Stories about: Unilever

If you asked a random employee which organization embodies your company's culture, what would she say? Marketing? HR? Sales? I'll bet you my entire shoe collection she wouldn't say IT. In most companies, IT is so far removed from the heart of the company that it is often housed in a separate building.

You can be forgiven for thinking that the days of the offshore captive center were numbered. Citigroup, Unilever, Deutsche Bank, and Dell are just a few of the Fortune 500 companies who have sold or shut down their one of their wholly owned offshore service centers in the last year. Some 60 per cent of all such captive centers fail to meet expectations. And the third-party offshore outsourcing industry, particularly in India, has reached a level of provider maturity that one wonders why a company would take on the hassle of setting up their own shop abroad. (Indeed, many industry watchers have.)

The early returns are rolling in on Apple's iAd mobile advertising platform, and so far the results seem mixed.

Two weeks ago, the CIO of Texas penned a seven-page letter outlining the chronic failures of the state's nearly four-year outsourcing relationship - a deal the Texas governor had briefly suspended in 2008 citing service delivery problems that he said put the state's agencies in danger.

Though it started selling software to universities and small businesses, Google has pervaded more large businesses during the past year with Google Apps, the company's suite of messaging and productivity software. Analysts say Google Enterprise, the division of Google that runs Apps, has added many features to the product that make it more attractive to enterprise IT departments.

AMR Research released its annual "Supply Chain Top 25" list, and the top dog leading the supply chain pack this year -as it did last year - is Apple.

Tania Howarth built the Birds Eye Iglo IT infrastructure from scratch after it sailed away from parent Unilever. She recalls the journey.

How CIOs and their C-level peers need to work with the boss in reducing head count.

A local power failure has left Dr Richard Sykes temporarily without electricity at his home in Islington, London. He is also being photographed to illustrate this article but the double delay in being able to talk to him affords a little time for admiring his collection of modern art and perusing his bookshelves, groaning under the weight of volumes that testify to the interests that have underpinned his career.

On December 14 and 15, 2005, Coty, one of the world's largest cosmetic and fragrance makers, held an all-hands-on-deck executive meeting at the company's headquarters in New York City. Five months earlier, Coty had acquired Unilever Cosmetics International (UCI), a subsidiary of the eponymous conglomerate, and Coty's IT team was just finishing moving UCI employees off Unilever's infrastructure and onto Coty's