Stories about: Celanese

I can remember when CIOs wore short-sleeved shirts and pocket protectors and didn't have any status in the company," says Cathy Hotka, who was vice president of IT at the National Retail Federation from 1995 to 2002.

From retail storefronts to the military's front lines, wireless technology now permeates nearly every sector of the economy. The technology has come a long way from simple bar-code reading with wireless PDAs. Today, tags affixed to retail garments taken into a dressing room can wirelessly signal a wall-mounted screen to display color choices and fabric information. Students can do research in the cafeteria instead of the library, and forklift operators can save themselves hundreds of miles of travel in factories by receiving product requests from computers mounted on their vehicles.

Their minds are chiefly in cost-control mode, but IT leaders must begin to train their sights on the challenges they and their companies will face when the economy begins to rebound.

Since public electronic marketplaces hit the scene two years ago, the behind-the-scenes integration work, bickering among industry rivals-turned-partners and other logistical headaches have illustrated how these electronic bazaars have been hard-pressed to emerge.

It's one thing to use e-procurement technology to buy office supplies, through a process known as indirect procurement, because the goods aren't needed for the assembly line. But it's quite another to use the technology for direct procurement, such as buying the parts for manufacturing a helicopter. The complexity, importance and risks are much greater.

UUNET Technologies Inc. last week replaced President and CEO Mark Spagnolo with Bob Hartnett, president of global accounts at UUNET parent company WorldCom INc.. Hartnett will retain both titles going forward. Spagnolo will be working on "new projects" with MCI WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, a UUNET spokesman said. No additional details were provided regarding Spagnolo's new position or why WorldCom decided to make a change at this time. Hartnett joined WorldCom when it acquired MCI in 1998.

This morning, SAP AG co-founder Hasso Plattner opened the U.S. version of the business application vendor's Sapphire user conference with what could have been billed as a survey class in mySAP.com.