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Alignment, staffing and culture are often more critical than software and apps

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Ann All

June 2009

June 30, 2009

AP Latest to Wrestle with Social Media Guidelines

In May I wrote about the social media guidelines that Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones issued to its employees, making the point that they were about control rather than collaboration. I agreed... More >

June 29, 2009

Software Vendors Hedging Their SaaS Bets?

Earlier this month I shared what I thought was an interesting sentiment from the founder of a company that sold a software-as-a-service business intelligence application that SaaS vendors needed to ... More >

IT Should Lead, Not Follow, on Process

About a month ago, I wrote a post in which I tried to convey some of the long-running angst about the role IT can and should play at most companies, especially the responsibilities of the CIO. In the... More >

June 26, 2009

Did Lack of Fees Contribute to LucidEra's Collapse?

When IT Business Edge reported Oracle's latest earnings , which were down but nonetheless beat Wall Street's expectations, it cited a San Jose Mercury News story that said, essentially, that Oracl... More >

Most Companies Can't Afford to Be as Secretive as Apple

People often mention Apple in the same breath as Google. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, is famously an Apple board member, which recently attracted the unwanted attention of the Federal Trade Commissio... More >

Catty Thoughts on Job Recruitment via Second Life

Like many folks, I find it tough to focus on work on Fridays. It's an even bigger challenge than usual today, thanks to the Goverment Technology story sent to me in response to a call for sources f... More >

June 24, 2009

Twitter Is Like That Hot Guy/Girl You Let Get Away

It's not you, Twitter. It's me. Or maybe it is you, at least a little.   I've been on Twitter for several months now and still haven't warmed to it. For me, it's like dating a handsome, smart gu... More >

June 23, 2009

Tech Market Quakes After World Bank Report

Any tenous investor confidence in technology stocks took a dive yesterday, as the World Bank said it expected the global economy to shrink 2.9 percent this year, an increase over the 1.7 percent co... More >

Can Insourcing Help Companies Roll with Business Changes?

The troubled economy is leading lots of companies to reassess their business and conclude they need to make changes to survive. This self-examination trend may not be a good thing for offshore servic... More >

June 22, 2009

Vineet Nayar on 'Unemployable' Americans: Even Smart People Say Dumb Things

By most accounts, Vineet Nayar sounds like a very smart man.   In a recent interview with BusinessWeek , for example, the CEO of HCL Technologies speaks of the importance of helping the outso... More >

June 19, 2009

Five More Tips on Trimming IT Waste

Yesterday I wrote a post about eliminating waste in IT operations, noting that while cutting fat should always be something IT shops aspire to do, it becomes an imperative in budget-constrained times... More >

June 18, 2009

Want to Improve IT's Rep? Try Reducing Waste

Next to keeping their jobs , one of the things that most IT folks want to do is save their employers money. And yes, maybe the latter can help with the former. When companies are forced to eliminate... More >

June 16, 2009

Opera Puts Browser at Center of Collaboration

Cloud-based collaboration tools are becoming downright common. Yesterday I wrote about Adobe.com , a just-out-of-beta offering from Adobe, which joins similar solutions from Google, Microsoft, IBM, ... More >

June 15, 2009

Another Cloud Collaboration Offering, This One from Adobe

It's beginning to look as if collaboration is truly the cloud's killer app , I wrote last month. (Although commodity back-office applications such as payroll may give collaboration a run for its mon... More >

Companies May See Outsourcing in New Light, Thanks to Cloud

At its heart, cloud computing is a variant of outsourcing. Whether you outsource development resources (middleware-as-a-service), a full-fledged development platform (platform-as-a-service or PaaS) a... More >

June 12, 2009

Call Center Catch-22: Cutting Turnover While Controlling Costs

IT Business Edge recently featured a couple of stories involving U.S. companies moving their previously offshored call center jobs back to the U.S. , notably Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. (It... More >

June 11, 2009

Does Fuzzy Job Definition Put CIO Role at Risk?

Practically since the CIO role was introduced, there's been an ongoing debate about what CIOs do. Just last month, at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, several attendees opined it was time to come up wit... More >

June 10, 2009

IT May Adopt Sunnier Outlook on Cloud Computing than SaaS

With all of the acronyms and buzzwords in the technology sector, it's no wonder that folks find emerging concepts confusing, especially nebulous ones like cloud computing. I got a bit bogged down mys... More >

June 9, 2009

What Twitter Knows: It's OK to Play

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert cut to the chase when he recently interviewed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Shortly after promising to ask Stone about "every mundane detail about every moment of h... More >

June 8, 2009

Newspapers Aren't Only Ones Struggling with Collaboration

I'm a former print journalist who's been working more or less exclusively online for about a dozen years. (Yeah, I'm old.) Several other print veterans work at IT Business Edge. All of us have friend... More >

Seeing Is Believing: Show Business Users BI Benefits

The headline on one of my recent articles asked: Big vs. Small BI : Which Set of Returns Is Right for Your Company? It was a trick question, of course, since the answer is "both."   Many compan... More >

June 4, 2009

Squeezing Vendors Isn't a Good Idea

Pushing too hard for steep discounts in outsourcing contracts is a no-no, as we at IT Business Edge point out time and time again. It often gets you fewer services or ones of lower quality, as seve... More >

June 3, 2009

Sure, RFID Shows Promise, But Economy Has Put It on Hold

Earlier this week I wrote about how the recession will likely contract spending on RFID -- and more broadly, on any technologies deemed discretionary. Reader Patrick Sweeney left a comment in which... More >

June 2, 2009

Social Media Monitoring: How Much Is Enough?

More than ever, folks are abandoning traditional venting venues like company Web sites and call centers to air complaints in the wider Web. Whether it makes them feel better or they actually get resp... More >

June 1, 2009

RFID and Recession: Not a Good Mix

The recession and discretionary IT spending just don't mix. Discretionary spending cuts are one of three strategies that companies use to narrow the growing gap between demand for IT services and I... More >

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