Global cio bps extraordinary transformat…
Two years ago, the CEO of one of the world’s largest corporations laid some very tough love on his 500 top managers. Despite having annual revenue of about $300 billion, BP had become, said CEO Tony Hayward, “a serial underperformer” that had “promised a lot but not delivered very much.”At that March 2008 meeting, those same 500 top BP managers also heard a Morgan Stanley oil and gas analyst tell them that while the rest of the energy industry was undertaking rapid change, BP was building a legacy of consistent failure both in finding and extracting new energy, and in refining and marketing finished products.
And unless BP transformed its entire global business dramatically and rapidly, the analyst predicted, “BP will not exist in four to five years’ time in its current form. “One of the people in that meeting was BP CIO and group VP Dana Deasy, who’d joined the company four months earlier as its first global CIO.
He was a key figure in the strategy by Hayward, who became CEO in May 2007, to restore revenue growth across the enormous company, refocus the behavior of the company around high performance and accountability, and reduce the stifling complexity of the organization. That effort already had resulted in the elimination of up to four layers of management. As Deasy listened to the sobering comments from his CEO and from a highly influential analyst, he thought about the transformation he had already launched within IT, an organization he thought had become, like the company overall, bloated, passive, unfocused, and unconcerned with performance and accountability.
Deasy wanted to strip out $800 million in expenses from BP’s overall IT budget of $3 billion; cut in half the more than 2,000 IT vendors it had; overhaul BP’s ranks of 4,200 IT employees; rationalize and reduce the 8,500 applications in use at BP worldwide; and turn IT from a tactical services unit to a business-driven and intimately embedded strategic weapon. No stranger to challenging CIO roles, Deasy took the CIO post with full knowledge of the tumultuous times ahead.”We were several billion dollars behind our competitors in oil and gas, and there was a real and very pressing concern in the company due to that,” Deasy says.
“Another part of the gap that Tony wanted to see closed was around organizational simplification: fewer layers of management, smaller corporate staffs, and deeper talent across key functions. “While noting that BP at the time had some great people in IT and some cutting-edge systems for exploration, Deasy also understood that he was going to have to drive enormous change in personnel, processes, and objectives across the entire IT organization in order to support and enhance the larger overhaul taking place across all of BP. To read the rest of the article, download a free PDF of InformationWeek magazine(registration required)Download Our Global CIO Report For additional insight from BP CIO Dana Deasy on his transformation strategy, success measures, and challenges, download our report. Download Our Global CIO Report
Years ago I played around with IRM (I heard about it from someone I 'knew' in the IT dept. at Valdosta State, where I think the program started) when I worked as a tech for a school district which ended up going with some other costly windows friendly program (that is so memorable I can't remember the name) that I didn't like as much. Anyway IRM is a PHP/MySQL web based system. The Valdosta State IT dept used to have a relatively unpublicized demo version setup, though I doubt that exists anymore. http://sourceforge.net/projects/irm/
Agreed. You don't need Dreamweaver. Look at aptana instead. http://www.aptana.org The free community edition is more than enough. It's based on the extremely popular eclipse editor for Java. In terms of a methodology, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Be sure you know plain XHTML by hand first (Aptana will help you write the code, but you have to understand the code.) Don't rely on a visual WYSIWYG tool like Dreamweaver, because when you're writing PHP code, your own code creates the XHTML. You've got to know how to write it if you're going to write a program to write it. Learn standards-compliant design: CSS for layout - no tables. Dreamweaver teaches bad habits you'll have to unlearn eventually. Once you can create a web page, start working on JavaScript (it's cool again, thanks to AJAX) and PHP to add interactivity and permanence to your sites, For commercial work, you'll eventually need database work, and MySQL is hard to beat.
it is already built into windows see help file nothing to download nothing left when it over Windows Remote Assistance: frequently asked questions Here are answers to some common questions about Windows Remote Assistance. What is Windows Remote Assistance? When you're having a computer problem, sometimes you might want help from someone else. You can use Windows Remote Assistance to invite someone to connect to your computer and help you, even if that person isn't nearby. (Make sure you only ask someone whom you trust, because the other person will have access to your files and personal information.) After connecting, the other person can view your computer screen and chat with you about what you both see. With your permission, your helper can use his or her mouse and keyboard to control your computer and show you how to fix a problem. You can also help someone else the same way. How does Windows Remote Assistance work? First you invite a person to help you, using e‑mail or an instant message. You can also reuse an invitation that you have sent before. After the person accepts the invitation, Windows Remote Assistance creates an encrypted connection between the two computers over the Internet or the network that both computers are connected to. You give the other person a password so that he or she can connect. To find out how to use Windows Remote Assistance, see Get help with your computer using Windows Remote Assistance. You can also offer assistance to someone else, and when that person accepts your offer, Windows Remote Assistance creates an encrypted connection between the two computers. To find out how to use Windows Remote Assistance to help someone else, see Help someone with a computer problem using Windows Remote Assistance. When someone connects to or takes control of my computer, how are my privacy and computer security affected? When someone uses Windows Remote Assistance to connect to your computer, that person can see your desktop, any open documents, and any visible private information. In addition, if you allow your helper to control your computer with his or her mouse and keyboard, that person can do things like delete files or change settings. So only allow people you trust to access or share control of your computer. Warning Before you allow someone to connect to your computer, close any open programs or documents that you don't want your helper to see. Watch what your helper is doing. If at any time you feel uncomfortable about what that person is seeing or doing on your computer, click Cancel, click Stop sharing, or press ESC to end the session. What happens if I select the "Allow