Stories about: Marriott International

Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center caused scores of companies to reconsider their disaster recovery and business continuity plans, whether they were affected by those catastrophic events or not.

In this groundbreaking awards program, Computerworld US honors 12 user companies and another dozen vendors that are leading the way in green-IT. These green leaders are virtualizing, videoconferencing, turning down the cooling systems and turning off the lights. Top honors this year went to Highmark.

There's no question that blogs are multiplying in cyberspace. Now they're infiltrating businesses, too, even if the IT departments haven't sanctioned their implementations.

For many companies, the move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can yield substantial rewards, including reduced operating costs and better customer service. But those benefits only show up after companies work through thorny problems like obtaining executive buy-in, shifting the way development groups operate and hammering out sometimes contentious new business rules, according to users at The Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego.

The memoir of John Lennon's first wife, Cynthia, tells how the Beatles -- ready for new ways of thinking -- visited the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Ringo ran out of the canned food he had brought along and went home after two weeks. Paul left a few days later but became a lifelong vegetarian. John and George stayed two months. John wrote a nasty song about the Maharishi, and George integrated the teachings into his daily life.

While moving toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) often means radically changing how a company uses software applications, some of the most vexing issues associated with SOA aren't technical -- they involve the challenge of managing people and policies during the shift.

Willy Anderson remembers the day he realized the human impact of the work he does at Allstate Insurance. When he started as an intern at the insurance giant at the age of 19, Anderson was responsible for maintaining the company's claims loss reporting system. As part of that job, he listened in on a call that the claim center received from a woman who had just been in a car accident.

When John Barbano assumed the position of vice president of global infrastructure operations at Johnson & Johnson Networking & Computing Services, he did all he could to learn about the US$47.3 billion parent company, Johnson & Johnson, which develops pharmaceuticals, medical devices and consumer products. Since Barbano's previous CIO experience was in financial services at Merrill Lynch & Co., he immediately began studying the inner workings of the New Brunswick, N.J., conglomerate and its product lines. Approximately 15 months later, in February 2004, he moved up the management ranks to vice president and CIO for J&J's largest business segment, pharmaceuticals. (The pharmaceutical arm stretches across six R&D companies worldwide.) Once in that role, he initiated a deeper educational process.

Although online travel firms provide more information about their policies and are more responsive to customers, many of them continue to share users' personal information with outside parties, according to the Third Quarter 2005 Online Customer Respect Study of the largest airline and travel firms. The study was conducted by The Customer Respect Group Inc.

Smart leaders give serious thought to succession planning, especially in IT. By Thomas Hoffman

People and passwords -- in the long run, they just don't work very effectively together. At least that's what Phil Fowler, vice president of IT at Telesis Community Credit Union, a financial services provider that manages $US1.2 billion in assets, found out. His team ran a network password cracker as part of an enterprise security audit last year to see if employees were adhering to Telesis' password policies. They weren't.