Outsourcing
Meta Group, 4/15/02: IT Outsourcing Benchmarking: Part 1 - Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Service Management Strategies
Stratos Sarissamlis
Long-term IT outsourcing deals that lack midcourse pricing and service-level adjustments lose competitiveness over the contract term. Users should consider benchmarking an integral part of relationship-based management.
Outsourcing is evolving from an IT-driven undertaking to an acceptable business practice, enabling IT organizations to regulate technology refresh cycles and reform operational processes. Diverse reasons prompt users to review sourcing strategy implementations, including the following: harsh economic conditions that compel them to demonstrate ROI of sourcing options; faster technology and business process changes that make assimilation and integration efforts ongoing challenges; and growing emphasis on operational process maturity and service-quality improvement initiatives that require baseline measures to be effective. Indeed, many users assess benchmarking service offerings and options to validate performance comparisons of external service providers (ESPs) and determine realistic measurements of service and financial transactions.
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Meta Group, 5/3/02: IT Outsourcing Benchmarking: Part 2 - Looking Beyond Pricing
Service Management Strategies
Stratos Sarissamlis
Benchmarking is key to midcourse pricing adjustments in long-term outsourcing deals, but to maximize the benefits, users should broaden their benchmarking scope to encompass quantitative and qualitative assessments.
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IT Management
TechWeb, 5/9/02: Managing IT In Tough Times
Can you put a value on your company's culture? You may have to: This intangible asset could be the key to keeping competitive in today's tough economy.
That's the new thinking among some IT executives. They say that by aligning corporate culture and practices with IT spending, companies can increase innovation and boost productivity.
Is this New-Age outlook just the latest in MBA mumbo jumbo—or the real deal? In a new InformationWeek Research survey, a majority of executives say intangible assumptions carry as much weight as, or more than, hard ROI. Simply put, companies that invest heavily in IT and organizational capital see an increase in both productivity and market value.
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Personal Computing
ZDNet, 5/10/02: Why PC design must change
By Greg Papadopoulos
COMMENTARY--The sheer scale of the challenge is like nothing we've faced before. But it's not as if the high-tech industry is looking up at a rock wall like El Capitan or the famed North Face of Mount Everest. This is worse--it's like preparing to scale a tidal wave.
The wave analogy is apt, I think, because the Internet has been coming at us in waves. We create the waves because we want to ride them, like surfers shooting through the Banzai Pipeline, but our skills are about to be severely tested.
The first wave was a network of computers that swelled to encompass hundreds of millions of systems, all connected, all continually exchanging data.
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Microsoft
ZDNet, 5/10/02: MS customers balk at licensing program
By Joe Wilcox
With a summer deadline looming, about two-thirds of Microsoft's largest customers have not signed up for a new software licensing program that represents an important revenue stream for the company.
According to surveys by two research groups, Gartner and Giga Information Group, one-third of businesses contacted said they do not intend to sign up for the subscriptionlike software program, and another one-third of businesses said they are undecided. Most of this latter group are expected to go with the program, the market researchers concluded.
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ZDNet, 5/9/02: Microsoft: Server upgrades coming soon
By Ben Heskett
LAS VEGAS--Microsoft executives on Thursday confirmed plans to deliver a new set of server operating systems--already twice delayed--by the end of this year.
Microsoft's family of upgraded Windows 2000 server operating systems--called Windows .Net Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter--are in testing with customers. The company plans to have release candidates, or near-final versions, of the software in the pipeline sometime this summer, according to Bob O'Brien, a group product manager at the software company.
The release of the server software is expected to be key as the company increasingly bets its future on its .Net software strategy and the Internet in general.
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