Stories about: Aberdeen Group

There are things you can do in just 20 minutes that can have a meaningful and even a long term positive effect on your IT organization, your career, your technology knowledge, your management skills and your relationship with the business. We've gathered 20 of the best ideas we could find

Service-oriented architecture promises many positives: resource reuse, application integration, business agility and infrastructure flexibility, among others. But never do SOA proponents claim ease of management as one of the technology's glories.

There isn't much about Tom Sanzone that bespeaks drama. The CIO of Credit Suisse is direct, meticulous and practical, and it doesn't seem as if he'd suffer fools gladly, an impression partly informed by his New York accent, nearly shaven head and confident demeanour

This past February 2, at 5.15pm, Alan Boehme, 47, VP and CIO of Juniper Networks, left his office and climbed into his black 2004 Infiniti G-35. He pulled out of the company parking lot and began the 90-minute drive to his home in Half Moon Bay, a coastal town in Northern California's San Mateo County. Boehme's work had been going well. In December, he had completed an ambitious restructuring of the $US2.5 billion networking company's IT infrastructure, globalizing its operations and laying the foundation for its future growth.

Mess up internal search and you'll frustrate your employees. But mess up external search and you'll alienate your customers

Chris Boebel, the director of information technology at Delta Sonic Car Wash Systems, had a big sales job on his hands

Australian cable manufacturer Tycab has completed a large ERP implementation which replaced three disparate, ageing and paper-intensive systems with a centralized solution.

If there was any question about whether the ERP market was in turmoil, the recent shakeup in senior management at ERP stalwart SAP that pushed out rising star Shai Agassi should have answered it. The shakeup at usually sedate SAP underscored the frayed nerves in the corporate boardroom of many leading ERP vendors, as technologies such as SOA and Web services enable enterprises to turn to smaller vendors and service providers who can deliver applications that meet their demands for speed, flexibility, and low overhead.

Innovation in big companies has always been treated like gold - hidden deep inside secret vaultlike labs and protected from everyone except the researchers in lab coats. When products or services emerge from the labs after years of development - and just one in a hundred does - they fail most of the time.

The era of do-it-yourself supply chain integration - its costs, its risks and its drain on your IT resources - is coming to an end. Help has arrived

It's the hot technology for most large companies, but business, technical and cultural issues must be addressed for a successful SOA implementation.