IT Skills in a Tough Job Market
IT professionals know they must keep their skills up to date. But doing so requires knowing what skills are in demand.
Charles R. Litecky
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Competitor Analysis and its Defenses in the E-Marketplace
A firm's presence on the Internet opens a valuable channel for its competitors to collect and analyze its business information---to the firm's competitive disadvantage---unless it devises a defensive strategy.
The external auditor’s review of computer controls
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, coupled with growing demands for corporate accountability, have forced both auditors and computer administrators to evaluate computer based controls. Computer administrators can benefit from both a knowledge of an auditor's approaches to evaluating controls and his/her recommendations for control improvements. Here, a survey of the control evaluation practices and desirable control features identified by computer auditors is presented, along with recommendations to ease the burden of the auditor's review. The authors' suggestions should ease the tasks of internal control analysis and of preparation for possible public reports on an organization's system of internal control.
A study of errors, error-proneness, and error diagnosis in Cobol
This paper provides data on Cobol error frequency for correction of errors in student-oriented compilers, improvement of teaching, and changes in programming language. Cobol was studied because of economic importance, widespread usage, possible error-inducing design, and lack of research. The types of errors were identified in a pilot study; then, using the 132 error types found, 1,777 errors were classified in 1,400 runs of 73 Cobol students. Error density was high: 20 percent of the types contained 80 percent of the total frequency, which implies high potential effectiveness for software-based correction of Cobol. Surprisingly, only four high-frequency errors were error-prone, which implies minimal error inducing design. 80 percent of Cobol misspellings were classifiable in the four error categories of previous researchers, which implies that Cobol misspellings are correctable by existent algorithms. Reserved word usage was not error-prone, which implies minimal interference with usage of reserved words. Over 80 percent of error diagnosis was found to be inaccurate. Such feedback is not optimal for users, particularly for the learning user of Cobol.
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