Scoping the global market: size is just part of the story

The IT market is changing so quickly that it's hard to keep pace. This concern is what motivated a recent study conducted by the International Data Corp. (IDC) and published by the World Information and Technology and Services Alliance. WITSA-a consortium of 35 IT trade associations worldwide-wanted more than market estimates. Its members wanted hard data on size and impact of the IT industry-details like the number of computers being used, the total IT investment companies made both inside and outside their walls, and the effect of that investment on individual countries worldwide. The resulting publication, Digital Planet-The Global Information Economy, provides measurements from 1992 to 1997 for the global IT industry with details for the 50 largest countries. Collectively, they represent 98 percent of the world's spending on IT and 97 percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP). The Digital Planet study is unique in several respects. It is the first to look at IT's influence from a global perspective, to measure internal spending on IT, and to examine IT's social and economic effects. It is also the first to use hard data and consistent definitions on such a large scale     

IT in post-graduate teacher training

Abstract  The IT capabilities expected of all students training to be teachers are now laid down in government guidelines but time on one year postgraduate courses is limited. It is therefore important to be aware of the IT skills that students bring with them to help develop the courses on offer. A questionnaire survey of nearly 400 PGCE primary and secondary students was completed for a 1989/90 cohort. This study set out to find what prior IT experience students brought with them, and what they perceived as their IT training needs. Two thirds of these students were found to have little experience of using computers either at home, school, college or work, and there was a very low level of experience of some of the more high priority National Curriculum software packages (e.g. electronic communications, modelling software, control software). Most students gave high training priority to learning how computers can be used in teaching. These results are discussed in relation to other surveys of IT in teacher education, and the implications for PGCE course development.     

IT spending in the midst of the Asian economic downturn: a Singapore perspective

The Asian economic downturn has severely affected the revenue and profitability of companies operating in Asia. This has in turn caused a significant number of companies to reduce their spending on IT, particularly in the countries that have been most affected by the downturn. While IT spending is an immediate and visible effect of the downturn, less visible changes in managerial attitudes towards IT, and approaches to controlling IT spending are likely to have longer term implications to the IT capabilities of companies in the region. In this paper, we examine these issues in the Singapore context, paying particular attention to how companies plan to control and reduce IT infrastructure spending. We found that in the participating firms, managers appear to pay more attention to the links between business strategy and IT after the downturn. We also found that deferring investments in physical infrastructure and outsourcing were the main approaches to IT cost reduction.     

How to select a technology lawyer

Investigating your technology law needs may save you money and headaches down the lines. IT professionals are dealing more with outside vendors and consultants. In these transactions, it is vital to protect your intellectual property (IP). One of the best ways to do this is to use the appropriate “legalese”. Poorly written nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), contracts, memorandums of understanding, and other legal documents can sink a business. Large corporations usually have sizable legal staffs to protect their interests. It's the smaller firms that need the most help. If you are making technology decisions at smaller companies, be aware that: (i) any dealings you enter into without legal representation automatically put you at a disadvantage, and will appear to the opposing parties as a sign of weakness; (ii) protecting technology today can substantially increase its future value-for example, the value of America Online is greatly enhanced by its recognizable trademark; (iii) some law firms will work at reduced rates if they believe in your technology and you agree to retain their services in the future (after you hit the big time). The article gives advice on how to select an appropriate lawyer     

Resource Complementarity and IT Economies of Scale: Mechanisms and Empirical Evidence

ABSTRACT

In this study, we explore economies of scale for IT infrastructure and application services. An in-depth appreciation of economies of scale is imperative for an adequate understanding of the impact of IT investments. Our findings indicate that even low IT spending organizations can make a difference by devoting at least 60% of their total IT budget on IT infrastructure in order to foster economies of scale and extract strategic benefits.     

Information Technology and new Primary School teachers

Abstract  This paper looks at the use of IT by teachers in their first year of teaching. Students on a Primary PGCE course were followed up in their first year of teaching, data was collected through questionnaires and interviews, and an interview with the Primary PGCE IT tutor provided a picture of the training they had received. It was found that the training had provided a limited preparation, enabling a start to be made with subject-related games and word processing, but had left the teachers reliant on school support, to develop further use of IT. Suggestions for course improvement are made.     

Are You Prepared for Daylight Saving Time 2007?

The odds are good that the appointments you've made with US or Canadian associates through Microsoft's Exchange or IBM's Lotus Notes or Domino are going to be off by an hour in the last three weeks of March 2007. Your legacy Java runtime environments also will likely produce incorrect time-sensitive results. Why? Buried among the hundreds of provisions in the 1,700 pages of the United States' Energy Policy Act of 2005 is a modest change to the rules that establish when daylight saving time starts and ends. The changes, which the government ostensibly implemented as part of a federal energy conservation effort, require that beginning in 2007, daylight saving time (DST) start three weeks earlier and end one week later than in previous years. (For more information on the policy's history, see the sidebar "US Laws governing daylight saving time.") These new start and end dates can greatly affect IT systems. Users will expect the effects to be transparent, so the burden of managing the situation will fall to IT professionals. Unfortunately, the fixes are not automatic. In this article, we'll describe the possible risks to computer networks and discuss some remediation strategies to keep your systems running on time     

A blueprint for solving problems in your IT architecture

An IT architecture is a series of principles, guidelines, drawings, standards, and rules that guide an organization through acquiring, building, modifying, and interfacing IT resources. These resources include hardware, software, communication protocols, application development methodologies, database systems, modeling tools, IT organizational structures, data, and more. It should provide a purposeful and executable design so that you know what you need to build, what you are actually building, and how you can make transformations at maximum speed with minimal cost and disruption. Blueprints visualize and communicate that design by illustrating architectural adaptability points. They are the focal point for understanding the relationships between IT assets and for changing those relationships. Many companies end up with an architectural mess because they never institute a clear and manageable architecture definition. They take isolated actions under the rubric of architecture, but never institute effective ways to govern, change, and record architecture. The article gives advice on how to achieve effective IT architecture management     

IT under school-based policies for Initial Teacher Training

Abstract This paper describes aspects of a survey carried out amongst students and staff in the use of Information Technology (IT) in the initial training of teachers at the University of Leeds during the academic year 1992/93. The survey attempted to chart the IT profiles of students during their Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) year, assessing their initial and final IT confidence, their IT activities and problems they encountered, and the extent to which IT was used on their teaching practice. The results of the survey are discussed in the light of the changes which are taking place in the training of teachers.     

Managing Your Security Future

ABSTRACT

Information technology organizations within most corporations are spending significant time and resources securing IT infrastructure. This increased need for security is driven by a number of factors. These factors include increased dependency on the Internet, financial and legal liability, protection of personal identity information and sensitive corporate data, increased numbers and age of legacy systems with limited vendor support, deploying complex systems, and new regulations governing corporate transactions. There a number of technologies on the market today that can mitigate most of these security factors. However, managers in IT organizations need to identify potential future threats and security technologies to assess and potentially mitigate risk through the deployment of those technologies. This article investigates three areas critical to the successful deployment and securing of information technology.     

Finding Your True IT Transformation

If you want to transform your business and cause a dramatic improvement for the enterprise, you'll need to start by truly transforming your IT life cycle. It's easy to believe that IT is truly reinventing itself by hiring new people, installing new tools, or preaching a new methodology. However, providing transformational leadership starts with the leadership itself along with the development of the three core competencies of strategy, solutions, and implementation. Your job in IT leadership is to develop all three competencies in your organization by cultivating the necessary skills and techniques, and then to cause each of them to happen continuously and concurrently. When these changes become the organization's new habits, you're on the path to true transformation.     

IT best practices: CIO wisdom

The CIO Institute formed in January 2002 is a subsidiary of the nonprofit Eastern Technology Council, an organization that focuses on supporting business in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area. The CIO Institute members are ask to contribute chapters to a best practice volume for IT. The resulting volume revealed three major categories of IT best practices that can make your IT group a positive force in the enterprise. This article excerpts, analyzes, and represents these CIOs' collected wisdom, as represented in the book, entitled CIO Wisdom II: More Best Practices (2005).     

The consideration of organizational issues during the systems development process: an empirical analysis

The lack of consideration of organizational issues in systems development can lead to project failure. A review of the literature and a pre-test survey suggested classifying organizational issues into five categories and examining how these are considered by IT managers. A postal survey with responses from 64 senior IT specialists over a cross section of industry and commerce showed that there is a general awareness of the importance of organizational issues but there was little consensus on how they should be addressed in the development process. These IT managers were consistent in spending most effort on the issues perceived as most important from the list of 14 issue provided, but there was considerable variation in which specific issues they rated most important. In general those organizational issues with a 'technical' aspect were given more prominence than those which are less tangible, but which may be more critical to a system's success.     

Teaching object technology

Since 1986 I have hardly spent a month without teaching at least one object technology class, to groups large and small. I draw from this experience to suggest a few rules for effective object training in industrial environments. A mOOzak effect is caused by the omnipresence of OO this and OO that in the computer press. The words flow so continuously as to cause a general dilution of the concepts. The words are familiar, but are the concepts understood? Often they are not. The trainer must convince the trainees that they do not yet know everything, because no one can learn a subject he thinks he already knows. The only strategy guaranteed to overcome the mOOzak effect is to present the initial training course; have the students try their hand at OO development; and present the initial training course. Initial training should focus on implementation and design. Do not limit yourself to introductory courses, however. Reserve at least 50 percent of your training budget for advanced courses. Finally, do not train developers only. A training curriculum should include courses for managers as well as software developers     

The Real Cost of Fraud to E-tailers

With 27 billion credit card transactions conducted annually, credit card spending is at its highest rate ever. Estimates suggest that 2%, or 540 million, of these transactions are conducted over the Internet. Unfortunately, the boom in online spending comes hand in hand with an increase in E-commerce credit card fraud. The statistics say that E-commerce fraud is 10 to 20 times more likely than face-to-face, with some research claiming rates as high as 5-10%. The actual cost truly shows the shortcomings, with companies like Expedia incurring a $4 million fraud bill last year.     

Myths about outsourcing to application service providers

Which applications are organizations outsourcing to ASPs? What did they hope to gain? And what are the critical success factors for organizations using ASPs? To assess these issues we cosponsored a study to assess organizational attitudes and adoption metrics for ASPs. Our survey garnered 256 usable responses from businesses regarding their use of ASPs. The study indicated that a significant number of respondents believed ASPs offer a fast-track way of implementing IT projects. However, 80 percent also favored internal implementation for core IT projects, which suggests that other factors still present a substantial barrier to ASP adoption. Nevertheless, companies are outsourcing some core applications - such as supply chain management and e-commerce - and several non-core applications. This outsourcing implies that companies perceive a significant benefit to ASP adoption. The message for users is unambiguous: to succeed, understand how Internet outsourcing works for your company, benchmark against successful ASP adopters, and establish a common criterion for evaluating an ASP     

IT,productivity and organizational practices: large sample,establishment-level evidence

Our paper uses a large longitudinal survey of establishments to address two questions: Has IT implementation significantly contributed to workplace performance? Do IT implementations have a positive or negative effect on high performance human resource/workplace practices, compensation practices and training? We put forth four main hypotheses and four auxiliary hypotheses. Three of our four main hypotheses were not rejected: that higher use of IT will increase productivity, that higher use of compensation practices will increase productivity, and that increased training will increase productivity. The hypothesis that increased use of workplace practices will increase productivity was neither rejected nor accepted. There was partial support for the hypothesis that increased investment in IT will increase productivity. The remaining three auxiliary hypotheses were rejected: that the interaction between IT and compensation practices should be positive, that the interaction between IT and workplace practices should be positive, that the interaction between IT and training should be positive. The latter findings are puzzling and point to the need for further research into the effects of computer use and generally accepted practices which should increase productivity.     

The impact of information technology on financial performance: the importance of strategic choice

Information technology (IT) may not automatically improve firm profitability. It is an essential tool, but not sufficient in itself, and should therefore be coupled with organisational factors such as business strategies. A firm can maximise the value from its IT investments by aligning them with business strategies because IT improves scope economies and coordination. This paper examines empirically the contribution of IT to financial performance as measured by net profit, ROA, and ROE by focusing on the alignment of IT with business strategies such as vertical disintegration and diversification. Empirical analysis shows that IT does not directly improve financial performance. In conjunction with vertical disintegration and diversification, however, it does improve financial performance as measured by net profit. Financial performance ratios such as ROA and ROE, however, are not correlated with the alignment (or interaction) factor of IT with vertical disintegration and diversification. The results indicate that increased IT spending improves net profit, but not performance ratios such as ROA and ROE, of firms with decreased vertical integration and higher diversification.     

Information technology in Nigerian banks: The limits of expectations

In the last ten years, banks in developed countries have been investing more and more in information technology (IT) as a means to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. An investigation of the application of IT in Nigerian banks was carried out in order to determine the expectations and success of IT implementations in the sector. The data were generated from a survey of randomly selected branches of 56 banks in Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria. Almost all the banks had an IT policy, the main thrusts of which where to achieve full application of IT, to be able to meet organisational goals, to secure competitive advantage, and to be up to date. Only 54.6% of them actually achieved some measure of successful implementations. The expected benefits of investment in IT were realised in only a relatively few number of banks. The consequence was that less than 40% of the banks were poised to maximise the benefits of IT through major investments, especially in the areas of online access and transactions, electronic commerce, and electronic publishing. It is estimated that at least 60% of the branches of these banks are spending less than $150,000 annually on IT. An upsurge of investment is, however, expected, first by the banks that style themselves as progressive and have already made some success in IT implementations, and later by the other banks.