Information Week, 4/15/02: Business Technology: ROI Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
By Brian Gillooly
Like a child chasing a Monarch butterfly on a windy day, business-technology executives have been pursuing ROI as it flutters tantalizingly within their reach. They just never seem to quite capture it.
Changes in the economy and the evolution of the purchase process for business technology have placed unusual importance on determining the return on investment for almost all technology projects. Until recently, those requirements were placed only on large-scale, expensive implementations. Or on projects that were "on the bubble." But these days, does anyone know of a technology implementation that isn't on the bubble in this economy? As noble as determining ROI is-for the business, for customers, for shareholders-there's still little consensus among businesses, technology vendors, and financial experts on how to measure it accurately. ROI, it seems, truly is in the eye of the beholder.
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Information Week, 4/19/02: Building Organizational Capital April 19, 2002
IT can boost productivity, but the real gains for a business come from combining IT investments with investments in corporate culture and organizational practices, according to an MIT study.
By Rick Whiting
An MIT study has found that while IT can improve a company's productivity, the real gains come from combining IT investments with "organizational capital"--the investments companies make in corporate culture and organizational practices. The study, presented Friday at an E-business conference in Cambridge, Mass., found that companies that invest in both IT and organizational capital are more productive and have much larger market capitalizations than those that don't.
"Productivity growth comes from new technologies and new ways of doing business," said Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Sloan School of Management professor, who, as co-director of MIT's Center for E-business, led the study. While the study found a slight correlation between IT investments and productivity, spending levels were of little importance. "It was how they used technology. It was what they were doing with it. And it was their corporate culture, their attitudes towards a whole set of information-related decisions," Brynjolfsson said.
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Information Week, 4/22/02: Secret CIO: Today A CIO; Tomorrow, Perhaps, The World?
It's rational for an aspiring CIO to expect that his or her career path can lead to CEO.
By Herbert W. Lovelace
Not too long ago, you'd swear every professional conference had at least one session (if not its entire theme) dedicated to that burning question: How can we poor abused IT professionals attain our proper level of respect within the company? The presentations either complained that management (those dolts) didn't understand what gems we really were and needed to be educated, or declared that the gap was caused by our own multiple inadequacies--Mea culpa! Mea culpa! I'd come home from these get-togethers thinking I hadn't seen such levels of angst since I was a teen-ager and all of us knew our pimples would go away if only we could find the right elixir on the drugstore shelves.
But lately, I've noticed a pronounced change in the way major companies view their CIOs. My friends tell me they've seen the same phenomenon over the last year or two, though they're quick to caution that the situation may be as fleeting as the late, lamented run-up in Internet stocks. Personally, I think it's here to stay. In fact, it will accelerate rapidly.
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The McKinsey Quarterly, Q1, 2002: Computers: Why The Party’s Over
M. Michael Cho and Brent Neiman
The McKinsey Quarterly, 2002 Number 1
Higher sales of more powerful computers propelled the industry’s success in the late 1990s. But the tide may have turned for the worse—at least for computer manufacturers.
The computer- and semiconductor-manufacturing industries are central to any inquiry into the reason for the acceleration of US productivity after 1995, since together they account for roughly one-quarter of the national productivity growth jump (0.3 out of 1.33 percentage points).1 Both sectors already had very high productivity levels and growth rates. Productivity growth in computer manufacturing accelerated from an annual rate of 27 percent (1987–95) to 60 percent (1995–99); in semiconductors, it rose to 66 percent, from 43 percent.
More powerful computers
Nearly all of the productivity acceleration in computer manufacturing stems from the industry’s success in selling more powerful computers, a phenomenon reflected in labor productivity data, not higher prices, since powerful computers become cheaper as technology develops.2 More powerful computers resulted from technological advances in inputs, such as microprocessors, memory, and storage devices, and from the integration of new components, such as CD-ROMs and modems, rather than from operational changes undertaken by computer manufacturers. Even so, they were credited with much of the gain in productivity.
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Press Release, 4/22/02: Broadcom Demonstrates Industry's First 10-Gigabit Serial End-to-End Transmission Over Copper
Chip-to-Chip, Module, Backplane and System Interconnects Can Now Be Enabled With High-Speed Serial 10-Gigabit Copper Links to Enhance Enterprise, Metropolitan, and Long-Haul DWDM Transport Applications
IRVINE, Calif., April 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), the leading provider of integrated circuits enabling broadband communications, today announced a breakthrough chip technology that enables 10-Gigabit per second (Gbps) serial transmission over a variety of copper media. The advanced signal conditioning capability of the Broadcom(R) BCM8102 high-speed transmitter/receiver chip alleviates bottlenecks and reduces the cost of moving large amounts of data in high-speed switching and routing networks. It achieves this by increasing the reliability and speed of multi-Gigabit data transmission over copper.
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TechTarget, 4/16/02: .NET Server: Does it belong in your future?
By Ed Parry, News Editor
LOS ANGELES -- Gartner vice president and research director Tom Bittman was a little like Charles Dickens during his talk at the consulting firm's Windows: Nothing but .NET? conference.
Bittman introduced the Ghost of Windows Future.
The ghost wasn't a shrouded, silent specter like the one in "A Christmas Carol." It was more like a set of slides that advised administrators of Windows Present what to expect in the future -- and how to keep from getting scrooged.
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The New York Times, 4/22/02: After an Age of Digital Hubris, Wired's Editor Is Still a Believer
By DAVID CARR
You do not need a magazine like Wired to tell you that the future has become a more complicated, less optimistic place. The biggest status symbol in Silicon Valley right now is a job. The digital story is kaput, at least for the time being, and dozens of mainstream publications are competing for news that Wired used to have all to itself.
In the midst of the free fall, Chris Anderson took over the helm of the magazine, one of the digital revolution's most cherished tribal artifacts. And precisely because he was not a member of the tribe — he arrived from The Economist — he has been fighting for custody of its soul ever since.
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