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Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »January 29, 2008 — CIO —
Teach for America (TFA), the nonprofit group that helps place college graduates into teaching jobs with low-income communities, will adopt social networking for its 5,000 members this spring to share information with one another about best practices, job opportunities and other career interests.
"We might have a fifth-grade teacher in Philadelphia and another fifth-grade teacher in Los Angeles,"says Ben Lichtenwalner, Teach for America's vice president of technology. "We need them to be able to find each other and share relevant information," such as teaching techniques.
The project, to be launched in beta this May, will be built on Lotus Connections, IBM's social software suite that includes profiles, communities, blogs, bookmarking and online tracking of various tasks. In the company's last quarterly earnings report, IBM called Connections the fastest-growing software in the company's history.
Lichtenwalner says a primary reason his organization chose Connections, instead of trying out other options in the Web 2.0 startup space, involved integrating the new system with existing data the organization held about its members.
While Lichtenwalner wouldn't disclose how much he's paying for Connections, an IBM spokeswoman says it typically costs $110 per user, which is a one-time fee and includes software and support for a year. After one year, the customer pays a per-user maintenance and support fee, an amount IBM doesn't release, but which she says is much lower.
To set up a social network internally, Lichtenwalner says he wanted to push a baseline of biographical information from back-end systems to the profile page of his members. In addition, he says that TFA members in the past had set up their own informal social networks ad hoc—he wanted a way to connect those disparate groups by bringing them on to one system.
Oliver Young, a Forrester analyst who studies Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, says incumbent vendors such as IBM (and Microsoft, with its SharePoint platform) have addressed integration worries to woo customers like Teach for America. "Integration with the back end is very important," Young says. "It's one of the reasons IT departments will go with a vendor like IBM, since they already do a lot of the large-scale infrastructure."
Lichtenwalner says the rollout will initially center on Teach for America's 5,000 members. He believes their predisposition to social networking—their generation drove the emergence of sites such as Facebook—should help ensure widespread adoption. Eventually, he hopes to extend the Connections software to his 800-person staff and 12,000 alumni members of the organization founded in 1990. For the latter, Lichtenwalner believes it could help graduates of the program land job opportunities.