on your golf game. On the other hand, brace yourself, open your mind, stop believing those little lies ("everything will work out... eventually"), and read on.
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Click here to read on
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One project: >$2 billion over-run |
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The heading is not a typo. It was recently revealed that the US Census Bureau is facing a total cost overrun of more than $2 billion because of a single project.
My initial source was this article from ZDNet (local copy here), in which they state that the US GAO (Government Accountability Office) already started sounding warning bells in January 2005, yet it is clear that their recommendations were simply not implemented. It seems to revolve around a $600 million contract awarded to Harris Corp. in 2006 for the supply of FDCA (Field Data Collection Automation) equipment.
In digging a bit deeper, however, I uncovered far more interesting material, such as a scathing summary by the GAO on what transpired, which shows how the Harris Corp. sub-project is merely a symptom of far deeper issues. And of course, the cost estimate for the over-run just increases.
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How BA saved £10 million |
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AccountancyAge reports that British Airways has saved 30% of their audit bill with Ernst & Young by delisting from the New York Stock Exchange. Furthermore, fees paid out for ‘other services pursuant to legislation’ are now less than 5% of what they were last year. The company stated that the savings relate to 'costs associated with our US listing/registration and the related reporting obligations'. This echoes cries of non-US companies that doing business in the USA is often more expensive than worth it. Yes, regulatory requirements play a big role here, but if you look at the numbers in the short article, you will see that the savings on litigation are almost the same as the savings in their audit bill. |
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Liability for lost data |
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Introduction
Who is liable if your laptop gets stolen with client data, especially if the data ends up being used for identity theft or subsequent fraud? Of couse, there is the matter of burden of proof, but at the very least you will sit with a very large legal fee. The same holds for stolen backups and (horror of horrors) memory sticks.
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In certain industries it is becoming a legal mandate to secure data via encryption (medical records and the HIPAA law, for example). For backups this is relatively easy (encrypt it all), but for live data it is far more difficult, particularly if it resides on a laptop or a memory stick.
This is an area of much current activity, and you can browse around at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/, the typically bureaucratically-named National Institute of Standards Information Technology Laboratory Computer Security Division's Computer Security Resource Center, where you will find some quite useful documents.
Alternatively...
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...click here to read about a solution
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