Perhaps it is old habits dying hard, but there is still a part of my brain that approaches August thinking: “Ah, good. It will be a little quieter for a month, I can catch up on all those things I never had time to do before.”

What happened? Talk to anyone across the industry and the answer is the same ­ it’s busy, busy, busy. If you have time for a holiday, you’re not working hard enough.

For those who manage to get away from it all, research by Credant Technologies last month suggested that 83 per cent of City IT workers expect to take their mobile phone or BlackBerry with them on holiday. Some 65 per cent plan to contact the office from the beach.

And according to the Chartered Management Institute, one in three IT executives will not use their full holiday entitlement this year. Some 17 per cent of IT managers say they use their annual leave to develop skills to make them recession-proof, 51 per cent do not want to let down colleagues and 33 per cent are too focused on “meeting project deadlines”.

Is it just the credit crunch concentrating people’s minds on the precariousness of their jobs, or is it the result of years of gradual downsizing and outsourcing reducing IT departments to the absolute minimum number needed to still provide a service?

It is difficult to come up with a definitive answer, but these sorts of trends will be high on most people’s list.

Just look at the news so far in August. There’s Cern, the nuclear research lab in Geneva, switching on the world’s biggest particle accelerator and so putting into practice the largest IT grid in existence to capture all the data. There are rumours of Fujitsu and Siemens parting ways in their joint-venture partnership. The NHS has appointed two new IT chiefs, not to mention the Beijing Olympics and all the technology needed to support the 2008 Games. No doubt Oracle will buy somebody soon, just to keep us all further on our toes. It never stops in IT these days.

So is there any great revelatory conclusion we can draw from the lack of a summer in IT? Only that technology is so fundamental now to every aspect of work and life that the industry can simply never switch off, and that is a situation that will only get worse ­ or better, depending on your point of view ­ in future.

Enjoy the summer ­ wherever you may be spending it.

Private Eye brought us an insight into the world of Google-chasing last week.

The satirical magazine and media-baiter revealed the “secrets of the Telegraph’s online success” after the newspaper claimed to have became the most-read daily paper on the web.

To quote from the Private Eye story: “News hacks [at the Daily Telegraph] are now sent a memo three or four times a day from the web site boffins listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those key words into the first paragraph of their story. Hence, if the top stories being Googled are ‘Britney Spears’ and ‘breast cancer’, hey presto, the hack is duly expected to file a piece about young women ‘such as Britney Spears’ being at risk from breast cancer.”

This sort of behaviour – relentlessly and shamelessly chasing the maximum number of hits from Google searches or Google News – is one of the unspoken facets of the internet news age.

From an editor’s point of view, one of the great things about the web is that you can track precisely what stories are being read and which are not. It is valuable information to understand the topics that matter to our audience – but some web sites take it to the sort of extreme described above.

In the IT world, if Computing were to publish more stories featuring Linux, Apple, open source product names, Microsoft product names, virus names, music downloads, iTunes or iPods – among others – it would comfortably provide a boost to our page impressions. The fact that we don’t reflects our desire to serve the needs of our target audience –senior IT decision-makers in the UK, whose interests lie in best practice technology implementations, case studies, market intelligence, skills and careers issues, leadership, management and how technology relates to the key business issues of the day.

If we really went hell-for-leather for hits, we could work in the occasional mention of Britney Spears or UFOs or Kate Moss. I’m sure Britney and Kate own a PC, so there’s bound to be an IT angle. In fact, I bet they own a trendy Mac, so double those hits.

The internet has been great for journalism – and more importantly for readers – but a future of Google-chasing strategies benefits nobody.

Readers would end up with the same old re-hashed stories about the same old topics, with little differentiation or editorial agenda to make them interesting beyond the basic facts. Worse, you would lose the diversity of topics needed to inform, entertain and educate.

For journalists, Google-chasing is the antithesis of good investigative reporting. If a specialist web site breaks a fantastic, exclusive, authoritative, ground-breaking story, Google will largely ignore it because its news selection algorithm assumes that the more web sites are featuring a particular story, the more important it must be. If one site breaks a great exclusive that does not go into the mainstream, it will barely be read. Chasing hits means chasing the stories that rank highest on Google, not necessarily the stories that matter.

And for advertisers – without whom, of course, there would not be the multitude of news sites available on the web – they lose the ability to target potential customers that comes from the in-depth understanding of a particular audience and their unique needs and interests.

If you want to read about reality TV stars and minor celebrities everywhere, the Google-chasing future will be for you. If you prefer bold to bland, diversity to conformity, special interests to special offers, then I hope your needs will be met too.

On the walk from Oxford Circus tube station to the Computing office in London’s Soho, there is a Carphone Warehouse shop. It is normally unremarkable – except today at 9am there was a queue of (mainly male) people outside, apparently eager to be the first to buy the new 3G iPhone, out today.

Well, you might have thought, there’s a popular product. The last times there were queues in Oxford Street were for the opening of a new Primark store and the latest Harry Potter book.

But in this case, there also happened to be a camera crew set up outside the phone shop to film the queue. And another camera crew inside, no doubt waiting to film the “rush” of punters to get their hands on an iPhone.

Hmm. In-demand, or very carefully stage managed? I think the latter.

Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse have done a great PR job on the new phone – creating the illusion of massive demand regardless of how many units they will ship.

Newspaper stories this morning claimed that supply was limited to one iPhone per customer, or two per business. Given the big bucks Apple is chasing by establishing the product as an genuine corporate alternative to the BlackBerry, this is hardly likely to be the case.

Imagine the conversation: “Hi Apple, I’m the IT manager at [insert global multinational company]. I’d like to buy 10,000 iPhones please.”

“Sorry Mr Global Multinational. You can only have two.”

Yeah, right.

It’s become classic consumer electronics marketing – create a buzz around a product by making people think everyone is desperate to own one.

In the case of the new iPhone, it probably needs the buzz. After all, the great new features of the second-generation product include 3G connectivity for faster web surfing – already available in, erm, every other product on the market. And an online store of 900 ready-to-download consumer and business applications to help make your smartphone more functional.

Or you could buy a Symbian-based phone and download any of the 9,000-plus applications already developed for that platform.

Oh, and the iPhone costs a bomb.

Perhaps I’ve been in this game too long and the cynicism has set in after seeing too many product launches, but if anything is more likely to turn me off the iPhone – already the most over-hyped technology product in history – it’s the stage-managed artifice surrounding a me-too, catch-up phone.

The Tories have decided that e-crime is another weak spot in the Labour government’s policies that is ripe for prodding.

Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire told delegates at a McAfee security briefing in London this week that the government’s inaction leaves the country vulnerable to cyber terrorism.

"If you accept cyber criminality you heighten the risk of cyber terrorism,” he said.

Fair point. Can’t argue with that. But the response of the 100 or so IT security chiefs in the audience didn’t exactly display confidence in a Tory alternative.

“He looked about 12,” said one delegate about the youthful MP.

“I’d like to ask him, where has he actually worked?”

And of course, that is the best thing about being in Opposition – it’s easy to say what you want to do, when you don’t have the opportunity to do it.

My perception of the mood of the delegates was that the views and actions of politicians will have little influence on their plans. After all, despite lots of good words, government has hardly rallied to back the IT security profession in the challenges it faces.

First, the well-respected National Hi-Tech Crime Unit disappeared. The Information Commissioner is still largely toothless in his ability to enforce the Data Protection Act. And the decision last year to switch e-crime reporting from the police to banks sent out all the wrong messages.

As Brokenshire pointed out in one of the moments he did connect with the audience – salmon poaching is officially considered a graver offence than cyber crime.

If I walked up to you today and stole £10 from your pocket, I’d be in trouble with the police.

But if I managed to hack £100 from your online banking account, I would just be another statistic in a summary report from your bank.

There is little to suggest that the situation will change soon. The Metropolitan Police spent months trying to convince the Home Office to provide a meagre few million pounds of funding for a new central e-fraud reporting unit.

E-crime is simply not taken seriously by politicians – or at least by those with the power to do anything about it.

As IT professionals, you may not be aware of the hard work being done on your behalf by market researchers.

Here at Computing, we daily receive press releases containing the latest research into IT workers preferences / habits / spending plans / attitudes / opinion / any other often lame way to try to get coverage in the paper. So we are uniquely positioned to draw all these often-spurious trends together to gain a picture of our readers.

Well, you’d have thought so, anyway.

If you were to rely on the pollsters opinions of the IT profession you could end up with the most dysfunctional and disturbing perceptions imaginable.

Here is the latest example, which comes courtesy of the government-backed training organisation Learndirect.

According to its “hidden skills” survey, 51 per cent of IT professionals have “untapped potential” that their employers fail to take advantage of.

Quite probably true. But let’s see what the pollsters say.

Apparently, IT workers choice of superhero boss would be Bruce Wayne, alter-ego of traumatised crime-fighter Batman. Least favourite supervillain boss would be bat-nemesis The Joker.

Are you already wondering why they bothered?

My favourite part of the research identifies the hidden skills gained through activities out of work.

It seems 29 per cent of you have writing skills – proved by the fact that you do crosswords or have written letters to a local paper.

Next, 24 per cent of you have numeracy skills – which the pollsters know because you are good at Sudoku.

And 22 per cent of you have presentation skills – gleaned from giving a best man’s speech.

I don’t know about you, but I’m wondering what abilities the 71 per cent without writing skills have, or the 76 per cent without numeracy skills. Now that would be interesting research.

And apparently you are a modest bunch too. When asked who you would turn to if you wanted to discuss you hidden skills, 17 per cent said you wouldn’t tell anyone.

If any of you – and I mean even one of you – happen to recognise yourself or your colleagues from this clearly valuable and insightful research, please let me know by commenting on this blog post. Unless of course you are part of the illiterate 71 per cent who might struggle to string a few words together (perhaps you should try a crossword instead?)

Just to round off the in-depth research, it seems 37 per cent of you wish you had the power of mind reading to use at work, followed by 24 per cent who would choose invisibility as your superpower.

Personally, I’d choose an inbuilt personal spam filter for pointless and demeaning surveys.

Why is the IT industry still so incapable of realising that the negative perceptions that surround it are largely caused by its unceasing use of jargon and rubbish buzzwords?

I realise this is hardly a new topic. There has been plenty of navel-gazing in the past on this recurring theme, but I’m inspired to write about it again thanks to Atos Origin.

The IT services provider has produced a pretty good study of the key trends affecting business and IT over the next few years. It’s called Look Out 2008+, and you can find out more about it here: http://lookout.atosconsulting.com/introduction/welcome-look-out-2008 - it’s well researched and worth a read.

But the stand-out for me was on one of the opening pages of the printed version, where the headline proudly states:

“Why is Look Out different? …because it removes the hype and gives a pragmatic view of the art of the possible.”

No hype – but “the art of the possible” ?

In other words – “We won’t use buzzwords, and to prove it, here’s a naff buzzphrase.”

This sort of jargoneering has always annoyed me no end, as it does so many people in the IT community who find themselves labelled as geeks because whenever those outside the industry read anything about what we do, it is full of all this meaningless drivel.

Sometimes it’s fine, and sometimes IT jargon becomes part of everyday language – the internet, the web, broadband, for example – but mostly it harms the image of the industry.

Is it any wonder the tech sector is struggling to attract new people to help tackle skills shortages if the first thing potential candidates read about working in IT is full of jargon and buzzwords? How is that a way to make this seem like an exciting place to work?

I wish I knew the answer – the IT industry can hardly say it has not been told remorselessly that this is a problem, yet still it cannot do anything to change.

Cutting the hype? The art of the impossible, perhaps.

I had an unusual professional experience this week – one that most people who work in IT would recognise in the same circumstances – that of being the only male in a conference room full of about 250 women.

Most technology conferences I attend are hugely male-dominated – a typical but sad reflection of the fact that just 16 per cent of the one million IT professionals in the UK are women, a figure that has been reached after the numbers dropped every year since the turn of the century.

Women in IT is one of those old technology industry perennials that is regularly discussed and investigated – yet for all the effort and initiatives to turn the situation round, still women leave the industry in droves.

My 250-to-one moment came at the Women’s Leadership Summit, a cross-industry event dedicated to showcasing the best in female business leaders from every sector of the UK. I chaired a panel debate looking at the IT industry and discussing the opportunities it presents for all potential workers – but with a particular focus on women.

I was accompanied on stage by six senior female leaders from six of the most influential consumer and business technology companies in the world – BlackBerry-maker RIM, Google, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco and Canon. Their skills and experience encompassed the full range of roles, from management to sales to engineering.

RIM’s European managing director, Charmaine Eggberry, talked about how the rapid growth of the company means it expands its workforce by 20 per cent every three months. RIM could hardly have more female-friendly employment policies – yet Eggberry still struggles to attract women even to apply for jobs. “But I have no problems recruiting men,” she said.

The concensus of opinion was that the biggest barrier to attracting women into IT is the image of the industry – a chicken-and-egg situation whereby the profession is seen as geeky, dull and male-dominated, and as a result it cannot attract a diverse workforce so remains seen as geeky, dull and male-dominated. Yet the senior speakers at this event were anything but – every one an excellent role model for the sort of career that IT can provide to anybody, regardless of gender or age.

I could debate endlessly the subject of women in IT and the reasons we have to reverse the trend, but what I took from the summit was more than simply this ongoing issue.

There was a noticeably different feel to this event, a different atmosphere to the usual male-dominated IT conferences – more open, more collaborative, more relaxed, more positive, and I would even say more inspirational and aspirational.

I walked out of the event smiling – which I suppose could be attributed to being the only bloke in a room full of successful and in some cases fairly wealthy women – but I can’t honestly say I felt the same way walking out of the keynote speech at the SAP conference last month. We simply cannot ignore the positive effect that a more balanced workforce would have on IT.

You would be amazed at the misogyny displayed in some of the letters Computing receives when we write about women in IT – a minority of course, but one the profession could do without.

Computing reporter Janie Davies has been researching the subject for an article in next week’s issue of Computing – I won’t steal her thunder but some of the tales of sexism she has been told are gobsmackingly bad; an embarrassment to every other man in IT.

Technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and the UK IT profession simply has to reflect the diversity of the people that use its products and services – or it will wither. We need 140,000 new entrants into the industry every year for the next five years – and that means significantly more than 16 per cent of those need to be female or the jobs will not be filled and the work will go overseas.

There is no shortage of initiatives to promote women in IT and to encourage women into IT. But there remains a shortage of women who want to work in IT. There is no overnight solution, but a solution must be found.

As SAP’s latest user conference draws to a close, what should the software giant’s customers and prospects expect over the coming months?

The event was fairly news-lite, with no big announcements from the supplier that would really shake up the market. But it was clear that there are certain messages that your friendly SAP sales rep will be pushing to IT leaders the next time he or she comes to call.

At a strategic level, the phrases you will hear most frequently this year are collaboration, “business networks” and “strategic agility”. The latter, in particular, strikes me as a classic IT marketing buzzword that means very little in the real world of running an IT department. But overall, SAP is predicting that its customers will need to become more flexible, more open, and more connected with their supply chains from customers to staff to suppliers.

The biggest SAP users – the likes of Nokia, Colgate-Palmolive, Rolls-Royce or Kraft Foods – who presented at the conference exist in a global environment with many outsourced functions and a potential for complexity that would cripple a business that does not adequately support critical processes with technology. They rely on close co-operation with suppliers and fast response to customers. They have all adopted the principle of ruthless standardisation for their IT.

For the many thousands of companies that are not operating on such a huge scale, the concepts of flexibility and collaboration will still be recognisable – if a little scary. Opening up the organisation, becoming connected to external partners, and sharing internal information do not come naturally or easily to many companies – but they will be key characteristics of successful businesses in the internet age.

At a technology level, SAP is going for a big push on its latest customer relationship management (CRM) release, SAP CRM 2007.

Insiders at the supplier privately acknowledge that SAP’s previous CRM offering was maybe not as good is it could have been, but with the new product the firm hopes to better compete with Oracle / Siebel, as well as mid-market alternatives such as Microsoft. There seems to be a big internal push on making 2008 a successful year for CRM 2007 – so expect the sales rep to come knocking soon.

This was my fourth Sapphire, but my first for a few years. Overall, I would say this is one of the better IT vendor conferences – purely because SAP is very good at getting high-profile customers to speak about what they are doing and to share their experiences with their peers. Of course, if you want to delve into products and technologies, there’s every opportunity, but as an occasion to learn from IT leaders at some of the world’s top companies, it is a worthwhile way for any IT professional to spend a couple of days.

Oh, and Berlin has some pretty good bars too… 

Yet again the theme of ruthless standardisation has come through strongly in interviewing some of SAP's biggest customers here at Sapphire.

Kraft Foods is one of the very biggest – 12,000 users in Europe, 30,000 more in North America by 2010, Asia Pacific to follow later, and with the software in use since 2001.

Kraft used to have disparate systems in every country in Europe, but was very much an early mover in adopting a single, standard, unmodified version of SAP across the continent.

One of the great benefits of this was realised in October last year. The firm wanted to upgrade to the latest release of SAP to take advantage of new functionality. For most companies, the prospect of a major version upgrade to 12,000 users in many countries would make them shudder. The cost and complexity of such a project is what has historically kept too many organisation stuck on older versions of applications, with a system update taking on all the characteristics of a total re-implementation.

But for Kraft, the decision to standardise paid off – the entire upgraded system was built remotely, offsite, and implemented in just three months.

To add to the achievement, the food giant also chose to change its whole IT infrastructure at the same time – and completed that in the same three month period, working with outsourcer EDS and key supplier IBM.

Kraft senior director, SAP competency centres, Jan Ziskasen, is so laid back now about his standard implementation blueprint for SAP that he was able to be in Berlin this week despite a major part of the US project about to go live this weekend.

How many IT directors would be confident enough in an impending deadline to be happily thousands of miles away on another continent?

Computing is attending SAP's Sapphire conference to meet and talk to the software giant's customers. We are, as always, far more interested in the real-life business experience of IT leaders - our readers - than the detail of the technology itself.

But for once, I found myself genuinely impressed by a product demonstration today.

SAP has worked with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion to integrate its business applications with the BlackBerry user interface and have created a truly seamless connection between the two.

The demo featured the RIM executive who was presenting going into his BlackBerry calendar, finding a meeting with a customer, then at the click of a button bringing up that customer's history from RIM's corporate SAP software.

It is the first time I have seen a real business-focused innovation in the mobile technology world for some time, and an example of the way that business executives will be using their mobile computers - be they BlackBerrys, phones or smartphones - to really keep up with the organisation away from the office.

Email and calendars are the easy and obvious tools for flexible working, but there has been much less progress made by IT vendors in making the mobile properly a part of the core business applications that actually run the company.

SAP and BlackBerry are onto a winning combination - and an example of what will one day be the norm for business.