Gary H. Anthes

Five years ago, Whirlpool began an effort to turn around its global supply chain. The company is seeing results, but it's not done yet.

What does the future hold for IT? We thought the best way to answer that question was to ask the experts, so we sought out the views of a baker's dozen of IT visionaries that includes university professors, CIOs, IT consultants and a software vendor researcher. We did not ask our panel about technology per se -- when we will see quantum computing, what the future of microprocessor architectures is and so on. Rather, we sought their views on the economics and delivery of IT.

A laser war breaks out between proponents of emerging optical storage technologies, and IT managers might find themselves stuck in no-man's land.

When the economy surged in the late 1990s, office furniture maker Haworth Inc. rode the wave. A booming demand for new office space plus several acquisitions propelled the 52-year-old company to US$2 billion in sales in 2002, making it the world's second-largest designer and manufacturer of office furniture.

After taking a long, hard look at commercial CRM packages for use in Humana Inc.'s call centre, the company's executives found them too expensive. Then an IT analyst there came up with a creative solution based on in-house software, a few low-cost purchases and some custom programming.

When it comes to IT projects, it doesn't get much better than this: Procter & Gamble Co. saves US$300 million annually on an investment of less than one per cent of that amount.

John Parkinson is senior vice president and chief technologist for the Americas region of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young U.S. LLC in Chicago. He recently told Computerworld's Gary H. Anthes why he thinks IT outsourcing and agent-based systems will become ubiquitous, why collaboration software will not, and why data warehouses and operating systems might disappear altogether.

It was an online retailer's worst nightmare. Most customers of the Louisville Slugger Museum's online gift shop arrived by way of Hillerich & Bradsby Co.'s home page for its famous bats, www.slugger.com. But last July, someone uploaded the wrong file to the company's Web site, and for six weeks, all attempts to go to the gift shop from the Louisville Slugger home page were redirected to another company's Web site.