Donald Sears

In an effort to curb rising costs for employees and for the company, IBM will be picking up the tab on health care costs for primary care in 2010. “Employees enrolled in IBM plans will receive full coverage throughout the year–no coinsurance or deductible–for in-network primary care with their internist, family practitioner, pediatrician, general practitioner […]

If you haven’t read about the fascinating tale of alleged insider trading by Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon Group, IBM Senior Vice President Robert Moffatt, Rajiv Goel from Intel Capital and others that recently erupted out of Wall Street, you have missed a fairly elaborate scheme between hedge fund managers and technology management insiders, according to […]

With the threat of 120,000 job losses, the industry trade group TechAmerica is pushing hard for an extension of the U.S. R&D tax credit. The credit brings $2 for every $1 spent back to the United States, claims the group. Tax reform organizations have called the tax credit corporate welfare, and want Congress to let […]

Perhaps the headline for this one should have read: “Does Your Project Have a Business Sponsor?” When surveyed about how to improve technology projects, most executives from IT and the business side often rank alignment of business and technology as a top priority. In fact, it ranked as the No. 1 priority on a survey […]

A recent report says September saw a significant improvement in IT services jobs, according to Vero Beach, Fla.-based Foote Partners. The IT industry analyst firm tracks data in the five segments of technology that the Department of Labor provides: communications, computer peripherals, management technical consulting, computer systems design and data processing/hosting. Foote is particularly impressed […]

A decades long study by psychologist Tim Judge has shown that those who believe they are in more control of their own career paths and are confident in their abilities outperform by many times those who see themselves as victims. The news on this study is tough medicine for many who have lost their jobs […]

The headline for a recent Forrester report should be: “If you build it, they won’t come.” Forrester’s “Workforce Technographics US Benchmark Survey” from the second quarter of this year and released this week shows that the most advanced applications are simply not used by the largest groups. The top things used: e-mail, Web browsers, word […]

Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is pushing for reform in the H-1B visa program and recently urged the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to ask for evidence that workers coming over to the United States actually have employment. Grassley recently wrote to the director of the USCIS: “Simply put, adjudicators should be asking companies […]

As part of the kick of for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the Department of Homeland Security recently announced that it will hire 1,000 top security professionals to help fight off the threats the U.S. faces over computer networks, infrastructure and the Internet over the next 3 years. “Effective cybersecurity requires all partners–individuals, communities, government entities […]

It may be the most common scenario in IT. Too many projects, and not enough staff to handle the work. Add a down economy, the downsizing of staff, trimming of costs, and pressure to get strategically competitive projects up and running yesterday, and you have a stress cauldron boiling over that requires tough leadership and […]

Technology projects rarely go off without a hitch. We all know it, and we all have seen and absorbed an unnecessary amount of stress, blame and headaches from projects gone wrong. Why do they go wrong? Bad project management? Poor planning? Bad estimation of work scheduling? Missed dependencies? It’s easy to have one throat to […]

We’ve all heard about government jobs, but where are they? Well, the government has a pretty good-looking Website that will tell you exactly what it is looking for, and where the jobs are located. There is a projected total of 11,549 IT employees to be hired by the U.S. government between now and 2012. Check […]