CIO Essentials: Open source, green tech, women in IT

Ever wondered what CIOs are reading on silicon.com? Our CIO Essentials feature puts you in the picture. Each week a leading IT chief picks his or her top stories from the past week and explains why they matter.

This week we hear from Paul Broome, CTO at 192.com.

Open source 'not relevant', claim CIOs
How bizarre. We presume the CIOs who think this do not use TCP/IP/HTML/HTTP/Apache/Tomcat/Java/FTP/SCP/Ping/Route and many other open source systems embedded in our daily lives. It's a good job the pharmaceutical industry did not treat open source penicillin in the same way.

We use open source extensively at 192.com. We have benefited with search, object memory databases and programming languages. These require no more and sometimes less support than "commercial" software. What they do require is an ability to take some risks - no riskier than an Italian publishing house I knew, which spent two years on a massive advertising engine only for their top three software provider to decide that they would no longer support it.

Should you ban social networking sites at work?
What next - let's ban phone call, email, instant messenging and chatting between colleagues? Folks need to know how to operate in the digital world - luddite banning is counterproductive to any company's well-being.

The silicon.com CIO50 2007

♦ CIO50: Who's on the list?
♦ The top 10 CIOs
♦ CIO50 analysis: How to be a top CIO
♦ CIO50: The full report

Women in IT: Welcome or not?
When I started in IT 30 years ago the computing department held more women workers than many I have seen today. They were programmers, operators (the sys admins of the time) and punch girls (they 'punched out' tapes and cards).

As the computing environments have become more common but harsher - tougher deadlines, on-call 24/7 and long hours - many bright people have dropped out for less anti-social, anti-family pursuits. However, a reality check is required. This article says it's a misnomer that tech is about sitting in a corner all day coding. Sorry, but being a programmer is just that - and combating too many meetings and other 'time-stealers' interruptions. What's wrong with using your brain power and coding - all day even?

Tech vendors scrutinised over green credentials
How hard can this be? We can all make a difference by shutting down our desktop/laptop when we go home. As for the datacentre the issue lies with the marketing-driven write-off accounting rules beseeching us all to re-equip more often than we probably feel we need to. Just buying something that consumes a watt or two less, does this really mean we should consign something useful to the bin? That now 'obsolete' server took say 50kilos of CO2 to manufacture - why repeat that for marginal gains?

Adobe gets AIR-headed over web apps
We'll see more and more of these Java script libraries replacing the previous rationale for desktop applications. The Adobe one is good but no lightweight and we currently use the Yahoo! script library as it's a bit quicker and more agile. What really stands in the way for true replacement of client/server-based models is the usual nonsense over browser incompatibilities even in IE6 and IE7. Rolling out these types of AIR-based apps means hours of mind-numbing testing and re-jigging of code because of huge inconsistencies between Safari, Mozilla, IE etc.

If you are a UK-based IT director or CIO and would like to take part in the CIO Essentials series by choosing your top five stories of the week, send us an email here at silicon.com.