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  • How to Improve Your IT Job Prospects by Volunteering

    Unemployed? Don't sit at home and wait (and hope) for an opportunity. Volunteering your IT skills is a way to keep current and show potential employers your business and technical acumen, your character and your drive.

    Written by Sharon Florentine23 Sept. 13 13:38
  • Gimme shelter: Wall Street braces for next superstorm

    Heading into the heart of hurricane season 10 months after Sandy slammed the New York metropolitan area, Wall Street has had time to reassess and revamp backup plans.

    Written by Marc Ferranti20 Aug. 13 12:06
  • The CIO as the ultimate insider

    Kevin Angland, CIO of IAG New Zealand, has the distinctive experience of working across most areas of the insurance industry.

    Written by Divina Paredes17 Dec. 12 15:35
  • How IT could have prevented the financial meltdown

    In the coming weeks the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?

    Written by Ephraim Schwartz25 Sept. 08 09:05
  • IT investments that matter

    It’s not just you! It really is getting harder to outpace the other guys. Our recent research finds that since the mid-1990s, which marked the mainstream adoption of the internet and commercial enterprise software, competition within the US economy has accelerated to unprecedented levels. There are a number of possible reasons for this quickening, including merger and acquisition activity, the opening up of global markets, along with companies continuing R&D efforts. However, we found that a central catalyst in this shift is the massive increase in the power of IT investments.
    To better understand when and where IT confers competitive advantage in today’s economy, we studied all publicly traded US companies in all industries from the 1960s through to 2005, looking at relevant performance indicators from each (including sales, earnings, profitability and market capitalisation) and found some striking patterns: Since the mid-1990s, a new competitive dynamic has emerged — greater gaps between the leaders and laggards in an industry, more concentrated with winner-take-all markets, and more churn among rivals in a sector. Strikingly, this pattern closely matches the turbulent “creative destruction” mode of capitalism that was first predicted more than 60 years ago by economist Joseph Schumpeter. This accelerated competition has coincided with a sharp increase in the quantity and quality of IT investments, as more organisations have moved to bolster (or altogether replace) their existing operating models using the internet and enterprise software. Tellingly, the changes in competitive dynamics are most apparent in precisely those sectors that have spent the most on information technology, even when we controlled for other factors.

    Written by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson07 Sept. 08 22:00

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