At a little under £12 billion, plastic cheese conglomerate Kraft’s acquisition of Cadbury has landed it one hell of a selection box IT-wise.  In particular, according to this enlightening article in CIO mag, supply chain efficiencies look set to made on a macro scale with the mother and father or all SAP ERP integration projects.  

SAP is a little like algae, the more of it there is, the better it is for the eco-system.  The only drawbacks are its tendency to suffocate the life out of everything else that co-habits its environment, oh and the fact that cleaning it up is usually extremely expensive.

Have you steered IT infrastructures through merger or acquisition?  Let us know your best-practice tips.

Analysis monolith Gartner believes that one in five companies will close their IT departments by 2012 as the trend toward cloud computing takes hold.  What they overlook of course is that the corporate management at those 20% of companies would presumably have to pay attention to, and endeavour to understand, whatever the hell it is that IT does… and very soon.  Cutting IT staffers might be appealing to the bean-counters, but to be replaced with a cloud?  Many still struggle with the concept of a web for pity’s sake.

For better or worse, Gartner is well respected and intently listened to, and much of its remaining ‘cloud impact’ argument seems logical.  IT hardware won’t need looking after in enterprise scale environments, instead they will be tended to on massive hosted IT farms.  Procurement, management and development of specific technologies will all be taken away.

As a piece of futurology, we think Gartner’s prediction holds water, but this is surely not going to take such a radical hold by 2012?  More a case of “maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of IT professionals’ careers…”  

In such a world, IT skills would remain in high demand and the prospect of drowning in IT operations sludge would well and truly become a relic.  More time for IT innovation – isn’t that what we all want?

Salad-dodging IT sorts are being mollycoddled into ‘wellness’ by their own professional association, Automated IT can report. 

The BCS (which now rather puzzlingly stands for ‘The Chartered Institute for IT’) has launched a microsite called Savvy Citizens which offers articles and video-based tutorials on reducing cholesterol, measuring body mass index and learning to love celery.

We think the timing is excellent, as many IT pros grapple to hold sway with their weight-loss related new year’s resolutions.   And for good reason…  a survey last November showed the IT profession to be among the unhealthiest in Britain, topping the nation’s inertia league, drinking way too much coffee and eating about as much fruit and veg as a shark.

If you have any 2010 resolutions then we’d love to hear them - email them along to us at automatedit@cohesive.uk.com

Scouring the latest IT news stories to bleat about on this blog, we’ve found it pretty difficult to find anything that isn’t banging on about Google’s Nexus One and other assorted bits of gadgetry being touted as the ‘next best thing’ at the glittering CES event in Las Vegas. 

Forgive the cynicism, but isn’t it true that all these ‘devices’ follow a predictable journey? It goes something like this…

 1) Appear to be conceived as the vision of the world’s social, cultural and business future

2) Get a design and a price tag

3) Launch in a blaze of publicity, despite severely restricted product availability everywhere

4) Everyone (seemingly everyone) goes out and buys one

5) Everyone then brings theirs into work and shows everyone else

6) Oh joy…

Whatever shiny junk gets launched at these shows will likely end up under the noses (and possibly in various broken pieces under the fists) of IT departments, along with users unapologetically wondering why it isn’t as easy/safe as they hoped to integrate it into the company’s IT systems. 

How about this for an idea… a system that automates the integration and management of mobile devices… worth flying to Las Vegas for?  We’d bloody walk there!

It’s 2010 and you can’t tell me the Queen doesn’t have a PC, or possibly even a smartphone.  Buckingham Palace must have a network and we’d be surprised if Sandringham wasn’t Wi-Fi’d up to its cloisters.  Best place for a datacentre?  Balmoral.  It’s cold enough and the security is excellent. 

If disgraced banker Fred Goodwin was worth a knighthood then how come the IT world was almost completely overlooked in the New Year’s Honours list?  Apps running a bit slow ma’am?  Fancy sorting it out yourself then?  This is how revolutions start you know…

OK, sure a few gaming gurus and a Microsoft propeller-head picked up assorted OBEs, MBEs and CBEs – but what of the heroic men and women of our IT departments who are perpetually snowed in by masses of IT operations and overloaded with mountains of monotonous tasks, who, yet, still manage to find time to look after users?

Laugh?  We nearly cried…

If you are a busy IT professional with no let up in store over the coming two weeks, then you are not alone.  Chestnut sellers, Santa Claus impersonators, Delia Smith… oh… and hackers… will be joining you for a festive period with little chance for respite.  Be warned: hackers may like having the summer to relax (and weekend off too) but 81% reckon the winter holidays are their busiest time of year.

If that didn’t keep you busy enough in the IT department, then don’t forget most of your users will be remote working at some point over the holidays.  In fact, 75% of smartphone users will be checking their emails on a regular basis; two-thirds of those at least a couple of times a day.  The fools…

For many IT departments, the festive period is one of the few opportunities during the year where the white calm of deep winter replaces the white noise of everyday operational fire-fighting.  There will be space to think (for once) and that important such-and-such project you have been planning to get sorted for ages will finally get some attention.

If you do have time for a little light relief – perhaps you’re already well on your way to IT automation – you could do a lot worse than reviewing one of the best 2009 round-ups on The Register.  Or get some tips from Silicon.com about how to avoid the dreaded Christmas callout.

However you spend Christmas this year, Automated IT wishes you peace on your helpdesk and goodwill to all server rooms… HO HO HO!

Regular followers of this blog will be readily aware of how vociferously opinionated we are about the need to dismantle and burn outmoded manual processes which eat up valuable resources within the IT department. Why? Because they are so unnecessary… and the alternative is highly beneficial to all concerned. New practices can free you up to be strategic and innovative with IT rather than continually being chained to the fire-fighting grindstone (how’s about that for mixing metaphors?).

So in the midst of the current debate about the future of the humble cheque, you’d probably expect us to be firmly in the camp that says they should be swept away in favour of 100% electronic transactions? Well no. You might be surprised…

Let’s face it – there are some similarities here between the cheque debate and what goes on within IT departments up and down the land. Many people refuse to give up the idea of a tried and trusted mechanism which has ‘served us well’ for so long. In the case of cheques, they certainly do their job, in fact they are such a good instrument that the principle has (partly) enabled the successful development of trade and commerce for over 300 years.

But the fact that a process has always been that way doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be improved. But the humble cheque has already seen its fair share of development over 300 years, and IT has enabled a great deal of that over the last few decades.

If the process of increasing the automation of cheque transactions any further has been exhausted (and we’d question whether it actually has), then before we kill it off let’s remember that the cheque itself is not a ‘process’ at all. The cheque is an audit trail, a record of authentication, and – crucially – a symbol of credit trust. With major retailers already refusing cheques at the till, it is also becoming a key differentiator for smaller outlets who remain dedicated to serving the 6 million or so UK consumers who continue to rely upon it to make payments.

We believe that progress is only progress when it is reasoned and intelligent. Progress for the sake of progress is movement without direction.

What do you make of the cheque debate?

The man who manages the impossible balance of having white hair but black eyebrows, Alistair Darling today also took on the equally arresting challenge of cutting public sector investment without affecting public sector services. The pre-budget report was always going to have a good dollop of ‘efficiency savings’, and the realm of public sector IT took its fair share…

According to dearest Darling, IT will be expected to ‘cut back on the scope of major projects’ and cough up its share of savings that will amount to £5bn across a variety of spending projects. Earlier this week, Health Minister Andy Burnham already fessed up £600m of savings from the hapless NHS IT scheme.

But how will the total extent of savings be achieved? The devil will be in the detail, but the headline seems to read: ‘aspire less’. If this is true then government departments could well reap what they sow with IT initiatives that cost less but also achieve less. Being more prudent on capital outlays is a given, but what about the fate of IT professionals working in the public sector? Surely the processes they operate must be addressed before they ever are.

Let’s not forget that IT is supposed to be there to make business processes (including in the public sector) more efficient. So yes, pour some fat from the roast, but don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

How will the PBR affect your IT department? Please feel free to leave comments or discuss on our forum.

The opening of a National Skills Academy for IT in the UK is one step closer now that the latest procedural obstacle has been cleared. Barring further delay, the facility should be up and running by Autumn 2010.

The question we’d like to ask is, what exactly will these people be trained to do? According to e-skills UK, the NSAIT will train over 10,000 people in its first three years, a small proportion of the 420,000 new IT recruits forecast to be required by the industry during the same period. Maybe 1 in 42 translates to the proportion of IT professionals who work for organisations that allow them to develop and exploit the power of IT rather than having their time dictated by onerous, fire-fighting IT operations processes – now there’s a theory!

The NSAIT sounds like a great (and long overdue) idea, but only if skilled up IT folk are empowered to show their worth in a strategic setting rather than being constrained by IT departments whose innovation is stifled by a lack of IT automation.

Wondering what gift to buy the IT professional that you love? Look no further than ‘IT Manager 3: Unseen Forces’ which its publishers anticipate will be even more popular than the 120,000 grossing IT Manager 2, whatever the devil that was…

Granted, its publishers are Intel and the whole enterprise would appear to be a pretty barefaced sales ploy for Intel related bits and bobs. Still, it’s a bit of fun, though not quite enough to inspire commercial games developers to take on the format. Can’t see Call of Duty 5: Phone the Helldesk! happening anytime soon…

What strikes us is that – at first glance at least – the main IT pro characters you ‘live’ the game through spend an awful lot of their time dealing with repetitive and onerous distractions that keep you away from achieving the important challenges. Sound familiar? If so, then ask yourself whether you’d rather repeat your professional frustration in cyber-reality, or cure those sorts of ills via automation.

Download the game here
Read the write-up in eWeek Europe