Susan Maclean

At least one analyst claims it

The very best firms at managing technology have a very business savvy person at the head, says Mark Rodrigues, a managing director at Mercer Oliver Wyman.

These strategies could help you make IT less of a big part of a problem and more a major part of the solution as you seek to improve the efficiency and profitability of your organization.

In an all-out effort to improve IT enterprise efficiency, the financial services sector seems to be replete with consolidation, not just between merged companies but also within a single company

While some financial institutions are struggling with legacy IT systems to compete in a market of rapidly changing products and services, others seem to be clicking along with an IT environment that accelerates their progress. What accounts for the difference?

Behind the scenes at the world's largest online marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books, the IT system handles 55 million books/SKUs and, daily, about 10 million static home page hits, about 1.3 million book searches, two million Java servlet hits, plus generates about one gigabyte of transaction information per hour and executes 1000 SQL statements per second. Having grown tenfold already in under five years, Abebooks of Victoria, B.C, is preparing for continued explosive growth.

As vice-president of operations at Columbia Plastics Ltd., a custom injection moulding firm in Surrey, B.C., Brian Holmes attended the lean manufacturing Measure UP for Success conference in Toronto last October.

When used for remote sales force order processing, handhelds offer an attractive ROI.