IT Management
TechWeb, 7/28/03: Losing E-Mail: A Life-Altering Event
A third of IT pros say having their company's E-mail system go down is as stressful as a divorce or car wreck.
By Gregg Keizer
A third of all IT professionals say the stress caused by having their company's E-mail system go down is on the same level as major life events such as a car wreck or a divorce, according to a survey by U.K.-based Dynamic Markets for American storage software vendor Veritas.
"E-mail has become far more than a communication tool, placing a huge responsibility on organizations to ensure that E-mail is always available," said Mark Bregman, Veritas' executive VP for product operations. "When IT managers fail to keep the systems running, they inhibit the ability of the entire organization to conduct business."
The survey, which polled 850 CIOs and IT managers of midsize and large organizations in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa, also uncovered other tidbits of stress and anguish over E-mail and the prospect of it going south.
[more]
Collaborative Technologies
Inc, 7/03: Blogging for Business
The word is out: Business blogs are in.
Blogging has been popular with teens, geeks, and flamboyant extroverts for years, but today, they're garnering more attention from businesses as a way to connect with customers and prospects.
By: Anne Stuart
"Blog" is shorthand for weblog, a sort of public online diary, updated regularly -- often daily or even every few hours -- with the owner's comments, announcements, and recommended links.
Blogging has been popular for years with teens, geeks, and flamboyant extroverts comfortable with blog style: informal, unedited, first-person entries, usually posted in reverse chronological order. While many bloggers apparently consider no detail too insignificant to chronicle for a worldwide audience ("went to the podiatrist today;" "had egglant parm at Gino's and forgot to tape ER "), the best stock their online journals with news and links they believe visitors might find useful.
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Computerworld, 7/28/03: Meeting of the Minds: Technology for business "swarming"
By KATHLEEN MELYMUKA
At global advertising agency Lowe & Partners Worldwide, when an account executive in Hong Kong gets a request for a proposal from a prospective client, he opens up a collaboration space on his PC and invites in subject-area experts, planners and other creative types from India to England. Each can invite others from his personal network, whether inside or outside the company. In minutes, a swarm of creative talent is exploiting the opportunity. Artists post relevant images; content experts surf the Web in unison to find useful sites; researchers drop in pertinent files; copywriters type or edit documents together in real time.
"This has shifted the landscape of expertise," says Ethan Schoonover, e-business director for the Asia-Pacific region at Lowe. "We're discovering resources we didn't know existed."
…
Swarming is a type of collaboration in which large numbers of geographically dispersed people quickly self-organize in a peer-to-peer network to deal with a problem or opportunity. It's a fluid, shifting network with no central control or hub. A swarm can be as complex as a global business network or as simple as a "cell phone posse".
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Bloomberg, 7/28/03: Pentagon Plans Futures Market for Events in MideasT
The U.S. military plans a worldwide on-line futures market to help it predict events in the Middle East. Traders could bet on the likelihood of events ranging from the overthrow of a government to the collapse of an economy or the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Traders can register starting August 1; on-line trading would begin a month later, according to the program's Web site. Two Democratic U.S. senators say the market is a terrible idea and must be stopped.
[more]
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