Computerworld articles from March 2002

Computerworld archives from March 2002

Managing Einsteins And Leaderless Teams.
March 4, 2002... Leadership Ensemble: Lessons in Collaborative Management From the World's Only Conductorless Orchestra, by Harvey Seifter and Peter Economy with J. Richard Hackman (Times Books, 225 pages, $25). On the surface, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in...

NAS Finds Its Niche.(Brief Article)
March 4, 2002... Network-attached storage (NAS) is quietly transitioning from an ad hoc, departmental storage add-on to a serious top-down enterprise storage resource. This highly reliable file server approach has always been relatively inexpensive and easy to...

NAS by Class.(Buyers Guide)
March 4, 2002... Enterprise-class NAS: For enterprise-class network-attached storage, EMC Corp.'s Clariion and Network Appliance Inc.'s NetApp filer servers still rule. The devices can scale to nearly 30TB and offer the most advanced management tools -...

Bigger and Bigger.(network-attached storage)
March 4, 2002... While storage-area networks (SAN) have been getting all the attention, network-attached storage (NAS) has been quietly breaking all the rules. Essentially a plug-and-play disk storage subsystem with embedded file-serving software, NAS...

Getting Big Files Into a Small Box.(Forest Oil)
March 4, 2002... Forest Oil Corp. Headquarters: Denver Web: www.forestoil.com Phone: (303) 812-1400 Who they are: A $2 billion independent oil and gas exploration and production company. Goal: Allow geologists and geophysicists to share...

Storage Appliances: Not All Plug and Play.
March 4, 2002... Don't tell Dan Rosman that NAS devices just plug and play. His first clustered NetApp servers from Network Appliance Inc. wouldn't work with his warehouse application server, until he discovered that the HP-UX-based system needed a patch to...

What Have You Done For Me Lately?
March 4, 2002... Bob Coates Position: CIO Company: Edwards Theatres Circuit Inc. Location: Newport Beach, Calif. The project: Automating cash flow and accounting processes The payoff: Cut from three months to two weeks the amount of time...

Netiquette.
March 4, 2002... A U.S. Department of Commerce report says that more than half the nation is now online. Thus, more people than ever before are meeting one another for the first time, chatting on a regular basis and swapping ideas and opinions with perfect...

ThisWeek'sGlossary.(Brief Article)
March 4, 2002... Two-factor authentication: This authentication method requires users to provide something that they have (a token) and something that they know (a PIN). The user creates the PIN when the token is first used. Subsequent uses require the...

Authentication Rollout Turns Into Control Issue.
March 4, 2002... One-time passwords, tokens, smart cards and public-key infrastructure are all excellent methods for creating access- control architectures. My company is in the process of implementing a token-based infrastructure for access to our critical...

Out of Alignment.(Opinions)(Column)
March 4, 2002... I have always been amused by simplistic methods offered to CIOs to answer complex questions about the health of IT. One recent attempt is particularly noteworthy because it received widespread publicity and reputable endorsements. Last...

Business Index.
March 4, 2002... Delivering the Goods CEOs and chief financial officers expect their IT leaders to come up with ideas to help their organizations slash costs and pump up sales in good times and bad. Read how three movers and shakers are getting the job...

Virtual Recovery Via Virtual Servers.
March 4, 2002... In an ideal world, disaster recovery strategies would include backup equipment ranging from a single server to an entire dark data center. In the real world, you can't afford to set up an entire extra data center that you hope you'll never use....

Application Integration Forges Offshore Link.(Tesoro Petroleum)
March 4, 2002... Having tasted success with a limited enterprise application integration (EAI) project, Tesoro Petroleum Corp. was emboldened to tackle linking mission-critical information silos that had never exchanged data before. A year ago, Mark Evans,...

No .Net Advantage.(Opinions)(Column)
March 4, 2002... Now that Visual Studio .Net has launched (on Feb. 13 - that wasn't a Friday, was it?), will someone remind me why .Net is destined to revolutionize Web services? Let's look at what .Net brings to the table. First, .Net relies on standards...

The Question for 2002.(Opinions)(Column)
March 4, 2002... "What have you done for me lately?" may well be the question for 2002. Be it companies asking workers or workers asking companies, that cry hangs endlessly in the air as revenue-stressed businesses forget to care and workers struggle to remain...

A Matter of Forms.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 4, 2002... Joe Auer's article "A Form for Fairness" \(Business, Feb. 11\) really hit the nail on the head. We've been using form contracts for several years with varying degrees of success. I don't recall seeing a better argument in support of the...

Good Ethics at Work Lie in the Hiring.(Opinions)(Column)
March 4, 2002... The Enron mess sure seems to be opening up a lot of old wounds. For instance, several years ago, I was employed by a pop- ular consumer electronics company, until it lost half its stock value overnight when it was accused of playing...

Make Spammers Pay.(Opinions)(Column)(Brief Article)
March 4, 2002... In "Spam Taking a Toll on Business Systems" \(News, Feb. 18\), Todd Meagher of Credit.com said the potential loss of legitimate business correspondence inherent in blocking spam is an acceptable price to pay. It's outrageous that people feel...

Finding a Future in IT.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 4, 2002... Melissa Solomon's "Layoff Lessons Learned" \(Business, Feb. 11\) was a pertinent, well-written article. The "10 Tips for Job Seekers" sidebar mentions the New York-based organization Futures in Information Technology, and I am interested in...

On the Wrong Trail.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 4, 2002... Frank Hayes' "The Story So Far" \(CRM Knowledge Center, Feb. 18\) wasn't a history of customer relationship management but of prospect relationship management. The trail he should have followed was that of the field service products of the...

Portals Can Open Array of Services.(Opinions)(Column)
March 4, 2002... Measuring the value of enterprise portals is more art than science. But don't let that sway you from embracing them to consolidate disparate back-end application services through self-service front ends to save money and boost revenue....

American Express Signs $4B IT Services Deal With IBM.
March 4, 2002... In a blockbuster deal that's expected to be worth more than $4 billion over the next seven years, American Express Co. is outsourcing a big piece of its IT operations - and transferring about one-third of its 6,000 technology workers - to IBM....

Intel Sticks With R&D and Production Spending Plans.
March 4, 2002... SAN FRANCISCO Intel Corp. suffered along with other technology vendors during 2001, which CEO Craig Barrett described in January as "a terrible year." But the chip maker isn't backing off from its plans to invest heavily in product...

News briefs.
March 4, 2002... Judge Denies Xerox Injunction Request A federal judge in Rochester, N.Y., denied Xerox Corp.'s request for an injunction that would have barred Palm Inc. from selling its handheld devices. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Palm is appealing the...

Ariba Ships 'Spend Management' Tools.(Spend Management Suite from Ariba)(Product Announcement)
March 4, 2002... Ariba Inc. last week announced new invoicing, spending analysis and contract monitoring tools, continuing its attempt to redefine itself as a vendor of "spend management" software instead of business-to-business products. Sunnyvale,...

Just Say No to Intrusive Ads, 1.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 4, 2002... Personally, I detest pop-up, lay-under and blanket ads \("Intrusive Ads a Sign of Online Advertising Evolution, Analysts Say," Computerworld.com, Feb. 19. I think with time Internet advertising will become closer to that found in the more...

Just Say No to Intrusive Ads, 2.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 4, 2002... Intriguing. Consumers have been complaining for years about online advertising and unrequested junk e-mail advertising. Now advertisers decide to try an even more intrusive approach sure to really tick off the very people they're trying to...

Just Say No to Intrusive Ads, 3.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 4, 2002... Underneath this development is a thinly veiled threat, that unless Web sites find a good advertising model, the Internet will collapse because no one will fund it. Poppycock! The Net wasn't started by these greedy commercial interests, and it...

Just Say No to Intrusive Ads, 4.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 4, 2002... The mad rush of Web site operators and advertisers to develop "new and exciting" methods of advertising is doomed to failure. I absolutely refuse to be lured to a site or product by most current Web advertising. To me, pop-ups, pop-unders,...

Java Tool Tied to WebLogic, for Now.(Bea Systems WebLogic Workshop)(Product Announcement)
March 4, 2002... BEA Systems claimed that the WebLogic Workshop development framework it unveiled last week will make big strides in easing the creation of Java-based Web services applications for programmers of all skill levels. But while corporate...

Briefs.
March 4, 2002... Novell Names Vice Chairman; COO Leaves Novell Inc. brought back former executive Christopher Stone to work as vice chairman within a new "office of the CEO." Stone will report to CEO Jack Messman and will run engineering, marketing,...

BEA Moves to Better Unify Its Middleware.(WebLogic Platform 7.0, WebLogic Server 7.0)
March 4, 2002... San Diego Looking to improve the ability of its middleware to serve as enterprise-grade glue for users with a mix of different applications, BEA Systems Inc. last week announced plans to combine its tools into a unified and better...

Best Practice? Nope.(Opinions)(Column)
March 4, 2002... Let's Say you spot a house that's on fire, and you call the fire department. How long should it take the fire department to answer the phone? A few seconds? A minute? Or suppose you find a ticking bomb and call the police. How long should you...

Shark Tank: Wrong, wrong, wrong!('IBM Personal Computer 750)
March 4, 2002... Install program for this piece of company software isn't working properly, so pilot fish calls the help desk. "Model number?" tech asks. IBM Model 6887, says fish. "I don't know what a 6887 is," says tech. "Well, on the front it says, 'IBM...

Efforts Afoot to Coordinate IT Volunteer Work After Disasters.
March 4, 2002... After recovering from the shock of Sept. 11, Julie Gandle decided to do her part to aid the recovery efforts. She told a Park Avenue emergency relief center volunteer that she had 18 computers and two weeks of man-hours to donate from her...

How IT Pros Helped Out.(Brief Article)
March 4, 2002... It took three tense days for TripleHop Technologies Inc., an enterprise search-and-retrieval software firm that was on the 53rd floor of the World Trade Center, to learn that all of its employees were safe and accounted for. Then...

A Push for One Voice.(Brief Article)
March 4, 2002... Among the fog of events after Sept. 11, one phone call stands out for James Paddon, chief financial officer at Lava Trading Inc., a trading-floor software firm that was on the 83rd floor of 1 World Trade Center. The call was from from a...

Financial Firms Plan Widely Dispersed IT Operations.
March 4, 2002... New York In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, financial services executives are putting more stock in employees' ability to work from remote locations using virtual private networks, and they're widening the gap between office locations to...

Wall Street Seeks Cyberterror Defenses.
March 4, 2002... The most effective way to deal with the twin threats posed by hackers and cyberterrorists, say many Wall Street IT executives, is to form a unified effort between the private sector and government to create a central communications platform to...

Lasers Eyed as Medium for Disaster Communications.
March 4, 2002... New York Companies near ground zero in New York learned some painful lessons in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, not the least of which is how to communicate when telephone lines and Internet service providers are down. One...

Microsoft Stepping Into CRM Market.
March 4, 2002... Microsoft's expansion strategy extended to the business applications space last week, when the company announced plans to offer customer relationship management (CRM) software. The software maker also recently confirmed its intention to...

Microsoft Delays Launch of .Net Server Operating System.
March 4, 2002... Microsoft Corp. disclosed last week that the release of its new Windows .Net Server operating system is being delayed until the second half of the year - the same time frame in which the first service pack of updates and fixes is due to emerge...

Water Systems Improve Net Security After FBI Warning.
March 4, 2002... Following an FBI terrorism alert issued in January, municipal and publicly owned water systems around the country have started to boost the security of wireless data systems that control their distribution networks. The FBI's National...

Digital Destruction Was Worst Imaginable.
March 4, 2002... Washington For several tense hours on Sept. 11, the nation was deaf, dumb and blind due to the "absolutely massive" loss of communications infrastructure resulting from the collapse of the World Trade Center, a senior government official...

DHL Builds U.S. Data Center to Help Manage Global Net.
March 4, 2002... DHL Worldwide Express Inc. plans to spend $250 million over the next five years to build and operate a U.S.-based data center that will complete a trio of facilities designed to provide round-the-clock management of the air freight carrier's IT...

CA Confronts User Anger, Reveals Web Portal Plan.(Interview)
March 4, 2002... Islandia, N.Y. Last week at Computer Associates International Inc.'s headquarters here, President and CEO Sanjay Kumar spoke at length with Computerworld about CA's historically stormy relationship with its customers and the recently...

CA Confronts Obstacles, Pushes Ahead With New Apps.
March 4, 2002... ISLANDIA, N.Y. Computer Associates International Inc. is preparing to ease the pain for users running heterogeneous storage and security management applications. And CA says it will do so without forcing them to buy into its Unicenter...

Attention: Calling All Cobol Veterans.
March 4, 2002... Bill Payson is sick and tired of debating whether Cobol is obsolete. "The fact is, there's so much Cobol out there that companies are going to have to deal with it," said Payson, president of The Senior Staff, a Campbell, Calif.-based online...

Mainframe Skills, Pay at a Premium.
March 4, 2002... IT managers looking to cut labor costs during the ongoing recession might want to think twice before laying off any of their workers who have mainframe or data center skills. With mainframe shipments on the rise and legions of traditional...

At Deadline.
March 4, 2002... Microsoft, DOJ Revise Antitrust Settlement Microsoft Corp. and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) revised their proposed antitrust case settlement in advance of a court hearing scheduled for Wednesday. Most of the changes were intended to...

The Roots of Mistrust Go Deep.
March 4, 2002... IT managers can do a perfect job of managing privacy but still be penalized by consumers for other companies' lapses. It's like boot camp: Even if just one soldier messes up, everyone may be told to do 50 push-ups. The privacy mistakes of...

Corporate Privacy Credibility Crumbles.
March 4, 2002... Washington Christopher Fisher, information systems director at Royal Appliance Manufacturing Co., agrees with a recent Harris Interactive Inc. poll that found that a majority of the public is mistrustful of corporate privacy practices and...

Mirroring Cuts Data Center's Recovery Time.
March 11, 2002... Financial services company Pershing last month completed the installation of a mirrored data center that has reduced the firm's data recovery time from more than 24 hours to about one hour. IBM, whose Geographically Dispersed Parallel...

Just Say .Nyet.(Opinions)(Column)
March 11, 2002... I couldn't come up with any reasons last week as to why .Net would revolutionize Web services. I've heard from many defenders of .Net during the past year, and not one of them has offered a credible argument regarding a unique advantage that...

The View From Microsoft.
March 11, 2002... Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, recently gave his view of his company's strategy in relation to the enterprise and corporate IT in an e-mail exchange with Computerworld's Carol Sliwa. In the course of the correspondence, he offered Microsoft's...

Time for .Net Reality Check.
March 11, 2002... .Net is finally turning into something more than a catchy marketing tag for Microsoft Corp.'s .Net Enterprise Server line now that the software maker is building support for its new development framework into its products. But it remains to be...

Business, IT Leaders Still Have Time for Big Ideas.
March 11, 2002... What's the big idea? In the March issue of the Harvard Business Review, its editors ask that question as they look back over the past year. They came up with seven big management ideas for 2001, and senior editor Julia Kirby talked about some...

No Pain, No Gain.(Delta Air Lines' construction of Cordiem LLC e-marketplace)
March 11, 2002... Since public electronic marketplaces hit the scene two years ago, the behind-the-scenes integration work, bickering among industry rivals-turned-partners and other logistical headaches have illustrated how these electronic bazaars have been...

ThisWeek'sGlossary.(Glossary)
March 11, 2002... RFC1918: This Internet Engineering Task Force request for comment specifies the following three ranges of IP addresses exclusively for internal network use: * 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix) * 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255...

SNMP Vulnerability Offers 3,200 Reasons to Worry.
March 11, 2002... The past few weeks haven't been a complete disaster, but I have to dig deep to find the silver lining in recent events. It started when the Finland-based University of Oulu's security research team released a series of vulnerability...

IT Goes to War.(Future Watch)
March 11, 2002... The U.S. Army has seeded a field with antitank mines, but the enemy has managed to clear a path through the mines and is advancing. But before the tanks can get very far, mines from some distance away hop into the cleared area. The...

One Bite at a Time.(Opinions)(Column)(Tutorial)
March 11, 2002... Here's a strategy you can use to help gain and maintain negotiating strength. The key to this - called the "salami" strategy - is to disclose your goals to prospective vendors a few slices of information at a time, rather than give them the...

Agents of Change.(Opinions)(Column)(Editorial)
March 11, 2002... What makes an IT project a success? Arriving on time and under budget? Showing a measurable return on investment? Delivering value to the business? If you're answering "All of the above," few would argue with you. Those are classic,...

Holes in CRM Story.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 11, 2002... Brian Sullivan's article "Experts Divided Over Use of CRM to Prevent Terrorism" \(Computerworld.com, Feb. 28\) has holes in it. First, intelligence consultant Robert David Steele appears to have an agenda of saving intelligence community jobs...

More to Story Than H-1Bs, 2.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 11, 2002... I don't think the woes of the IT world can be blamed on the H-1B policy. In fact, the main problems that IT must address are the method of its sudden increase over the past few years and how it has dealt with it. In early 2000, I was hired...

'Who' Says Linux Is Cure?(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 11, 2002... "I Can't Explain" how Nicholas Petreley managed to "Join Together" an article that so captured the "Amazing Journey" of "My Generation" in computing, and had some fun in the "Bargain" \(" 'Get Back' to IBM," Technology, Feb. 25\). "It's Hard"...

Nothing to Brag About.(Opinions)(Letter to the Editor)
March 11, 2002... I read with interest Sanjay Kumar's comments on why CA's reputation in the marketplace is less than desirable \("Q&A: CA's Sanjay Kumar on Customer Relations Problems," Computerworld.com, Feb. 27\). He cited poor acquisition management as one...

More to Story Than H-1Bs.(Opinions)(Column)
March 11, 2002... When the economy was much better, many tech workers thought the H-1B visa was a good idea, since it aids in improving technology and may have put U.S. companies ahead in global competition because they could hire the best. However, recently I...

Cable Clarifications.(Opinions)(Column)(Correction Notice)
March 11, 2002... In "The Cables That Bind" \(Technology QuickStudy, Feb. 25\), the author stated that with twisted-pair cable, "The twisting keeps the two wires as close together as possible so both wires experience the same total amount of interference. If the...

Making Support Pay.
March 11, 2002... If you've ever answered the same question over and over again, you understand firsthand the potential value of a system that lets users quickly and easily access stored knowledge on the fly. Among other things, it would enable workers such as...

Pay Now, or Pay More Later.(Opinions)(Column)
March 11, 2002... How much is your IT worth? Do the math; that's the initial cost to your organization from potential security breaches. The revelation that all of the Interior Department's computers had to be shut down because an investigation using ethical...

Checkpoint and Restart.
March 11, 2002... Have you ever toiled for hours on a document only to have your computer crash just as the last line gets written? From that type of experience, most users learn to save early and often so their work can be restored in the event of a crash. ...

Lost in the UCITA Fight.(Opinions)(Column)
March 11, 2002... Ucita, the proposed software licensing law, has grabbed a lot of attention in the IT media, mostly focusing on the fear and loathing it has inspired in the corporate world - the buyer's point of view. But the views of smaller software...

Computer industry briefs.
March 11, 2002... Oracle Q3 Numbers Will Be Below Plan Citing weak software sales in Asia, Oracle Corp. said it will report lower-than-expected results for its third quarter ended Feb. 28. Sales in the U.S. and Europe increased slightly over second-quarter...

Microsoft Reorganizes to Spur Revenue Growth.
March 11, 2002... Microsoft last week said its mobile devices and network service provider groups are being fused into a single business unit, the latest in a string of organizational changes at the company. The internal changes reflect a fine-tuning and, in...

Software Vendor Peregrine Puts B2B Unit up for Sale.
March 11, 2002... How hard is it to integrate e-commerce with the rest of your business? So hard that even some vendors can't do it. Peregrine Systems Inc. is an example. The San Diego-based software vendor last week put its business-to-business technology...

Readers Respond.(Opinions)(Column)
March 11, 2002... Readers write - and, as usual, they've got things to say. After the Jan. 7 column in which I suggested that backers of UCITA were like weasels - except that weasels don't really eat their young - one reader responded, "Actually, they have been...

Shark Tank: D'oh!
March 11, 2002... "My e-mail is missing," remote user wails to help desk pilot fish. "The icon is there, but nothing happens when I click on it." Fish can't get the server to respond either, so he visits the site - and finds a bare spot where the server should...

Volvo Taps IT to Help Truck Units Collaborate on Design.
March 11, 2002... Volvo Group is launching a set of collaborative product development applications in a bid to cut costs and more tightly connect its three separate truck units and their suppliers during the vehicle design process. Volvo Trucks announced...

News briefs.
March 11, 2002... Nortel Delays Switch For Optical Networks Nortel Networks Corp. indefinitely postponed shipments of a photonic switch that would let users send data through optical networks in the form of light, saying it didn't see enough demand for the...

'Limited Edition' of Datacenter Debuts.(Product Announcement)
March 11, 2002... Microsoft last week released a higher-performance "limited edition" of Windows Datacenter Server, its challenger to high-end Unix operating systems. But it's uncertain how much appeal the limited edition will have for corporate users, many...

Cruise Line's CIO Changes Leadership Tack.
March 11, 2002... PALM DESERT, CALIF. Tom Murphy is one CIO who was willing to resort to Plan B on his company's IT strategy as well as his own style of leadership. When Murphy joined Miami-based Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. three years ago, he was told...

ROI on IT Projects Difficult to Measure.
March 11, 2002... Palm Desert, Calif. ROI might be the acronym du jour in these budget-conscious times, but how well do companies really measure returns on their IT investments? Not very well, according to an informal poll at Computerworld's annual...