Thanks to the explosive popularity of Wikipedia, many consumers are familiar with the concept of a wiki, a collaborative web page which can be viewed and edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Corporate adoption, however, has been much slower. Only 37% of enterprises currently use wikis, according to
How productive are your employees? That’s every organization’s big question. Employee performance management systems aim to provide an answer. But do their metrics measure what truly matters? By evaluating employees’ degree of engagement, a performance management system can “definitely impact the productivity you get from your workforce in many dimensions”
When food and beverage maker Welch’s was preparing to deploy a complicated Oracle ERP system, the IT group responsible for the implementation wanted to make sure their staff had the right skills needed for the job. Wayne Lemmerhirt, former group manager of applications development at Welch’s, in Concord, Mass., held
The Semantic Web was first envisioned in the late 1990s as the ultimate tool to harness the Internet’s ever-accelerating growth of data. Then and today, information searches are limited by the keywords people manually enter; if you don’t know the right keyword, you may miss ferreting out the information you
It’s harder to move up the IT career ladder within your organization these days because the rungs don’t stay put. With downsizing, outsourcing, off-shoring and ever-shrinking corporate budgets, IT job slots are often re-named, redefined or replaced. The good news is that industry analysts report the field is healthy despite
In the IT world these days, creativity frequently caves to pragmatism. To survive and profit from the converging and merging evolution of IT advancements, in-house proprietary and legacy systems have largely succumbed to out-of-the-box and off-the-shelf solutions. This situation is increasingly forcing IT pros out from behind their computer screens
Blackberries, Web 2.0 tools and other nifty widgets may make life easier, but they don’t change the primary responsibility of a senior IT executive. The basic job description still involves overseeing all the resources — personnel, financial budgets, software and equipment — invested in various projects, whether they are temporary
The individual who was born to be a project manager is a rarity. If you’ve been given the title (and the responsibilities that go along with it), you may have had little or no prior training. Your expertise may be in traditional management or the specific subject matter or technical
You’ve no doubt heard of great college football coaches who couldn’t cut it in the NFL, or terrific salespeople who got promoted to sales manager only to find that they were much better at sales. It’s the same in IT. “The IT field is littered with great technologists who are
IT managers walk a fine line between profits and productivity, but never more than when launching a new enterprise project. Tight budgets, paper-thin staffing or a misstep in scheduling employees or allocating resources can lead to blown budgets and bungled projects. “Salaries are money, time is money and technology is
