CPTTM CIO newsletter issue #5

Topics in this issue:

How to reduce the downtime of your IT services by 30%

We're all concerned with downtimes. How to reduce them by as much as 30%? ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) can help. ITIL is a set of best practices put forth by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) of the UK Government for better IT management. According to IDC,after implementing ITIL, organizations can increase the productivity of their staff by 53%, increase the efficiency by 26%, reduce down time by 31% and the ROI can be as high as 1296%. According to MetaGroup, by 2007 about 40% of enterprises in US will implement ITIL.

Would you like to learn more about ITIL? We will have an expert speaker from Pink Elephant (Canada) to teach an ITIL foundations course in Nov 12-14. The speaker once gave a presentation at the 7th itSMF IT Service Management Conference in 2004. For more info,please see http://www2.cpttm.org.mo/training/sdb/showCourse.do?courseCode=CM218-10-2005-C.

Decision of Massachusetts to move to OpenDocument Format is final

The Massachusetts state gov has finalized its mandate to use the OASIS OpenDocument Format as supported by OpenOffice as the default office document format starting from Jan. 2007. Other open formats such as PDF are also allowed. The departments will have to migrate their applications before then. For details, see http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5878869.html.

What does it mean? There are some possible results:

  1. Microsoft will lose Massachusetts, which is very unlikely. or
  2. MS Office will support reading and writing in OpenDocument Format, which is also quite unlikely. or
  3. 3rd party conversion utilities will appear on the market.

No matter it is 2) or 3), interoperability between MS Office and OpenOffice will only get better and better.

Any ideas or questions? If so, please contact us at 781313 or kent at cpttm dot org dot mo.

Until next time, 

Kent Tong