Baseline articles from June 2002

Baseline archives from June 2002

The Bottom Line Per ... Glenn Bonner.(MGM Mirage's CIO)(Interview)
June 1, 2002... MGM Mirage's Glenn Bonner is responsible for the information systems running at the Las Vegas-based hotel and gaming company, which owns or manages 19 casinos in the U.S., Australia and South Africa. He oversees a staff of 220 with an annual...

A Turnaround Project That Saved $300 Million.(Aetna's financial services IT organization)
June 1, 2002... I can't imagine being anything but a chief information officer. You get to see the entire business operation. It's a birds-eye view of all the different pieces that make your company run, and you have an impact on everything that happens. ...

Mastering Data.(MasterCard International's new operations)
June 1, 2002... Mike Bray was looking forward to his Memorial Day weekend last year. But he wasn't planning a cookout. He would spend all his time indoors, at MasterCard International's new operations center in a suburb of St. Louis. His mind was...

Cozying Up to the Customer.(Pacific IBM Credit Union)
June 1, 2002... In the mid-1990s, a sleepy IBM employees' credit union woke up to the fact that it needed to market itself more aggressively. Today, the changes are quite visible for visitors to Meriwest Credit Union's branches in River Oaks and Milpitas,...

May Day Mayday.(Best Buy's WiFi system's vulnerability to electronic snooping)
June 1, 2002... You could call it a security Mayday. Imagine Best Buy's surprise when it found on May 1 that customers' credit-card data and other transaction information at some of its 1,900 stores had been left vulnerable to electronic snooping, thanks...

Measuring Up: Turn Out the Lights, the Party's Over.(AMR Research's report on the decline in the sales of enterprise resource planning software)(Statistical Data Included)
June 1, 2002... Rumors of renewed economic growth haven't reached the enterprise software market. And according to analysts at business research firm AMR Research, sales of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems--software suites that manage corporate...

Random Radio Waves Around Wall Street.
June 7, 2002... A year ago, the idea would have seemed a relatively innocent exercise of freedom of the press--and the freedom to move about this country. But sitting in a deli a few steps from the New York Stock Exchange, mixed feelings were the order of...

HP Taps XML for Integration.
June 11, 2002... Think you have integration indigestion? While Hewlett-Packard corporate tackles its mega-merger with Compaq, smaller groups within HP have been wrestling since well before the merger with hefty integration efforts of their own. Though small...

Quiz: Is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Right for You?
June 12, 2002... Instructions: Use our four-point scale to indicate how closely you disagree (1) or agree (4) with each statement. Stronglydisagree1 2 3 Stronglyagree4 A merger or acquisition is imminent, and we'll need to share financial data from day one....

New Rx for Pharmaceutical Data.
June 12, 2002... Schering-Plough will pay $250 million to the U.S. government this month--the first portion of a $500 million penalty--after federal regulators found the drug giant violated dozens of manufacturing rules in the last several years. Abbott...

How Toyota Customer Data Spun Out.
June 13, 2002... If you own a Lexus--or know someone who does--you know how much value the luxury auto brand places on customer service. Take a noteworthy case in 1998. Toyota Motor Sales USA (TMS) responded to a recurring service problem with its Lexus...

Unilever's Supply-Chain Diet.
June 15, 2002... You know Unilever. It sells products that 150 million of us use every day to wash clothes (Wisk, All), wash bodies (Dove, Lever 2000), dine (Ragu pasta sauce) and diet (SlimFast drinks). No. 1 in home- and personal-care items, and second to...

Gotcha! Managing Continuous Flow Manufacturing.(flow-based systems in the steel industry)
June 15, 2002... Did You Know... If you want software specifically built for lean or continuous flow manufacturing, like steel production, you've only got a handful of options Oracle makes a flow manufacturing application for its 11i e-business suite,...

At U.S. Steel, New Computers Revive Old Plant.(computers eliminate over 7,000 workers at steel mill)
June 15, 2002... Finding people at U.S. Steel's Mon Valley Works can be a challenge. At times, a manager can look from one end of the half-mile long plant to the other without seeing a single soul. The floors on which 9,300 steelworkers once tended to blast...

Chat for Better Service--But Not Savings.
June 17, 2002... Chat is no longer just for teen-agers and insomniacs. About 17% of corporate Web sites now provide real-time, text-based communication with customer service representatives (CSRs), according to Jupiter Media Metrix. And Gartner Inc. analyst...

Hitachi Data Systems: Late But Coming On Strong.
June 17, 2002... Late, but Coming on Strong Hitachi Data Systems is gunning for EMC Corp. Although Hitachi entered the market for storage area networks after EMC had become dominant, the subsidiary of Japan's Hitachi Ltd. is making up for lost time....

EMC: No Longer Alone on Top.
June 17, 2002... No Longer Alone on Top EMC Corp. was once one of the darlings of high technology, a leader in the seemingly mundane area of data storage whose outsize profits in the Internet's heyday gave it a market value well in excess of $100 billion,...

U.S. Steel Tries Tech Alchemy.
June 17, 2002... U.S. Steel Base Case Headquarters: 600 Grant St., Pittsburgh, PA. 15219 Phone: (412) 433-1121 Business: Integrated steel manufacturer Financials: $6.38 billion total revenue; $218 million net loss (fiscal 2001) CIO: Gene Trudell, managing...

U.S. Steel: Why the Red Ink?
June 17, 2002... For all the talk (and reality) of bankruptcy in the steel industry, U.S. Steel is widely lauded for its technology and efficiency. Which simply begs the question: Why is it losing so much money? Better yet, why is it pressuring the government...

POSCO: The Next Big Steel.
June 17, 2002... At the turn of the 20th century, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie made an observation that would portend the difficulties U.S. Steel would face at the turn of the 21st. "Pittsburgh," Carnegie told a gathering of steelmakers in Cleveland in...

Enterprise Servers: HP's Alpha Division.
June 17, 2002... The Omega of Alpha It was Digital Equipment Corp.'s baby, which went through midlife at Compaq and now will die at Hewlett-Packard. Such is the life of the proprietary Alpha chip, the engine inside the powerful and ultra-reliable...

U.S. Steel: Selling Tech--Or Selling Out?
June 18, 2002... U.S. Steel is often painted as part of a group of century-old steelmakers that are too inefficient and backward to compete with the rest of the world. Yet U.S. Steel sells its own technology to many of the world's largest steelmakers,...

IT Spending: 2003 May Maintain 2002 Lows.
June 20, 2002... BOSTON--The average U.S. corporation is likely to reduce its spending on information technology by 10% or more in 2002--and then "reset" its budget for 2003 to the lower levels, according to survey results and a panel of chief information...