Baseline articles from October 2003

Baseline archives from October 2003

Voice of Experience: Mercy Health Partners CIO Jim Albin.
October 1, 2003... Manager's Profile: Jim Albin came to Toledo-based Mercy Health, a division of Catholic Healthcare Partners that operates hospitals in northwestern Ohio, three years ago. As chief information officer, he shepherded 4,800 projects in his Pacific...

WD-40.
October 1, 2003... Mike Freeman's job was to fix something that wasn't broken. WD-40 Co., where Freeman is president of North American operations, makes WD-40 lubricant spray. For decades, that was all it made, and the San Diego company was expert at getting...

Dallas Mavericks.
October 1, 2003... Ken Bonzon keeps a serenity prayer by St. Teresa of Avila taped to his computer monitor. "Let nothing frighten you," it counsels, which is good advice when your boss is Mark Cuban. As chief information officer of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks,...

Hot Topic.
October 1, 2003... At least once a year, Hot Topic Vice President of Technology John Horwath spends a day working at one of the chain's stores, selling body jewelry, spiked chokers, and other current emblems of "alternative" youth culture. At 44, Horwath is...

Unleasing Potential You Already Possess.
October 1, 2003... When new sales and support hires arrive at Carreker, the $149 million supplier of financial software encourages them to work at one of two places: at home or at a customer site. Now approximately 40% of the company's 580 employees work out...

Mixed Signals.
October 1, 2003... Thaddeus Arroyo, Chief Information Officer for wireless carrier Cingular, is preparing for what could be a six-week sprint to meet a regulatory mandate. Wireless local number portability, known as WLNP, will allow customers of the 100...

Does Honesty Pay Off?
October 1, 2003... For Bob Travatello, the benefit of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley is calculated in prison time: "The ROI is keeping my CEO and CFO out of jail." Travatello is chief information officer for Blue Rhino, a Winston-Salem, N.C., provider of...

The Natural Tendency of Natural Events.
October 1, 2003... When I came to BellSouth, the company was just beginning its transformation from a local phone company to an information-services company. It wasn't just a technology transformation, but a business one. The company needed to design what its...

Talk a Language They Understand.
October 1, 2003... There are two kinds of executives: The business-savvy manager who uses technology and the technologist. Before long, the latter will become extinct. "The day of the technology bureaucrat is over," says Ken Bohlen, executive vice president...

Noveon: The Box Stops Here.
October 1, 2003... Noveon needed to boost its returns, fast. So the billion-dollar specialty chemicals company loaded up on low-cost standard computers. By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld The Task: Create an almost entirely new computing and communications...

Sonic Automotive, Rodside Aid.
October 1, 2003... When Chief Information Officer David Boatman arrived at Sonic Automotive four years ago, the company was motoring ahead like it was on the acquisition Autobahn. Purring like a Mercedes-Benz E55 AMG, the auto dealer had begun picking up...

Waters, Around the World in 99 Days.
October 1, 2003... More than 100 handpicked senior managers were summoned to a conference room at the Milford, Mass., headquarters of Waters Corp., a manufacturer of analytical instruments for the pharmaceutical and scientific industries. They were mostly in...

Which Projects are Worth Your Time?
October 1, 2003... Knowing your technology department can deliver on time and on budget is one thing--but how do you know it's working on the right initiatives in the first place? By assessing your corporate strategies, assigning a real value to each project and...

Niku: The Old-Timer Is New Again.
October 1, 2003... When managing projects with specialized software was still a fairly new idea, New York-based ABT was widely acknowledged as a leader in the fledgling field. At the time, "ABT was one of the companies spending the most on development," says TRW...

Pacific Edge: Mom-And-Pop No More.
October 1, 2003... Pacific Edge is no longer run on a day-to-day basis by its married co-founders, but longtime customers say it hasn't lost its personal touch. The key: Giving users what they want, especially the ability to easily exchange data from its...

Changepoint: Same Script, Different Theater.
October 1, 2003... Aptly named Changepoint has certainly adapted--to stock-market hiccups and software-market shifts. The firm shelved its 2000 public offering, but had roughly $40 million in venture capital as a cushion. Since then, the firm says it's had two...

By the Numbers: October 2003.
October 1, 2003... Tight Pocketbooks Find Room for E-Business As information technology budgets shrink, e-business initiatives continue to gain a bigger piece of the pie, according to an annual study by Line56 Media and A.T. Kearney Inc. The 150 companies...

Tech Vendors: Don't Curb Individual Liberties for Security.
October 2, 2003... Security technology is growing increasingly sophisticated--so much so that computers can now identify and track the movements, physical characteristics, and chemical traces of people without much help from human beings. Over time, those...

Vote, with No Confidence.
October 2, 2003... The voting machines that almost derailed the Oct. 7 California recall election are all being replaced. But controversy over voting technology is far from finished in the Golden State--or the rest of the country. For local officials in charge of...

Bottom Line Per....QVC CIO Rob Cochran.
October 2, 2003... Sixteen years ago, Rob Cochran joined the then-fledgling retailer hawking jewelry, apparel, electronics and other merchandise on television. The company, recently acquired by Liberty Media Corp. from Comcast Corp., reeled in $4.4 billion in net...

Calculating Costs: The Software Debate: Buy vs. Rent.
October 9, 2003... The past few years have been dif-ficult for software companies, with one big exception: vendors of hosted sales and customer service applications. Companies such as Salesforce.com of San Francisco and UpShot Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., have...

Primer: XQuery 1.0.
October 9, 2003... What is it? A language that allows users to search for and extract information from databases as well as documents in which content is identified by tags based on the Internet's eXtensible Markup Language (XML). What does it do? XQuery makes it...

Quiz: Can XQuery Help Our Company?
October 9, 2003... XQuery 1.0 is a language that allows users to search for and extract information from databases and documents. Here's how it works, who is using it, and whether or not it's right for you. 1. Our company has a lot of data stored in the XML...

My Aching Technology Department.
October 9, 2003... Sometimes it's hard to know exactly where the pain in your information technology department comes from. "It's like a patient who tells a doctor that his knee hurts, when it's actually his hip that's causing the fundamental problem," says Ann...

The Scobleizer Versus Cerberus the Hound of Hades.
October 20, 2003... The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be the $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog. Scoble, part of the Windows marketing team, publishes his personal observations...

Is The Economy Leaving Your Tech Dept. Behind?
October 30, 2003... For Paul Zazzera, chief information officer at Time Inc., 2004's technology budget is going to look a lot like 2003's: Flat. Zazzera's budget, which serves the flagship magazine division at sprawling media giant Time Warner, will feature a few...

Suite Returns.
October 30, 2003... The Microsoft Office 2003 launch on Oct. 21 included plenty of proclamations from chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates and other honchos about how the new suite of word-processing, mail and presentation software can enhance...

LeapFrog: Trouble In Toyland.
October 30, 2003... LeapFrog Enterprises may enjoy strong demand for its educational toys, but the Emeryville, Calif. manufacturer could use a primer on how a supply chain needs to work as Christmas approaches. The basic lesson: a company should think twice before...

Avon: Offshore Twist.
October 30, 2003... Avon Products is joining the trend to hire programming talent in foreign countries, where wages are lower. But it has added a twist to the offshore bandwagon--by insourcing, rather than outsourcing, the work. The cosmetics giant is calling...