Information Technology
The McKinsey Quarterly, #3 2003, What CEOs Really Think About IT
Eric Monnoyer
The McKinsey Quarterly, 2003 Number 3
Most large companies in the United States and Europe have long struggled with the need for tighter relationships between IT and business managers. This perennial management problem is echoed once again in a recent study of how French CEOs and chief information officers (CIOs) view the performance of information systems within their organizations.1 Insights from the study suggest that CEOs are growing keener to find a solution—and that both CIOs and the leaders of business units may soon be held more accountable for business ownership of IT.
In the survey, CEOs say that IT isn’t meeting their (admittedly high) performance expectations, particularly in providing systems and tools to support managerial decision making and in gaining the scale advantages of deploying common systems and processes across business units. CEOs attribute the gap between expected and actual performance mainly to the insufficient involvement of business units in IT projects, to the weak oversight and management of these projects, and to IT’s inadequate understanding of their business requirements. As one CEO commented, "Because the business people are uninterested in information systems, the information systems people have the power."
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Infoworld, 8/13/03: Fiorina: IT does matter
HP CEO responds to Nicholas Carr's article
By Robert McMillan
The role of technology in the enterprise may be changing, but IT still very much matters, Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina said Tuesday in a keynote speech at her company's HP World user convention in Atlanta.
Fiorina was referring specifically to a widely discussed May article by Nicholas Carr in the Harvard Business Review entitled "IT Doesn't Matter." In it, Carr argued that scarcity was what made a resource strategic, and that since high technology has become commonplace, managers should focus on mitigating risk rather than leveraging computer technology to gain competitive advantage.
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Security
The Wall Street Journal, 8/13/03: Wall Street Firms Curb Access to Personal E-Mail
By CARL BIALIK
Goodbye.
An increasing number of financial-services firms are blocking their workers from accessing personal e-mail accounts from America Online, Yahoo Inc., Hotmail and others. In the latest move, Merrill Lynch & Co. last week told employees that it was barring them from accessing their personal e-mail accounts while at work. In a memo, Merrill said it was putting in place the new policy "to help ensure that electronic communications to and from Merrill Lynch facilities are subject to proper monitoring and surveillance."
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Mobile
Wired News, 8/13/03: RIM Pushes on With New BlackBerry
By Elisa Batista
Following a court order that could prevent the company from selling its bread-and-butter BlackBerry communications device, Research In Motion released the latest version of the product Monday.
A court order last week forces RIM to file an appeal in an ongoing patent dispute with NTP, a holding company based in Arlington, Virginia, or halt all BlackBerry sales. Despite that ruling, RIM teamed up with T-Mobile USA to launch the BlackBerry 7230: a full-color device that lets customers make and receive cellular phone calls and view Web content, as well as manage e-mail.
The device, which T-Mobile plans to sell for $400 with a voice plan and an additional $30 per month for unlimited data use is, by far, RIM's most robust product.
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Infoworld, 8/13/03: Iomega readies 35GB portable drive
RRD system will let users back up the entire OS, not just individual files
By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service August 12, 2003
Iomega is developing a way for computer users to take their hard disks on the road.
On Tuesday, the San Diego storage company, best known for its Zip and Jaz drives, will announce plans to begin shipping a new type of storage technology called the Removable Rigid Disk (RRD) system. RRDs will be based on commodity hard drive components but will feature a special drive cartridge that can be used to insert the disk in a special drive and remove it. The disks are expected to have a capacity of 35GB.
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Collaborative Technologies
The New York Times, 8/13/03: Blah Blah Blog
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Is the Internet over?
There are troubling signs. AOL Time Warner, a company that started out scorning its Old Media side, is now looking to jettison the letters AOL. Fast Company, a hot magazine that celebrated the successes of dot-com innovators, is now relegated to eulogizing them.
Don't get me started on the Blaster virus sabotaging Microsoft systems, or the cram of spam reminding us that the average American is an impotent, insecure, overweight, tired, depressed loser desperately seeking to refinance.
The most telling sign that the Internet is no longer the cool American frontier? Blogs, which sprang up to sass the establishment, have been overrun by the establishment.
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Cool New Stuff
ZDNet, 8/13/03: Flash drive maker adds boot feature
By Ed Frauenheim
In a move that may speed the death of floppy disk drives, M-Systems on Tuesday said its USB flash memory storage device can now start a PC's boot-up process.
M-Systems said that if users plug the flash memory device into the USB port of a computer that has crashed and turn on the power, the machine will start to boot up. Booting up a computer loads an operating system into its main memory.
"We believe the new bootability function will provide users with a world of benefit, including those owners with slimline laptops that no longer need to carry their external disk or CD drives," said Blaine Phelps, director of worldwide marketing for M-Systems' DiskOnKey business unit.
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