Business Process Outsourcing
ZDNet News, 1/14/03: IT service firms: From PCs to payroll
By Ed Frauenheim
Faced with weak information technology spending, companies that provide IT services are expanding beyond their traditional role as overseers of networks, PCs and computer help desks and moving into "back office" areas such as accounting and human resources.
So-called BPO, or business-process outsourcing--which involves an outside company taking over various back-office functions including procurement, invoice processing and the like--has become a vital market for IT companies as corporate spending on conventional data center services has dropped.
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Service Providers: Market Research
Giga, 1/13/03: Service Provider Alternatives for Marketing Initiatives
Elana Anderson
Companies that wish to reevaluate their customer marketing strategy are faced with a set of vastly different options. Understanding those options and selecting the one that will work best for the organization is key to achieving the desired outcome. There are three major alternatives to consider, full service provider, management consultant and analytic service boutique.
The best approach depends a lot on the culture of the company, the current marketing environment and the depth of the work that the organization is prepared to take on. While the full service provider option may be the best choice for companies that are primarily program or single channel focused, a management consultant may be more appropriate for complex multi-channel environments. The analytic services boutique, on the other hand, may be the best option for smaller or less complex organizations with superior marketing leadership and solid IT support for marketing integration.
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Microsoft
Infoworld, 1/13/02: Microsoft adds category to security rating system
By Joris Evers
AFTER CUSTOMERS COMPLAINED that they couldn't identify the most serious security vulnerabilities, Microsoft has added a fourth category to its vulnerability rating system. But critics feel that the extra tier adds even more complexity to an administrator's job.
Under the new system, fewer bulletins get the "critical" stamp. Only vulnerabilities that could be exploited to allow malicious Internet worms to spread without user action are now rated critical. Many issues that were previously rated critical are now "important," a new category in the rating system. These "important" vulnerabilities could still expose user data or threaten system resources, but they might not receive the urgent attention from administrators that they deserve.
"If Microsoft wanted to simplify matters, they should've done just that -- cut the categories down from three to two levels. Administrators want to know whether a patch needs to be applied immediately, or if they can conveniently schedule it," says Thor Larholm, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based security researcher with PivX Solutions.
A two-tiered system would let administrators quickly decide whether they need to drop all tasks at hand and apply a patch, or whether the risk is small enough that they can wait and include it in a weekly patch cycle.
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Management / Human Resources / Corporate Culture
Giga, 1/13/03: Good Human Capital Management Increases Shareholder
An emerging market for human capital development and management (HCDM) solutions is providing leading-edge firms with a competitive advantage that delivers tangible bottom line results. It has become increasingly clear in the past few years that human capital is now the leading component of a firm’s market capitalization. In fact, recent studies have shown that the human capital component has risen from about 17 percent in the mid-1970s to almost 80 percent today. It only stands to reason that improvements to human capital will have a direct positive impact on shareholder value.
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Signs of Hope
The Age (Australia), 1/14/03: Broadband boom offers hope of dot-com revival
By Garry Barker
Amid the lingering pain of the dot-com crash and the tech-wreck in Silicon Valley, signs of a tentative recovery are emerging. While it's still early days, there are now signs in the United States that interest in the Internet is beginning to expand beyond e-mail and basic services, and investors are beginning to return.
The source of this cautious new energy has been the steady growth of broadband connections across the US. More than 15 million homes here now have either cable or DSL (digital subscriber line) connections - about 17 per cent of the total 107 million households.
According to the telcos 100,000 new subscribers are signing up a week and America should have more than 20 million households connected before the end of this year. But there's a long way to go; 75 per cent of the 75 million US homes with Internet access still get there by slow dial-up modems.
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