This weekend my family and I went on a camp out with our church.  This wouldn’t be a bad thing, however, my family has camped out only twice in 16 years!  Needless to say, we’re not really fans of it, or have much experience at it.

A recent article in CIO magazine, the "C" in "C-level" could stand for "character ("Job Seekers: Get Ready for the Character Interview," June 25)." According to the article, recession-era employers can afford to be incredibly choosy. So if you really want that C-level post, think in terms of a whole different way to prepare for the final interview. For example, you might swing by Tiffany's and pick up their book on table manners.

In examining the many budget issues that face tech leaders these days, I was wondering where and how consulting services and consultants stood when it comes to IT projects and efforts.

There are the pros and cons, but when every penny is now under scrutiny, and every task must be rationalized, justified and evaluated for investment return, are those extra hands you bring in becoming a luxury item?

The Financial Times' Jillian Tett, in her book Fool's Gold about the financial crisis, describes Jamie Dimon's first visit to the bank's offices in London. He headed first to Bournemouth, the location of the bank's IT operations.

"There he convened a town hall and spent a couple of hours discussing the bank's IT infrastructure.

Having flown Northwest through Detroit to get from Wisconsin to New York twice in the last two weeks, I feel safe predicting that video conferencing is only going to grow in popularity.

Unlike Olive Garden and Red Lobster, which accept something less than 100 percent utilization of food so they don't run out of what a customer wants, Northwest seems to be aiming for total efficiency in staffing without much regard for customers.  Bad weather leads to flight cancellations because backup crews and planes are either few or nonexistent.  A 45-minute flight into Detroit includes 10-15 minutes sitting on the tarmac waiting for a ground crew to show up.

I read a post the other day by Arkady Maydanchik (co-founder of eLearningCurve.com a provider of on-demand technical training via the internet and author of “Data Quality Assessment”) titled “Data Profiling: Myth and Reality”.  Maydanchik starts out by saying:

Every data quality management guru will tell you that data profiling is the first step towards better information quality. Every data warehousing professional knows that you must profile the source data before implementing a new BI application. A data migration consultant will place data profiling on the first page of the project plan. Master data management starts with data profiling and it is a cornerstone of any metadata repository.