Easy and not-so-obvious ways to improve people skills

Fall has fallen, and that sound you hear is the end of the year starting to whirr out of control. Stay on top of the latest blogerati posts with our handy little smorgasbord of IT-centric tidbits. We’ve got some insider scoop on a possible iPhone 5 release date and also loads of tips to improve people skills, as well as a discussion on whether it’s worth your time and money to chase down data reduction.

• Can you bank on your handshake? That’s one of 15 not-so-obvious tips that Kate Nasser lists to improve people skills and get ahead in an IT leadership role.

• Is corporate IT as we know it dead? The news that users are circumventing IT support when purchasing phones has Forrester analyst Matthew Brown defending the future of corporate IT.

• Is data reduction technology a wasted effort? Stephen Foskett takes a closer look at the ROI on data reduction technologies in the face of free compression and deduplication already present in many SSDs.

• Firms of all stripes wrestle with version management, but check out these practical tips for simplifying hardware and software registration.

• A little Zen for your work week: A fascinating look at how the stories heard time and again become the underpinning of our technological advancement, including a look at what Galileo has to do with the economy.

• A new key to the release of iPhone 5 and iOS 5 launch: Apple is forbidding its employees to take vacation during the second week of October. Could this really be it?

• If you think your job is tough, you don’t know the half of it. Survey respondents listed “director of information technology” as the most hated job of all time. Guess the survey respondents really worked with some CIOs who needed to improve people skills.