Outsourcing
Gartner, 8/24/04: Use Risk Analysis as a Guide to Better Sourcing Decisions
Outsourcing can move some risks out of your company, but bring in others, like mismanagement of relationships. A risk analysis framework can help you manage these perils across all four stages of the sourcing cycle.
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Gartner, 8/24/04: Include Clauses That Allay Risks in Outsourcing Contracts
When outsourcing, don't assume you can transfer the risk management responsibilities of the relationship to your service provider. Use sample contract clauses to address potential risks in the relationship.
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Gartner, 8/25/04: Evaluating Risks in a Sourcing Environment
Risks are inherent in sourcing engagements. Clients must understand the basic framework and identify risk categories and the best practices for dealing with them in all phases of the sourcing life cycle.
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Gartner, 8/24/04: Create a Sourcing Strategy to Manage Risks
A well-developed sourcing strategy can help alleviate the risks that are common in sourcing relationships.
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Gartner, 8/25/04: San Diego County Resolves Outsourcing Conflicts
San Diego County's large outsourcing deal nearly fell apart early in the process. However, adjustments to change management and dispute-resolution processes have put the project back on track.
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Gartner, 8/25/04: Management Update: Avoid Deal Failure by Managing Sourcing Risks
Deal failure is a company’s greatest risk when outsourcing. Sourcing management’s key responsibility is to ensure a successful transition, service delivery and termination and transfer of the sourcing relationship.
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Microsoft
C|net, 8/27/04: Microsoft tackles AMD conflict in SP2
By Matt Hines
update A problem in the Service Pack 2 update for Windows XP may keep owners of AMD-based computers from using the long-awaited security package under certain circumstances, according to Microsoft.
In an article posted in the Knowledge Base section of its Web site, Microsoft says that Service Pack 2 may not work with computers running Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit microprocessors. The Redmond, Wash.-based company said earlier that owners of such PCs may want to bypass the update completely, but has now come up with a workaround.
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C|net, 8/27/04: Gates: Longhorn changed to make deadlines
By Michael Kanellos and Ina Fried
Microsoft on Friday set late 2006 as the deadline when it will ship Longhorn, the next major version of Windows.
But to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation of WinFS, an ambitious file system geared at letting users search through all of their files at once.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates spoke exclusively with CNET News.com on Friday about how Microsoft handles deadlines and new opportunities.
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This Digital Life
The Wall Street Journal, 8/25/04: Workaholics Use Fibs, Subterfuge to Stay Connected on Vacation
You never would have guessed Jodi Burack was vacationing last week in South Carolina. When she received an e-mail from me last Friday asking if she was doing work during her time off, she responded within 10 minutes.
"Well, there was an outage of service," she pecked back on her BlackBerry. "I was nuts calling my office too much." But then the service was finally restored, and she was barraged with more than 200 e-mails, "My husband was playing golf. Did not catch me but we are with friends and they grabbed the pager away," she typed.
The attitude of family and friends forces Mrs. Burack to do what any self-respecting nonrelaxer must do: deceive, beguile and swindle. Last March in Hawaii, for example, her husband expressed shock that she hadn't brought her BlackBerry. But "I had it," she admits. "I was hiding it." She used it when everyone else was asleep, and if they weren't, she would sneak into the bathroom or the closet. The closet? "Oh, yeah, that's nothing," she says.
Some people just can't take a real break from work. Harboring an abiding certitude that something tragic will happen when they aren't looking -- including possibly to them -- they spend great sums and drive great distances dowsing for a few bars of cellular signal or BlackBerry link. Loved ones, though, rarely understand that the very possibility of missing something big at the office is more tragic than spending hard-earned money to effectively set up a satellite office beachside. That forces the helplessly connected to abandon all semblance of dignity just to get their fix. It's another sign of how much work can contaminate leisure.
When his family went biking on island trails, Mr. Koehler surreptitiously planted his laptop, cellphone and BlackBerry in the bicycle trailer carrying his 9-month-old son, leaving them with their power on to collect messages during the ride. It worked until his wife caught him. "She accused me of giving the baby cancer because I had the cellphone under him," Mr. Koehler recalls.
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