CIO Insight Staff

Baseball fans are a sturdy lot. They have weathered every kind of scandal modern sport can offer—from corked bats and scuffed balls to player strikes and steroids—and still they come streaming through the turnstiles every spring, filled with the hope that their team can win the pennant. The fact that baseball engenders a sort of […]

Can Two Rights Make a Wrong? Insights from IBM’s Tangible Culture Approach By Sara J. Moulton Reger IBM Press, April 2006 304 pages, $24.99 It was an intriguing book idea: Those involved in IBM’s $3.5 billion acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting back in 2002 would explain just how hard it was to integrate the two organizations. […]

Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent By Ken Dychtwald, Tamara J. Erickson and Robert Morison Harvard Business School Press, April 2006; 288 pages, $29.95 Demographic trends are presented here in stark terms: Starting very soon, the oldest baby boomers will start retiring in droves, and a declining birth rate […]

Like most CIOs these days, Paul-Camille Bentz, of AGF (a French subsidiary of Munich-based insurance giant Allianz AG), has been looking for ways to cut costs from his IT budget. So far, he’s reduced infrastructure, extended the life of the PCs used by AGF’s 32,000 employees, and renegotiated his telecom contracts. Now he’s targeting a […]

Four years ago Limited Brands, the $9.4 billion specialty retailer, learned about the need for supply chain visibility—and the cost of not having it in place—the hard way. “We had a pretty significant catastrophe,” Paul Matthews, the company’s senior vice president of supply chain transformation, told attendees at the National Retail Federation (NRF) annual convention […]

Being a CIO isn’t always as glamorous as it sounds, particularly when you’ve got the top tech spot at a small company. Just ask Bruce Lehrman, the CIO at RuffaloCODY, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based provider of fund-raising software and consulting services to nonprofit organizations. With just 300 full-time employees, his company does less than $40 […]

Carlota Perez knows a thing or two about bubbles. in fact, the Venezuelan scholar has studied all five technological revolutions over the past two centuries, and she’s found a series of similarities among them. According to her, we’ve still got a ways to go until the information revolution runs its course. Perez is a research […]

In general, growth is a good thing. And growing globally can be a great thing. But as more companies expand operations overseas, global recruitment is becoming a vexing problem. Manpower Inc., the Milwaukee-based recruiting firm, surveyed 33,000 employers in 23 countries, and found that 40 percent of respondents are having trouble finding qualified people—particularly salespeople, […]