Stories about: Top Line

Smart companies ensure they have balanced portfolios of low- medium- and high-risk projects.

Wall Street isn't the only group looking for improvements from Sun Microsystems's new CEO and president, Jonathan Schwartz. Users are also candidly weighing in with some specific changes they want Sun to make, even if they see Schwartz's appointment as a sign of management continuity.

In the past several years, there has been a growing interest in forging greater alignment between IT departments and the larger organizations in which IT exists. Some authors have attributed this to the collapse of the dotcom bubble, which caused disillusionment and confusion regarding the promise of technology, and the re-evaluation of technology-intensive efforts. Some have noted that, in an environment where the question "Does IT matter?" generates so much debate, tying IT closely to the rest of the business is a matter of survival. Others suggest that technology provides companies with significant competitive advantage and therefore needs to be close to the business.

Xerox, one of the world's largest printer makers, expects to increase its earnings per share by 10 percent to 15 percent next year in part by capturing new growth opportunities such as color printing, the company said in a Monday statement.

The year 2006 holds great promise for Australian CIOs with research showing corporate Australia will have greater confidence in IT and its ability to transform business.

A fault line runs beneath the groundswell that began a few years ago with XML Web services and continues today as SOA (service-oriented architecture). True, nearly everyone agrees that XML messaging is the right way to implement low-level, platform-agnostic services that can be composed into higher-level services that support enterprises business functions. Yet, here's also a sense that the standards process has run amok. IBM, Microsoft, and others have proposed so many Web services standards that a new collective noun had to be invented: WS-* (pronounced "WS star" or sometimes "WS splat"). The asterisk is a wild card that can stand for Addressing, Eventing, Policy, Routing, Reliability, ReliableMessaging, SecureConversation, Security, Transactions, Trust, and a frighteningly long list of other terms. Surveying this landscape, XML co-creator Tim Bray pronounced the WS-* stack "bloated, opaque, and insanely complex."

I recently attempted to identify the skills that next-generation IT leaders think they are going to need in order to be successful when their turn comes to run IT.

Are you finding it more difficult lately to construct a good business case? Infrastructure managers are probably screaming, "Lately? For years!" But now it's becoming more difficult for development teams, too.

K&S Group's IT Manager Brian Wharton shares his IT experiences with Computerworld's Sandra Rossi.

In scanning the coverage of the telecom recovery, we read about the excesses of the past and how we "know better" now. Everyone is singing the same tune: "Things are so different now." . . . "We'll never return to the 'old days.'" . . . It'll never be the same." And the sad part is, most people believe it.

Donald K. Peterson, the chairman and CEO of Avaya, came to the company from Lucent Technologies, where he was chief financial officer from 1996 to 2000. Avaya, spun off from Murray Hill, N.J.-based Lucent in October 2000, sells communications equipment, software and services, and services made up half of its US$5 billion revenue last year.