CIO Insight Staff

Breakthrough Business Results With MVT: A Fast, Cost-Free “Secret Weapon” for Boosting Sales, Cutting Expenses, and Improving Any Business Process By Charles Holland with David Cochran John Wiley & Sons, March 2005 336 pages, $29.95 The letters “MVT” stand for multivariable testing. When applied at work, it is a 12-step process that Holland, a consultant, […]

“Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self. What we wish for, we readily believe.” —Demosthenes Too many executives with control over system implementation projects practice MBWT (Management by Wishful Thinking), blundering into predictable box canyons, and incinerating budgets and energy that could have been spent wisely elsewhere. The wishful thinkers share amazement at […]

Studies of how IT is used in medicine have consistently shown that the people most resistant to information technology are the ones who are most central to making it effective: doctors. Some doctors fulfill the stereotype of the distracted clinician who is forbidden to use the office equipment by administrative staffers who are tired of […]

When Wal-Mart decreed that its top suppliers would have to install Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips in pallet and case-sized loads, a lot of potential RFID users celebrated. It meant Wal-Mart and its cronies would be doing a lot of the work to get RFID working. Fast forward a couple of years and Wal-Mart’s cronies […]

Outsourcing business processes or entire departments to overseas companies has become so common a tactic that senior managers more often have to justify why they’re not doing it than why they are. But the common wisdom about offshoring is often wrong. It’s not a panacea for high-cost corporate processes; it’s not a fire-and-forget solution to […]

During the ’90s, the phrase “real-time business” was the shibboleth of a particular brand of corporate executive: brash, often arrogant, fiercely ambitious and pretending to be iconoclastic as a way to set himself apart, while actually conforming to the trendiest academic fads. A decade later, the very executives who conceived and implemented the “real-time business” […]

Fifteen years of research, five books and countless articles have earned Mary Lacity, a professor of information systems at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, a reputation as one of the world’s foremost experts on IT outsourcing. “Mary Lacity has a historian’s view of IT outsourcing,” says Jeanne Ross, the chief research scientist at MIT’s Center […]

In September 2004, less than three months after its $58 billion acquisition of Bank One, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced that it would be scrapping a seven-year, $5 billion IT outsourcing contract with IBM Corp. having decided instead to bring the technology back in-house. The reaction from the press was predictable: an explosion of stories […]

Passionate and Profitable: Why Customer Strategies Fail and 10 Steps to Do Them Right! By Lior Arussy John Wiley & Sons, Feb. 2005 224 pages, $27.95 Everyone would agree with the following: No customers, no business. But not everyone agrees on the best way of gaining and keeping those customers. In fact, argues consultant Arussy, […]

The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Employees What They Want By David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind and Michael Irwin Meltzer Wharton School Publishing, Jan. 2005400 pages, $26.95 If after looking at the subtitle you concluded that the authors are crazy, you would not be alone. Most people would say that if you give […]