End of Week 12 Reflection

With the Thanksgiving break coming up we reviewed the EASy Security Project and did not really go over anything new this week. My team seems to be on track with the project as our formatting has become a little more universal and navigation has become much easier compared to previously. We updated all the sections to determine where our security incident faulted according to the CoBiT document. Feedback has now been received and we are going through the revision period to fix anything that was deemed unsatisfactory. All in all the project is going well and it is interesting looking at these incidents and trying to come up with resolutions based on specific sections of where they failed. I look forward to hearing about every other groups security incidents and seeing what their resolutions entail.

End of Week 11 Reflection

This week the big idea discussions focused solely on the Enron incident. It is interesting to think of the thought that some of the people posting about Enron and keeping the work environment safe and free of corruption may actually partake in an activity some day in the work place that is considered unethical. Most, if not all, of the working class have had to deal with unethical situations and many participate in these. Some unknowingly and others know what they are doing and do not mind the feeling of guilt. It will be an important part of my job some day when I am part of management of a company to be sure that my employees are ethical and try to keep these unethical situations to a minimum. It will be a tough part of my job as some unethical situations are unavoidable and hard to decide on. In my classes at Stout we have gone over many unethical situations that really put managers in a tough spot, but I feel I would make the best decision possible and stick to my actions. I will consult people for their help and in the end make the decision based on what I feel is best for all the parties involved. It really does excite me to be put in these positions and make the important decisions to allow for a productive and ethical workplace.

End of Week 10 Reflection

Well this week is again pretty repetitive based on the readings and webcast. Backing up documents and having servers that are not centralized were the main points this week. Many different topics were talked about on the discussion boards and I guess my favorite point brought up is having multiple prompts that come up when doing administrative work to be sure you are doing what you want to do. This was brought up by Alec and I hope many companies enforce this sort of practice in the workplace to prevent major disasters happening by the users themselves. We also met to discuss our project plan with Evan to make sure we are on the right track. This was important for our group and we were able to show Evan our plan and get his okay on our thoughts of dividing up the project. We decided we would have our parts done by Wednesday and then will spend the next couple of days updating the format on the wiki to represent a more professional project. It should be a successful project as our group has worked well together in the past.

End of Week 9 Reflection

This week for the big idea it really seemed to be a repeat of a previous week where the focus was on security in the workplace and surviving a disaster. This week however they went more in depth and explained the importance of backing up data at a different site other than the centralized site where everything important is stored. The main reason for this is based on natural disasters. If they occur at the main site then everything is gone whereas if you had it backed up elsewhere in a different location, that location would remain intact. People gave some experiences with their jobs that had great security in backing up their documents and others gave some not so good experiences where their company may not have realized the importance of having documents backed up at multiple locations and some undesirable situations arose. We also reviewed the CoBiT objectives once again to be sure we understood the concepts and I think it is engraved in our heads pretty good now. It'll be interesting to go through each objective based on the security project we are doing and relating them to an actual disaster that happened.

End of Week 8 Reflection

It was a pretty quiet week this week as we mostly just reviewed the CoBiT objectives with group presentations. It is nice to see all the individuals becoming more comfortable giving these presentations and seeing the presentations get more and more professional each time. I think everyone was comfortable with the information they were presenting this week which made it easier. My group has yet to give our presentation, but I am feeling confident with the material I am presenting because we have reviewed these objectives a couple times now and I am comfortable with it. The reading also dealt with controlling IT operations. It sort of coincides well with CoBiT as they both deal with controlling operations and making sure that problems are solved for future occurrences. I think a great example of the negative possibilities that can occur if problems are not resolved is one that I have in my upcoming presentation. If one employee has a problem and it causes him to lose 6 hours of productivity, that 6 hours is not going to affect the company that much. But if more employees have the same problem that 6 hours multiplies quickly. Also, if the way the problem is resolved is not documented well then if others experience this same problem then employees would have to spend more man hours trying to solve the same exact situation and may not even be able to solve it. All these hours add up quickly and really waste a lot of valuable time. Having a good process of documenting the problems and their resolutions really save a huge amount of time and is fairly simple to implement.