Edward H. Baker

Here’s a project for you: Take a look at the graphic (To download graphic click here). It’s a wiring diagram of the planned “common-use” system being installed at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. The first phase of the project, the newly renovated Terminal 1, connects 250 check-in counters, 50 express check-in kiosks, 40 VoIP phones for […]

Why is it that some companies seem to get so much more out of their IT efforts than others? Do they have better technology? Do they throw more money at the problem? Are their executives smarter, more talented, more dedicated? As Peter Weill and Jeanne W. Ross note in their IT Governance: How Top Performers […]

In this month’s Expert Voices, Laura Unger, the former acting head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, speaks of the hope on the part of the commission that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act will help instill in corporate America a “culture of compliance.” The nonconformists out there may bristle at the phrase, but the goal is a […]

The Center Cannot Hold MIT’s Tom Malone discusses his new book The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life. From the development of Linux to the outsourcing of data to Bangalore, and from the Screen Actors Guild to the “loose hierarchy” at AES […]

It’s hard to imagine two more different business leaders than Bernie Ebbers and Ricardo Semler. Ebbers, former bouncer, former telecom billionaire and—until recently—former unindicted chairman of WorldCom, liked to claim he was an “aw-shucks” kind of guy. His self-described talent for business consisted in his ability to bring people together, then trust and encourage them […]

This month’s issue includes our annual survey of IT spending, and the results are mildly encouraging: The more than 600 CIOs we polled have increased their 2004 IT budgets an average of 2.2 percent over 2003, and more than two-thirds of CIOs expect to be given the authority to exceed their budgets if need be. […]

The goal of scenario planning is not to predict the future, but to present a range of possible futures, all of which should be taken into account in your strategic planning. That said, the results of this month’s research study are not meant as an exercise in scenario planning. What we’ve done, in the sections […]

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s The Smartest Guys in the Room, a real page-turner of a history on the rise and fall of Enron Corp. and an all-inclusive instruction manual on how not to run a company, analyzes with great care former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling’s “asset-light” business strategy. The idea involved selling off Enron’s […]

Dealing with security is like trying to figure out the Year 2000 problem—only there’s no deadline, just continued uncertainty. No one can say with great confidence just how vulnerable the Internet and the networks hooked up to it are to a massive attack. Some incredibly effective worms have gone across the Internet, and what has […]

Recently, a large consulting firm invited me and my colleague, Marcia Stepanek, to meet the chief of its IT security practice. When we arrived in the lobby of the firm’s Times Square office tower, we signed in at the security desk. We identified ourselves and whom we were visiting (the guard had been informed of […]

The concept is compelling: An IT architecture designed to free companies from the complexity and expense of islands of IT infrastructures. The ability to provide computing capacity to business units as they need it. Pay-as-you-go outsourcing models that free corporations from the need to buy, operate and maintain large, unwieldy, redundant IT operations. Simplified platforms […]

In July, one of the biggest corporate reform packages since the Great Depression was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush. The new rules, which will force companies to cough up more timely, accurate and detailed accountings of their financial health and make CEOs and CFOs certify under oath the accuracy of […]