NEW YORKWas it IBM’s much-ballyhooed recent announcement of a mainframe that runs only Linux that swayed E*Trade Group Inc. to dump its Sun Microsystems Solaris servers in favor of the open-source operating system? E*Trade Chief Technology Officer Josh Levine says no. Instead, it was Linux’s vendor-independence that led the online
Would you buy all your software over the Internet? IBM thinks you will. As 2002 began, IBM VP and IBM.com General Manager Doug Maine told Baseline that he had an executive mandate to fulfill 100% of IBM’s software sales through IBM.com. An IBM spokesman, Michael Rowinski, later would say Maine
When gauging the success of technology projects, numbers count. But so does executive support. “[Success] has very little to do with technology and lots to do with people,” says Karen Larkowski, executive vice president of the Standish Group, a New England-based research firm that has studied some 31,000 technology projects
Technology mishaps were hard to miss in 2001. Much attention was paid a debacle starring an alleged $400 million investment in i2 Technologies software that led Nike to say that inventory problems hurt earnings. But there were plenty more botched tech projects, marked by the usual issues: bad vendor relationships,
10. CEO talks more about “vision” than “execution” 9. Cover stories appear in Fortune/BusinessWeek about CEO’s uniquely effective leadership 8. Article in Harvard Business Review extols excellence of company’s most-recent change effort 7. Company stock has a 50+ P/E ratio; CEO promises The Street 25 percent growth 6. Company pulls
“Contrary to the conventional wisdom, must companies are not in a state of crisis today.” That’s the surprising message one management guru plans to deliver at next week’s World Economic Forum meeting. It won’t be business as usual when nearly 2,000 corporate, political, academic and media leaders convene this year
By the 530th day, the turnaround that Chuck Conaway announced on Aug. 10, 2000, was finished. On that day, Kmart filed for bankruptcy protection. Now, Kmart CEO Conaway and newly named Kmart Chairman James Adamson will begin a new turnaround effort, washing the No. 3 discount retailer’s balance sheet of
The profound failure of Kmart’s ever-vacillating technology strategy was both a cause and a symptom of the problems that drove the retailer to bankruptcy. On the cause side, Kmart has been unable to build the systems that would get its supply chain in shape to compete with Wal-Mart and Target,
This chart and timeline show the total costs of implementing a networkto exchange medical claims data electronically, from the perspective of a health care provider. The example is based on a midsize hospital that must integrate connectivity, routingand data-translation software with its legacy infrastructure and that must be able to
Baseline, published by QuinStreet, is dedicated to helping business and technology managers and executives work together to achieve their business and IT goals, improve the ROI on their technology investments, and, ultimately, have a positive impact on business performance and the bottom line. The website provides a community in which