John Parkinson

A few months ago I got one of those semi-spam e-mails from a market research company acting on behalf of a major auto manufacturer (not named, but it was clearly GM) asking me to participate in a survey about some aspect of engine technology. It turned out that they wanted to know if the use […]

In my February column, I looked at some of the ways CIOs are beginning to differentiate their strategies by building portfolios of projects that incorporate concepts from the world of financial investment. Buried in that column was a promise to look at approaches to justifying and funding projects when the benefits for those putting up […]

Modern market theory states that markets are so efficient that no one can perform much better than the market average for very long. Transparency—the notion that everyone can see what the winners are doing—will rapidly drive copycat behavior, forcing a rapid regression to the market’s mean performance level. It’s also conventional wisdom that, because there […]

It’s been more than 15 months now since the Great Blackout of 2003 (in which I was briefly caught, traveling to and in Cleveland), and we have had three months to ponder the findings of the commission appointed to review the causes and suggest ways to stop such problems in the future. Along with poor […]

To view this issue’s whiteboard, click here.To download a printer-friendly version of this issue’s whiteboard, click here. Now that we are perhaps beginning to see some relief from our current economic woes, it might be a good time for CIOs to focus on how they would like to be measured during and after the recovery. […]

I get a lot of e-mail—we all do—but with around 800 messages a day, I simply can’t read them all, and only 100 or so really require my attention. The challenge is to handle the rest automatically, but still be able to get to them later if I need to. Enter software agents. In early […]

I got my first cell phone back in 1989—it was a Motorola “brick” that cost more than $1,000—and I’ve probably used a couple of dozen different models since. My first PDA arrived as soon as they were available, and I’ve probably gone through a dozen different models. I got a “luggable” business computer in 1986 […]

My April column looked at the triple issues of productivity, automation and offshore labor markets and their likely impact on medium- to long-term U.S. technology employment. The conclusion: There is no real alternative to accepting that these forces will dramatically reshape the North American and European technology jobs landscape over the next decade. Resistance is […]

In 1991, the Technology Consulting and systems integration business was in a bad way, and the organization I worked for back then was amongst the basket cases. We were just coming out of a difficult post-merger integration effort. Our core business—developing large, complex, custom information systems—was losing a lot of money and not growing very […]

In the final quarter of every calendar year I send out a survey to my private research panel asking them about their (or their company’s) technology spending plans for the coming year. The respondents—a 30-year collection of just over 600 friends, acquaintances, ex-colleagues, clients and other contacts in the technology world who are willing to […]

Does your business have a customer loyalty program? Do you have CRM extensions that let you issue and track customized membership tokens—magnetic-stripe or bar-coded cards and key chain tags, maybe even smart cards—for some segments of your customer base? Do you use this information to help you operate your business? If you do, I bet […]

The radio frequency identification infrastructure developed at the Auto-ID Center at MIT and being steadily rolled out by early adopters is an interesting departure from recent technology architectures, including both the Internet and the Web. It uses essentially dumb endpoints (the tags) that are cheap to build in huge volume, and a network of sensors […]