Roundup from the Charlotte ITEC show

I had the pleasure of providing the keynote speech for the ITEC regional IT conference in Charlotte, N.C. this week and had a great time visiting the area for the first time. Even better, I had the chance to sit down and talk to IT folks fighting the good fight in the Southeast.

One of my pet peeves is that many vendors act like everyone in America is a college educated, white collar knowledge worker sitting in front of a computer all day. Not true.

I talked to the security manager of a large food service production and distribution company that has 6,000 employees but only about 2,000 computers. Truck drivers, warehouse people, and other hands-on workers don't tend to need computers to do their jobs. That's why the company has a 3:1 ratio of people to computers.

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I had the pleasure of providing the keynote speech for the ITEC regional IT conference in Charlotte, N.C. this week and had a great time visiting the area for the first time. Even better, I had the chance to sit down and talk to IT folks fighting the good fight in the Southeast.

One of my pet peeves is that many vendors act like everyone in America is a college educated, white collar knowledge worker sitting in front of a computer all day. Not true.

I talked to the security manager of a large food service production and distribution company that has 6,000 employees but only about 2,000 computers. Truck drivers, warehouse people, and other hands-on workers don't tend to need computers to do their jobs. That's why the company has a 3:1 ratio of people to computers.

That's an even higher percentage of people to computers than the building products company I chatted with at lunch that has two IT people, the Good IT Cop and the Bad IT Cop, and they were both at the show. Their company has 125 employees and 57 computers, plus five servers.

Not everybody uses a computer to work. Some don't need BlackBerries or cell phones.

In fact, the food service company delivers across large areas of Virginia and the Carolinas that don't have cell phone service. Keep that in mind next time you read about relying on constant Internet connections: some people work without cell phones (lucky dogs). But work you must, cell phone or not, so remember to have a Plan B for all your big “Mobile Technology” initiatives.

The security manager for the food service company has given up trying to enforce the “don't share your password” rule among the company's executive ranks. “They all give their passwords to their administrative assistants so they can read their e-mail for them,” he said. “I just tell them to be good to their assistant, because if they aren't, the assistant can write an e-mail from their account saying anything they want, and the executive will get the blame.”

That's a pretty clear reason to keep your password to yourself, isn't it? Anyone who knows your password can then steal your company identity and do whatever they want. Let's hope they want to help, and not send a mass e-mail to all coworkers with a photo of a donkey's rear end labeled “Our Boss.”

Many executives make life difficult for security managers (ask any security person you know for verification) because the execs think that, since they make the rules, they can ignore the rules. If you're one of those executives, keep the people who know your password happy, or else keep your resume updated.

Let's go back to our building products company, with only 57 PCs supported by five servers. There's the main Windows 2003 server, acting as a file server and providing the domain and authentication service. There's the Exchange 2003 server. There's another file server, and two application servers running Microsoft SQL Server to support programs like Maccola ERP and accounting applications.

One server for every dozen computers seems like a lot, but the Bad IT Cop said, “that's what you get with Microsoft.” He's actively searching for some external storage appliances, because he doesn't want to pay for another Microsoft server license to add more disk capacity.