Alignment, staffing and culture are often more critical than software and apps
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We talk a lot about finding the right work-life balance, but hardly anyone seems to be doing it. The recession hasn't helped, since layoffs ratchet up anxiety about keeping a job, no matter ho... More >
Call centers metrics have long focused on categories like cost per call and average handle time. But are those the right metrics? They weren't at Dell. In a half-hour webcast at DataInfoCom ,... More >
As the mother of an 8-year-old, I know kids learn more when lessons feel more like an enjoyable exercise than a chore. Personal attention from teachers helps, but it's getting tougher to provide that... More >
IT/business alignment is a perenially popular topic among IT analysts. And alignment has prompted a fair amount of soul-searching among CIOs. But the need to cut IT costs, precipitated by th... More >
My fantasy jobs all involve getting paid to do something I love. Because I am a voracious reader, I always thought it'd be great to be an editor at a big publishing house. I'd relocate to Vermont if ... More >
Not long ago, I likened ERP to the crazy relative that disrupts family gatherings. You know the guy I mean. He's the one who pick ups a woman in the checkout lane and turns up the next day in a polic... More >
HP last week announced it was officially changing the name of EDS, which it acquired last year , to HP Enterprise Services. According to an HP announcement, it "marks the next major step in a year-l... More >
There's a perception that business intelligence is costly, driven at least in part by the wide price ranges of BI solutions , a characteristic that's highlighted in this BeyeNetwork column on mid-... More >
I'm a writer and have been for essentially my entire professional life. So naturally I am pretty hung up on words and their meaning. A growing number of folks in IT apparently share my obsession. &nb... More >
In my discussions of the evolution of the CIO role, including whether it's important for CIOs to have a technical background , I pretty much take it as a given that companies need a CIO or other hig... More >
Back in July, I wrote two stories and a blog post about Twitter's rapidly growing popularity as a recruitment tool . The Wall Street Journal covers a lot of the same ground in a story published ea... More >
Google has long been held up as a great place to work even though it slid from the No 1 spot to No. 4 on Fortune magazine's annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2009. So maybe it's ... More >
When I wrote about federal CIO Vivek Kundra earlier this week, I mentioned the Web sites launched on Kundra's watch. His detractors knock the sites for their costs, while his supporters laud the intr... More >
Obviously there's more potential for growth in less mature global economies with big populations and rising income levels. So companies with the ability to compete in such markets are going after cou... More >
If asked to compare their careers to a comic strip, many people invariably choose "Dilbert," in which the characters are seen toiling in cubicles and constantly trying to circumvent a bureaucratic ... More >
Being on the same wavelength with smart people gives me a visceral thrill. My thrill-o-meter went off earlier today as I read yet another interesting Web Strategy post by Jeremiah Owyang. In it, he... More >
Business intelligence and open source are both pretty hot topics in the enterprise software space and open source BI vendors like Jaspersoft have been earning a fair amount of ink in the trade press... More >
As my regular readers know (hi, mom!), one of my favorite pet topics is how people and processes play a key part of making any technological initiative work. A few months ago I cited a nice illustrat... More >
Some people seem to think location is the key to outsourcing agreements. They're wrong. It's governance. There is perhaps no better illustration than the travails of Boeing in working with ... More >
After months of being the bearer of mostly bad news about IT spending, lightened by only an occasional sign of optimism , it's nice to share any glimmer of financial news that seems to bode well for... More >
There are several winners in Netflix's million-dollar competition to find an algorithm that will improve the accuracy of its recommendation system and, in theory, help it retain more customers. Obv... More >
Many companies fear the wrath of dissatisfied customers when it comes to social media . When I spoke to CRM Essentials co-founder and partner Brent Leary last month about social CRM, he told me: &nb... More >
Is federal CIO Vivek Kundra a star or a sham? Most of the coverage of Kundra's first six months in office is positive, bordering on fawning. Somewhat typical is MercuryNews.com writer Chris ... More >
Business analysts and project managers should be the MVPs of the IT team because of their theoretical ability to help IT understand and better meet business needs. Instead, business analysts are mo... More >
I can't decide if it's healthy or unhealthy for CIOs to subject themselves to so much self-analysis about their work. Maybe it's a good thing to constantly strive to better define the role you can pl... More >
When I interviewed The Hackett Group's Erik Dorr and Honorio Padron earlier this year about the gap between IT supply and demand , one of the timeliest topics we covered was discretionary cost cutti... More >
I am the weak link in the real-time data chain. That's because there's a delay -- sometimes a significant one -- between my brain processing information and telling the rest of my body what it needs ... More >
Just how big of a deal is U.S. Bank's decision to abandon Microsoft SharePoint in favor of IBM's Lotus collaboration software, a story reported by Computerworld ? "It's a very big deal," according... More >
Though we are seeing far fewer reports of the kinds of mass layoffs that send shudders down our collective spines, the technology hiring market isn't exactly hopping . As in the past, many ... More >
It's becoming increasingly obvious that few, if any, companies will be able to opt out of Twitter by assuming it'll be a short-lived trend. Twitter enjoys the kind of explosive popularity not generat... More >
A couple of years ago, I read Steven Johnson's book " Everything Bad Is Good for You : How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," mostly to reassure myself that my son's avid interes... More >
About a month ago, I compared Microsoft's SharePoint to Shimmer Floor Wax, a faux product featured in an old "Saturday Night Live" sketch that was improbably both a floor wax and a dessert topping. A... More >
With practically every new technology, there's an accompanying shortage of professionals equipped with the right skills. We've seen skills shortages with service-oriented architecture , and companie... More >
On Friday, I shared some scary statistics about ERP implementations and noted that ERP gives many companies fits . Yet here's the thing: Many companies also simply can't function without ERP systems... More >
One of the most persistent myths about millennials is that they won't have anything to do with the old farts with whom they work. Not true, found the creatively named Hidden Brain Drain Task... More >
Every family has a crazy cousin (or uncle or grandparent) who tends to derail reunions and other gatherings with unpredictable, borderline crazy behavior. Most in the family have a love/hate relation... More >
I think there's been ample warning about the need for IT professionals to improve their "softer," business-oriented skills in addition to their technical chops. Criminy, wake up and smell the Java, p... More >
Depending on whom you ask, governance can either solve practically any organizational problem or is itself a problem. When I interviewed her in June, Jeanne Ross, director of the Center for In... More >
One of the data points that struck me from McKinsey's recently-published survey on Enterprise 2.0 , which I've already written about three times this week, was the relatively poor showing made by co... More >
IT Business Edge's Mike Vizard wondered on his blog last week whether it was time to throw out most existing software and start over. He wrote: But the really hard question that everybody continues ... More >
As any woman (and most men) know, it's not difficult to game a survey in "Cosmopolitan" or "Glamour." The way the questions are phrased, it's pretty easy to figure out the answers you should offer to... More >
Just yesterday I wrote about some of the highlights of McKinsey's recent study about adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Forbes has an interview with the study's author, Jacques ... More >
About two months ago, I wrote a post in which I urged companies experiencing success with Web 2.0 tools and technologies and the vendors that serve them to be more forthcoming about sharing details o... More >
About a year-and-a-half ago, I wrote about Tata Consultancy Services' introduction of something it called IT-as-a-service that would leverage software-as-a-service to deliver standardized solutions... More >
Want to generate a string of impassioned -- and not always logical -- comments on your blog? Then write about H-1B visas, which allow companies to hire skilled workers from other countries. They've l... More >
Many folks think it's a given that service quality declines when call center work is moved offshore. Earlier this summer I wrote about the difficulty of maintaining service quality here in the Unit... More >
Can outsourcing be about both cost reduction and business transformation? Maybe, but I am beginning to have my doubts. Peter Allen, TPI's managing director for Global Practices, and Everest Re... More >
Though the economy is starting to take tentative steps toward recovery, most IT leaders are still in cost reduction mode . Many of them are postponing new systems and upgrades and spending less on h... More >
Which survey about cloud computing are you going to believe? It's a nascent technology, no one seems exactly sure how to define it and, as always with surveys, some of those that administer them have... More >
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