fyi solutions

Author:  Barbara Schiffman

FYI Solutions is a member of TechServe Alliance, an organization comprised of IT & engineering staffing and solutions firms, clients, consultants and suppliers dedicated to advancing excellence and ethics within the IT & engineering staffing and solutions industry.  Very recently, TechServe collaborated with Inavero to conduct a survey of the staffing landscape to help clients, candidates, and staffing firms identify key opportunities – and challenges – in IT and engineering staffing.

Inavero interviewed 96 IT and Engineering staffing firm leaders, 274 clients, and 377 job candidates/consultants.  We are happy to be able to share this important survey with you.

A STARTING POINT FOR DISCOVERY

Amid market conditions characterized by low budgets and cautious hiring practices, recent years have been a time of both opportunity and challenge for staffing firms working to meet the demand for technical talent.  To help members and their clients navigate these waters, TechServ Alliance commissioned a 360-degree study of the lT and Engineering staffing industry.

The TechServ Alliance study examines the lT and Engineering staffing industry’s opportunities and challenges from three distinct perspectives:  clients, candidates, and staffing firms. The findings (more…)

Authored By: Hank Specht

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the CIO Visions’ Cloud & BI Summit held in Brooklyn, New York.  This conference, which FYI Solutions was a proud sponsor of, is a three-day affair that offers firsthand perspective to what IT decision makers face on a regular basis when dealing with Business Intelligence and/or the cloud and provides its attendees and sponsors a chance to network, listen to CIO presentations and get an understanding of the new technologies and solutions that are out on the market via targeted research meetings.  These meetings, with executives representing various vertical markets, came fast and frequently and provided great insight into their struggles with business intelligence, understanding what it means, its process, the resources needed as well as the overall impact it has on their organization.

While business intelligence/analytics are much ballyhooed buzz-words these days and are now at the forefront of most organizations’ initiatives, the concept has been around for a while now.  It is only now that most organizations are starting to scrutinize the end result.  And it’s here where most of the issues and pain start to manifest themselves for managers and end-users.  Most business units utilize (more…)

Author:  Jason Apwah

FYI Solutions has been involved with Quality Assurance for nearly 30 years.  Having provided QA Centers of Excellence to many of our clients, we would like to share some of our experiences and ideas for how we approach this.

1) Document the QA Methodology

Document the policies of your QA model. You should ensure that you document policies for your project. It will be difficult to achieve ‘quality’ if all team members do not have a unified understanding of what you are seeking to achieve. 100% perfection is not usually a (more…)

When anthropologists tallied the use of emotional words through a century of literature to see if patterns could be identified, they included many books without clear emotional content — technical manuals, for example, and automotive repair guides. We found the article below from a recent publication of Shots: Health News From NPR that illustrates yet another example of the way that data analytics is being used to understand our past and help predict the future. Following is an excerpt from that article.

Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed, sadder? Is it even possible to compare the emotions of one generation to another?  A recently published study may offer a few answers. A group of researchers used data analytics to (more…)

Author: Brian Birkbeck

Just last week I had the privilege of participating in an AIRS training course, titled “Certified Social Sourcing Recruiter 4.0”, to learn about the variety of social media sites you can use to impact your social recruiting initiative.  Social Media is the medium for leading edge recruiters to locate and engage with the passive top talent candidates they need for their organizations.  With more than 200 well known social networking websites (such as Facebook , Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+.. etc.) that have between 200 million (LinkedIn) and 1 billion (Facebook) registered users, this makes social media a great source for recruiters to find talented candidates.  The session focused on two key components; the ability to attract and find talent.  As an active job seeker, it is crucial for you to (more…)

Author:  Hillary Delabar

Is your company is currently experimenting with Big Data Analytics? 

From years of experience with data and business intelligence, I have learned that If you are going to prove anything –it better be business value that you are proving.  Many of the executives I speak with about a Big Data Analytics strategy are struggling with executing their strategy because they are  just beginning their exploration of it.   It appears most companies are developing a Big Data Analytics proof-of-concept rather than a full-out strategy.   But Big data is now! The volume, variety and velocity of data coming into your organization continue to reach unprecedented levels. This phenomenal growth of data requires that you not only understand big data to decipher the information that counts, but more importantly, to envision the possibilities of what you can do with it using analytics.

So the solution to the big data challenge then becomes obvious – big data requires high-performance analytics to process and figure out what’s important and what’s not.   How do you get started? (more…)

Author: Andy Mayo

For those of you that are Star Trek fans, you might recognize the similarity of the title to the “Trouble with Tribbles” episode where the Enterprise was overrun by these harmless, furry creatures called Tribbles.  Their only purpose was to procreate, and of course, to be cute(late 1960’s cute of course!).  Similarly, the Tuple type introduced in .Net 4.0 is able to multiply as well so that it can contain an infinite number of different data types defined by you, the application developer.   Cute, however, is probably not a term that I would use to describe to a storage type, so the semblance of a Tuple to a tribble stops at the volume of types that it can contain, or, its ability to procreate or grow.

The Tuple data type has existed in other programming languages for quite some time.  It allows you to (more…)

Author: Michele D’Aries

BYOD
Clients are asking how companies are handling the trend to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the workplace.  One way Clients are dealing with security for BYOD is to mandate security and lock down endpoints. Also, IT can treat BYOD the same way as any introduction to new technology.  Companies have to decide if they want to embrace BYOD or choose not to because there is too much risk involved. IBM banned its employees from using two popular consumer applications over concerns about data security.

Benefits of BYOD
By asking employees to BYOD and companies enabling those devices with corporate content, the companies benefit would be: (more…)

Author:  Ralph Cetrulo

On March 21st, FYI Solutions participated in the IBM Business Analytics Summit in Morristown, NJ. The theme of the event, “Gain Insight. Drive Performance.” set the stage for what turned out to be a day focused on driving better business performance across all areas of your company. Please allow me to recap the days’ thought-provoking, well attended presentations.

The Keynote: Presented by Industry Expert, Jeffrey Eisenberg, was a compelling discussion of how organizations that use analytics to drive business decisions outperform their peers. It highlighted measurements in terms of financial results, with up to 1.6X revenue growth, 2X EBITDA growth and 2.5X stock price appreciation. Outperforming organizations are building analytics competencies that enable them to exploit all data, leverage all perspectives and guide all decisions across their enterprises. Click to access the whitepaper.

Track 1: Delivering Optimal Value with Your BI and Analytics Program

Session 1: Getting Self-Service Right: This session focused on best practices for creating a working framework that addresses a spectrum of self-service models—from a managed dashboard experience through complete self-sufficiency. Click to access presentation

Session 2: Driving Peak Performance: For those looking for new methods and those not sure where to start, this session focused on the decision points needed to implement a world-class performance architecture, the use of in-memory capabilities and the latest (more…)

Author:  Lee Rygiel

In the fairy tale of “The Three Bears”, I was introduced to the importance of finding the proper solution by searching for the “Just Right”. In her search of the Bear’s home, Goldilocks was presented with 3 different solutions to her needs. The first was always too much, the second was always too little but she diligently continued until she came across that just right solution.  In a way this was my first introduction to scalability and my quest for “Just Right”.

The world of IT that once experienced an almost unlimited access to financial resources in the expectation that those investments would pay for themselves in reduced costs brought about by technological improvements. We of IT answered the call by first by steamlining back office operations, then sales, procurement, advertising, communications, and just about every other aspect of business and government operations.  Having been so efficient at those process improvements, it’s now IT that is called upon to (more…)