Baseline articles from July 2002

Baseline archives from July 2002

The End of An Aura.
July 2, 2002... The CIO of the one of the nation's largest discount merchandisers is calling on the major online retail exchanges, which aspire to provide everything from auctions to collaborative sales forecasting, to combine and improve their performance as...

Measuring Up: Stand Back And Let The Big Dog Eat.(Brief Article)
July 2, 2002... Private-sector chief information officers will turn green with envy, especially as the economic climate forces them to hold the line--if not cut--their own technology spending budgets. The federal government plans to spend $37.1 billion on...

Inability to Search Isn't Just FBI Problem.(data warehousing challenges corporations and government agencies)
July 2, 2002... Outrage and disbelief were the first reactions last month to news that FBI agents, in the weeks before Sept. 11, had been unable to search bureau computers for a word string as simple as "flight schools." That revelation by Coleen Rowley, the...

Sign Up Now, or Sign Up Later.
July 2, 2002... Steve Krapes knows it's just a matter of time. All it will take is a system outage, a security breach or a little budget tightening, and he'll have them right where he wants them--as customers. Then, every manager of an AT&T business will...

Chemical Reaction.(Sigma-Aldrich's electronic- commerce site)
July 2, 2002... If you worked in Sigma-Aldrich's customer service group three or four years ago, you performed some ugly gyrations to fill the orders of online shoppers. Like a lot of companies, Sigma-Aldrich--a supplier of chemicals to research...

Streaming Media Gets Serious.(Mercedes-Benz USA)
July 2, 2002... Entertainment may have gotten streaming media into the cubicle. But now, the technology is being used by companies to inform and train workers, fostering communication while cutting costs. Take the case of Mercedes-Benz USA, which two years...

Pricey, but Worth It.
July 2, 2002... Akamai Technologies, a content distribution network best known for helping companies distribute Web sites and stream Webcasts on the public Internet, is readying plans to launch a service to provide a service for corporate intranets. ...

Mary Kay Trims Servers, Taps Windows Mainframe.(Microsoft's Windows 2000 Datacenter Server)
July 2, 2002... Kregg Jodie knows exactly how well commodity hardware handles added demands. As CIO of Mary Kay Inc., the $1.3 billion direct seller of cosmetics and beauty products, he built the company's entire electronic commerce effort on servers made...

Accounting Shakeup: Time to Count on IT?
July 2, 2002... With $6 trillion of shareholder wealth wiped out since March 2000, and Xerox, WorldCom and Enron all in the middle of billion-dollar accounting scandals, public reporting on spending of all types is getting deeper scrutiny. This will put...

Calculator: Smarter Than The Average Help Desk.(Brief Article)
July 10, 2002... As your help desk adopts best practices, its efficiencies can impact your company's overall bottom line significantly. One way of tracking this relationship, says Bob Wooten, author of Building & Managing a World Class IT Help Desk...

Companies That Bet On Start-ups.(Wakesoft, EFS Network offer source code security services)
July 10, 2002... Betting your business on a start-up, as EFS Network has done, is a tough decision for many customers given the number of vendors that have disappeared or been acquired over the last two years. One protection that customers are seeking is to...

Bitter Pill.(Schering-Plough's $500 million settlement with the FDA)
July 10, 2002... Schering-Plough, a $9.8 Billion Drugmaker Best Known for Its Claritin Allergy Pills, Is a Chronic Violator of Food and Drug Administration Rules on Making Medicines. The company just paid $250 million to cover half of a $500 million...

Corporate Express: Then, There Were Two.
July 10, 2002... In 1998, Things Were Looking Bleak for Corporate Express. the World's Largest Business-To-Business Office Products Company Had Gotten That Way Through Hundreds of Acquisitions. It Had Taken on Too Much Debt. in November of That Year, Standard &...

Voice of Experience: Mike Meinz, General Mills.(architecture of the company's corporate computing system)
July 10, 2002... Mike Meinz Director, Information Technology General Mills Minneapolis, Minn. www.generalmills.com Manager's Profile: A 35-year veteran of General Mills, he started as a computer operator working with punch cards and paper tape. He now...

Favored by Penny-Pinchers.(Microsoft's Windows Media)
July 10, 2002... To gain traction in the streaming media market, Microsoft Corp. is using a time-tested strategy: It's bundling its technology into the operating system. Microsoft's Windows Media platform is woven into the Windows operating system,...

Surviving in Spite of Microsoft.(RealNetworks Inc)
July 10, 2002... RealNetworks has to be better than free. RealNetworks typically charges corporations tens of thousands of dollars to license its streaming media servers and players for use in delivering audio and video on corporate networks. In contrast,...

The Bottom Line Per ... Jim Bolte.(vice president of information systems for Toyota's North American manufacturing operations)
July 10, 2002... As the vice president of information systems for Toyota's North American manufacturing operations, Jim Bolte spends his days figuring out how technology can be used to streamline operations--and thus manage costs--at a mass-production business...

The ROI is the ROI--Except When It's Not.
July 10, 2002... How could three little letters cause so much confusion? Most executives know that ROI, or return on investment, is the dollars-and-cents payoff of a project. Calculating ROI for technology initiatives is a fairly recent development, but one...

Autonomic Networks.
July 10, 2002... What are they? Computer networks that manage themselves; sometimes described as "self-managed" or "self-healing." The term derives from the vertebrate nervous system, which controls involuntary functions like breathing and digestion. ...

Cut Help Desk Costs Without Sacrificing Service.
July 10, 2002... Ever consider what a call to tech support costs? Combine charges of $12 to $40 with the help desk's poor reputation, and employees might be tempted to call a psychic hotline instead. Experts say any effort to make help-desk operations more...

Update: New CIO for Tyson.(Jeri Dunn)
July 31, 2002... Jeri Dunn, formerly the vice president and CIO of Nestle USA, has left the world's largest food manufacturer to become the first senior vice president and CIO of Tyson Foods, the world's largest processor of beef, poultry and pork. Dunn,...