Elizabeth Bennett

No security alarms went off when ring maker Jostens recently lifted Best Buys homegrown application integration software. Thats because Minneapolis-based Jostens wasnt stealing from Best Buy. It was sharing—through a “corporate community” called Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative. Avalanche hit its first anniversary in March and so far has 12 members. Thats enough to be useful […]

Although the federal governments information-system miscues get a lot of attention, there are plenty of local- and regional-level snafus. Heres a sampling of a few recent projects that have run aground. Bexars Bear of a Project San Antonios Bexar County (pronounced “bear”) is feeling the hard edge of a recent SAP installation. The $4 million […]

Getting certified is a little like eating your veggies. Theres a sense that it must be good for your company, but the benefits arent always evident. A company-wide effort to meet a quality standard like the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) for software development is mostly justified as a way to build business or meet […]

Sometimes its hard to know exactly where the pain in your information technology department comes from. “Its like a patient who tells a doctor that his knee hurts, when its actually his hip thats causing the fundamental problem,” says Ann Browne, vertical market director of Lawson Softwares service process optimization division. When the patient is […]

A “standard” shipping container is 8 feet wide, 8.5 feet high and 20 feet long. It can hold as much as 19 tons of soft and hard goods. Only about 2% of the containers that move through a port get screened. In Oakland, gamma ray scanners are used to boost that to 10%.For an infographic […]

Do your employees thrive in a classroom situation, or are they bored and listless? Before you replace the instructor—or the employee—consider changing the classroom. “Were all wired differently, and we all have preferences for how we want to learn,” says John Bonanno, assistant provost of Boston University Corporate Education Center (BUCEC), which offers online adaptive-learning […]

For the next year, youre going to be joined at the hip with the consultants redesigning your network. You know they can do the job. But can you trust them with the piles of confidential data youll be sharing during the project? Defining precisely what information is confidential is critical, according to Susan Meyer, a […]