7 Ways to Cut Costs without Firing Your Employees

CIOs are used to be told to “do more with less”. It’s an annoying, frustrating cliché, yet it’s one CIOs must live up to. Budgets can only be slashed so far, though, and in a terrible economy like this one, jobs are a cost center that sometimes can’t be sustained. Or at least that’s the…

When Win-Win is a Bad Idea

While many negotiations experts advocate a win-win approach to deal making, just as many regard this as a mistake. I put this question to a number of experts, and most of them were wary of the win-win idea. Sure, it looks nice on paper, but as Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke pointed out, “No battle…

The 7 Symptoms of a Bad Deal

For many organizations, a good deal is defined at the bargaining table: Did you get the price concessions you wanted? Did you get service add-ons thrown in for free? Are extra features included in the base package? Yes? Well, then it’s a good deal. Software vendors love this line of thinking. It’s lazy and it…

When Is a Cloud Really a Cloud?

One of the more tech-geeky Cloud debates centers on what exactly Cloud computing is and whether or not “private Clouds” are a contradiction. Technically, perhaps, they are, but Cloud purists are already being drowned out by pragmatists. Early Cloud leader, Amazon, isn’t worrying about definitions. They recently released the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service,…