Dear CIO/IT managers,

This CPTTM CIO newsletter is to bring useful news to you, CIO/IT managers in Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or recommend your friends to subscribe, just email me at kent@cpttm.org.mo. Old issues are available here.

Topics in this issue:

• CIO Forum: open for registrations
  
• Save money with free anti-virus software in your businesses
  
• How to measure the performance of IT support personnel

CIO Forum: open for registrations

The Macau Computer Society will be conducting a CIO Forum titled "CIO's winning strategy in the financial tsunami: experience sharing between the four areas across the straits" during 6:00pm and 7:15pm on Jan. 15, 2009 (Thursday). Four CIO guest speakers from across the straits will gather to share their ideas on how to respond to the financial tsunami. IT professionals and students in Macau will be able to learn how IT can assist businesses to win in difficult times. The forum will be conducted in Cantonese and Mandarin. The venue is Vitoria Room, Hotel Royal.  The CIO guest speakers include:

• Mr. Peter Kwok, Global CIO of Lee Kum Kee Health Product Group,  one of the 2007 China top 10 business technology leaders in China.
• Ms. Helen Pao-Yun Huang, Chairperson & CEO, Digimax Inc., Taiwan.
• Mr. Wang Yia Qiang, CIO of Corun Information Ltd., GuangZhou.
• Ms. Fanny Cheng, IT Director in the gaming and hospitality industry, Macau.

Save money with free anti-virus software for your businesses

There are many free real-time anti-virus programs but most of them are licensed for personal use only and thus can't be legally used in businesses. However, we've found one exception: the Comodo Internet Security. It can be freely used in businesses (Ref: EULA) and provides anti-virus, firewall and host intrusion detection functionality. At Cyber-Lab, we've deployed it to all our 130+ computers successfully. In contrast, a popular commercial anti-virus program costs MOP80 for a computer for every two years. It means it has saved us over MOP10,000 for every two years. The more computers you have, the more you'll save! A great way to save money in such an economic crisis.

How to measure the performance of IT support personnel

How do you measure the performance of your IT support personnel? If you don't measure, you can't reward and can't improve. Simplying counting the number of tickets handled is not enough because one ticket may be very easy to fix while another may be very difficult. After a lot of thinking and some experiments, we should be settling on the following scheme:

1. The support engineers record their time working on a help ticket. This is their work load and should be compensated. However, this is not good enough as a performance indicator because this will encourage people to spend as much time as possible on a ticket. So, we need more measures (see below).

   

2. When a user creates a ticket, he need to specify the pending time when a daily damage will happen until it is not fixed(see the figure) and the damage level. For example, need to install some software by this Friday, otherwise a high damage will occur daily. In practice, in most cases, the pending time is now, i.e., the damage has started (e.g., can't send mails or can't print).

3. To encourage the support engineers to fix the ticket before its pending time, we multiply a certain multiplier (2-3) to the basic work load for that ticket if it is indeed fixed by the pending time. The closer the ticket creation time and the pending time are (more urgent), the larger that multiplifier is because it puts more pressure on the support engineers.

4. If they fail to fix a ticket by its pending time, how to prevent it from being left unhandled forever? For this, we apply a penalty for every day for every ticket that has passed its pending time. This penalty is set according to the damage level. As it is a team responsibility, it is split and shared evenly by all support engineers.

Feedbacks

Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 28781313 or kent@cpttm.org.mo. We also have two other newsletters: Network administrator newsletter and Software developer newsletter, your staff may like to subscribe.

Until next time, 

Kent Tong