Don E. Sears

On Oct. 15, IBM was officially terminated from a 10-year welfare services contract with the state of Indiana-a project intended to improve the efficiency and quality of working with welfare recipients. A press release about the termination came from Gov. Mitch Daniels, who stated that Indiana plans to move ahead with a “hybrid” strategy that […]

An immigration lawyer in West Covina, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles, and his business partners have been charged with visa fraud in relation to an elaborate scheme targeting immigrants, according to a report from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.Kelly Einstein Darwin Giles, 46, and two of his associates, the married couple of […]

Former state-run telecommunications company France Telecom is under a lot of pressure from the union over employee suicides. Over the last 18 months, 25 employees have taken their lives for what the union dubs “workplace stress” and pressure.The latest suicide occurred last Thursday, by a 48-year-old employee who hung himself at his home and who […]

It’s the fourth quarter, and your CIO is working with your line of business management on budgets for next year. It’s a long process, but it’s an important one, since budgets equal three things: new toys for your projects, new co-workers to help on projects and the money to pay for it.Nearly half of technology […]

By 2013, jobs in information technology will expand by 5.8 million worldwide, according to a recent report by technology analyst firm IDC. The Framingham, Mass.-based firm expects that 75,000 new businesses will be created with an annual rate of job growth at 3 percent in that span, said a news release on the report. The […]

Companies understand that you need a day or two off every now and then-but be careful what you say and how you handle it.“Longer hours and heavier workloads are common in the current economic climate, and employers are becoming more flexible with their time-off policies,” said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, […]

Technology staffing firm Yoh says technology wages are lightly up through the second quarter of 2009. Using data it gathers from IT workers with jobs, the quarterly “Yoh Index of Technology Wages” shows technology wages up 1.07 percent. The Yoh report analyzes 20,000 paychecks of 5,000 temporary technology workers in four-week cycles. As a comparison […]

More than half of the 1,400 CIOs surveyed block sites such as Facebook and Twitter completely from employee access, according to Robert Half Technology. That’s a big number of technology management professionals saying that you should be avoiding online distractions as much as possible.With the rise of mobile Internet technology, however, the question is whether […]

Technology job loss has risen in the last quarter to 5 percent, says an article in GovInfoSecurity.com. Looking at data provided by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the article pegs technology job loss at the highest levels in roughly six years.Industry trade group TechAmerica Foundation recently published a report showing that technology […]

10 BlackBerry Apps for IT Managers, IT Contractors, Road Warriors by Don Sears DubMeNow Networking has never been so easy. Send your mobile business card to other BlackBerry users’ address books with the press of a button. DubMeNow allows you to send LinkedIn invites, and soon you will be able to add up to 20 […]

Failure in IT projects is a much written about topic, and an all-too-frequent experience for technology and business professionals. There are many competing factors: There are budgets to maintain, schedules to manage, personalities to handle, resources to share and shifting priorities to organize. Most of you live and breathe it every day. It’s complex, requires […]

Perhaps more telling than the rise of small and midsize companies’ use of outsourcing is that the levels for large companies remain essentially the same, says a new report by Computer Economics. Small and midsize companies’ use of offshore outsourcing services grew 10 percent from 2008 to 2009. “There is a surprisingly sharp increase in […]