While vendors and analysts argue the fine points of what information lifecycle management (ILM) means, some customers are just doing it and seeing impressive cost savings and productivity improvements as a result.
Imagine that you have to find the fraudulent calls in a 100,000-page phone bill. Or that an invoice for employee health insurance offers little more than a guess as to who is covered in a given month. Or that four out of 10 checks you receive require human assistance to figure out what the customer bought. That's reality for many business-to-business transactions today, and that's why there's so much interest in electronic invoice presentment and payment (EIPP) systems.
When Web-based self-service is good, it's really good. Customer satisfaction soars and call center costs plummet as customers answer their own questions, enter their own credit card numbers and change their own passwords without expensive live help.
Mainframe Linux can boost application uptime and reduce support costs. But users and analysts recommend acting carefully when choosing which applications to move to the open-source operating system and when training staff in the required skills.
What do Saddam Hussein and networked storage have in common? They're both the subject of intense negotiation and coalition building as competing parties try to find a common approach to a big problem. With Saddam, the problem is neutralizing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. With networked storage, the problem is getting devices of mass storage (pardon the poetic license) from different vendors to work together.
Cathy Gilbert at American Electric Powe isn't too worried about security on her 2-year-old storage-area network (SAN). There are "very few people in our building that would actually know what to do" to reconfigure her Fibre Channel SAN -- assuming they could reach it on its internal private network, which can be administered only from a locked room, says Gilbert, a senior IT architect at the Columbus, Ohio, energy producer.
Security is the No. 1 factor keeping many IT managers from deploying Web services. But don't tell that to Matt Hird, director of IT at Superior Information Services.
Steve Etzell saw for himself how quickly a minor unauthorized change can foul up a Web site. Etzell, director of Web technology at Select Comfort Corp. in Minneapolis, was on vacation when he got a call telling him the bed maker and retailer's Web site performance had gone "into the tank." The reason: A developer had let a business group user "twist his arm" into dynamically generating user-specific price quotes on a Web page that showed an entire category of Select Comfort's products. The site had previously sent users to a cached page that showed the same prices to everyone.
So your organization has gone global, with mission-critical applications spanning time zones and national borders. You're more extended - and more vulnerable, relying on not only the glass house down the hall but also on an Internet service provider in Guatemala or a telecommunications company in Kazakhstan to get your fancy Web-enabled applications to customers and suppliers.
Information security architect Joe Judge faced a security challenge. But he didn't want to have to become an expert in Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to solve it.
Until now, if you're like most IT professionals, watching the feds battle Microsoft Corp. has been a spectator sport. If you love Microsoft, you've gnashed your teeth as Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered it broken in two as a lawless monopoly. If you hate Microsoft, you've cheered as an industry bully was finally brought to heel. But as a Computerworld survey in May showed, fewer than one in four of you said the case would affect your IT planning in the next two years.
Passlogix offers software that allows users to easily create passwords consisting of a series of mouse clicks.
FRAMINGHAM (06/29/2000) - Tired of balancing your notebook PC on the passenger
seat while you're stuck in traffic? Do you want to really impress clients when
you take them to lunch? Q-PC Real Car Computing, which has provided ruggedized
gear for missiles and the U.S. Army, is offering what it claims is the world's
first Windows 98-compatible PC available for cars. The base PC - with a 450-MHz
processor, 64MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive - costs $2,895, not including
installation. The Huntsville, Alabama-based company can be reached at
www.Q-PC.com.
There. I've done it; shamelessly used sex to get you to read a column about storage. And I'm not proud of myself. But I'm not the only one who feels a need to make this subject more, um, exciting. While at Computerworld's Storage Networking World earlier this month, I was struck by how dowdy and unattractive storage networking seems at first blush - and by how exciting it really might be.
There. I've done it; shamelessly used sex to get you to read a column about storage. And I'm not proud of myself. But I'm not the only one who feels a need to make this subject more, um, exciting. While at Computerworld's Storage Networking World earlier this month, I was struck by how dowdy and unattractive storage networking seems at first blush - and by how exciting it really might be.
