More from the user wish list

More wishes for 2006

6. Better communication. If Jim Hite could have one wish in 2006, it would be better communication from the departments he serves at Virginia's Prince William County schools, where he is supervisor of network services and central operations.

"When that happens, we have a clearer objective" of what the departments want and need from his group, Hite says. "As a service provider, we provide a service. The better and clearer the other departments' objectives can be stated, the easier it is for us to respond."

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More wishes for 2006

6. Better communication. If Jim Hite could have one wish in 2006, it would be better communication from the departments he serves at Virginia's Prince William County schools, where he is supervisor of network services and central operations.

"When that happens, we have a clearer objective" of what the departments want and need from his group, Hite says. "As a service provider, we provide a service. The better and clearer the other departments' objectives can be stated, the easier it is for us to respond."

It can be difficult for departments to express what they're looking for in terms of IT support, he says, particularly because people easily become intimidated when talking about technology. "It's an area where a lot of fear from other departments comes about, people don't want to seem silly or uninformed," he says. Over the years communication has gotten better, he says, but there's always room for improvement.

7. VoIP for consolidating operations. Bill Homa, senior vice president and CIO of Hannaford supermarkets in Scarborough, Maine, spent the last several years adding automation and virtualization technologies to his data center operations. One of the drivers for the work was server consolidation, because Hannaford was seeing just 10% utilization on Intel servers. Now that data-center operations are more cost effective, the next step will be looking at hardware in retail locations.

"We still have two servers in each store, and our goal is to get down to one and then to no servers needed in stores," Homa explains.

Homa plans to reach this goal in 2006 using VoIP.

"For us, leveraging voice over IP is going to be big. VoIP is still relatively untouched as an application, not as a technology. Most people with VoIP just do voice, but there is the capability to have a telephone be a terminal, especially for those of us in the retail industry or any industry with many branch locations," Homa says. "It's a huge opportunity for us to have our phones become more than phones, to be IP devices and terminals. That would have a dramatic effect on the retail industry and help us reduce the servers needed in our store locations."

8. A bigger budget. What Rich Cummins, manager of network services with Community Medical Centers in Fresno, Calif., wants in 2006 is 5% of his budget back. The healthcare company, which manages hospitals, clinics and extended-care facilities throughout central California with 6,200 employees, cut back on its IT budget for 2006, which means that a number of important projects will be put off this year.

Cummins has a long list of projects he would do if he could get those dollars back. First, he would hammer out an overall security architecture for his network. The company has a number of point-security solutions in place, but Cummins wants to "take a step back and look at the entire enterprise," he says.

Next, he would continue down the path of server and storage virtualization that the company has started on. He would also upgrade his core network infrastructure of Cisco switches and routers, and evaluate the company's data-management strategy, particularly its disaster-recovery and business-continuity plans. "We're growing our data at a rate of 200% a year," he says.