October 2003 Online Extras

Rob Cochran, chief information officer at retailing giant QVC, talks about internal rate of return and other metrics he uses to measure a project. Read the full story.

Mercy Health Partners Chief Information Officer Jim Albin has been able to improve customer satisfaction while cutting $4 million from the technology budget. See what he faced in the full article.

Figure out how XQuery can help your company bridge old systems with the new. Click here to take our interactive quiz.

Do you know where your company’s Sarbanes-Oxley compliance system is? Download this Microsoft Excel planner to get started on an accounting system that is an effective guard against discrepancies.

You don’t have to be big to be smart. In fact, every great company started out small. So it makes sense to regularly look at the fresh ideas that innovative companies with less than $500 million in annual sales are using on their path to getting there.

Check out the five profiled companies:
Dallas Mavericks, Hot Topic, Pediatrix, Battery Biz, and WD-40.

Think you have a handle on your company’s slate of technology initiatives? It’s not about the success or failure of any single project anymore, or even about schedules and budgets. It’s about maximizing the return on available resources. Where to start? Read about it.

Be sure to check out our Dossiers on three Project-Portfolio Management specialists:

• Niku (“The Old-Timer Is New Again”),
• Pacific Edge Software (“A Mom-And-Pop No More”), and
• Changepoint (“Same Script, Different Theater”).

Tool: To Buy or To Rent Software?
Can you save money by renting applications instead of buying software? Compare the options in this Microsoft Excel Calculator.

Quiz: Can XQuery Help Our Company?
XQuery 1.0 is a language that allows users to search for and extract information from databases and documents. Take our interactive quiz to determine your company’s need for XQuery.

Quiz: Where Does Your IT Department Hurt?
Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where the pain in your information technology comes from. Use this worksheet to zero in on a diagnosis.