Trendlines: The New, the Hot, the Unexpected

FRAMINGHAM (02/14/2000) - DEPARTMENT OF BIG, SCARY NUMBERS $114 billion: Estimate for the U.S. cost of Y2K repairs between 1995 and 2001.

$28 billion: Size of the U.S. e-commerce consulting market in 2003. $200 million: What the world spends on IT every hour. $1.75 trillion: What that works out to every year.$75 billion: What was spent in the United States during 1998 on IT projects that ultimately failed. 1/3: Fraction of their lives Gen Y-ers will spend on the internet.

Sources: International Data Corp.; Kennedy Information LLC; Rubin Systems; The Standish Group International; Fortino Group OUTSOURCING EING THERE (AND EVERYWHERE) By Meridith Levinson CIO Paul Turner can work up to 60 hours a week, earn up to $250 grand a year plus stock options and still have time to tee it up every Friday afternoon.

What's his secret? He's virtual.

Turner, 47, is one of 10 virtual CIOs (VCIOs) working for If & Then, a small San Jose, Calif.-based IT services company. Founded in January 1999, If & Then deploys its VCIOs to small and midsize companies, mostly in Silicon Valley, that don't have the resources to attract or pay for a full-time CIO. The VCIOs attend onsite meetings with each of their clients (Turner is currently CIO for two companies: Frog Design and Everdream) at least once a week, sit in on net conferences or web-enabled meetings when they can't be onsite and are available (virtually) 24/7 via e-mail and phone.

"I was skeptical at first about [Turner] not being onsite five days a week," says Doreen Lorenzo, COO of Frog Design, a multimedia design agency headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. "In reality, it works fine. We have six or seven IS people who take care of day-to-day needs." Turner, she says, takes care of strategic projects like the company's ERP implementation.

Like the other If & Then VCIOs, Turner has spent many years-30, in his case-in IT. Prior to joining If & Then last September, he was director of IT for PE Biosystems, a division of Norwalk, Conn.-based PE Corp.

For Turner, the beauty lies in being able to focus on the big picture rather than quotidian distractions and emergencies. As a VCIO, Turner says, "You can have strategic influence without managerial responsibility."

The downside? Ringing cell phones. Turner says that his major challenge is portioning his time.

VCIO Bob Dijkman, 55, who also has spent many years in IT, agrees: "It's more demanding than I originally anticipated."

Crazy as work can get, says Dijkman, it's always gratifying. He recently implemented a call center system for Everdream Corp., a computer services startup based in Mountain View, Calif., where Turner has since been assigned as CIO. The job took him 45 days.

"The real satisfaction of being a virtual CIO," Dijkman says, "comes from quick rewards. You can finish work within weeks or days, move on to another task and watch the company evolve."

MOVERS & SHAKERS AND A CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM Eleven-year-old Keith Peiris was a runner-up for best web design at the Atlantic Digital Media Festival held last fall in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Peiris was the youngest web designer to attend the event (entered by designers from all over Canada and the United States) and was recognized for his work on the Canada-Wide Science Fair 2000 website (www.cwsf2000.org).

When not busy with sixth grade or hockey practice, young master Peiris is president and CEO of London, Ontario-based Cyberteks Design, which he founded a year ago (with his father's guidance). He manages eight clients by himself and (according to Dad) had revenues of almost $6,000 in his first five months in operation. When asked what made him decide to become an entrepreneur at such a tender age, the enterprising Peiris responded, "Why waste the talent?"

-Meridith Levinson

WASHINGTON WATCH BY TOM FIELD

NEW IT PAC WEIGHS IN

I.T. just got a new friend-and a big pocketbook-in Washington.

CapNet, pitching itself as "The Capital Region's Voice for Technology," is the first political action committee (PAC) established to help its high-tech vendor members elect technology-friendly leaders.

Chartered by the Greater Washington Technology Community, CapNet is headed by Timothy D. Hugo, former chief of staff for Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), and its member companies include heavy hitters such as America Online, IBM and Oracle.

As of early December 1999, CapNet had already raised about $100,000 in member donations, and by this spring, Hugo hopes to have $300,000 to invest in key campaigns. One battle that CapNet will likely weigh in on: Sen. Chuck Robb (D-Va.) versus George Allen. Incumbent Robb is considered one of information technology's best friends in Congress, but he faces a formidable, perhaps unbeatable opponent in Virginia's ex-Gov. Allen. Look for CapNet to flex its new-found muscle in Robb's corner.

CapNet has already started lobbying for Rep. Frank Wolf's (R-Va.) Telecommuting and Air Quality Act, which would provide incentives for businesses to encourage employee telecommuting. And the PAC is also behind new efforts to increase (yet again) the nation's quota for H-1B work visas.

Stay tuned. As the races heat up, CapNet will be the PAC to watch.

WHO TO KNOW, WHERE TO GO IN D.C.

Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.) This California Republican was wise to Y2K before it was fashionable. As head of the House Government Reform Management, Information and Technology Subcommittee, Horn issued quarterly report cards grading federal agencies' Y2K mitigation efforts. Now, post-Y2K, Horn is making noise about the nation's ability to protect IT resources from terrorist attack.

Contact Horn at www.house.gov/Horn, or call 202 226-1012.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) OK, so what do the words "Massachusetts Democrat" mean to you? Liberal? Big government? Markey, a key member of the House Telecom subcommittee since 1986, helped write the House version of the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996, which opened up competition between the Baby Bells and the long-distance service providers. Now Markey is concentrating on electronic privacy issues and, in fact, at press time was on the verge of unveiling a new Privacy Bill of Rights.

Contact Markey at www.house. gov/markey, or call 202 225-2836.

Thomas J. Donohue, president & CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Asked to describe his organization's role in policy-making, Donohue says, "We take names and kick butt." Donohue is actively looking to involve more CIOs in his lobbying efforts.

Contact Donohue at www.uschamber. com, or call 202 659-6000.

Harris Miller, president, Information Technology Association of America The ITAA is one of the most powerful IT trade associations in Washington, and front-man Miller is one of the most influential representatives of business/IT issues. A key contact for CIOs.

Contact Miller at www.itaa.org or hmiller@itaa.org, or call 703 284-5340.

"America wins when government officials, from Buenos Aires to Beijing, don't use taxes and regulation to block business over the internet." -Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.) *Got news or views on IT issues in Washington? Send them to washington@cio.com.

SECURITY THE FOUR COMMANDMENTS OF VIRUS PREVENTION-PLUS ONE By David Rosenbaum Antivirus software vendors love viruses. No viruses, no vendors. So how can we trust them when they talk about viruses?

When they tell you how you can protect yourself without their software, that's how.

These four rules are from Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant of Sophos, an Abingdon, England-based vendor of enterprisewide antivirus software.

1. STOP USING WORD.DOC FILES. According to Cluley, 60 percent of the viruses in circulation are written in the macros embedded in Word.doc files. RTF (rich text format) files, on the other hand, do not support macros. Cluley suggests changing your default setting to save all text as RTF. No Word.docs, no problemo.

2. DON'T BOOT FROM YOUR A: DRIVE. Boot-sector viruses account for 25 percent of the world's circulating viruses. They jump to your hard disk when you boot up with a forgotten, infected floppy in the A: drive. (You get the message "Non-system disk" and your PC becomes a virus manufacturing plant.) Cluley advises modifying the startup sequence by changing the CMOS control configuration to make the machine boot from the C:-not the A:-drive.

3. BEWARE UNSOLICITED ATTACHMENTS. But of course, you say. Well, it's one thing to say it, another to do it, especially when the attachment comes from your old pal, Fred. Cluley suggests that you make sure all your employees remember that viruses almost always come from someone you know. Of course, they also tend to have bizarre subject lines and may even be in a foreign language. Just remember that it's unlikely Fred will suddenly know how to speak Dutch.

4. GIVE FRED A JOB. Hoaxes are not viruses, but they do eat up time and bandwidth as people e-mail everyone in the enterprise to watch out for a new version of "Important message from..." (the Melissa virus's calling card).

There's no antihoax software and never will be. Instead, Cluley suggests appointing Fred as virus knowledge holder. If anyone in the enterprise receives a virus warning, forward it to Fred, and it will be Fred's job to assess it.

Now our addition to Cluley's list:

5. NEVER TURN YOUR COMPUTER ON. FOOLPROOF.

HOT TOPIC CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT PRETTY AND SMART By Alice Dragoon Ordering books or toys over the web is one thing; plunking down $3,500 for a notebook PC is another. Online computer seller Cozone.com is trying to help buyers feel better about taking the plunge by offering customized advice through a virtual sales agent named Jill.

Jill, enabled by Manchester, N.H.-based Silknet Software's eSales software, appears as a pretty face on the customer's screen and asks multiple-choice questions culled from Cozone.com's best real-life customer support reps. Want a low-end laptop or a top-of-the-line brand? Will a college student or a grade-schooler be using it? How much travel will it have to endure? A scoring mechanism runs a customer's responses against a database of product attributes including price, weight, battery life, memory and so on. Jill then recommends the top three products that most closely match the customer's needs.

"We wanted to help people feel good about making a pretty sizable purchase on the web," says Cozone.com CTO Chuck Dean. Focus groups revealed that Cozone.com's target customers-people with a working knowledge of computers-want to feel as if they are making a smart choice but don't want to become experts to do so. Jill is designed to help them research their purchases without having to surf. "Our goal was to keep the person at the site to make the buying decision," Dean says.

Jill uses layman's terms and a conversational tone. (Jill began life as Bill but underwent a sex change before her web debut, as Cozone.com decided that a female agent would speak better to women entrepreneurs, a large chunk of the site's target market.) Sales hype is kept to a minimum. "We wanted to make it feel like the customer was making the decision, not that we were guiding him or her to whatever we had in stock," explains Dean.

Jill's a pretty good saleswoman. In fact, Jill's e-mail in-box regularly includes kudos-and the occasional request for a date.

At press time, Cozone.com was planning to give Jill the ability to respond to free-form questions. As for dating, sorry, guys, she's otherwise engaged.

THE WEB EVERYBODY'S IN NET BIZ By Polly Schneider Hollywood and the dotcoms are falling in love. The netrepreneurs and the beautiful people have discovered that they have a lot in common: Both are eager to build their brands and both are hungry to spot, or better yet be, the latest trend. Celebrities are quickly becoming sponsors, investors and even board members of both well-established and startup internet companies.

Such deals have been going on for a while, but when William Shatner signed a multimillion-dollar endorsement contract with Priceline.com in April 1998, Hollywood's heart went pitter-pat. (Reports have placed Shatner's deal at over $7 million in Priceline.com stock. Priceline.com would not confirm that number.) Top talent agencies are setting up deals in droves. At William Morris, agent Lisa Shotland, who's the East Coast head of the company's New Media group, says that in the last six months she's arranged meetings between internet companies and some 200 showbiz clients. "I've got 20 offers sitting on my desk right now," she says. The stars usually get paid in a cash/stock combination, Shotland says, and internet companies benefit by adding star power to their sites. But it's not just cyber-execs who are tying up Shotland's phone lines in search of famous faces; a lot of the calls come from the stars themselves.

"They feel they have to be part of this new world," Shotland says.

STARS ON THE WEB David Bowie, rock deity: BowieNet (www.davidbowie.com), an internet service provider and community builder. Relationship: Founder.

Whoopi Goldberg, actress: Flooz (www.flooz.com), an online gift currency service. Relationship: Spokeswoman and business partner.

Buddy Hackett, 75-year-old Borscht-belt comic: Kardz.com (www.kardz.com), which offers gift-plus-personalized card combinations. Relationship: A line of "Buddy Kardz" features his jokes.

Lee Majors, "The Six Million Dollar Man": Kozmo.com (www.kozmo.com), a site where customers can order videos, music, food and more delivered to their homes. Relationship: Spokesman.

George Martin, former Beatles producer: Garageband.com (www.garageband.com), a site where emerging bands can post their music. Relationship: Chairman of the advisory board.

Cindy Crawford, supermodel: Babystyle (www.babystyle.com), a baby goods and clothing site. Relationship: Spokeswoman, board member, contributes periodic column.

William Shatner, captain, starship Enterprise: Priceline.com (www. priceline.com), a marketplace for bidding on goods and services. Relationship:

Spokesman.

Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard, Midas-touch movie directors: POP.com.

(www.pop.com), which will deliver short films, interactive video and animation online. Scheduled to debut this spring. Relationship: Founders.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT DOLLARS TO DOUGHNET By Meridith Levinson For her 13th birthday last June, Evergreen Park, Ill.'s Ellen Dahlke's parents set up an online bank account for her through an e-commerce site called DoughNet. They put in $50, and now when Ellen wants to buy something online from any one of DoughNet's 65 participating merchants-say the latest Backstreet Boys CD from Amazon.com or a cardigan from Delias-she simply debits her account.

DoughNet (www.doughnet.com) is one of several e-commerce sites targeting teens and their wallets, including RocketCash (which claims 120,000 members) and ICanBuy (which declined to reveal its numbers), that hit the web in the spring of 1999. Kids can establish their own debit accounts or link to their loving parents' credit cards. You might ask, What parents in their right minds would allow such a thing? What about saving for college? What's the world coming to?

Well, it's not as bad as it may seem at first blush. With these sites, parents actually have more control over what their kids are buying on the net than what they buy at the mall with their friends. All these sites filter for "explicitly violent or pornographic material," so while your son or daughter could pick up The Anarchist Cookbook or Madonna's Sex in the mall, they can't get it online if they're shopping through one of these sites.

Parents can also view online summaries of how much money their children spent, what they spent it on, and where and when they spent it. With DoughNet (which says it has over 2,000 members), parents also have control over how much money is in their kid's account, how much their kid can spend on a single purchase (for example, no more than $100 on an Esprit coat) and which stores they can patronize.

Signing up at all the sites is free. Your kids will think you're the coolest mom or dad on the planet. Just don't tell them about all that Big Brother stuff.

HOT TOPIC KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT THE BUZZ BY CAROL HILDEBRAND We're intrigued by the technology put out by Cambridge, Mass.-based Abuzz. But we're also a little dubious about where Abuzz is going with it.

In a nutshell, subscribers to Abuzz file a profile listing their areas of interest or expertise. So, for example, an avid gardener could register his expertise in gardening. The Abuzz software uses the profiles to connect people with questions to people with answers. What's more, it monitors subscriber exchanges and updates profiles when someone answers a question.

Here's how it might work, says Andres Rodriguez, president of Abuzz and CTO of its parent company, Times Company Digital: "Say I have a specific question about American brands of birth control pills. I would create a mini-message board around that, and the profiling system would scan the profiles and send invites to the dozen or so people who could answer the question, creating a tiny forum. Those individuals can accept or decline the invitation, and the system then learns from that."

By matching specific people to talk about specific questions, Abuzz avoids "squashing all conversations about one topic into an overly large discussion group," a common problem with groupware, says Rodriguez.

An ongoing, self-updating system, Abuzz has the potential to track intellectual capital throughout a company. Seamlessly. The possibilities are great for any large corporation struggling to codify and list internal experts.

Which is why the direction Rodriguez wants to take the technology is so problematic. Abuzz wants to amass a large amount of expertise at its site, www.abuzz.com, with a goal of attracting 2 million different subscribers by the end of 2000. "We're trying to build a social experience on a scale that hasn't been approached before," he says. The site contains 31 different content silos, he says, and plays host to a vibrant collaborative community.

But why go the community route rather than sell to corporations? Communities have been around on the web for a long time, with mixed results. Abuzz needs a critical mass of participants to succeed, and it's hard to imagine that happening without some incentives to attract those 2 million. Not impossible; just hard.

OFF THE SHELF Edited by Carol Zarrow

THE INVENTOR AS MONSTER THE NEW NEW THING: A SILICON VALLEY STORY By Michael Lewis W.W. Norton & Co., 1999, $25.95 Does truth reside in the dancer or the dance? Michael Lewis's The New New Thing focuses on the dancer, Jim Clark. In this slick, magazine-style profile, the creator of the Geometry Chip, the founder of Silicon Graphics, the force behind Netscape, the man who gave us Healtheon, is presented as both a genius and a jerk. In Lewis's view, it is precisely because Clark is uncomfortable in the world that he is driven to create new ones. And the world enables his whims and outrages because for the last two decades the surest way to get rich has been to follow Clark wherever his impulses lead him.

Perhaps technological advances have always been driven by ego and greed, but the Valley world that Lewis limns-full of sycophantic venture capitalists, dim-witted managers and alienated engineers, all held in thrall to Clark's agitated depressions and devouring neuroses-is particularly distasteful. The New New Thing holds the reader like a wreck holds gawkers on the highway.

-David Rosenbaum

Also...

THE KNOWING-DOING GAP: HOW SMART COMPANIES TURN KNOWLEDGE INTO ACTION By Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton Harvard Business School Press, 2000, $27.50 Companies pour billions of dollars into acquiring knowledge, but most of that money is wasted, according to the authors of The Knowing-Doing Gap, because of the disconnect in corporate America between knowing what ought to be done and actually doing it. The book's eight-point plan can help companies move from just talking the talk to actually walking the walk. Of course, even this book could end up on a dusty shelf of unused how-to's. After all, a call to action is a very different thing from action itself. -Carol Hildebrand CIO BEST SELLER LIST 5. First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman Simon & Schuster, 1999 4. Customers.Com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond by Patricia B. Seybold Times Books, 1998 3. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen Harvard Business School Press, 1997 2. Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life by Spencer Johnson Putnam Publishing Group, 1998 1. The New New Thing by Michael Lewis W.W. Norton, 1999 Source: December 1999 data, compiled by Amazon.com Tell us what you're reading and why at books@cio.com WHAT THEY'RE READING John Puckett, CIO, Toysmart.com, Waltham, Mass. The New Rational Manager, by Charles Kepner and Benjamin Tregoe (Princeton Research Press, 1997) "I think it's a must for every CIO and IT team. It's like learning how to read music and bringing together an orchestra to play a symphony. The methodologies work and the results can be astonishing! Highly recommended."

Brian Feucht, CIO, Hire Quality Inc., Chicago Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons for Corporate Warfare, by Alan Axelrod (Prentice Hall Inc., 1999) "This book summarizes the best military tactics and applies them to business relationships. A real page-turner, hard to put it down."

APPLICATIONS MOBY DATA

Marine biologists who study whales and dolphins aren't big on computers. At sea for months at a time, the wind in their hair and the salt spray on their laptops, they record much of their data by hand, noting every time a whale surfaces, slaps its flukes or pairs up with a pal. The process is tedious...and essential.

Perhaps that's why some biologists are raving about SOCPROG, a series of data-mining programs that analyze animals' social structure, populations and movements. Written by Hal Whitehead, a Canadian biologist who studies sperm whales and northern bottlenose whales, SOCPROG comes into play after the researchers have entered their field notes into a computer. Unlike off-the-shelf data mining programs, which do not allow scientists to readily correlate observations from different times and places, SOCPROG organizes and analyzes the data on individual animals. Over time, the program can, for example, flag a whale that always surfaces first, thereby spotting a pod's leader.

A self-proclaimed computer geek, Whitehead, a professor of biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, released the latest update of SOCPROG early last year. Since then, Whitehead says, it has been downloaded (is.dal.ca/~whitelab/index.htm) for free by more than 40 scientists around the world.

Robin Baird, a Hawaii-based post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie who studies killer whales and dolphins, says SOCPROG has enabled him to identify patterns of behavior never noted before. He recently discovered a subspecies of killer whale, for example, that eats other small whales and dolphins, too. "[SOCPROG] allows people who don't have a programming background to do very sophisticated analyses relatively easily," Baird says.

If Captain Ahab had had SOCPROG, perhaps Moby Dick would not have taken him unawares. -Matt Villano PROGRAMMING CAN YOU SAY OOP? HERE'S A STORYMAKING THE ROUNDS: Australian Air Force programmers were recently asked to include kangaroos in their virtual reality flight simulations because fleeing herds of skittish 'roos can give away helicopter positions. The programmers, in order to save time and money, simply took the code used to model infantry detachment reactions to choppers flying overhead, changed the icon from a soldier to a kangaroo, and increased the speed of movement.

But when pilots first buzzed the virtual kangaroos in flight simulation exercises, they were shocked to see that after they scattered, the kangaroos "launched a barrage of Stinger missiles." The programmers had forgotten to remove that part of the infantry coding.

The moral, according to the Australian Defense Science and Technology Organization's report on the incident? Be careful about reusing object-oriented code.

Since then, the report concludes, pilots flying simulations have taken great pains to avoid the heavily armed marsupials. -David Rosenbaum LITTLE SCARY NUMBER "There is now one computer chip for each person on the planet." -Ron Griffin, CIO, The Home Depot, speaking at the Society for Information Management Conference in Atlanta last fall THE (TIME) KILLER APP "The most frequently used application on a salesperson's laptop is Solitaire." -Michael Hammer, president of Hammer and Co., author of Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution .

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