Three IT Triumphs for 2001

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

Three Big Breakdowns of 2001

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,

Top 10 Signs a Company Is Headed South

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

Management Lessons for ‘Fragile’ Times

“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

Kmart: SCM Gone Wrong

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

Commentary: Blame Enough to Go Around at Kmart

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,

Calculating Costs of Implementing an Electronic Medical Data Network

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

Editorial Mission

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

Vitria Technology: A Company in Transition

Vitria made its mark selling integration software to high-flying telecom companies, but that industry focus came back to haunt it. As telecom returned to earth, Vitria had to refashion itself—looking to integration services for more of its revenues. And Yibo Dong, integration engineer for Sigma Networks, an optical-network service provider,