Network Computing, 4/15/02: Get Help! Use Our Guide to Outsourcing Service & Support
By Jonathan Feldman
Like a stressed-out homeowner bent on purchasing every $500 nail gun, chainsaw and riding mower to save on $40 handyman jobs, some IT departments think they must do every little thing in-house despite the cost. Various factors, including a mistrust of vendors, a "not invented here" mentality and a fear of total departmental outsourcing, contribute to this tendency.
But whether you serve a couple of hundred users or a supersized multinational organization, odds are that to do IT business efficiently, you will have to figure out what to hand off to outside experts. It's essential to set priorities and delegate noncritical tasks.
First priority? Be the business-technology champion for your parent organization. Only the internal IT department can fill that role; outside entities almost always have their own agendas. To do it right, you'll need to closely examine your resources and goals.
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Computerworld, 4/22/02: The Power of 'How'
By Frank Hayes.
If you want to understand a statement that doesn't make sense, sometimes you have to know a little more about why someone would make it. Three weeks ago, I wrote about an admiral who told a public forum that the U.S. Navy wants to preserve its 30,000-odd legacy systems as it connects them all to a Navywide network. That's impossible, I said. A laudable goal, a good political position - but not a practical possibility. Now I think I finally understand why he'd make such a nonsensical statement. It wasn't a goal, or political positioning. It wasn't even a pile of public-relations double talk. It was a "How."
As in "How we're going to keep costs down on this project."
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Gartner, 4/23/02: The PC Market Won’t Grow Much in 2002
Worldwide PC sales estimates for the first quarter of 2002 confirm that the market remains flat. Gartner forecasts that the market will likely grow only 4 percent in 2002 as a whole.
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Infoworld, 4/19/02: Server, heal thyself
AT INFOWORLD CTO Forum 2002, I had the honor of moderating a roundtable discussion of a familiar topic: systems management. Yawn, you say? Au contraire. Luminaries from IBM, Cisco, and Path Communications expressed fascinating and diverse points of view about the challenge of managing IT assets -- systems, infrastructure components, and applications -- in a distributed setting. For all the coverage of Web services, grid computing, and utility computing, surprisingly little attention is paid to keeping these widely dispersed, loosely coupled federations of systems running smoothly.
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Strategy+Business, Q2, 02: Why Know-Who Trumps Know-How
By Sigvald J. Harryson
A six-step guide to the promotion of corporate entrepreneurship and the exploitation of innovation.
The innovation process is no longer limited to intracorporate know-how, but leverages instead global know-who. Know-how is the ability to solve problems efficiently based primarily on internally accumulated knowledge, experience, and skills. Know-who is the ability to acquire, transform, and apply that know-how.
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