Stories about: Operations Research

"Harry Potter must not escape."

When disaster looms, who you gonna call? It could increasingly be a mathematician if IBM scientists succeed in one of their current research efforts.

We at Computerworld would be the last to say that science and technology aren't creative pursuits. Still, when most people say, "Oh, she's very creative," they're probably not talking about the subject's ability to perform higher math or engineer a network. Such people might be amazed to learn of the remarkable number of actors, directors, musicians and other celebrities who nurture an inner geek.

What do women want? Sigmund Freud asked this question a century ago; he never answered it. Unfortunately, IT managers are asking this same question today about women in the technology workforce, and they don't have an answer either.

IBM has bought services-oriented architecture (SOA) vendor Webify Solutions and plans to make it a part of IBM's Software Group and WebSphere middleware product family. The move is designed to give IBM customers new options to more easily integrate existing specialized applications using SOA.

Companies can wield business intelligence as a weapon to outmaneuver competitors and boost revenue -- but not without making analytics an enterprisewide effort backed by senior management.

One of the real promises of SOA is enabling companies to leverage existing legacy systems as a set of core, reusable Web service building blocks that can be assembled to create new processes and applications quickly and inexpensively. That's just what Transamerica Life Insurance was looking for when it sought to provide its business partners with self-service access in real time.

It's been a long time since office suites in general, and Microsoft's in particular, generated much heat. The features that most users depend on most often were hammered out before these programs were even ported to Windows. Word's document-handling prowess and Excel's analytical power have matured over the years, and they are formidable assets, but the truth is the average information worker has little need of them. Resumes, memos, and e-mails are written in Word by habit, not by necessity. Excel is typically used just to format, convey, and visualize tabular data. The way to reinvigorate Office was not to pile on more elite functionality, but rather to expand the scope of routine tasks. Office 2003 does so in ways that make it, arguably, the most compelling upgrade ever.

Melbourne's Metropolitan Ambulance Service is using software developed at Auckland University to optimise its use of vehicles and equipment.

As the supply-chain management market continues to heat up, enterprises are beginning to move beyond simple applications for balancing supply and demand to technology that quickly analyzes the impact of various decisions to help boost product margins and lower costs.

Sabre Holdings Corp. last week announced a US$3 billion deal to sell its airline IT outsourcing business and its internal technology assets to Electronic Data Systems Corp. As part of the deal, Sabre outsourcing customer American Airlines Inc. said it will pull some of its application development activities back in-house.