Project Management Tools for IT Executives

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

Purchases, Negotiations and You

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

The Semantic Web: Finally Becoming Enterprise-Ready

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

Does Your Staff Have the Skills to Succeed?

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

Streamlining Performance Reviews

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”

Wikis in the Enterprise

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 to Win the Talent War

Times are good for technology workers looking for a new job or just entering the workforce. Already one of the fastest-growing industries in the U.S. economy, the tech sector will continue to expand, thanks to the ongoing innovation in computer systems design. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,