Stories about: Harrah's Entertainment

You might think that measuring return on investment is one of those things that never changes. You'd be wrong.

Reducing mobile voice and data costs is a top concern for CIOs, judging by comments at an enterprise mobile and wireless conference this week.

Microsoft has chosen what it sees as the next-generation in PC form factors -- a computer the size and shape of a coffee table with a flat, touchscreen display -- as the third major product it has designed and is branding for the consumer electronics market.

When John Halamka first became the CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston in 1998, he was told that being an IT chief was a 9-to-5 job. He quickly discovered that they had it backward. "It turned into a 5-to-9 job," says Halamka, meaning 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.

The fact that a particular enterprise-class piece of network gear meets a formal industry standard certainly doesn't guarantee that it works and performs as advertised.

Scott Manuel had a lot to learn when he arrived at Thomson two years ago. After all, the newly minted MBA graduate began his professional career in 2000 with two years at Enron, just at the crescendo of its infamous collapse.

In the high stakes world of casino gambling, customer loyalty often trumps liquidity.

For IT professionals interested in career advancement, a scan through the help wanted ads could pique their interest in the booming business intelligence arena. It's no wonder there are so many new BI positions: With increasing competitive pressures, companies have to make smarter decisions, which BI systems can support. And with the growth in Web-enabled systems, BI is no longer cost-prohibitive.

Tim Stanley and the IT organization at Harrah's Entertainment in Las Vegas have won many awards for their world-class IT operation. Harrah's IT department has constantly monitored hundreds of details such as system uptime and project deliverables to track its performance over the past five years. It even links the success of its IT objectives to the company's earnings-per-share growth.

Mergers and acquisitions have become a way of life across many industries. With vendors, competitors and in some cases their own companies consolidating at a rapid clip, enterprise IT managers and staffers at all levels have to stay on their toes in order to ensure job security.

At the recent US Computerworld Premier 100 conference, IT leaders searched for a clear pathway through many challenges: the rising tide of globalization, offshoring, mergers and acquisitions, and rapid technological change. Attendees debated how to make postmerger IT integration projects move more quickly and how to consolidate infrastructure while innovating in areas such as enterprise data warehouses and analytics applications that can cut costs and generate revenues.