Outsourcing
Business Week, 11/15/04: Accenture's New High-Wire Act
CEO Green is going after bigger, longer contracts -- and guaranteeing results
In late 2000, storage giant EMC Corp (EMC ) was battening down the hatches for the tech tsunami that lay ahead. But a project to install a critical new software system at the Hopkinton (Mass.) company had fallen behind schedule, threatening to hamper its operations. So EMC's then-Chief Operating Officer Joseph M. Tucci put a call into William D. Green, chief of the tech group at Accenture Ltd. (ACN ), the consulting firm managing the installation. Could Green help? The Accenture exec took over the project himself, pulled in three senior partners to help the one who had been on the job, and stayed in regular contact with Tucci to make sure things were on track. The result: EMC had the software to coordinate manufacturing, sales, and finance in place by the original deadline of October, 2001. "He went over and above," says Tucci, now EMC's chief executive. "He will find a way to get his goals done and make you happy."
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IT Management
Computerworld, 11/8/04: Going down fast
Slashed resources and impossible demands have caused IT morale to disintegrate.
News Story by Julia King
NOVEMBER 08, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Skeptical, stressed, scared, sucked dry. This is how IT professionals feel about work these days.
Other telling words that surfaced repeatedly during more than 30 interviews and in 200 written survey responses include fear, loathing, disgust and dread.
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Computerworld, 11/8/04: After the Outsourcing
News Story by Matt Hamblen
NOVEMBER 08, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - When a company decides to outsource jobs or send them offshore, the morale of the remaining IT workers can nose-dive and pose challenges to managers who need to motivate them.
Outsourcing survivors may react with outrage, fear, "survivor's guilt" or even a heightened work ethic, bordering on manic behavior, say psychologists and workplace consultants.
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Security
C|net, 11/8/04: McAfee unveils 2005 security suite
By Dinesh C. Sharma
Building on the notion of defense in depth, McAfee has bundled together its latest security applications into a single suite aimed at home users.
MIS 2005, announced Monday, includes upgrades to the company's VirusScan, Personal Firewall Plus, Privacy Service and SpamKiller packages, which are designed to protect computers from viruses, hackers, spam, phishing scams and other online dangers. It also is meant to act as a safeguard against threats targeting instant-messaging software from America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft.
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W2Knews, 11/5/04: Spyware Worse Threat Than Viruses
Need ammo to get budget for enterprise anti-spyware? Use these results of a recent survey. It's pretty ugly, and getting worse fast.
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The responses show that on average 48% of system administrators spend more than 20 minutes per system removing unwanted spyware, 18% say it takes 15-20 minutes per system, and 16.2% of system admin say it takes 10-15 minutes. Over three quarters of admins reported that up to 20% of the machines that are infected need a total rebuild to get rid of persistent malware.
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Postini Resource Center, 11/9/04: Geographic Origins of Spam and Viruses
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Collaborative Technologies
Josh Rubin’s Cool Hunting Blog, 11/8/04:
Another creative approach to data visualization, Jonathan Harris' 10 x 10 is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The grid is updated every hour with the 100 most relevant words and images based on the headlines and leading photos from the worlds primary on-line news sources. Every hour is archived and a 10 x 10 summary is also created for each day, month and year. In a sense, the project is a series of beautiful historical flash cards.
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Otherwise
Wired News, 11/8/04: Hardest Tech-Support Job on Earth
By Michelle Delio
VICKSBURG, Mississippi -- Soldiers in the battlefield now have their own army of geek advisers whom they can contact whenever they need technical support.
The TeleEngineering Operations Center, headquartered in Vicksburg and run by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, or ERDC, has come up with a way to connect troops in the battlefield directly to the engineering center. The TeleEngineering project allows thousands of highly skilled specialists to be virtually present around the clock in the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iraq or wherever else they are needed, 365 days a year.
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