News You Can Use: 8/2/2017

  • Is IT having an identity crisis?

    Forty percent of the CIOs said that they make 50% or less of the IT decisions for their companies. And 39% said that business departments buy their own technology without consulting IT “often,” “very often” or “most of the time.” Meantime, IT departments themselves perform a shrinking proportion of the technology work they still oversee, with 24% of the respondents saying they outsource more than 50% of their IT and only 9% saying they outsource none at all.

    If outsourcing is the norm, and business departments outside IT are increasingly procuring their own technology, it may be time to ask exactly what IT’s role and identity is in the modern workplace.

    Also:

    Whatever IT’s identity within an organization may be, if it’s primarily viewed as a cost center, that’s not a good thing. “IT is a foundational element,” says Ed McLaughlin, CIO at Mastercard. “You really have to cease thinking of technology as a cost center. Technology is one of the primary assets of a business.”

    http://www.computerworld.com/article/3191986/it-management/is-it-having-an-identity-crisis.html

  • Do Raises Make Employees Happy or Is It Something More?

    “One of the most striking results we’ve found is that, across all income levels, the top predictor of workplace satisfaction is not pay. It is the culture and values of the organization, followed closely by the quality of senior leadership and the career opportunities at the company. Among the six workplace factors we examined, compensation and benefits were consistently rated among the least important factors of workplace happiness.”

    However, there was a study from Princeton that found that “having a higher income increases happiness but only up to about $75,000 per year.” After that, “higher pay doesn’t influence happiness much, and other factors take over.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297326

  • The Case for National Childcare
  • 8 Ways Any Millennial Can Be a Millionaire in 5 Years

    Investing can be tricky, but it’s one of the best ways to get a return on the money you currently have. If you want to make significant money quickly, you’ll need to take some major risks, which means being willing to lose all the money you put in. For best results, start by investing a good amount of money. You can make more potentially if you risk more. Pick certain sectors that you find yourself most interested in and concentrate on investments in those spaces. Before any of this though, take time to learn as much as possible about the stock market.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297322

  • Six Words And Phrases That Make Everyone Hate Working With You

    3. “IT IS WHAT IT IS”
    Clichés like this make you sound like a lazy thinker. We default unthinkingly to empty expressions when we’re trying to give the impression we have something to say but really don’t, and also when we want to sound as though we’re comfortable with something but might not be. “Business is business,” “it is what it is,” and phrases like them aren’t just meaningless and repetitious—they sound like you don’t really care or that your brain just isn’t in gear. Good luck getting promoted that way.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40441775/six-words-and-phrases-that-make-everyone-hate-working-with-you
    This is my dad’s favorite saying, guess he won’t be getting that big butcher shop promotion…

Photo: Brodie Vissers