IT Management
Computerworld, 3/8/04: Amex CIO Glen Salow on measuring IT value
The American Express CIO said business leaders too often ask the wrong question
News Story by Kathleen Melymuka
"Why does everything take so long and cost so much?"
That's a question that makes IT leaders cringe, but it's not the question business leaders should be asking, according to Glen Salow, executive vice president and CIO at American Express Co.
In his opening keynote address at Computerworld's Premier 100 Leaders Conference here today, Salow told an audience of more than 500 IT leaders that the right question is, "Do our technology investments generate adequate value?" Then he offered a framework for answering that question.
The IT value chain is similar to that found in a manufacturing process, he said. Core resources (people, hardware, bandwidth and base software) combine to create technology components, which are used to build and operate applications that power the business processes.
"All of American Express's products and services are ultimately delivered via our technology plant," he said. "It's all about asking, 'Do I have an efficient technology factory, and are we effective in our consumption?'"
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Computerworld, 3/8/04: Managing IT risk at Delta Air Lines
Measuring risk vs. investment can keep the focus on IT spending, attendees at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference are told
News Story by Gary H. Anthes
Managers at Delta Technology Inc., the IT subsidiary of Delta Air Lines, used to debate how much to spend on IT infrastructure and on the renewal of IT assets, from laptops to mainframes to networks.
Although the IT capital budget is multiyear, these debates "seemed to occur daily," Brian Leinbach, senior vice president for operations at Delta Technology, told attendees at Computerworld's Premier 100 Leaders Conference today.
But that debating and wrangling has now largely disappeared, he said, thanks to a simple but relatively rigorous framework now being used by the company to analyze the costs and risks of IT infrastructure renewal. "It's fairly intuitive," Leinbach said. "Simple ideas are often best."
The analysis tool is based on a curve that measures risks and investments. At one end, risks are low but the investments needed to achieve goals are too high. At the other end, investments are modest but risks are high. Leinbach said the solution for Delta Technology, whose capital budget is $200 million a year, is to stay near the middle of the curve in a "manageable" area between unacceptable risk and unaffordable investment.
To do that, the company develops a weighted score for each IT asset based on five factors: technology age, business value at risk, platform supportability, platform complexity and risk of failure. Each asset is then assigned a flag that is green, yellow or red depending on whether the asset is deemed to present low, medium or high risk to the airline. The scheme is carried out by business area and asset type to show officials at a glance, for example, that an existing server infrastructure presents a low risk for Business Area 1 while network technology is deemed to present a high risk to Business Area 4.
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Security
eWeek, 3/8/04: Viruses 'Winning the War'
By Dennis Fisher
IT managers pressure vendors to take more aggressive stance...
In the wake of what will likely go down as one of the worst weeks in the history of Internet viruses, security specialists say that the focus on user education is failing and that pressure must now be put on vendors to make their products safer. The tack toward the vendors comes after a week that saw 16 new viruses and worms—nearly half of which had a risk rating of at least medium—unleashed on the Internet. The threats, all but one of which are variants of previous malware, such as Bagle, Netsky or MyDoom, did not spread widely or do much damage. But IT managers say that with two or three new threats showing up daily, few enterprises can keep up.
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Computerworld, 3/8/04: DHS: Dumb, Huge, Slow
Opinion by Maryfran Johnson
If you've been at all worried that the Department of Homeland Security might be doing something worth paying attention to, rest easy. When it comes to having any significant impact on corporate IT security plans, the $36 billion federal agency has been monumentally ineffective.
As our front-page story this week points out, it's private-sector companies -- particularly in transportation, utilities and finance -- that are driving their own IT security strategies to protect the nation's critical infrastructures. Without any push from the DHS, for example, the Rail Industry Security Committee is busy sharing best practices for both physical and cybersecurity. In the natural gas industry, same story. "All of the initiatives are industry-driven," says Gary Gardner, CIO of the American Gas Association.
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Hewlett Packard
C|net, 3/8/04: HP to put blade servers on a diet
By Stephen Shankland
Hewlett-Packard announced on Monday a new, thinner blade server--a system that will enable customers to stack twice as many of the dual-processor machines into the same space.
The BL30p server is scheduled to ship by the end of June and will cost less than the current dual-processor BL20p, according to HP, though both systems use Intel's new "Prestonia" generation of the Xeon processor.
As many as 16 of the BL30p systems fit into an enclosure 10.5 inches tall. By comparison, IBM's market-leading BladeCenter can accommodate 14 dual-processor servers in a chassis 12.25 inches tall.
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Hardware
Business Week, 3/15/04: Are Laptops The Next Desktops?
With a price war raging, notebooks are headed fast toward commodity status
When Intel Corp. (INTC ) launched its Centrino chip for wireless notebook computers last year, General Managers David "Dadi" Perlmutter and Anand Chandrasekher made a bet with the sales team: Beat the sales targets, and we'll shave our heads. On Feb. 3, after sales topped forecasts by 10%, they took the stage at a sales summit, doffed wigs, and unveiled new chrome domes.
Perlmutter and Chandrasekher may have shaved too soon. The notebook boom that Intel helped set in motion looks to be running into some difficulty. For one thing, a price war that has raged for three years in desktops is shifting to notebooks, threatening to turn them, too, into commodities. And it looks like the industry over-estimated first-quarter demand -- meaning some PC makers may have big inventories to work off even as new rivals are rushing in. Finally, supplies of such key parts as liquid-crystal displays are tight, pushing up costs. With most PC profits now derived from notebooks, the combination could spell bad news for the industry. "The safe haven is disappearing," says IDC analyst Roger L. Kay.
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Open Source
Infoworld, 3/8/04: IBM's Wladawsky-Berger sees open source future
VP of Technology and Strategy says open source software is key to infrastructure integration
By Gillian Law,
Open source software needs to be more widely used if the next wave of technology is to fully take off, IBM Corp.'s Vice President of Technology and Strategy, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, said Monday.
IBM is in negotiations with Sun Microsystems Inc. over the possibility of creating an open source version of Sun's Java technology. "In the middle of negotiations, it's not the best time to make any public statement, but we feel very strongly that it's becoming more and more critical to make sure your infrastructure is as integrated as possible," Wladawsky-Berger said in an interview at a London hotel. "And to do that, you need the software to be open source."
If a small company approached Wladawsky-Berger with a device it wanted to make Internet-enabled, he would send them off and tell them to download Linux software, the executive said. "You don't need to come to a company like IBM, you just do it yourself," he said. "And that brings tremendous innovation, because there's then a whole ecosystem of people developing new products who are able to get access to the key software and to integrate their products."
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