Thomas Hoffman

IT leaders are still hungry to recruit .Net programmers, desktop support technicians and voice over IP project leaders, according to an online survey conducted in June by the Society for Information Management. But when asked by SIM to cite the top workplace skills that they are seeking among both entry-level and midlevel IT workers, the 231 respondents overwhelmingly cited ethics and morals as the traits they most desire.

SIM didn't disclose the number of respondents who chose ethics and morals. But that choice easily beat out alternatives such as communications skills and business acumen, said the group, which released the results of its annual membership survey at its SIMposium 2008 conference in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., today.

It's not easy for IT professionals to make a wholesale switch to a different technical discipline to reap the benefits of a hot skills market -- say, moving from a job as a systems administrator to a Java developer. "It's very difficult, because those two things just don't go together," says Katherine Spencer Lee , executive director of Robert Half Technology .

But that's not to say it can't be done, say Spencer Lee and other IT labor experts. For example, a systems or network administrator could take online or classroom courses to hone his Web development and systems life-cycle management know-how.

Walter Scott may not be your typical IT professional. But the circumstances around his current compensation have become all too familiar.

Scott, a 20-year IT veteran, is a solutions architect at Verizon Business in East Meadow, N.Y., where he helps devise IP telephony systems for the company's commercial customers. Scott says he has helped land a few prominent deals since joining Verizon two years ago, including a $30 million contract with a health care customer in 2007.

What steps do IT executives need to take to get on the "A" list for a high-profile job opening? Is it bad form for IT managers to reach out to an executive search firm?

These were a few of the questions that were posed yesterday to three executive recruiters during a session at the 2008 CIO Executive Leadership Summit held in Stamford. The recruiters who fielded the questions were Rhona Kannon, a partner in the information technology practice at The Cambridge Group Ltd.; Beverly Lieberman, president of Halbrecht Lieberman Associates and Phil Schneidermeyer, a partner at Heidrick & Struggles.

Last year, when more than 7.3 million unique users visited the USOpen.org Web site managed by IBM during the 2007 U.S. Open, server virtualization was a critical component behind the vendor's ability to scale computing capacity as needed, said Rick Singer, director of worldwide sponsorship marketing for IBM.

For the 2008 tournament, which kicked off Aug. 25, IBM has continued its server consolidation efforts on behalf of its client, the United States Tennis Association. But this time, "green IT" has taken center court.

BI projects are frequently driven by the demands of executives who want to scour dashboards to analyze sales and other business trends. But at Boyne Resorts, the company's BI directive was marshaled by its CIO.

In 2007, Chris Downing, who was Boyne's IT chief at the time, asked Noah Meister, then an up-and-coming help desk support person, to take the lead on the company's BI effort. Downing wanted dashboards and various reports that executives in sales, marketing and other business units could sift through to get a better understanding of customer behavior.