Outsourcing
Business Week, 4/13/04: The Let-Someone-Else-Do-It Strategy
Outsourcing tech functions can be a big money-saver. Just don't ignore the hidden costs, oversight issues, and other pitfalls
The folks who run the Mobil Travel Guide faced a tough decision two years ago. Its competitors had begun publishing their travel books online, and Mobil needed to jump onto the dot-com bandwagon -- fast. Even though it's owned by ExxonMobil (XOM ), the Park Ridge (Ill.) company felt that it couldn't afford to buy servers, build data centers, or hire programmers to put up a Web site that would, henceforth, be the heart of a bustling business.
So it decided to hire outsiders to do just about all of the key tasks for its online product. Mobil rented Web hosting from IBM (IBM ). Then, to enter the business of taking hotel reservations from travelers, it engaged a Canadian company called Virtual-Agent Services. Since the guide's hotel and restaurant reviewers were already freelancers, "we've outsourced virtually everything," says Paul Mercurio, Mobil's chief information officer. The IBM deal alone saves his company 25% to 30% vs. in-house Web hosting, Mercurio figures.
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Offshoring
The Canadian Press, 4/14/04: Accounting firm PwC warns of surge in IT offshore outsourcing from Canada
TORONTO (CP) - Seventy-five thousand Canadian information technology jobs could migrate abroad by 2010 unless the country positions itself effectively as a "nearshore" provider of IT services to the United States, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study suggests.
The advisory firm said Wednesday that "offshoring" of Canadian technology work to India, China, Russia, and other low-cost emerging economies "is about to dramatically take off."
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Security
MSNBC, 4/12/04: Report: CEOs should focus on cyber-security
Computer security should be among corporate governance values
WASHINGTON - Corporate CEOs should take as much responsibility for computer security issues as they do for their company’s financial results, says an industry task force report released Monday under the guidance of the Department of Homeland Security.
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“It is the fiduciary responsibility of senior management in organizations to take reasonable steps to secure their information systems,” said Art Coviello, president and CEO at RSA Security and co-chair of the task force. “This call to action is the work of many competing institutions coming together with common purpose,” Coviello said. “We have done our job, and now we encourage CEOs and boardrooms across this country to do theirs.”
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But should any kind of disaster strike, the administration can’t feign ignorance of a possible threat. Those warnings come from, among others, no less than former counterterrorism chief and later cyber-security czar Richard Clarke.
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During a March 26 speech on cyber-security at Indiana University, Clarke spoke with reporters, saying that "the really bad news is 2004 is going to be worse” in terms of the amount of attacks on U.S. based computer networks. “What that says is there is chaos in cyberspace,” Clarke said.
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ZDNet, 4/14/04: PGP software gains antivirus defense
PGP is adding a virus-defense tool to its line of secure-messaging products.
The company on Wednesday said it will bundle Symantec's AntiVirus Scan Engine with its PGP Universal products to minimize the risk of unwanted payloads in e-mail messages. The package will check outgoing messages for viruses before they are encrypted and incoming ones immediately after decryption.
The combination is intended to provide a simplified method for addressing the complexity of security threats facing businesses, the companies said.
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C|net, 4/15/04: FTC to shine light on spyware
By John Borland
Pressure is growing for new rules to curtail malicious programs known as spyware, once again raising a vexing problem for the Internet age: Can software risks be regulated into submission?
The issue will get a high-profile hearing next week, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans to convene a workshop on the dangers of spyware. In a common scenario, such programs might bombard victims with unwanted ads or, more rarely, allow hackers to snoop on Web surfing activities and steal confidential data such as passwords to online bank accounts.
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"So much stuff is being foisted on people that it's really slowing their computers down," said Roger Thompson, vice president of product development at Pestpatrol, which markets software that promises to clean spyware out of infected systems. "That's stepping out of bounds of what's fair and reasonable."
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Computerworld, 4/14/04: Developer preps for hardened Linux
News Story by Matthew Cooney
Security Enhanced Linux, a "hardened" version of the open-source software that was helped into existence by a U.S. spy agency, is on the verge of gaining broad acceptance, a New Zealand developer says.
Kerry Thompson, an Auckland security consultant, says the pending release of the Fedora Core 2 distribution will introduce SELinux to mainstream Linux users. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat Inc. and built on Red Hat 9, and has been adopted by many former Red Hat community members. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, due early next year, will also include SELinux technology.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Watch, 4/14/04: Microsoft Patches: Too Much of a Good Thing?
By Mary Jo Foley
Will Microsoft step up its server capacity to meet increasingly heavy user demand for its monthly patches? Stay tuned.
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"Now that more people are aware that updates are due on the second Tuesday … I'm seeing what I thought would happen...Denial of service of Windows Update from their own customers," said one Microsoft customer, systems engineer Rafael Cappas.
"I checked Windows Update at 5 p.m. PST last night and it was unresponsive and received many 'server too busy' messages. I checked Windows Update at 9 a.m. EST this morning and the same problems were present," he said.
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Collaborative Technologies
Dan Gillmor’s Blog, 4/14/04: Amazon's Search Tool
• posted by Dan Gillmor 02:45 PM
A9, Amazon's new search engine, went into public beta today. Note the tabs on the right when you do a search. This is going to be one of the sites I use often, I suspect.
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The New York Times, 4/15/04: Call Me E-Mail: The Novel Unfolds Digitally
By ADAM BAER
CORPORATE e-mail message goes astray. Two young strangers flirt in cyberspace. They agree to meet. An assault ensues. And a mystery built on digital clues is born.
It's not a plot that breaks new ground. But then, the earnest new "novel" that it fuels, "Intimacies," by Eric Brown, is drawing notice more for its style than for its content.
A former English professor who teaches executives how to write, Mr. Brown, 59, calls "Intimacies" a digital epistolary novel, or DEN, terms that he has trademarked. The plot of "Intimacies" is based on "Pamela," the 18th-century work by Samuel Richardson that is one of Western literature's first epistolary novels. It is the format of Mr. Brown's work rather than its story that makes it postmodern: it is meant to be read with the aid of a software interface designed by Billy McQuown, an employee at Mr. Brown's consulting firm, Communication Associates.
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Otherwise and Future Focused
Fortune, 4/14/04: The Future of Work: An 'Apprentice'-style Office?
Get ready to choose your own boss. MIT visionary Tom Malone sees big changes coming to the workplace.
Democracy and freedom are coming to business, says Tom Malone. And it's all because of technology. Malone teaches at MIT's Sloan School of Management and runs something called the Center for Coordination Science, which studies how technology changes the way people work. His new book, The Future of Work, posits that the central transformative development of our time is the radically decreased cost of communications caused by the Internet, wireless voice and data, and cheap long distance, among other new technologies. It is all fundamentally changing the nature of work, Malone says: "This change may be as important for business as the change to democracy has been for government." He stopped by the office the other day to talk about the book, published this month, and his ideas.
Malone sees a parallel between the evolution of human society and the evolution of business. "For millenia," he says, "all human societies were organized as small, autonomous, egalitarian groups called bands. Then we saw the rise of bigger and bigger, more centralized societies called kingdoms. Only in the last 200 years have we seen the rise on a large scale of the third way of organizing human society-democracy." Each of those stages, Malone says, can be explained by a change in a single factor--the cost of communication. In his view, writing is what enabled hierarchically organized kingdoms to arise. Printing led to democracy.
Likewise, he says, "until a couple hundred years ago businesses were still organized like bands. It was only when new communications technologies like telegraph and telephone and even the Xerox machine made communication cheap enough to coordinate larger groups of people that we saw the rise of the centralized corporation--the kingdoms of the business world." I like the way this guy thinks.
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