Revitalizing staff skills
As the role IT plays in producing business value changes, so too does the notion of traditional IT skills or a typical IT career ladder.
As the role IT plays in producing business value changes, so too does the notion of traditional IT skills or a typical IT career ladder.
When it comes to finance, IT executives often find themselves feeling like Star Trek's Dr. McCoy when they protest, "I'm an IT director, not an accountant!" But as companies work to integrate their information services and business processes, they have a greater need to count both beans and bytes.
For many years, vendors have been promoting intelligent storage switches, particularly for virtualization projects. Initial implementations, however, relied mainly on appliances that created performance bottlenecks and were application-specific and difficult to scale. As a result, end users have been slow to adopt those so-called smarter solutions.
Google's recent foray into the enterprise search market may have raised the profile of the technology, but the tools are nothing new to Jeff Watts and National Instruments's 3,500 employees and 25,000 customers.
Patching is supposed to secure your organization from the latest batch of malicious code. But try telling that to the state of Alaska 's IT department. Staffers were working diligently to stay up-to-date on patching, despite the sheer size of the territory they serve and the limited bandwidth available in remote areas. But what if no patches existed?
In November 2005, PHH Arval released its PHH InterActive Dashboard, giving customers three years of key performance indicators and expenses, including billing, inventory, fuel purchases, vehicle orders and used-vehicle sales.
Many U.S. companies still haven't recovered from last year's hurricanes. United Pipe & Supply, however, managed to keep growing despite supply shortages.
Getting trains to run on time is simple enough; Mussolini accomplished that back in the 1930s. Getting financial data on time is much harder, but US-based BNSF Railway is managing to do that, too. BNSF is the result of the merger or acquisition of 390 railway companies dating back 150 years. It has 40,000 employees running 6,300 locomotives pulling 220,000 freight cars over 32,000 miles of track.
Eastern Mountain Sports, an outdoor specialty retailer in the U.S., turned to business intelligence software to gain insight into the actions of individual shoppers and boost sales of high-profit items.
Certain IT initiatives fall into the "bet the company" category. Setting up an ERP system from SAP AG is one such choice. These complex undertakings carry both greater opportunities and greater risks than other enterprise software projects. Done right, an SAP deployment can transform an organization by streamlining operations, cutting costs and opening up new business opportunities. Done wrong, it can become a multiyear nightmare.
Many data center problems are easy to solve once you know what's going on. The hard part is finding them in the gigabytes of data dutifully logged on a millisecond basis by all the hardware, databases and applications. Manually combing through all the tiers of log data to track down a transaction or problem is slow and expensive. This is where Splunk comes in, a tool that uses search technology to speed problem resolution.
Companies spend billions of dollars creating enterprise portals and integrating applications. With Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP software, some of that customization is no longer needed. Duet lets users access SAP applications from within an Office environment.
Back in the days when mainframes ruled, there was a close ratio between IT workers and computers. Now, PCs worldwide number close to 1 billion, but the number of IT workers joining the field is dwindling fast.
As companies have become increasingly dependent upon electronic transactions as a primary means of customer interaction, many have found that it's no longer adequate to simply monitor overall performance. For businesses such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, monitoring each user's experience has become critical.
Security dashboards offer visibility across the system from a central console.