Deb Perelman

As an industry, IT is not exactly famed for finding uses for older technologies. Typically, it opts to replace them with newer and seemingly more exciting innovations whether or not the business value of these investments has been proven. In few areas of IT is this tendency more prominent than in legacy systems, whose “legacy” […]

Given the darkening U.S. economic outlook, Forrester Research is updating its IT spending outlook for 2008. However, as long as the U.S. economy has only two to three quarters of very weak real GDP (gross domestic product) growth—1 to 2 percent—but no recession in 2008, analysts don’t feel that the slowdown will have any negative […]

The IT work force is still scarred from the dot-com bust of 2001, with some technology pros feeling like they never got back on their feet. Even more ended up leaving the field. Fears that another round of downsizing and layoffs are imminent have technology workers on edge again, just when they should be focused […]

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently appointed California’s first statewide, cabinet-level CIO. Schwarzenegger created the post in August, establishing the Office of the State Chief Information Officer as a cabinet-level agency with statutory authority over technology policy. Teresa “Teri” Takai, former CIO of Michigan and the director of the Michigan Department of IT since 2003, was appointed […]

IT project managers seem to suffer from a case of low expectations, in which their projects consistently fail to meet the goals set out for them. This is for good reason, as one in three IT projects fail to perform to expectations, finds a survey released Dec. 11 by Tata Consultancy Services, an IT outsourcing […]

It’s a bad day to be an IT professional in Georgia, where state Governor Sonny Perdue has announced that he is moving all of the state’s IT over to the private sector. The move—what Perdue calls the most ambitious outsourcing over services in the state’s history—is expected to result in pink slips for about 200 […]

Sixty years ago, six women became some of the earliest computer hackers in history. A new documentary hopes to give them their credit due. In the half-century since Rosie the Riveter became the culture icon not just for women who had worked in manufacturing plants while men were off fighting World War II, but for […]

MIT just got a whole lot less exclusive. MIT celebrated a milestone Nov. 28 in its efforts to open its course content to the public–the core teaching materials, including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams from MIT’s 1,800 courses, are now online and free to the public. The site (www.ocw.mit.edu) includes voluntary contributions from 90 […]

Comparing the scores of 15-year-old students in the United States to their international peers, the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) report results, released Dec. 4, are especially disheartening this year. The average combined science literacy scale score for U.S. students was lower than the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental agency […]

Despite ongoing worries that an economic slowdown is looming, a new report suggests that the IT professional job market will be immune-at least for the time being. Thirteen percent of CIOs said they plan to add IT staff in the first quarter of 2008, according to the latest IT Hiring Index and Skills Report from […]