July, 2010

Catalyst Conference: Is the new BI about less automation — or more?

I'm here on the business intelligence track at the Burton Group's Catalyst Conference, trying to sort out the old BI from the new. As you might expect, there is a lot of talk about predictive analytics and

How mega data center construction is tied to taxes

Massive data center construction is happening in places where power is cheap and taxes are low, like Dublin, Ireland. That's where Microsoft built a 300,000-square-foot data center to support European cloud services on the Windows Azure platform. Mega data centers are becoming the trend -- Intel...

Readers respond to practice and philosophy of IT chargeback

My thanks go out to readers who were charged up enough to write about the IT chargeback series on SearchCIO.com. Whether you do showback, partial chargeback or chargeback for a profit; charge by usage...

Chief data officers: Bringing data management strategy to the C-suite

John Bottega admits he's a bit of a clotheshorse. The guy likes a quality suit. Actually, he is a connoisseur of fine suits, their fit, their style, their durability. The sleeve on a quality suit, for example, is cut to show a glimpse of shirt cuff. Crumple the pant leg of a quality suit, and it...

Chargeback process: An old model heralds changes in IT

The old chargeback process, revived by cloud computing, could have major ramifications for IT organizations as they revamp to become centralized service providers, experts say.

Traditional chargeback models divide the IT budget for a business unit, for example, by the number of users in it....

Does IT chargeback pave the way to outsourcing?

If your organization is talking about moving to an IT chargeback or a supply and demand model for IT, could that be its first step on the road to outsourcing? That was an interesting sidelight raised by a story I did this week on a company that

IT chargeback: A political hot potato is tossed up by cloud computing

A question has been nagging me since I attended Cloud Expo in New York: What metrics can IT departments use to charge back business units for cloud services? Measured service is fundamental to the

Bumpy patch ahead for MDM software

Master data management software is about to enter a rough patch, according to analyst Andrew White, agenda manager for MDM and analytics at Gartner Inc. White explained to me in an email recently what the near future for MDM adoption looks like, and it is not necessarily pretty. The large software...

A funny thing happened on the way to Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court considered a broad challenge to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and it chose to rule narrowly. The 5-4 opinion changed the way the members of the Public Company Accounting...

Biometric fingerprints find new, mobile audience

The world has gone mobile faster than most people expected it would, resulting in security nightmares for CIOs. It is not uncommon for roaming employees to use multiple devices to gain access to sensitive information, with IT left to figure out how to