H&R Block's (HRB) virtualization project -- a CIO 100 Award winner this year -- is putting thin clients in the tax preparer's thousands of retail stores in an effort to simplify its operating environment and cut expenses. The change should also help it to better compete with chains such as Jackson Hewitt, as well as with independent tax preparers and software-only rivals such as TurboTax and Intuit (INTU).
Remember knowledge management? In the 1990s, KM emerged as a way to collect and share expertise across a company. Employees would fill out profiles for a database about their skills and knowledge. Colleagues could query the system to find the best person to help with a project.
Pamela Rucker doesn't want to spend money with IT vendors that waste water or energy, or that have large carbon footprints. After all, she says, as vice president of IT for environmental services firm PSC, it would be hypocritical to not hold vendors to high standards.
Sometimes you take a chance on technology even when you can't predict hard returns, hoping that an educated experiment will create business opportunities.
As with paper and plastic, "reduce, reuse, recycle" works for software. Especially when you're a small company in a cutthroat business, where squeezing as much life as you can out of an IT infrastructure can mean the difference between breathing easy and landing on the garbage heap.
Started in a dorm room four years ago, the social networking site Facebook now claims to be the fourth most-trafficked site in the world. Ninety million active users pound on 10,000 servers every day, uploading millions and millions of pieces of information in a given month. For example, "friends," who socialize in 21 languages, add 500 million photos per month.
You see it. You want it. You buy it. That's what e-commerce sites are banking on this holiday shopping season.
Mattel, the £2.8 billion (AU$6.9 billion) toy company, last week put its IT and supply chain systems under pressure again when it issued its third product recall, this time of 848,000 Barbie accessories and Fisher-Price toddler toys that could contain lead paint.
It used to be that only corporate royalty, CEOs, presidents and chief financial officers, demanded and received customized contracts that specified employment terms and locked in juicy parting deals or "golden parachutes." But elite CIOs who have earned the same kind of clout are now learning which terms work to their advantage and which ones don't.
Security analysts warned this week that another worm is hunting the Internet for Linux systems left unprotected against several well-publicized vulnerabilities, including one commonly found in Version 7.0 of Durham, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc.'s Linux release.
Amazon.com Inc. earlier this month posted a new privacy policy on its Web site aimed at giving online shoppers a better idea of exactly what happens to the personal information they give the company.
Amazon.com Inc. Thursday posted a new privacy policy on its Web site that's aimed at giving online shoppers a better idea of exactly what happens to the personal information they willingly give the company -- not to mention the data they inadvertently leave behind.
IT Auditing: What It Takes
As more and more dot-coms fall on hard times, insiders and ex-employees say the IT groups at those firms are frazzled - running short on cash, time and skilled staff.
Information technology auditors don't like to think of themselves as cops, but they do monitor IT projects for delays, mistakes, undue risks and other costly and embarrassing problems. Often coming from corporate auditing backgrounds, IT auditors have to evaluate two areas: project progress and political winds. It's an IT auditor who must tell a powerful CIO what's gone wrong under his command and then break the bad news to senior management.
