Keeping a business on course and profitable requires a corporate leader to make judicious decisions at every step. It’s no surprise, then, that decision support systems (DSS), long used at the operational levels of enterprises, have matured enough to become part of executives’ everyday tools. “Although some people think the
When IT consultant Mike Benz’s phone rings, it’s often a client struggling with a software development project gone bad. Recently, for example, a retailer called the certified project management professional (PMP) in Minneapolis, Minn., in a panic: They needed to change their computer software, hardware and their business practices in
Managing data effectively has always been a major challenge for businesses. How do you capture it? Store it? Process it? Access it? What do you do with it once its immediate usefulness to your organization is gone? And, naturally, how do you accomplish all this at the lowest possible cost?
Ramiro Perez doesn’t like to wait around. As purchasing manager for Copart Inc., a $500 million automotive services firm based in Fairfield, Calif. helping insurance companies process and sell “total loss” vehicles, his job is all about efficiency — and that’s as much about making sure his organization doesn’t waste
A strange thing happened when St. Louis, Mo.-based Sisters of Mercy Health System began populating its data center with new servers. “We ran out of power capacity,” says Bill Hodges, director of the data center at Mercy, the ninth largest Catholic healthcare system in the country. Mercy found that the
In the perennial push for greater speed and more robust functionality, multicore servers have been promoted as the solution for the future. But despite their obvious benefits in cost-effective and faster parallel processing, there are significant trade-offs. Chief among these are pushback from application developers, skill transfer, memory limitations, provisioning
Rapid change in technology is nothing new. But some things remain a constant: CIOs will always be under pressure to prove IT spending improves business growth and, at the same time, find ways to deliver more with less. These days, that means figuring out which parts of IT to keep
The troubling news is remote access remains as much of a security threat for enterprise as it ever was. The good news is that companies can diminish the likelihood of a breach with the right management and technology. “Remote access is probably the key problem to all problems we have
It’s an unpleasant and unavoidable fact of life: IT organizations are almost always in problem-solving mode. And the best way to address unusual, urgent or one-time issues is to create temporary IT “solution teams.” The experts on these SWAT teams – the apt acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics –
Virtualization is the topic du jour among IT professionals. As CIOs continue to search for more efficient – and cost-effective – ways to manage the data center, the promise of being able to do more with fewer resources is spurring a large proportion of enterprises to test the virtualization waters.