IT Managers Inbox» Random IT

13 Sites to Download Free eBooks

Sam — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:41:00 +0000

eBooks have become very popular with devices such as the Kindle and the new iPad. You can get applications for your smart phone to read PDF files and eBooks from most popular book sites. There are a large selection of eBooks and many are free.

Amazon has a collection of free eBooks for their Kindle reader so be sure and check their site. You don’t have to buy a Kindle to read them. They have applications you can download for your computer, iPhone and certain smart phones that are free.

A lot of eBooks are standard PDF files so all you need is a PDF reader on your computer or port them to your Kindle or iPad and many other devices.

You can also check out a list of free eBook sites by visiting this XMarks link for free ebooks.

Sites To Find Free eBooks

Ebookee – Books you will find: Almost any book, magazine, even audio books you can imagine. Not all links work, but fresh ones usually do.
E-Books Space – Books you will find: “Computer IT, Programming Language, Software Development, Tutorial, Database Design in PDF-CHM file format.”
Ebooks Download Free – Books you will find: Management, Business, Technical, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Medical, Programming and more.
Free Book Centre – Books you will find: “Freebookcentre.net contains links to thousands of free online technical books. Which Include core computer science, networking, programming languages, Systems Programming books, Linux books and many more”
Free Computer Books – Books you will find: “Free Computer, Mathematics, Technical Books and Lecture Notes, Etc.”
Download Free PDF – Books you will find: “You’ll find a huge collection of Ebooks on various topics. Abap, Adobe, Ajax,Java, Asp, Calculus, C++, Cisco, Dream Weaver, HTML, J2ME, MBA, Networking, Oracle, PHP, Microsoft Windows, VBA, XP”
ebook 3000 – Books you will find: Business, Database, Graphic Design, Hardware, Internet, Microsoft, Web Development, Programming, Engineering, Magazine, Personality.
E-Books Directory – Books you will find: “3663 free books in 414 categories.”
Free Book Spot – Books you will find: A wide variety including Technical, Do-It-Yourself, Cooking, Dictionaries, Fiction, and more.
Free Ebooks – Books you will find: A wide variety and selection. A virtual bookstore on many topics.
Get Free Books – Books you will find: “The ebooks which you find within this site are collected from all over the net.” Including a lot of magazines, articles and white papers, but most require you to register.
Free Tech Books – Books you will find: “This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet.”
Zillr.org – Books you will find: Mainly technical, but also a lot of links to a variety of magazines.

Disclaimer: Free does not always mean the eBooks were written and intended for free distribution. Some of these sites traffic in books, magazines and other documents that are copyrighted and not intended for free download.

WRL – IPad, Your Mojo, Email Mistakes, Declutter, Negotiations

Sam — Sat, 08 May 2010 14:57:02 +0000

Have an IPad and want to use a keyboard? Are you losing your leadership mojo? Want to know the 10 fatal mistakes managers make in email? Want to know some good ways to declutter your digital life this weekend? Need to brush up on your negotiating basics?

The Weekend Reading List is a collection of posts, articles and videos from around the Internet posted each Saturday. Feel free to submit your own recommended weekend reading in the comments section.

This Weeks Weekend Reading List

iPad Keyboard Dock or Bluetooth Keyboard?

Even though the IPad has a nice touch screen keyboard when you are doing extended typing session you may want to use an external keyboard with your IPad. This article explores all of your options. Use the dock or a stand? Wireless keyboard with the dock or a Bluetooth keyboard?

What’s Killing Your Mojo?

Are you having problems with your mojo? Read this post on the Leading Blog to find out why leadership mojo is important and the common mistakes that can kill your mojo.

Common mistakes include: Over-committing, waiting for the facts to change, looking for logic in all of the wrong places, bashing the boss (big one), refusing to change because of “sunk costs”, and confusing the mode you’re in.

10 Fatal Mistakes Managers Make in Email

Email has become the standard form of communications for managers. Making mistakes in email can reflect on you as a manager. From the Wall Street Journal via BNET learn the 10 fatal mistakes managers make in email.

Top 10 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life, 2010 Edition

The weekend is a good time to clear out and clean up your digital life. Read this Lifehacker article for ten ways you can declutter your digital life at home and at work. When is the last time you cleaned up your contacts? I use the binder clips solution for cable management at work. It keeps me from crawling under the desk to find cables that dropped down.

Negotiation Basics

When are dealing with vendors, your boss, leadership or reports you can end up in some for of negotiations. It is important to know the basics of negotiations, what the different tactics are and how to use them.

This link is to an anchor page of 12 different articles on negotiations for different scenarios.

2010 Super Bowl Commercials

Sam — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:13:36 +0000

Super Bowl 2010 commercials and ad’s are as anticipated as the game. As I did last year with the 2009 Super Bowl ad’s I am stepping outside the niche to bring you some of the best Super Bowl commercials from Super Bowl 2010, funny ads from the past Super Bowl’s and commercials banned from the 2010 Super Bowl.

Come back after the game for a full lineup of the best of the 2010 Super Bowl ad’s.

If you want to know when to look for your favorite Super Bowl commercial USA Today has a list of ads and when they will play during the game. According to USA Today’s ad meter the Doritos snow globe ad was the best of best from the 2009 Super Bowl.

Doritos Snow Globe 2009 Super Bowl

Super Bowl 2010 Commercials

CareerBuilder.com Casual Friday Super Bowl 2010 Commercial

Hyundai Brett Farve Super Bowl 2010 Commercial

Audi Green Police Super Bowl 2010 Commercial

Top Funny Super Bowl Ads

Bridgestone Scream Super Bowl Ad

E-Trade Baby Super Bowl Commercial

Reebok Terry Tate Super Bowl Commercial

EDS Cat Herders Super Bowl Commercial

Ameriquest Super Bowl Commercial

Budweiser Donkey Dream Super Bowl Commercial

Hulu An Evil Plot to Destroy The World Super Bowl Commercial

Budweiser Talking Frogs Super Bowl 1995 Commercial

Visa Yao Super Bowl Ad

Nationwide Insurance K-Fed Super Bowl Commercial

Banned Super Bowl Commercials

GoDaddy Super Bowl 2010 Commercial Lola

CareerBuilder.com Worst Seat Super Bowl 2010

Doritos Super Bowl 2010 Commercial

KGB In The Hole Super Bowl 2010 Commercial

Budweiser 2007 Super Bowl

Come back. As 2010 Super Bowl ads are released this post will be updated.

Learn to Give Better Presentations From Steve Jobs

Sam — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:30:00 +0000

Steve Jobs is known for giving presentations that keep his audience engaged. He has a natural talent for public speaking and he has honed it to an art form. Some would say it is nothing more than a salesman’s pitch, but are not a lot of presentations just that?

While we may not have the gift for presentation that Steve Jobs has, we can learn a lot about giving good presentations by listening to the flow and watching the body language of Steve Jobs. Below you will find a video of one on his presentations that will show you how he does it so well.

There are several things you will note.

Setting the theme for the presentation that is clear and consistent.
Creating a headline that makes it memorable and sets the direction for the presentation.
Always has an outline for his presentation. He opens and closes each point before transitioning to the next. This makes it easy for the audience to follow the story.
Steve Jobs demonstrates enthusiasm. In this speech he uses words such as extraordinary, amazing and cool. Your audience will be more engaged and accepting of what you present if you are passionate about it. If you are not passionate about the presentation, neither will the audience.
Most presentations contain numbers and statistics. They can be dull and boring. Jobs puts the numbers and statistics into context so the audience can relate and easily understand them.
Slides are often used in presentations. Dull boring charts and graphs. Jobs uses very little text in his slides. He makes them more visually appealing helping him tell the story. You do not want to overwhelm your audience with charts, numbers and difficult to read slides.
Jobs creates a memorable moment for his presentation. This is the one piece the audience will remember. When preparing your presentation consider what you want them to walk away remembering about it and build that into a memorable moment.
Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Jobs makes it look easy because he spends hours rehearsing. The greatest presenters do the same thing and so should you. Over and over again until the presentation flows from you without effort.

Steve Jobs approaches each presentation as an event. Take a look at one of his presentations below where the narrator breaks down all of these points.

How To Read Paid Content For Free

Sam — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:17:16 +0000

There are several news sites that now offer content only to paid subscribers. The Wall Street Journal is an example. If you are not a subscriber you can only read a preview of the content. To read the full article you must subscribe to the site.

Fortunately there is a way around this so you can read full articles. This comes by way of the Google First Click Free program. If you use a site a lot I would urge you to subscribe to it, but if you just want to read one article this trick might work.

The Google Hack

Let’s say you want to read the story that has become a soap opera that now includes rumors of Conan O’Brien possibly leaving NBC if Jay Leno is given the 11:35 PM time slot. On the Wall Street Journal this story is “subscriber content” so you can only preview the full article.

Using a Google hack you can actually read the entire article. Here is how it works.

1. You see an article you want to read, but notice the little key next to it indicating it is subscriber content.

2. If you follow the article you are presented with a preview with an option to sign up for a subscription.

3. Now highlight the title of the story, in this case “O’Brien Mulls Leaving NBC”, right click and copy.

4. Now go to Google.com and paste the title of the story in the search box and click on Google search.

5. Google will return the result and the full article should be the first one. Click on that.

6. This should take you to the full article for your reading pleasure.

Other Sites?

This hack does not work with all sites, but for some it will. You also may need to use other methods of copy and paste such as using the URL to get the result.

The Office Politics of Email

Sam — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:00:07 +0000

Email has become the de facto standard for business communications. It is on our desktop, our laptop and our phone. For this reason email has become the new form of “on the record” types of communications within organizations, thus like everything else subject to politics.

Office politics within an organization seems to be an unavoidable part of the job. Many have an agenda, turf to protect or use it for self-promotion or their own goals. When it comes to email you have probably seen plenty of office politics being carried out.

What I have found interesting is how people use email or avoid using it when it comes to going “on the record”. Okay so this is a little pet peeve rant, but I deal with these two types of people on a daily basis and I am sure I am not the only one.

Those Who Avoid It

These are people who refuse to answer an email because they know it will then be on the record. You email someone asking if something should be done or if something happened. You get no reply at all or later they will answer you face-to-face, usually with no witnesses around. Deniability.

To be honest these people annoy me. They are trying to protect themselves or escape responsibility. If you have so little faith in the decisions that you make or answers that you give that you avoid putting them in an email, you probably should not be in the position you are in.

I work in a ever changing environment and these people slow me down. I have learned who they are so when they do not answer the email I go and hunt them down so they can answer in private. At least that way I can get on with my job. I may even send them an email afterwards like “Just to confirm our earlier conversation…” They hate that.

Those Who Cover Their Ass With It

Then there are people who will not give you any answer face-to-face. They only respond via email. When you ask them something face-to-face they will tell you “Let me get back to you on that” or some other excuse not to answer. Later you will get an email along the lines of “Per our earlier conversation…..”.

These are the people who want to go on the record with everything. They know email is forever in a business environment so they carefully craft their answer. They sometimes even carbon copy half the company to be sure everyone knows exactly what they said. Another annoyance of mine.

I agree there are times when you want to have an official record to avoid the “I did not tell you to do that” issues. However there are some who hinder communications because they adhere to the philosophy affectionately known as covering your ass in all circumstances.

You can go ahead and give me the answer now and later you can send me the email to CYA, but don’t make me wait or worse not answer me at all.

Watch What You Write

While I wanted to touch on the politics of email, there is something very important you should take away about email.

For some time now courts have included email and text messages as “documents”. Electronic discovery requests have become more common in lawsuits against companies. For this reason you should be VERY careful with your emails so you do not write something that is against company policy or that could land you in legal hot water.

For some email is a casual form of communications and since it is not face-to-face they may say things they would not normally say. You should never put anything in an email you would not want a reporter, a jury or your boss to read.

If your company does not have an email policy leadership should contact a lawyer or their in-house legal team and create one.
You should never include anything that could be seen as discriminatory, that violates employment law or reveals confidential information.
If you are in management you should make sure all of your reports are aware of the company email policy. If you see an inappropriate email you should immediately speak with the individual about it and record the fact that you spoke with them about the issue in their performance log for your own protection.
Just because you delete an email does not mean it is gone. Don’t think you can email someone and tell them to delete it after reading it and it will be gone. It is still in the EVault.

Do you have any email pet peeves?

13 of the Worst Email Mistakes Made at Work

Sam — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 04:04:14 +0000

Doing research for another post I ran across a survey where people were asked if they had ever sent out an email message to the wrong person or copied someone by mistake. Not surprisingly seventy-eight percent of the respondents answered yes they had.

I am sure we all have sent out emails by mistake. I have used the recall button more than once, but usually because I forgot to include an attachment. Respondents were also asked what some of the worst email mistakes they or someone they know have made.

Good for a laugh and a second thought before you click that send button.

“Someone sent out confidential salary information to the whole firm.”
“I once sent a job offer to the wrong person.”
“An employee sent his resume to me by mistake. It was supposed to go to an outside company.”
“Someone made a nasty comment about a supervisor and it was sent to the supervisor by mistake. It eventually led to dismissal.”
“A person called another employee an idiot in an e-mail to everyone in the company.”
“One of our vendors accidentally e-mailed me information about their sales performance, so I gained some inside knowledge about that vendor.”
“My receptionist sent a very gossipy and catty e-mail about another employee to the wrong person. It was so unprofessional that she was terminated.”
“We sent an e-mail to a client that was meant for a vendor. It made it difficult when the client had seen our costs.”
“Confidential information about one client was sent to a different client. It was certainly embarrassing.”
“Someone crafted a scathing, sarcastic e-mail about a customer and did not mean to hit ‘send.’ It caused problems.”
“I once sent an internal memo about restroom etiquette to a prospective client by accident.”
“Someone sent me a copy of an employee’s bank records by mistake.”
“Someone meant to send a racy picture to a couple of friends but ended up sending it to the entire staff, which caused her much embarrassment.”

Source: “DOH” The Creative Group

The Planet Provides Highest Performing Cloud Storage

Sam — Wed, 20 May 2009 04:02:56 +0000

Speed, Ease of Integration, Global Coverage Provide Significant Customer Benefits.

The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today issued a report that shows The Planet Storage Cloud outperforms similar cloud storage platforms in both read and write tests.

With its benefits of on-premise storage, elastic cloud design and utility-based billing, The Planet Storage Cloud delivers transfer speeds that are more than three times faster than the leading competitors.*

The white paper — titled “Five Reasons Storage Cloud Is Right for You” — highlights upload and download testing performed on three cloud storage platforms: The Planet Storage Cloud, Amazon S3 and Mosso Cloud Files.

The Planet Storage Cloud demonstrated the best upload and download performance among the three, with speeds up to 46 MB/sec. It also delivered the smallest variance in test results among the three companies. Other highlights of the paper include ease of integration, multiple global nodes, flexibility and simplified billing.

“The demand for today’s storage requirements continues to escalate,” said Rob Walters, general manager for The Planet’s Storage and Data Protection business. “Coupled with these requirements is enormous confusion surrounding cloud capabilities, as well as too many surprises on customer invoices.

“At The Planet, we take a no-surprises approach to our Storage Cloud billing, which eliminates the uncertainty. We also offer the industry’s only globally dispersed platform, so customers can choose to store their data in close proximity to their users, no matter where they are located around the world. Customers tell us that our superior performance, combined with elasticity and a simple billing structure, is why they chose The Planet as their cloud storage provider.”

Storage Cloud White Paper Highlights

In addition to delivering higher performance than is possible with remote-only cloud solutions, The Planet Storage Cloud provides customers with unlimited scalability, coupled with usage-based billing and simple integration:

Ease of Use: The Planet provides three ways to integrate the Storage Cloud into customer accounts: a robust, full-featured Application Programming Interface (API), and software for FTP and NAS emulation.

Geographic Redundancy: With Storage Cloud nodes in five global locations – in The Planet’s Dallas D2 data center, Europe, Asia and the East and West coasts of the United States – customers can select where their data resides. The Planet offers up to a 100 percent Service Level Agreement (SLA) when customers choose a multiple-node policy.

On-Demand Flexibility: Storage Cloud features a scalable and elastic design, with capacity available on demand. Customers can scale both up and down based on usage needs, with no minimum-usage requirements.

‘No Surprises’ Billing: Usage-based billing ensures there are no hidden fees typically associated with other cloud platforms. The Planet’s “no surprises” approach calculates monthly bills based on how much storage capacity and bandwidth customers use.

To download the complete white paper, please visit http://www.theplanet.com/cloud-storage-reasons.

The technical brief — “Performance Test: Comparing Cloud Storage Platforms” — outlines the performance testing methodology and results published in the white paper. This brief — and instructions on how to independently recreate the tests — is available at http://www.theplanet.com/cloud-storage-performance-test.

*The Planet white paper sets forth the testing criteria utilized by the company with respect to the performance testing of various similar products. Tests were conducted internally by The Planet, and neither the testing criteria nor the results of such testing have been independently verified.

About The Planet

The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 15.7 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting and data center colocation, all backed by 24x7x365 support.

With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class service, backed by state-of-the-art data centers and an enterprise-class network, The Planet turns IT into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to grow their businesses. For additional information, visit www.theplanet.com.

Top 5 Tips for Cost Cutting in E-Commerce Without Losing Customer Loyalty

Sam — Fri, 15 May 2009 04:02:00 +0000

IT organizations responsible for e-commerce are challenged to improve online customer experiences to make up for closed locations and lost sales personnel, while cutting IT expenditures by 5-25 percent, according to Gartner, Inc.

Gartner has identified five tips in which IT leaders in charge of e-commerce operations can meet this challenge in this year’s tough economic climate. Gartner has also provided associated savings estimates for large enterprises with e-commerce budgets of more than $1 million for software and services, and for small enterprises with budgets of less than $1 million.

Tip 1 – Use off-the-shelf products, not custom development, for commodity functions

By eliminating custom-development efforts for commodity functions (such as shopping cart management, search, product merchandising and management) and replacing these with commercial, off-the shelf, or open-source e-commerce applications, Gartner estimates that large enterprises can save 35 percent of ongoing maintenance and license costs, and small enterprises can save 25 percent of these costs in 2009, and 20 percent in the future.

The one-time cost to implement this strategy is $250,000 to $350,000 in software, on average, with a one-time cost for implementation services.

“Except for market leaders, such as Amazon and eBay, custom development is likely to be a waste of effort and money because it supports functions that do not enable a differentiated online customer experience,” said Gene Alvarez, research vice president at Gartner. “For example, a developer who supports a commodity function, such as shopping cart management, would be better to develop rich Internet shopping capabilities or improve site design for search engine optimization so that the site can rank higher in a Google-based search.”

Tip 2 – Extract more return on investment (ROI) from technology that you own

Enterprises that seek to extract more ROI with technologies that are owned by the IT organization could decrease costs of service, sales, and marketing by 15 percent for large enterprises and 10 percent for small enterprises in 2009 and 10 percent in subsequent years. Gartner estimates that one-time costs to implement this recommendation are less than 5 percent, because they require only established resources to tune the use. Organizations should consider eliminating any established technology that does not achieve a use rate of more than 95 percent.

Tip 3 – Focus rich Internet application tool development on sales efforts with higher conversion rates, and leverage established community Web sites, rather than building communities in your organization’s site.

IT organizations experimenting with rich Internet application (RIA) Web 2.0 sales tools, usually developed in Ajax, can scale back their development efforts to only those tools that will lead to higher conversion rates. Gartner estimates that this strategy will save around 10 percent for large enterprises and about 5 percent for small enterprises in 2009, and 5 percent in future years. One-time development costs will be paid in full by reductions in other projects.

Tip 4 – Negotiate hard with e-commerce software vendors

If an IT organization is seeking to purchase or already owns e-commerce software, then tough negotiation with vendors is an absolute imperative. Skilled negotiators can save 20 percent to 50 percent on license fees in 2009, and an additional 3 percent to 4 percent long term. No additional expenses are required to make this happen. Gartner predicts that vendors will cling to prices during 2009, as they seek to preserve margins, but will offer big discounts to make up for longer sales cycles and increased competition.

Tip 5 – Make organizational changes to eliminate redundancy in job functions

In some enterprises, personnel perform the same job tasks on different sides of the business. For example, an enterprise may have one marketing person for online operations and another for the bricks-and-mortar side of the business. It may be possible to combine these roles and produce savings in HR. This one-time saving may represent 10 percent to 15 percent of e-commerce HR expenses in 2009 and 5 percent in subsequent years, with little upfront costs required for training.

Gartner YouTube Channel

Additional comments from Mr. Alvarez regarding cost cutting in e-commerce are available on the Gartner YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02IdH7C-fFk. Additional Gartner videos are available at http://www.youtube.com/user/Gartnervideo.

ITGI Report: IT Governance Roundtable – Unlocking Value

Sam — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:02:42 +0000

A recent research survey of CEOs from more than 250 companies by the non-profit, independent IT Governance Institute (ITGI) revealed that although three-quarters of them agreed that IT investments added value to the enterprise, more than half of them think that there are barriers that prevent a full return from IT investments.

The most significant barriers that prevent full return from investment in IT were identified as: implementing applications (37 percent), the culture of the enterprise (20 percent) and lack of skill base (16 percent). Whilst executive management (board) are accountable for IT governance in 71 percent of responding enterprises, the study found that more than a third of the organizations do not have a CIO on the executive team.

To examine IT value in greater depth, ITGI gathered a group of senior IT thought leaders from business, consulting and academia in London for an in-depth discussion of how to unlock value from IT investments and the role of the CIO. ITGI has now published the IT Governance Roundtable – Unlocking Value and the 20-page report is available as a complimentary download at www.itgi.org.

Participants in the roundtable discussion were:

Paul Williams, Chair of the ISACA Strategic Advisory Group and IT Governance Adviser to Protiviti, UK
Ali Hamza, PricewaterhouseCoopers and associate professor at Henley Business School, UK
Dr. Sharm Manwani, FBCS, Associate Professor of IT, Henley Business School, UK
Prof. M.J. (Jim) Norton, CITP, FBCS, FIET, FIoD, FRSA, Institute of Directors, UK
John Thorp, CMC, I.S.P., The Thorp Network Inc., Canada
Chris Tiernan, CITP, FBCS, FIMIS, Grosvenor Consultancy Services LLP, UK

The roundtable discussion examined topics such as the role of the CIO, measuring success, change programs, alignment between business and IT strategy, and how to make it happen and up your game.

According to Williams of the ISACA Strategic Advisory Group, “Without a robust business case, everything will be built on a somewhat shaky foundation. One of the things that rarely is factored into a business case is risk. It’s always about accentuating the upside without necessarily considering the potential downside. I advise organizations to apply the same sort of investment principles to business change projects as they apply to a standard investment portfolio, which is all about risk and reward. The higher the risk that you’re taking in any particular initiative, the higher the return you’re expecting.”

Williams went on to say, “Alignment is an interesting issue. The results of the ITGI CEO survey show that more than 25 percent of respondents indicate that organizations don’t establish and maintain alignment between business and IT strategy.”

John Thorp, who serves as chair of the Val IT Steering Committee for ITGI, said, “I did a lot of work regarding IT strategy, a term I don’t like. I found that I had to come up with a term— strategy translation—to take what someone says about strategy and turn it into something that someone else can relate to and evaluate against. It’s very difficult to do portfolio management and alignment with business objectives when there aren’t any clearly stated business objectives. And I think that’s a huge problem.”

The roundtable participants also discussed a particularly troubling statistic from the ITGI CEO survey—43 percent of respondents’ organizations do not measure the value of IT investments.

“What will it take to get people off the fence and do this?” Thorp asked. “When I started to talk about business governance of IT 12 years ago, I think people looked at me as if I were from another planet. Now people discuss it, but they’re not doing anything yet. They’re at the point of talking about it, but they don’t really know what to do about it or they’re not willing to do something about it.”

Business and IT executives who want to find out how to unlock value from IT can get additional help by downloading a complimentary copy of the Unlocking Value roundtable from www.itgi.org.

About the IT Governance Institute

The IT Governance Institute (ITGI) (www.itgi.org) is a non-profit, independent research entity that provides guidance for the global business community on issues related to the governance of IT assets. ITGI was established by the non-profit membership association ISACA in 1998 to help executives and IT professionals ensure that IT delivers value and its risks are mitigated through alignment with enterprise objectives, IT resources are properly managed, and IT performance is measured. ITGI developed Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) and Val IT, and offers original research and case studies to help enterprise leaders and boards of directors fulfil their IT governance responsibilities and help IT professionals deliver value-adding services.