Baseline articles from October 2007

Baseline archives from October 2007

Baseline 500: Best U.S. Users of Technology.
October 1, 2007... Story Guide: Getting a Glimpse, Through Numbers, of Who's Using Technology Well Very few of us are in the dark about the quality of I.T. management at our own companies. Getting insight into other companies is the trick. The List:...

Do It Yourself: Calculate Your Company's Information Productivity.
October 1, 2007... Here are the steps and financial data you'll need to calculate the information productivity of your company. 1. Your company's annual income statement and balance sheet. These audited results are found in your most recent 10-K form...

Getting a Glimpse, Through Numbers, of Who's Using Technology Well.
October 1, 2007... How good companies are at using information technology is one of those things that's hard to know--at least if you're outside a company. From outside, you can't know how easy it is to get data, whether the systems were designed with customers...

The Baseline 500 Methodology.(Brief article)
October 1, 2007... The Baseline 500 uses a company's financial efficiency as a proxy for how well it uses technology. We start with a company's profit and look at other measures, including the amount of capital invested, to figure how much value has been added by...

Top 10 Technology Users by Industry Sector.
October 1, 2007... Want to know who's tops in a given sector? Click on the link you're interested in below to get an answer to that, and to see if the top I.T. people in a given industry are concentrated in any single geographic area. Consumer Discretionary:...

5 Tips for Improving Your IP Score.(Information Productivity )
October 1, 2007... Businesses of all shapes and sizes comprise the Baseline 500. But they face many of the same issues in achieving high levels of information productivity (IP)--and have many of the same routes to getting there. Here are five: 1. Align I.T....

Miner, Insurer, Driller: Profiles of the 3 best.
October 1, 2007... Chief information officers at the three top-ranked companies on our list talk about their work. No. 1: Martin Ugarteche of Southern Copper On focusing on the bottom line. No. 2: June Drewry of Chubb On being a business person first,...

The Baseline 500 List.
October 1, 2007... The smallest company is $10 million in sales, the biggest $309 billion. This year's list of top technology users represents every industry, every geography, every approach to using technology. The List: 1-500 This is an updated version...

Cover Story: Wal-Mart's Faltering RFID Initiative.(Company overview)
October 3, 2007... Despite some big strategic changes, the retail giant insists it's not retreating on its investment. Story Guide: *Falling Short of Expectations *The RFID Promise *Making its Case *Sales-Floor ROI *Where Next? ...

Out of Scope: Hot Bots.
October 3, 2007... Hot Bots We couldn't help but chuckle at an e-mail from an alumni listserv asking members to vote for a particular DC-area TV reporter in a "Battle of the Media Hotties" contest. Then another note came across, this time linking to an...

List Cites Top 25 Tech Consultants, But Is It Accurate?
October 4, 2007... Unless you rely on hard metrics such as revenue, gross margins and new bookings, ranking tech consulting companies can be a dicey business. How, as an example, can you realistically compare Cisco, which specializes in helping larger companies...

Knowledge Management: 5 Big Companies That Got It Right.
October 4, 2007... American companies will spend $73 billion on knowledge management software this year and spending on content, search, portal, and collaboration technologies is expected to increase 16% in 2008, according to a recently-released report from AMR...

2008 Data Security Prediction: More Trouble for CISOs.
October 5, 2007... Chief information security officers should be on guard next year for social network attacks, Web 2.0 vulnerabilities and mobile computing hackers. Those risks are among the top security threats for 2008 as listed in a new report from the...

Fall Reading for I.T. Managers.(Brief article)
October 5, 2007... A few months back, Baseline looked into some interesting picks for beach reading. Now the fall has arrived, along with a new slate of books for I.T. pros. We reached out to top publishers and academic institutions and searched bookseller...

Fewer CIOs Are Reporting to CEOs, Survey Finds.
October 9, 2007... Far fewer chief information officers are reporting to their chief executives, according to a survey. Last year, 45% of those responding to a survey by the Society of Information Management said the CIO in their organization reported to...

Data Warehousing Conference: It's All About the Analytics, Attendees Told.(Conference notes)
October 10, 2007... Companies that know how to combine data warehouses with analytics will have a big advantage in the future, attendees at the annual Teradata Users conference were told. Randall Parman, database architect at Applebee's International, a chain...

Project Managers, at $84K, Are Best-Paid IT Consultants.
October 11, 2007... As an IT consultant, do you know how much you should be making? This depends, of course, on many variables that are not always easily gauged: experience, skills, industry, education, size and location of company. PayScale, Inc. has created...

CIOs Told to Make Conspicuous Contribution to Revenue.
October 11, 2007... Every year, thousands of information technologists gather in Orlando to hear Gartner Inc. analysts tell them that information technology should be aligned with business. Gartner always comes up with a new twist on the message, but the message...

Yahoo's Web Performance Guru: 14 Tenets for Speeding Up Sites.
October 15, 2007... In seven years at Yahoo, Steve Souders had focused most of his effort on back-end engineering tasks like squeezing more performance out of a database, or optimizing the memory usage in C++ programs running on a server. Three years ago, when he...

The I.T. Pro's October Reading.
October 17, 2007... I.T. managers and project leaders have a wide variety of reading interests, based on the top requested stories on our Web site so far this month. Many read about Wal-Mart's struggles with RFID, while others turned to our annual list of the best...

Tech Represents 20% of Fastest Growers, Magazine Says.
October 22, 2007... High-tech companies make up more than 20% of the 5,000 fastest-growing privately held American companies on a recently released ranking from Inc. magazine. The Inc. 5000 is based on revenue gains made by companies between 2003 and 2006....

How the Mighty Fall? Yahoo's Embarrassing Web Errors.
October 22, 2007... Maybe I'm behind the times, but I still think of Yahoo as one of the Web's great success stories. And, until recently, I also thought of it as setting the standard in Web site operations. When I was writing a cover story on MySpace and noticed...

Beltway IT: It Pays to Pay.(Information Technology)
October 24, 2007... For tech consultants and other contractors doing business inside the Beltway, the firms that spend the most on lobbying and dole out the biggest campaign contributions are more often than not the ones that get the big contracts. OK, that's...

TJX Breach Update: 94 Million Credit Accounts Potentially Exposed.
October 24, 2007... The number of Visa and MasterCard accounts that could have been exposed to potential fraud by a data breach at retailer TJX Companies, could be nearly double the original estimates, according to documents filed in court. Filings in a bank...

Virtualization: Agility More Significant Than Cost Cutting.
October 26, 2007... Although much of the excitement about virtualization has focused on the cost-cutting it enables, the real value comes from business agility, according to participants at the Ziff Davis Enterprise 2007 Virtualization Summit. "When...

Faulty Database Blinds Iraq Reconstruction Accounting.
October 26, 2007... A faulty database has prevented federal auditors from tracking more than $7.3 billion earmarked for the reconstruction of Iraq, according to USA Today. As a result, federal auditors still don't know how much waste and fraud has occurred. ...

No Such Thing as Security "Best Practices".(Company overview)
October 29, 2007... Linda Stutsman is managing director of the International Information Integrity Institute. I-4, as it's known, was founded in 1986 by SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) to promote the sharing of security-related information...

Google Maps, Predator Drones Turned Tide on Wildfires.
October 29, 2007... Cooler temperatures and sullen Santa Ana winds are aiding firefighter's efforts to contain devastating wildfires that have forced tens of thousands to evacuate and destroyed hundreds of Southern Californian homes. Prior to a change in the...

Playing by the Numbers: Baseball and BI.
October 29, 2007... It's gone from being the most cursed team in sports to being proclaimed the premier team of the new millennium by the New York Times. With its World Series Win against the Colorado Rockies on Sunday, the Boston Red Sox became the first team...

Join the Baseline Community.
October 29, 2007... No surprise that Microsoft is buying a stake in Facebook, the juggernaut social network. With more than 50 million active users and market valuation of $15 billion, Facebook is poised to become the next Google as it turns the corner from...