Articles 1 to 10 of 84
Privacy Practices: The Challenge of Safeguarding Digital Data
Privacy once meant drawing the drapes. Now that we depend on technology to do the world's business, privacy means securing data, protecting personal information and keeping hackers at bay. Drawing the drapes in an electronic sense will call for a complex system of safeguards and require policymakers to create guidelines. On January 28, Data Privacy Day was observed across the U.S., Canada and 27 European nations. The W. P. Carey School of Business celebrated the day with a symposium for privacy leaders in the public, private and academic arenas. The event was hosted by the Center for Advancing Business Through Information Technology (CABIT) and Intel.
Bob Anderson: Innovating from the Bottom Up at Best Buy
In the opening moments of Bob Anderson's presentation at a recent conference sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Business through Information Technology, the IT executive used the words "innovation" or "innovative" or "innovate" seven times. He has reasons to harp on that theme. Now chief technologist for Best Buy Co., Inc., the nation's largest consumer electronics outlet, Anderson defines innovative thinking as creative, inventive, radical and fearless. And when you're a retailer of products sold by everyone from Sears to Circuit City, coming up with new and better ways to service customers is crucial to survival, he said.
Sustainable Servers: How IT Can Help Companies Preserve the Environment and the Bottom Line
An explosion of electronic data is creating more demand for more storage capacity and for more servers. More servers mean more energy demands, increased costs and a greater impact on the environment. The situation represents an opportunity for IT to play a greater role in helping companies achieve green goals and reduce or contain costs, says Fred Mapp, former Chief Information Officer at AMD and author of "Mapping Information Technology ... to Your Business." Mapp was speaking at the Spark 2008 IT Invitational sponsored by the W. P. Carey School of Business.
Analysis: Kevin J. Dooley Asks Are Political Blogs Predictive?
2008 will be remembered for the classic battles between Obama and Clinton and McCain and Obama, but political wonks will also note the historical nature of this presidential campaign because of the profound impact that the Internet and social media have had on the dynamics of the race. Here, Professor Kevin J. Dooley, an expert in web communication, writes about the way blogs fit in the panoply of news and information media and the impact they have on politics.
Smart Services: Customer Focus Turns Technology into Solutions
To many participants at the recent Digital Smart Services Leadership Summit hosted by Qualcomm in San Diego, the phrase "smart services" is digital by definition. This new and slightly broader catch phrase covers the field also know as M2M, which means machine-to-machine communications to some or machine-to-man communications to others. But "smart services" refers to more than just the technology that links systems and devices together. Amid all the talk of broadband data rates and RFID (radio frequency identification), marketing Professor Mary Jo Bitner, the academic director of the Center for Services Leadership at the W. P. Carey School of Business, reminded the engineers of what might be called an analog or pre-Internet era definition of smart services: focusing on the customer.
First-Class Cloud: Google Opens Its Computing Power to University Students
Corporations want employees to "think big." Some want them to "think many," as well. Servers, that is. We're talking about thousands of servers linked together and delivering the power of "cluster" or "cloud computing." That's what people are calling the computing model that takes vast amounts of computational horsepower, produced by many machines working in parallel, and makes that resource available via the Internet or some other network. This kind of "Internet-scale" computing is what Google does -- and now the Academic Cluster Computing Initiative (ACCI), a program offered jointly by Google and IBM, is making such an environment accessible to academic researchers. This fall, students and faculty at Arizona State University are becoming part of this Google/IBM effort to bring cloud computing to college campuses.
Jamming Out Web Services? Maybe You Need a Conductor
Anyone who's ever watched a jazz ensemble jam knows it's a fluid process. Players have to listen to each other, yield the stage sometimes, take the spotlight every now and then and always stay in sync with the group. The same could be said for the shift to application development that revolves around web services. With service-oriented applications, functionality comes together in "content mash-ups" that unite multiple web services to give users a comprehensive application. Considering that application developers used to look at their task as a start-to-finish process, service-based software development presents managerial challenges, say Haluk Demirkan and Michael Goul, professors of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business. They believe the new development model demands new IT positions, and they call one such role "the conductor."
Podcast: Are Self-Service Technologies Making Your Business Better?
Self-service technologies, which automate routine interactions between companies and customers, are a source of convenience and efficiency to both parties -- until something goes wrong and the customer cannot make the system work. Many companies should be focusing more closely on the overall customer experience, says Michael Goul, a professor of information systems and a researcher at the Center for Advancing Business Through Information Technology. Curiously, here's a case where businesses could learn something from government!
Video: Collaborative Technology Poses Challenges for Businesses
Collaborative technology can advance business through innovation if it can be managed, translated and used creatively. At the "Achieving Innovation through Collaboration" symposium, hosted by the Center for Advancing Business through Information Technology at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Knowledge@W. P. Carey talked to presenters about challenges for businesses that are using collaborative technologies.
Cloud Computing: The Evolution of Software-as-a-Service
The next big upgrade to your corporate systems department may be something you will use but never see -- "cloud computing," the next step in the evolution of software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology. As with SaaS, cloud-computing customers tap into computing resources off-site and hosted by another company. The difference is scale. Cloud computing represents a "much larger-scale implementation," says Haluk Demirkan, professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business. "Now we're talking about thousands of computers" linked together via the Internet or some other network, he explains.
