Values

Nortec has our company values: Excellence, Integrity, Responsiveness, Follow-up, and Flexibility. These values are guiding principles for success as an Information Technology consulting company and generally good personal values as well. Company values are important and should align with individual values. Chances are individual values will be prioritized differently and should not be compromised.

Knowing your vales is the first step in living by them. Since values change and are influenced by parents, peers, friends, media and such they may change over time. They should be periodically reflected on. It is hard to align yourself around your values if you do not take the time to reflect on what they ought to be. Since we are approaching the end of the year it is a great time to reflect on our values. What is important? What should our goals be for 2011?

What are your values is an interesting question. If you say “I value a healthy lifestyle” but live an unhealthy life style does this mean you really do not value a healthy life style? Do actions speak louder than words? I believe this is an example of misalignment with values and action. I believe this is what creates a lack of integrity within oneself and causes stress and unhappiness.

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!”

Polonius’ last piece of advice to his son Laertes in Hamlet by William Shaekspere

Sometimes we do not really think enough about what are values are and what is important so this makes it difficult to live by our values and results in misalignment without understanding why. The other challenge to living up to what we value is that sometimes it is hard and takes more discipline then we actually have. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to live a healthy life style sometimes. You also have to define what living a healthy life style means for you.

Be clear in your values and what you want in life and then aggressively pursue the activities that will drive those results.

Enrique Salem, CEO Symantec Presentation at Partner Conference

Last week I attended the Symantec Partner Conference. Enrique Salem, Symantec CEO outlined the trends he sees in the IT Industry. He gave a similar presentation last year so I thought I would compare! Here are the five trends he outlined in 2009:

1. Virtualization
2. “We are under attack” – Businesses are under attack by criminals trying to gain financially through hacking into corporate information
3. “Consumerization of IT” – Consumers adopt and implement new technologies before businesses
4. Storage is growing extremely rapidly: A) 51% businesses plan to spend more on storage next year B) 33% businesses plan to spend the same on storage next year C) 16% businesses plan to spend Less on storage next year
5. Executives are targeted with IT attacks

This year Enrique Salem outlined the first five consolidating 2 and 5 as “Threat to Landscape” and added 4 more trends:

5. IT – ification
6. Mobility
7. Cloud
8. Social

IT – ification being that everything we do is becoming integrated with information technology. I suppose this explains the consumerization of technology….

Enrique Salem continued his presentation by painting a picture of the future with these four concepts:

1. Everything revolves around people and information
2. Business and personal merge
3. Simple and secure access to information is expected
4. The enterprise is more scalable and cost efficient

These trends do appear accurate. Nortec is engaged in most of these areas in some form or another. We saw the wave of cloud computing a few years ago and have been very active in our cloud offering, Nortec 24/7 since 2006.