Features

• Opinion: Dell has its work cut out for it

  Taking Dell private is a bold move, but won't ensure success. If you can't recognize opportunities and execute properly as a public company, buying yourself shelter from investors only takes you so far. The bigger challenge will be rejiggering the corporate culture and core processes to make more innovation possible.

• Four takeaways from Cisco's Q1

  Four things are clear from Cisco’s better-than-expected Q1 FY 2013 results:

• Most memorable tech industry apologies of 2012: From Apple to Google to Microsoft

  Tech vendors have been as bombastic as ever promoting the magical and amazing things their latest smartphones, cloud computing wares and network gear can do. When things go wrong, they're naturally a little less visible, but plenty of companies have sucked it up and done the right thing this year (perhaps with a little legal prodding here and there) and publicly apologized for minor and major customers inconveniences.

• Seven Lessons That SMBs Can Learn from Big IT

  Just because you don't have a large enterprise doesn't mean you can't run your IT operation like the big guys. Here are seven ways to help your SMB--a small or medium-size business--implement some of the lessons big IT operations have learned over the years. Using these tips, you should be able to improve productivity, cut costs, and keep your business running smoothly.

• Enterprise architecture: Lessons from the kitchen

  Everyone knows that there's a correct way to carve poultry into parts. In fact, basic carving methods haven't changed much since the time of the Roman Empire a couple of thousand years ago. If you want to be considered a great cook, you need to learn these ancient lessons. For chickens, it usually sounds something like this:

• Economic downturn creates rough ride for IT on spending

  With the economy struggling and financial markets in a state of chaos, this is becoming a hard time to be an IT manager.

• Stupid QA tricks: Colossal testing oversights

  What do you get when you add the human propensity to screw stuff up to the building of large-scale IT systems? What the military calls the force-multiplier effect -- and the need for a cadre of top-notch QA engineers.

• Corporate security and the climate crisis

  US military strategists, CIA analysts, international agency officials and Nobel Prize winning economists concur with the consensus of the world's scientific community: the Climate Crisis is a planetary security issue, as well as a national security issue for each of the one hundred ninety two countries that belong to the United Nations. But the Climate Crisis is also, by extension, a corporate security issue, as well as, yes, a cyber security issue.

• Angry IT workers: A ticking time bomb?

  It was 9:30 on the morning of March 4, 2002, and something was terribly wrong at the offices of PaineWebber UBS. Computers in branches all over the country began showing disc errors. A logic bomb buried deep within the machines had wiped their hard drives clean, preventing 17,000 brokers from making trades.

• 20 amazing, amusing and alarming IT facts

  A new report warns that the cost from lost productivity at work related to the new NFL season could add up to US$10.5 billion. And there we were, thinking the biggest waste of time at work came from fielding an endless stream of IT industry reports?

• 20 more IT mistakes to avoid

  Back in 2004, InfoWorld's then-CTO Chad Dickerson polled the best and brightest to reveal 20 IT mistakes that were surefire recipes for cost overruns, missed deadlines, and in some cases, lost jobs.

• Investigations: Merge ahead

  Not long ago, the legal department at a financial services company in New York got a phone call from a hospital in London. The query: Why are you hacking us? With two known IP addresses, it wasn't difficult for the financial firm's information security staff to go back through the logs looking for traffic between the two organizations. And with the traffic identified, locating the computer from which the hacks were taking place didn't take long, either. The culprit: an individual who-as their human resources records soon confirmed-had formerly worked at that very hospital.

• Why IT should get in the facilities business

  Picture in your mind the facilities management guy or gal in your building: Are you envisioning someone in a pair of overalls and a screwdriver tucked in the back pocket?