Eric Lundquist

Agendas can be altered to fit the circumstance, but long-term strategies should be just that: long term. And ethics are not pliable but need to be stated and adhered to regardless of events. Two recent episodes demonstrate why these principles should be followed. The first example is the ouster of Craig Conway from PeopleSoft. Under […]

How do you allocate your technology resources most efficiently? With a limited budget, limited expertise and a world of business demands standing outside your door, you need to know how to get the most bang for your IT dollar. When you follow a fad, invest in technology for technologys sake, or exhaust yourself and your […]

What is the end result of your corporate technology efforts? Is it a vague tie-in to your companys overall productivity? That connection would be welcome, but it is also one of the hardest to measure. Is it the ability to do more with less? That route too often takes you to the outsourcing door. There […]

Microsoft wants to get its next operating system in shipping shape by taking away one of the legs of the three-legged stool upon which the system would be built. Intel wants to boost processor sales by including attributes—compatibility with past systems, for one—that the company once seemed ready to abandon. Its telling when two companies […]

The week after Labor Day is a traditional time for taking out the to-do list and getting serious about finishing those important projects before years end. Heres the list that I think you should aim at finishing for this year. First on the to-do list is a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Disaster recovery is both […]

Our recent eWEEK interview with eBays technology chief, Marty Abbott, offered convincing evidence that once again the new generation of application platform companies, such as Amazon, eBay and Google, are leading the way in IT. When Amazon created the capability for users to order and track purchases via the Web, that capability made a big […]

The hard drive in my much-abused laptop recently had its consistency checked for the umpteenth time. During the checking process, I suspected—and was correct—that this time, consistency would be one goal this drive would never achieve again. I didnt get upset, since Ive learned to run regular backups to the corporate storage system. And despite […]

Hewlett-Packard, the company that has made “adaptive enterprise” a company slogan, needs to be more, well, adaptive. Thats my conclusion after spending a day last week at the companys HP World user conference in Chicago. The conference took place a few days after HP issued one of those fiscal surprises that Wall Street dislikes. The […]

What is the price of e-mail security? The word “price” (or a close variation) was in the message area in e-mail messages produced by the latest major virus, which made the rounds of the Internet last week. This variant of the ever-present Bagle worm serves as another reminder of the fragile nature of an e-mail […]

Instead of outsourcing or “insourcing,” I think the real trend to pay attention to in the technology business is shared sourcing. In shared sourcing, you keep the parts of your business that are most important, hand off the parts that can be done more efficiently elsewhere and end up with a business process that works […]

Remember the virtual corporation? As I recall, that was the company where most of the services were contracted, and the physical part of the company was limited. I had the image of a company consisting of one person, the president, sitting at a terminal. The virtual idea proved a bit ahead of its time, but […]

At FedEx, technology execs call it the “2-10 rule.” No, that doesnt have anything to do with what time your package gets delivered. The 2-10 rule defines when a technology moves from the interesting and cool stage to the really useful. The really useful stage is when you are willing to spend money to implement […]