When IT comes to enviable IT assignments, it's hard to beat Adam Grand's job as a project manager at Royal Caribbean Cruises. Grand regularly travels to Europe to install leading-edge technology on Royal Caribbean's luxury ships. In May, he finished a three-month assignment aboard the Freedom of the Seas, the company's newest and largest ship. He installed some of the most advanced technologies ever placed on a cruise ship -- wireless and Internet applications, BizTalk tool sets and radio frequency identification (RFID) systems.
In a perfect world, a computer would stay just as pristine and lightning-fast as the day it came out of the box. Performance wouldn't get bogged down by all the applications added and removed from its operating system over time.
The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the U.S. or abroad. Instead, IT departments will be populated with "versatilists" -- those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.
No matter how much you trust your staff, you can no longer take chances with personal information on clients, patients or staff.
The human brain comes equipped with more transmitting neurons than it needs. When a neuron dies, the brain automatically lets other neurons take over. So why can't storage systems do the same thing when a disk drive fails -- without an administrator's help?
A customer at electronics store Best Buy might not recall purchasing Shania Twain's CD Come on Over back in 1997, but the $25 billion retailer certainly does.
From retail storefronts to the military's front lines, wireless technology now permeates nearly every sector of the economy. The technology has come a long way from simple bar-code reading with wireless PDAs. Today, tags affixed to retail garments taken into a dressing room can wirelessly signal a wall-mounted screen to display color choices and fabric information. Students can do research in the cafeteria instead of the library, and forklift operators can save themselves hundreds of miles of travel in factories by receiving product requests from computers mounted on their vehicles.
At recruiting firm Emerging Technology Services Inc. in Waconia, Minn., recruiter Jenni Laraway sifts through a swelling pile of resumes, looking for the right blend of data warehousing and business skills. The position to be filled is "data architect," and 25 of her clients need one. Though she's not short on talented job seekers, 70% of her clients want candidates with enterprise-level business experience, not just data modeling for the human resources department. "That's the skill I'm having the most difficulty finding," Laraway says.
Every morning, Mark Bialik diligently scans 30 to 40 vendor and security Web sites looking for the latest patches for Infinity HealthCare's many Microsoft Office, Web server and Windows NT-based applications.
Emerging players helped these companies reach out to customers with technology that their marketing departments use to dig through valuable data and communicate efficiently over the Web.
About 95 percent of all online purchases were made with credit cards last year. But that could change as software developers and electronic payment services unveil a variety of new payment options.
UAL Corp.'s United Air Lines Inc. is rolling out a wide variety of online travel services at Internet speed, thanks to its decision to split off a separate e-commerce unit.
Seeking some of the sizzle created by eBay Inc. and other online auction sites, J.C. Penney and Co. is adding auctioning to its Web site.
Motorola and Internet security services provider VeriSign have signed an agreement to develop secure e-commerce transactions on wireless devices.
Compaq Computer Corp. has cut prices up to 20% on its Armada commercial notebook PC line. The Houston-based company also reduced prices up to 8% on some models of its Deskpro Workstation and Professional Workstation products.