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What the enterprise can learn from consumer technologies Today’s corporate end-users are far more tech-savvy than their productivity with IT tools indicates. After all, screen-deep in IMs, widgets, and elaborate consumer Web apps, they’re proving themselves well-versed in the production and distribution of content as facilitated by the consumer Web 2.0 craze. Offshore attrition on the rise Offshoring -- especially for BPO (business process outsourcing) -- is about to hit a wall. After all, despite being a relatively new phenomenon made possible by advances in communications, it remains subject to one timeless principle of economics: supply and demand.  January 23, 3:00 a.m. PST Predicting user behavior still not an exact science A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the use of predictive analytics to determine which of Philadelphia’s parolees were likely to commit murder caught my attention. A broad definition of predictive analytics would be the process of matching statistics with historical data in order to predict future events, mainly human behavior. December 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Good ideas take time Two years ago, I publicly floated the concept that IT should start thinking more like entrepreneurs. What a disaster! I was speaking at a meeting of CTOs, and I mentioned that I’d heard of a few IT departments that were focusing, at least in part, on creating saleable new products and services for their companies. I asked the group what they thought of the idea. December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST IT by the book Can something that’s been kicking around for more than 15 years qualify as an overnight success? It certainly feels that way with ITIL, a collection of nine books that lays out a blueprint for IT service management. In the United States, at least, ITIL has recently catapulted itself from a respected, if somewhat obscure, treatise for governance geeks to a mainstream discipline. October 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT US government agencies look to efficiently convert old data The future of U.S. government IT systems will include a big focus on converting old data into electronic form, two government IT leaders said Friday. June 16, 12:06 p.m. PDT EMC banking billions on ILM EMC Corp. is investing US$1.2 billion this year to develop and acquire technologies geared to help businesses share, protect, manage and secure data, said Chief Executive Officer and President Joe Tucci in his keynote address at the EMC World conference in Boston Monday. April 24, 10:12 a.m. PDT Tech marketing budgets to rise this year IT vendors will spend an average of 7 percent more on marketing this year, indicating that more money is needed to drive revenue, according to a study released Wednesday by analyst group IDC. March 23, 7:50 a.m. PST Sage makes offer for Norwegian software company British software company Sage Group offered Wednesday to buy Visma, a business-management software vendor based in Oslo, for £334 million ($585 million). March 22, 7:04 a.m. PST SAP moves to create non-union workers' council SAP has taken steps to form a workers' council comprised of non-union employees in an effort to fend off what the German software vendor views as the harmful influence of unions on its "startup" company culture. March 15, 5:54 a.m. PST Bring business analysis to streaming events It’s no secret to IT people, or any business executive worth his Beemer, that an amazing wealth of actionable business intelligence is coursing through enterprise applications, databases, and even system logs nearly every moment of every day. The problem has not only been plucking the meaningful events from the unimportant ones but also finding the often seemingly unrelated patterns between them, and doing so before it’s too late to make a difference -- before the supplier raises the price, the shopper leaves the Web site, or the scammer transfers the funds. March 9, 3:00 a.m. PST Filling the void left by baby-boomer techies The big exodus is getting closer and closer. The baby boomers are about to retire in droves. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 50. In the next 10 years, 43 percent of the workforce will be eligible for retirement, while the next two generations are about 15 percent smaller. February 28, 3:00 a.m. PST IT's input on outsourcing Few words strike fear into the hearts of IT pros like "outsourcing" and its closely related foreign cousin, "offshoring." For many, the "O" words are simply euphemisms for layoffs, an all-too-common occurrence. Worse, the corporate appetite for outsourcing continues to grow. February 27, 3:00 a.m. PST ROI: Debating the value of metrics for IT management You’ve deployed the technology. Now it’s time to gauge the payoff. In many organizations, winning support for your initiatives from senior management means demonstrating the ROI of your IT expenditures. But is ROI a valid standard for proving the value of IT projects? February 16, 3:00 a.m. PST AMD's Ruiz to Congress: American ingenuity threatened The U.S. reputation for ingenuity faces a grave threat due to a lack of interest in engineering among students, and more needs to be done to boost the country's competitiveness, Hector Ruiz, the chairman and chief executive officer of chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, told the U.S. House of Representatives's Committee on Government Reform on Thursday. February 10, 4:01 a.m. PST EC head says IT initiative not working European Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said Tuesday the Lisbon Agenda -- Europe's plan to increase jobs and growth based on innovation and information technology -- failed to translate into European-wide policy making. January 31, 9:02 a.m. PST Tokyo Stock Exchange installs new clearing system The Tokyo Stock Exchange successfully installed a new stock trade clearing system over the weekend and saw no problems during the first day's trading, it said Monday. January 30, 4:08 a.m. PST Mapping IT meltdowns Every few months, I exchange e-mail with a contact of mine, a guy with a fairly high-level IT job in the government. Actually, I don't really exchange e-mail with him. Because he works for a particularly secretive branch of the government, he has never given me his e-mail address. So I send a note to his assistant, who eventually e-mails his boss's response back to me in government time -- somewhere between immediately and never. The reply e-mails are based, presumably, on whatever my .gov guy has told his assistant. Occasionally, though, the whole process feels like a high-tech version of the game "telephone," with exquisite opportunities for misunderstanding built right in. January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST U.S. Department of Justice blasts Microsoft on compliance The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and state attorneys general slammed Microsoft Corp. in court papers Monday for lagging behind in compliance with some stipulations of the government's antitrust agreement with the company. January 24, 11:50 a.m. PST Wall Street Beat: Earnings bring mixed results Earnings season blew in with a vengeance this week, with disappointing fourth-quarter results from industry bellwethers Intel Corp. and IBM Corp. offset by better-than-expected reports from other vendors. January 19, 4:20 p.m. PST Beating the competition If InfoWorld were seeking a mantra, we might just opt for “IT is the business,” a quote from Netflix’s Tom Dillon. Interviewed in this week’s cover story, “Why IT gives business a competitive edge”, the movie-rental company’s COO was asserting that IT should be integral to a business’s goals, not an afterthought or simply a support mechanism. The conclusion: When fully aligned -- even woven into -- core business strategy, IT can foster competitive advantage and drive market leadership. InfoWorld shares that belief deep in its bones. December 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Nick Carr takes the middle path In 2003, Nicholas G. Carr published his inflammatory Harvard Business Review article, "IT Doesn't Matter," in a shot heard 'round the IT world. Then, last year, he published a book: Does IT Matter? IT and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage. December 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Hardware isn't enough IT buyers live in a golden age of commodity hardware. Processors, servers, networks, storage, you name it: Every segment of the IT stack keeps getting faster, cheaper, and more commoditized. No surprise, then, that IT managers often resort to a checkbook-waving strategy, throwing hardware at every IT problem, from a balky WAN to an application speed bump. November 28, 3:00 a.m. PST No. 2: Speed up those queries You can create the niftiest application in the world, but if access to back-end database servers creates a bottleneck, your end-users or customers won’t be happy. So fine-tune those database queries and maximize performance. November 28, 3:00 a.m. PST Late BlackBerry launches dent RIM subscriber predictions Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM) has lowered its previous predictions on how many new BlackBerry subscribers it expects to sign up during both its current third fiscal quarter and the following fourth fiscal quarter. RIM blamed the likely drop-off in new subscribers on delayed launches of the latest BlackBerry handsets, according to a company release. November 23, 6:21 a.m. PST Metrics for IT success What percentage of IT projects fail? At our recent SOA Executive Forum in New York, an attendee asked a group of panelists to estimate their success rate on projects; specifically, he wanted to know how many of their IT initiatives had “failed on any level.” November 21, 3:00 a.m. PST Survey highlights age discrimination in IT Bill Gates is likely to get many birthday cards on Friday, probably from fans and critics alike. He'll also get one congratulating him on the "rare feat" of turning 50 while still being employed in the IT sector. October 28, 4:11 a.m. PDT Re-engineering life interruptions As Web services automate the work performed by millions of workers, where will these folks go next? Not to worry. People are the exception handlers in all automated workflows, and intelligence and judgment won’t be automated anytime soon. What does worry me, though, is how we’ll connect people and services. Managing that scarcest of resources, our attention, is a huge challenge. October 26, 3:00 a.m. PDT HP meets European staff over restructuring plan Hewlett-Packard is meeting representatives of its European employees in Brussels this Thursday and Friday to give them further details of the impact of its worldwide restructuring plan. September 8, 7:58 a.m. PDT Dirty words, take II My column "IT's Seven Dirty Words" -- a subjective list of terms that shouldn't be repeated in polite IT company -- generated piles of e-mail from readers who were quick to add a few choice words of their own. In the interest of sharing, let me reproduce a few of their suggestions. September 5, 4:00 a.m. PDT Yahoo enhances small business e-commerce service Yahoo Inc. is testing improvements to the checkout portion of its Yahoo Merchant Solutions hosted e-commerce service for small businesses. August 25, 12:31 p.m. PDT Decoding analyst-speak How many industry analysts does it take to change a light bulb? We’ll get back to you on that. But first, wouldn’t you like to purchase our Illumination Industry Survey, which predicts that yearly spending on light bulbs will reach $3.7 trillion by 2010? August 22, 4:00 a.m. PDT Farewell, CTO Connection If you haven’t checked out this week’s columns yet, let me be the one to break the bad news: Chad Dickerson is hanging up his InfoWorld CTO spurs and heading off to Yahoo, where he’ll be toiling away in the brave new world of search. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT CEOs are faking it, Stanford professor says Your company's chief executive might be a pretender, and that may be a good thing, according to Stanford University Professor of Management Science and Engineering Robert Sutton. July 22, 5:53 a.m. PDT SEC investigating IBM stock option accounting The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has launched an informal investigation into the way IBM reported stock options in its most recent financial statements, the Armonk, New York, company said Monday. June 27, 3:43 p.m. PDT Cognos unveils new performance management system At its Cognos Forum gathering this week in Orlando, business software maker Cognos will talk about the steps it is taking to help customers better use its reporting and analysis applications -- a change that will focus on improving the processes around those applications, rather than the technology itself. June 27, 3:23 p.m. PDT What's really driving BPM Among the many great quotes in David Margulius’ BPM in the trenches is one from Mike Barnett, who describes the rise of BPM as “a near revolution of management against IT to get more control over the rules that control the enterprise.” June 27, 5:00 a.m. PDT IBM lands $1.6B services contract with NiSource Energy supplier NiSource said Tuesday it has signed a 10-year agreement with IBM to outsource a number of IT support functions, a deal IBM estimated will be worth $1.6 billion in service fees over the life of the contract. June 21, 8:24 a.m. PDT IBM goes the distance with Marathon When Houston-based Marathon Oil, the fourth-largest integrated oil and gas company in the United States, started looking for ways to become more efficient and cost-effective in the spring of 2003, it turned to BPO (business-process outsourcing). According to Cal Leeke, Marathon’s finance and accounting governance manager, given the far-flung and cyclical nature of the company’s operations across the globe, it made sense to shed some “repetitive and routine activities” that a vendor could do better. May 9, 5:00 a.m. PDT Product previews webMethodsSews New Fabric webMethods last week unzipped version 6.5 of its Fabric integration suite. New to Fabric are functions that advance the company’s BAM (business activity monitoring), BPM, and SOA wares. The new version includes rapid assembly of applications and processes, and an “analyst mode” that enables users to design business processes. Predictive monitoring improvements enable exceptions to be anticipated by comparing current activity to historical patterns. The new interface, My webMethods, presents metrics according to user role, which the company claims will boost productivity by making it easier for users to find information. webMethods also enhanced its Web services management, broker capabilities, and predictive quality of service monitoring to improve the SOA framework and help customers take advantage of Web services on a large scale. Fabric 6.5, webMethods April 25, 5:00 a.m. PDT An irresistible supply-chain story Want to hear what could be one of the best supply-chain success stories ever? Take the $4 billion commercial and consumer equipment division of a $20 billion company, reduce inventory by $500 million, and as sales grow, keep inventory constant -- thus avoiding an additional $500 million in inventory. This is what John Deere did starting in 2002, with the help of supply-chain optimization software vendor SmartOps. April 19, 5:00 a.m. PDT Gartner: Strategic IT spending can boost midsize firms IT staff at midsize companies can improve the profile and credibility of their departments by better aligning technology spending with business needs, Gartner said Wednesday. April 6, 8:46 a.m. PDT The IT generalist makes a comeback I’ve been seeing the title “IT generalist” coming back into use. It’s a welcome sight. I recall the generalist from the days when minicomputers and mainframes were being traded for less costly Unix microcomputers. Back then, the generalist was the one who had a functional understanding of the entire technical operation and many of the processes that depended on it. If you had a generalist, by any title, you may have him or her to thank for easing the transition from legacy to modernity. March 30, 6:00 a.m. PST Chart your Web site's success In the late 1990s, Web analytics packages did a respectable job crunching server logs and uncovering broad Web site trends such as page views or user clickstream behavior. Today the focus has shifted to business reporting -- pinpointing the effectiveness of promotional campaigns, measuring ROI, and analyzing processes -- and to delivering those facts to content owners in a clear manner so that the appropriate corrective measures can be put into motion. February 18, 3:00 p.m. PST Statistics wrapped in a red dress February is Heart Month, a time set aside for focused public education campaigns about life expectancies, calorie intakes, and good fatty foods and bad ones. Unfortunately, the month-long statistical assault, which is meant to educate and motivate, turns out to be numbing. February 18, 3:00 p.m. PST CA CEO-to-be begins revamp Incoming Computer Associates International (CA) Chief Executive Officer John Swainson made his first executive changes at the company last week by shuffling two of its top executives. Swainson placed company veteran Russell Artzt in charge of CA's product portfolio and moved CA's previous top products executive, Mark Barrenechea, to the newly created position of executive vice president of technology strategy and chief technology architect. January 24, 8:28 a.m. PST IT and business align around rules and patterns Aligning technology and business — what a concept. Everyone is talking about it, but to put things in perspective, I imagine the day after the wheel was invented the wife of the inventor got sick and tired of watching her husband roll it down the hill all day. She probably said, “Cyxny, honey, why don’t you make another one and put them on the cart?” November 12, 3:00 p.m. PST Nationwide drinks the ITIL Kool-Aid As one of the early U.S. adopters of the ITIL best practices framework, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company learned some key lessons on how to get the most out of ITIL. We talked with two Nationwide executives to get their perspective on how to approach deploying the ITIL framework across a large organization. September 24, 3:00 p.m. PDT Taking a page from ITIL's best practices In the 1970s, when the American auto industry found itself under attack by leaner, hungrier Japanese competitors, it fought back by adopting some of the very production processes the Japanese had pioneered. Using techniques such as statistical process control, quality circles, just-in-time inventory management, total quality management, lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma, the industry focused on improving how its people worked and how its processes operated. For example, workers were encouraged to stop the assembly line when anything went wrong so the process could be fixed permanently, rather than simply scrapping rejects at the end of the line. September 24, 3:00 p.m. PDT Microsoft aims to save $1B this fiscal year Microsoft Corp. customers have heard the vendor profess that its software allows them to "do more with less," but now it's Microsoft employees' turn: The company is cutting back on benefits. July 7, 4:12 a.m. PDT TimesTen touts transaction processing TimesTen on Monday will release Version 5.1 of its data management and transaction processing system, focusing on the “real-time enterprise.” June 14, 5:05 a.m. PDT Smart IT budgeting At Infoworld, it’s that time of year again, when fear and loathing haunt the hearts of CTOs: budget season. Along with the usual grinding pressure to do more with less, CTOs are confronted like never before with a surge of books and articles in the business press challenging the value of IT. After riling up the IT world a year ago with his infamous “IT Doesn’t Matter” article in the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr is back with a book-length version of the very same argument ingeniously rephrased as a question: Does IT Matter? (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). May 28, 3:00 p.m. PDT Maximizing business intelligence I like to take fuzzy-buzzy terms such as business intelligence and nail them down. BI is not just a smarter, faster way to extract statistics from databases and warehouses. It’s a grab for that brass ring of business computing: solutions that don’t just tell you what your data is, but also what it means. To take this beyond marketing speak, we must establish what “means” means. May 7, 3:00 p.m. PDT Innovate, or take a walk The theme for Ahead of the Curve this year is individual innovation, and I didn’t choose that theme at random. The IT economy is marginalizing and will permanently shed those who don’t bring creativity, curiosity, and invention to their jobs. April 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Business > Data management |
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