IT Management
Business Week, 7/5/04: Wanted: Systems Guru
For small businesses, hiring the right geek is a special challenge
Mary Clark knew that she was looking for the rarest of gems. When her company, a 116-person electronic-payment processor called Cibernet, relocated from downtown Washington to Bethesda, Md., she lost her in-house computer guru. That meant that Cibernet's networks and e-mail systems would be running primarily on hope. Clark had to find a replacement who could troubleshoot a network, fix the printer, and handle pretty much anything in between. As a veteran manager, Clark had a good idea of what she had to avoid, too. "I didn't need an IT snob," she says. "IT people are very capable of pissing off everybody they're supposed to support."
HIRING THAT jack-of-all-trades technology pro -- also called a system administrator, or sysadmin -- is especially challenging for smaller companies. For one thing, the résumé of even the most qualified applicant can look a lot like gibberish to someone without a similar background. While a big company may be able to get away with hiring a brilliant but antisocial geek to program in a darkened room, the rest of us "need somebody who is very flexible about taking on whatever there is to do," says Adam S. Moskowitz, an IT consultant and principal with Menlo Computing in Cheltham, Mass. Equally important are interpersonal skills -- no one wants to be laughed at because she finds her computer confusing. For all of the above, expect to pay $50,000 to $100,000 per year depending on location, says the System Administrators Guild.
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Security
Infoworld, 7/2/04: McAfee: New Lovegate worm spreading
Intruder affecting computers worldwide
By Jaikumar Vijayan
A new version of the Lovegate worm has begun infecting computers worldwide, including those belonging to several Fortune 500 companies, according to a statement from antivirus firm McAfee Inc.
Like its predecessors, Lovegate.ad@MM is a mass-mailing worm that spreads through e-mail and network file sharing and by exploiting a previously disclosed vulnerability in the remote procedure call interface in multiple Windows versions. Last year's widespread Blaster worm took advantage of the same flaw.
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Healthcare
eWeek, 7/2/04: Hammer Coming Down for HIPAA Compliance
By M.L. Baker
Medicare providers have only a few days left to file electronic claims that do not contain all of the information required by HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had said it would treat electronic claims that don't comply with HIPAA as paper claims starting July 1, but has extended the compliance deadline to July 6.
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Optimism
C|net, 7/2/04: Tech services jobs rise in June
By Ed Frauenheim
June was a better month for tech services workers, but not so nice to employees in computer and electronics manufacturing.
According to statistics released Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor, the seasonally adjusted number of payroll employees in computer systems design and related services rose by 6,300 from May, while workers in "management and technical consulting services" climbed by 4,700. Those increases were both larger than gains in the categories from April to May. But payroll employment in computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing fell by 1,600 from May to June.
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