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Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives

Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.

Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices

Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.

Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices

This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.

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Manufacturing: Factories of the Future

When a new idea about manufacturing arises, a new crowd of players jumps into the game and manufacturing’s technology rules ...

 

January 01, 2007CIO

When a new idea about manufacturing arises, a new crowd of players jumps into the game and manufacturing’s technology rules change dramatically. In the first third of the 20th century, the philosophy of continuous flow and assembly line technology gave American industry an edge over the European industrial powers. In the last third of the 20th century, U.S. manufacturers got caught off guard by the rise of "lean manufacturing" and the war on waste.

Perhaps the next time one of these turning points appears, the U.S. manufacturing sector will leapfrog its competitors and make up ground lost over the past few decades. That next turning point may the emerging trend of adaptive manufacturing, manufacturing that morphs on the fly as companies respond to chaotic economic changes.

Consider this scenario: Sooner or later, the central banks of Asia—China, Japan, Hong Kong and Korea—will make the value of the U.S. dollar fall because they stop buying the currency or, worse, start selling.

This shift would be bad news for U.S. industries associated with imports, but export businesses—making or managing physical goods, not services—would fare better. They’d need new, 21st-century manufacturing infrastructure, dominated by information processes and information management issues. A U.S. manufacturing revival would be managed by CIOs.

Already, today, manufacturing is becoming more about moving bits than atoms. Companies seeking greater manufacturing efficiency and greater competitive opportunity have much to gain from emerging technologies in adaptive manufacturing such as 3-D printing and sensor networks.

What’s Behind Adaptive Manufacturing?

Several factors are driving interest in adaptive manufacturing and the rising importance of information management in manufacturing, as outlined by Eric Beinhocker in his recent book, The Origin of Wealth. One is an ongoing, if quiet, revolution in the way economists think about markets and economies. For most of the past century, markets were viewed as quasi-mechanical processes that ground their way to equilibrium, defined as the point at which supply and demand balance. Today, an increasing number of economists see markets as essentially chaotic: complex, nonlinear and as unpredictable as the weather.

Under the old theory, the job of managers was to tune the mission of the company to the equilibrium points. That was called defining a sustainable competitive advantage. The new theory abolishes that responsibility, since it is the essence of a chaotic economy that competitive advantages can vanish almost overnight.

The new idea: As a tool in business, managers should use natural selection—a law of nature that enables species to grow and progress in a landscape as chaotic as any economy. That means defining a portfolio of experiments appropriate to the available competencies of the organization, running these against the market, shifting resources according to outcomes, then exposing a new set of experiments to the market and so on.

 
 
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Exchange 2007 Risks and Mitigation Strategies

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A Comparative Cost Analysis of Email Environments

This Forrester report will help you evaluate the full cost of your email environment and it will explore the benefits of cloud-based technologies.
 

An Infrastructure and Operations Analysis

This Forrester Report review three basic architectures to consider as you evaluate taking your email into the cloud.
 

Upgrading to VMware vSphere with vWire

Learn how vWire can help ensure the success of your upgrade from ESX 3.x to vSphere.
 

Practical Approaches for Securing Web Applications

Enterprises understand the importance of securing web applications to protect critical corporate and customer data. What many don't understand, is how to implement a robust process for integrating security and risk management throughout the web application software development lifecycle.
 

WEBCASTS

An Open Framework for Business Intelligence

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Smart techniques for application security: whitebox + blackbox security testing.

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Lower the Cost and Complexity of a Mobile Workforce through Automation

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Extending Client Refresh - 11 Steps to Maximize Savings

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Profit from Power Savings

Cut Costs & Green Your IT Operations with PC Power Management

Find out how and why 400 organizations have d...
 

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