Outsourcing
CIO, 9/04: Keeping IT Work Close to Home
BY STEPHANIE OVERBY
Sending IT projects to another country isn't the only way CIOs can keep labor costs in check. They can send IT work to the country, says former health-care CIO Dr. Kathy Britain White.
A longtime proponent of farming out IT work to rural U.S. areas, White is the founder of Rural Sourcing Inc. (RSI), a Jonesboro, Ark.-based nonprofit organization that enables CIOs to outsource work to underutilized, lower-cost IT workers in outlying areas of the United States the same way they would to India or China.
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IT Management
Infoworld, 9/9/04: Cisco to acquire network monitoring provider NetSolve
Channel partners to benefit
By Stephen Lawson
Cisco Systems Inc. channel partners will be able to offer real-time monitoring of enterprises' networks after the company agreed to acquire NetSolve Inc., the networking giant said Thursday.
NetSolve sells a service that remotely monitors the performance, health and status of data networks and can diagnose problems and provide troubleshooting, said Ned Hooper, senior director for corporate business development at Cisco.
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Life @ Work
The New York Times, 9/10/04: Cracking Under the Pressure? It's Just the Opposite, for Some
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR
For Michael Jones, an architect at a top-tier firm in New York, juggling multiple projects and running on four hours of sleep is business as usual. Mr. Jones has adjusted, he says, to a rapid pace and the constant pressure that leads his colleagues to "blow up" from time to time.
A design project can drag on for more than a year, often requiring six-day workweeks and painstaking effort. At the moment, he said, he is working on four.
But for Mr. Jones, the stress is worth it, if only because every now and then he can gaze at the Manhattan skyline and spot a product of his labor: the soaring profile of the Chatham apartment building on East 65th Street, one of many structures he has helped design in his 14 years at Robert A. M. Stern Architects.
"If I didn't feel like I was part of something important, I wouldn't be able to do this," he said.
Mr. Jones belongs to a rare breed of worker that psychologists have struggled to understand for decades, not for the sheer amount of stress they grapple with day to day, but for the way they flourish under it. They are a familiar but puzzling force in the workplace, perpetually functioning in overdrive to meet a punishing schedule or a demanding boss.
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Otherwise
The New York Times, 9/10/04: Call to Arms, With Trouble Right Here in Zombie City
By DAVE KEHR
If you are in the mood for leggy heroines blasting down zombie armies with absurdly large automatic weapons, the sequel to "Resident Evil" gives very good value for the money.
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The New York Times, 9/10/04: A Lesson in Harnessing Good Vibes
By DAVE KEHR
Part perky educational film, part goofy New Age recruitment effort, "What the Bleep Do We Know?" stars Marlee Matlin as Amanda, a grumpy, dispirited everywoman who gets a lesson in quantum mechanics from a basketball-playing child and ends up drawing little glitter hearts all over her body, apparently a sign of self-acceptance in some cultures of the American Far West.
…
The directors make a plausible transition from quantum mechanics to cognitive therapy, suggesting that, just as quantum mechanics states that phenomena are always transformed by observation, so can our perception of reality be changed by altering our ingrained attitudes about ourselves and our lives. Once upon a time this was known as "the power of positive thinking," and it didn't involve nearly so much math.
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