FRAMINGHAM (11/24/2003) - CEOs and CFOs may be the ones on the hook to certify their organizations' financial controls and procedures under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but IT executives had better be paying attention, too.
FRAMINGHAM (11/21/2003) - Sarbanes-Oxley readiness costs can be hard for companies to pin down, partly because complying with the new financial reporting law isn't a one-time event like Y2k, several IT managers said last week.
A silver lining for Accenture amid a weak IT spending environment has been strong growth in the so-called business process outsourcing (BPO) market, in which companies offload to a third party management of business functions such as accounts payable or human resources.
FRAMINGHAM (10/27/2003) - Bank of America Corp. (BofA), the nation's second-largest bank, announced Monday plans to acquire Boston-based FleetBoston Financial Corp. for US$47 billion in stock.
CHICAGO (10/21/2003) - Although CIOs traditionally rank alignment between IT and business as a top priority, reactions from chief financial officers in a recent survey indicate that little progress has been made in closing the gap.
NEW YORK (10/14/2003) - Ask almost anyone who has attended Comdex or any other big computer industry conference recently, and they'll tell you that attendance has taken a nose dive over the past couple of years. But as corporate travel budgets have tightened and overburdened IT managers find it harder to sneak out of the office, one beneficiary has been the Society for Information Management (SIM). The Chicago-based association, which was established in 1968 and counts nearly 3,000 IT executives as members, has witnessed a steady rise in attendance at local meetings among its 30 regional chapters, which now include recently added affiliates in central California, Charlotte, North Carolina, and St. Louis, according to President Ed Trainor.
FRAMINGHAM (10/03/2003) - As companies finalize their IT budgets for next year, some CIOs are finding themselves eyeing their calendars for an altogether different reason: to mark the increasing amount of time they're spending at their current jobs.
FRAMINGHAM (10/02/2003) - Nstar, the largest investor-owned utility in Massachusetts, hopes two IT projects will help it achieve a very aggressive goal: to boost its customer-service rankings into the top 25 percent of Eastern U.S. power providers over the next five years, says CIO Eugene Zimon.
FRAMINGHAM (09/26/2003) - You can't just throw money at innovation. And savvy chief information officers (CIOs) know that it's not a question of how much you invest in IT but how wisely you do so.
IBM and rival vendors are pushing new technologies such as automated provisioning software and blade servers to help IT managers lower data centre costs and scale up processing capacity as needed. And some users are buying into the idea.
IBM is pushing a new set of provisioning technologies and lower-cost Linux-based blade servers to help IT managers deal with cost-cutting pressures and a desire to scale up processing for compute-intensive tasks on an as-needed basis.
Widespread market changes and proposed federal mandates are putting new burdens on IT managers at US power companies to deliver real-time financial and operational data to corporate executives, as well as to customers, regulators and key business partners.
A federal mandate for electric power companies that's aimed at creating a more competitive national wholesale electricity market is fraught not only with technological challenges for IT decision-makers but also with organisational and political burdens.
Energy companies around the US have begun to use a common set of technologies such as enterprise application integration (EAI) systems and portals to help them respond to real-time information demands imposed by a more competitive, deregulated market. But to sell business executives on the need to invest in these systems, CIOs have had to take decidedly different approaches.
There are some signs that the IT labour market may finally be picking up steam. But corporate technology executives and industry analysts this week said most companies are likely to maintain IT staffing at or near current levels for the foreseeable future.