‘Heebeegeebees’ Slowing Tech Spending

Depending on whom you ask the IT market is up, down or holding steady. Cisco publicly warned of a slowdown and Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent reported earnings that clearly indicate the braking system is engaged but not screechingly so. Gartner says down, CDW says up Gartner keeps readjusting its 2012 IT spending forecast downward but according…

How to Find & Keep Technical Talent

“It’s hard to find good help these days.” Sound all too familiar? It’s the refrain many a CIO is uttering these days right along with their counterparts in other industries from manufacturing to the sciences. Technical talent management best practices This according to a new study from benchmarking and best practices firm APQC, Technical Talent…

OpenStack Lands IBM, Red Hat

The open source OpenStack cloud project has officially revealed its list of corporate supporters today and for the first time, both Red Hat and IBM are among the supporters. OpenStack is currently in the process of migrating from a loosely governed project to full open source foundation governance model. AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace,…

APQC’s 10 Best Practices for Innovation – Part II

Look to the future and the past When developing measures and improvement plans, it can be easy to focus solely on results. However, the organizations studied by APQC emphasize predictive factors as well as outcomes when developing measures. The organizations look both at leading indicators that provide a foundation for performance (such as employee training…

APQC’s 10 Best Practices for Innovation – Part II

by Becky Partida of APQC In Part 1 of this series, we looked at five best practices that contribute to new product and service innovation. These practices included expanding idea sources beyond areas traditionally associated with innovation (including looking outside the enterprise for innovative ideas) and acknowledging that different types of innovation require different terminologies…

APQC’s 10 Best Practices for Innovation – Part 1

Distinguish among different types of innovation The three best-practice organizations recognize that not all innovations are the same. These organizations consider the reach and potential gains associated with each innovation to develop tailored strategies. Unique processes, resources, and vocabularies may be applied to specific innovations and innovation types. For example, Kennametal groups its innovations into…

APQC’s 10 Best Practices for Innovation – Part 1

by Becky Partida of APQC Organizations are facing mounting pressure to innovate in order to spur growth and increase the bottom line. Despite belief to the contrary, the invention of new products and services does not occur spontaneously. There is a process involved, and organizations can take practical steps to ensure that their innovation processes…

The Security Tools CIOs are Buying Now

Security issues are so ubiquitous that many CIOs are tempted to bow to the seemingly inevitable and just buy insurance to blunt the losses. Cyber insurance coverage may be a good idea for some companies but it should never be used as a cop-out on locking the data center doors. Fortunately, most companies are continuing…

Big Data a $50 Billion Market by 2012?

The world is buzzing about Big Data and it begs the question: “How big is the Big Data market?” Unable to find any market size information, Wikibon, a open-source-style community of industry analysts, kicked off a project to study the size and forecast the market and report on market shares. The study, How Big is…

Enterprise Risk Management Software Gaining Popularity

Given the many shakeups (and downs) companies have experienced through the last few years of economic, security and technological turmoil, risk management has had to evolve and move to front-of-mind of most corporate executives. “With a recent jump in regulatory mandates, losses and increasingly active shareholders, many organizations have become increasingly sensitized to identifying areas…