CIO Insight Staff

American companies aren’t the only ones frustrated by the financial burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley. A growing list of foreign companies are delisting from U.S. stock exchanges— including German biotech Lion Bioscience and Nordic telecom TeliaSonera AB—to avoid complying with SarbOx. The actions prompted a statement by the SEC in early February that the agency is considering […]

Many Unhappy Returns: One Man’s Quest to Turn Around the Most Unpopular Organization in America By Charles O. Rossotti Harvard Business School Press, Jan. 2005 352 pages, $26.95 Just how big a mess was the Internal Revenue Service when Charles Rossotti took over in 1997? How about the organization chart that looked like a bowl […]

In 1977, David Barnes took a part-time position as a package loader with United Parcel Service Inc. in St. Louis. On January 4, 2005, twenty-eight years later, Barnes was named chief information officer and senior vice president at the venerable delivery company, replacing longtime CIO Ken Lacy. And though it took a while, every rung […]

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Kelley Blue Book stepped up its commitment to a high-tech future in late January when it hired CIO Justin Yaros, the former CIO of Sony Pictures Entertainment (“Screen Savers,” CIO Insight October 2003). Yaros reports to company president Paul Johnson and serves on the firm’s Executive Leadership Team. Unlike other companies he has worked for, […]

Strong Signals: What’s in Your Portfolio? By John Parkinson The typical IT organization, says columnist John Parkinson, the chief technologist for the Americas at Capgemini, should be thought of as a kind of specialized investor. CIOs makes bets that investments in technology will generate returns for the business by putting together a “portfolio” of systems […]

At United Parcel Service Inc., strategy is part and parcel of every it initiative, says David Barnes, the company’s newly appointed cio. Barnes, who worked his way through the ups ranks—first as a part-time package loader, then in various finance, business operations and it positions—takes a forward-thinking approach to keeping his staff of more than […]

Instant Persuasion: How to Change Your Words to Change Your Life By Laurie Puhn Tarcher/Penguin, January 2005 304 pages, $19.95 The conceit of first showing a “communication blunder” and then a couple of pages later showing what could have been said differently in order to turn it into a “communication wonder” becomes wearing fairly quickly. […]

The Workforce Scorecard: Managing Human Capital to Execute Strategy By Mark A. Huselid, Brian E. Becker and Richard W. Beatty Harvard Business School Press, February 2005 288 pages, $29.95 The problem, argue the authors, professors all, isn’t that managers don’t understand the importance of employees. It’s that they lack a good way to measure how […]

After a deluge of complaints by such organizations as the American Bankers Association and the American Electronics Association that Sarbanes-Oxley is wreaking havoc on small business budgets, the SEC in late December formed the SEC Advisory Committee on Smaller Public Companies to look at the problem and recommend reforms. The first order of business? Determining […]

63% of IT spending is nondiscretionary 87% say their executive teams feel IT spending is at appropriate levels 16% increase in ERP spending is planned for 2005 37% say they are spending more on IT than their competition Spending on information technology looks to be coming out of its slump—finally. According to the 438 IT […]