• Information is Useless: Survey

  January 15, 2007 Alex Woodie

  A new survey released by the consulting firm Accenture confirms what you may have secretly suspected all along: That information is difficult to find at work, and when it is finally corralled, it’s usually wrong. The dour findings are the result of a survey of more than 1,000 middle managers of large companies in the U.S. and the U.K. The survey was conducted last June, and it was done online, which doesn’t help its credibility much. Neither was there a margin of error attributed to the study, which couldn’t have been scientific, because you can’t control the randomness of the

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• USDA Farm Service Agency Wants to Consolidation 2,384 AS/400s

  January 15, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to a request for information seeking proposals from IT experts put out by the United States Department of Agriculture, the Farm Service Agency, which operates a network of 2,384 AS/400 Model 170 servers that host applications to help the farmers of America, is looking to simplify its IT infrastructure. And rather than just call IBM Global Services, the USDA posted a request for information to solicit ideas from the world at large to help the farm agency solve its unique problem. The FSA network has 2,384 service centers, which host a variety of System/36 RPG, COBOL, and assembler programs

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• LTO Consortium Spins Ultrium 4 Tape Format with Native Encryption

  January 15, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The companies behind the Ultrium Linear Tape Out (LTO) tape drive and tape cartridge specification announced last week that the specification for the LTO 4 tape format had been completed and was available for licensing by interested parties. That means that tape drives and cartridges based on the LTO 4 format, which has integrated data encryption capability, should start appearing this year. This time around, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum are driving the technology behind the LTO spec; disk maker Seagate Technology partnered with IBM and HP to drive earlier generations of LTO technology. With the LTO 4 specification,

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• IBM Wins U.S. Patent Count Again as Vendors Build Up Patent War Chests

  January 15, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some stories in the IT business have their seasons. About this time of the year, it is typical for the United States Patent and Trademark Office to put out a press release trumpeting the number of patents that were issued in America during the prior year just ended. But this year, USPTO didn’t put out a release, and I called up the public affairs office to find out why. To my astonishment and amusement, I was politely told by the public affairs officer that USPTO was concerned that the industry was focusing too much on the quantity of patents awarded

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• Zend Core for i5/OS Ships for OS/400 V5R3

  January 15, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After a brief beta testing period to make sure everything works alright, Zend Technology‘s enterprise-grade PHP software, Zend Core for i5/OS V5R4 has been back-ported to the earlier OS/400 V5R3 release. Zend Core for i5/OS 1.6, which runs on both i5/OS V5R4 as well as on OS/400 V5R3, went into beta in early December. The software is available for free for customers with these two operating systems, which support a range of iSeries and System i5 hardware. By supporting Zend Core on V5R3, IBM and Zend have significantly extended the reach of PHP on the OS/400 and i5/OS platform.

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• Why the Number of Women in IT Is Decreasing

  January 15, 2007 Mary Lou Roberts

  At its Fall Symposium last October, Gartner braved an interesting and controversial topic, examining the reports that women are reportedly entering the information technology workforce in fewer and fewer absolute numbers and in fewer numbers than the decrease of women in the workforce in general is showing up in other professions. Why this is happening, and why this is a serious problem that companies need to address? As a woman who cut her professional teeth in the IT world at the same time that Helen Reddy was singing “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar,” I was immensely interested in Gartner’s

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• Next Generation ERP and the Rise of the Agile Organization

  January 15, 2007 Jerome Peloquin

  Note: This is the third and final article of a series. I recommend reading the first two articles, but it is not absolutely necessary to understand this article. Links to the previous articles are provided at the end of this story. In the two preceding articles, I put forth our view of the use of ERP technology to leverage human performance. I argued that information is the fuel that feeds the performance engine, and technology is the delivery system. Just as the pipelines and tankers must be available to keep refineries running, so must technology be able to deliver the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Between y o u and i

  January 15, 2007 Hesh Wiener

  IBM started it. The company’s 1994 annual report had a plain white cover sporting y o u in very large letters. IBM did it again in 2000, rebranding its midrange as iSeries, but that was two years after Apple introduced its iMac. IBM completely missed its chance in mainframes, where it could have called the z9 the zMine. Apple launched its iPod in 2001, and it showed the iPhone just this month, weeks after Time magazine made You its Person of the Year. The echoes persist for a daffy generation whose narcissism may be its nemesis. There’s

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• Reader Feedback on The System iWant, 2007 Edition

  January 15, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Readers piped up a bit on the System iWant, 2007 Edition, a hypothetical System i5 product line I dreamed up with user-capped pricing across the entry and midrange portions of the product line. No one said it was crazy, but if you want IBM to actually do this, you need to start telling Big Blue to get on with it. Here’s a sample of the feedback; some of it cannot be printed in a family newsletter, but was much appreciated by me. (Wink, wink.) I just wanted to say that this article is one of the best that I

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• IDC Says Global IT Spending Will Kiss $1.5 Trillion By 2010

  January 15, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having made their projections for IT spending in 2007, the analysts at IDC have put a high sheen on their crystal balls and looked out further to project what the IT budgets of 2010 might look like in the aggregate. And if things pan out as IDC expects, then IT spending in 2010 should come in at just under $1.5 trillion. To be specific, IDC is projecting that between 2006 and 2010, IT spending worldwide will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6.3 percent, rising from $1.16 trillion in 2006 to $1.48 trillion in 2010. The forecast that

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