Stories about: SIR

Everything old is new again for Museum Victoria CIO Tim Hart

Criminals use online auctions as a place to unload stolen, diverted and counterfeit products. EBay does little to stop them, creating more work for CSOs. Here's what smart companies do.

Today's CEOs are giving incompetence a bad name.

Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde asked a highly pertinent question in his newsletter last week: Where are all the Inquiries going?

Don't think of it as a chain. Think of it as an intricate network of suppliers, distributors and customers who share information. Think you can do it? If so, it's not going to be easy.

Last June CIO's contributing editor Sue Bushell gave prominent CIOs the opportunity to voice their opinions on the their relationships with vendors. The criticisms came hard and fast. This year we thought we'd turn the tables, but in a kinder, gentler fashion, and find out which CIOs vendors admire.

If you try to solve large problems without understanding the laws of scale, you're sure to fail. Scale affects everything from the physical universe to the man-made construction of systems most of us are involved in. Why shouldn't it apply to leadership? Leading a very small team is fundamentally different from leading a very large global corporation. Successful careers are a progression from one scale of leadership to another, whether it's up the ladder to the top of the corporate hierarchy or out and down to captain a start-up.

Labor unions formed at Microsoft, IBM and Boeing. Will there be a May Day uprising in your cubes soon?

It's not easy to track the value of human capital. But the very act of trying can yield measurable benefits

If there's one trait all great Web ventures share, it's this: They make it easy, pleasant, even downright enjoyable for customers to do business with them. Sounds painfully obvious, doesn't it? But, like common sense, it's not all that common. As Patricia Seybold notes in Customers.Com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond (Random House , 1998), too many online businesses still squander too much time and money on everything but providing the ultimate experience for their current and potential customers.

At the heart of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, John Seely Brown boards an elevator in the rabbit warren of a building called Xerox PARC and greets a colleague. "Still making trouble?" he asks. "You bet," comes the hearty answer. "That's good. That's good," nods Xerox's director of research. He means it. Brown encourages his researchers to upset apple carts and hurl the occasional monkey wrench that jams conventional wisdom. Brown believes no company can survive the long haul without accepting the risks that come with a commitment to radical innovation.