Shane Schick's Computerworld

Canadian IT pros say collaboration is coming to the cloud

2011-10-11T20:34:00Z

The idea of an on-premise intranet may soon be a thing of the past.

In this latest teaser from our first annual State of Cloud Computing in Canada research report, you'll see we saw quite a bit of support for videoconferencing and all sorts of other collaboration tools moving into the cloud. Less than 20 per cent see it as a non-starter. Overall, this was the strongest area we saw, probably because it's seen as less mission-critical than the other areas (whether it should be thought of that way is a subject for another blog post).

We are oh-so-close to releasing the full details of this research in an on-demand Webcast that will come with the complete report. Stay tuned.

Why Oracle Fusion Applications are more important than the iPhone 5

2011-10-05T20:49:00Z

Yesterday the world waited breathlessly for a technology product launch that didn’t end up happening, and everyone seemed to be really disappointed. Today, a major long-promised launch did happen, and it feels like almost no one will notice.

The big news out ofOracle Openworld 2011 this year – other than thehuge snub against Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff – is the realization of the software company’s plans to create a unified set of enterprise applications under the Fusion brand. After spending much of the last few years gobbling up every major competitor in sight – PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, BEA and Siebel – Oracle can now boast a product suite that is truly built on the best in the industry. It makes the various rumours aboutApple’s iPhone 5 seem trivial by comparison.

I haven’t been to Openworld since the BEA acquisition, when Oracle was already beginning to look like a very different company. Charles Phillips was still a co-president, a calm force during the chaotic cries of analysts and customers. Larry Ellison was still getting over the fact that his big foray into grid computing with Oracle 10g did not necessarily change enterprise IT as promised. Oracle was still trying to out-Red Hat the real Red Hat with its Unbreakable Linux plan. Underneath everything that was going on in the Moscone Centre in San Francisco that year was the sense that somewhere in Redwood Shores was a huge warehouse filled with boxes and boxes of software from different manufacturers that were ready to spill out into the street.

Despite Ellison’s arrogance and Oracle’s aggregation as a self-styled “industry consolidator,” there’s no question the company has been smart about its approach on certain steps of the journey toward Fusion Applications. Where many CIOs and IT managers might have worried about what would happen to their investments in JD Edwards and the like (and I know a few in Canada still running them), Oracle promised lifetime support. Even this week, during the conference there has been as much talk of coexistence with legacy environments as there has been of upgrades. Oracle is also showing willingness to offer its applications in the whatever way customers want it: on-premise, hosted or through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

To demonstrate it is staying current with the trends, Oracle execs have added social media-like aspects to Fusion Applications, and even made them available on the iPad. Business intelligence capabilities have been emphasized as part of the value. Still, most Oracle customers will probably walk away from Openworld feeling more reassured than excited, but that’s surely better than disappointment.

In some ways, you could say the availability of Fusion Applications this week is simply the final step in Oracle’s biggest integration project, but there’s still room for innovation. Being able to work with ERP and HR systems on a tablet is great, but that’s still a fairly large interface. What if Oracle, given that it possesses such a powerful application suite now, were to become the first to create a workable design that it could be optimized for mobile phones – something that could be offered on the iPhone 5 once it finally comes out? Such capabilities might not generate international headlines, but they would have a profound impact on what people could do with technology. Much like Apple, Oracle needs to decide which of those things is more important.

The i-Canada initiative explained

2011-10-04T20:42:00Z

It's being called a new national dream of global leadership. It's up to everyone to make it a reality.

Slowly but surely the i-Canada Alliance, as it's called, has been gathering followers and members through the work of (among others) the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATA) and using social media tools like LinkedIn to provide updates on its progress. For all the worthy people involved, however, I'm not sure to what extent CIOs and IT managers are aware of it. With that in mind, we recently welcomed CATA's Barry Gander into our studio to provide an introduction of sorts. Hope this is helpful.

http://video.itworldcanada.com/?bcpid=7044989001&bctid=1199216321001

Process vs. outcomes in IT leadership

2011-09-29T20:32:00Z

Long before we started working with Canadian IT managers and CIOs to define their future career path, a Canadian leader in an entirely different field was trying to figure out his own.

Some of you may be familiar with Bruce Mau, but for those of you who aren’t, he is a figure of almost legendary status in graphic design, architecture and many related fields. Besides his impressive body of work, he’s also well known for publishing a document which can easily be found online called, “An incomplete manifesto for growth.”

Along with encouraging people to ask the “stupid questions” that often get to the truth and not worrying about being “good” when you can be great (echoing the old Jim Collins philosophy), his third point in the 43-point tract is, “process is more important than outcome.” Here’s an exact quote:

When outcome drives the process, we will only end up where we have already been. When process drives the outcome, we may not know exactly where we are going, but we know we will want to be there.

This may seem rather counter-intuitive for those CIOs and IT managers who have been working so hard in the last few years to orient the IT work they do to further the outcomes of the business, whether it’s increasing sales transactions, reducing customer churn and so on. But I think when you apply the concept of outcomes to a career, you risk limiting the kind of contributions that an IT leader can make.

We all know some of the hoped-for outcomes of a CIO or IT manager, of course. We hope that they will become more strategic advisors to the business, and that the work they do will contribute more directly to revenue, growth and so on. But there are so many outcomes that may not even be possible to guess at now.

If you ask those on the outside to determine the outcomes, the results can be even worse. For example, at our recent CIO Exchange conference we spent about five or six hours exploring the theme of the “Future CIO: Seizing the Opportunity for Change.” If you asked the average knowledge worker to forecast the future of the CIO, I’d be surprised if they took more than five or six minutes. That’s because some of them don’t see a future for IT leaders at all; there’s an expectation that IT roles will simply be absorbed into the operations area, or that it will be outsourced to a cloud computing provider.

We don’t believe that at IT World Canada, which is why we invest in events like CIO Exchange, the upcoming ComputerWorld Canada IT Leadership Awards and our ongoing coverage in our print publications and portals. As you engage with us, consider it the beginnings of a process of discovery – but of what an IT leader is today, and what it could be.

This process, of course, is as forever incomplete as Mau’s manifesto. When you’re working on an IT project and have to go back to the drawing board, it can be quite painful. But the best CIOs and IT managers I’ve met have embraced this idea of being constantly in start mode. They have realized, in effect, that having a beginner’s mindset is the closest we’ll ever get to experiencing the future – career-wise or otherwise – before it starts.

Adapted from my opening remarks at CIO Exchange 2011 in Toronto. For highlights of the event, flip through the CIO Exchange 2011 Scrapbook.

Amazon's Kindle Fire: My take as seen on BNN

2011-09-28T21:11:00Z

It's a tablet. It's not Apple's. Naturally, everyone wonders if it will be a game changer.

Shortly after the Kindle Fire was announced on Wednesday I had an opportunity to visit BNN and chat with its hosts about the device's potential and its market competition. See below. I made one slight misspeak: I said "Kindle" when I meant to say "PlayBook," but otherwise I think it was reasonably coherent. Feel free to offer your critiques in the comments below.

If you can't see the player below, click here

Enterprise apps in the cloud: What Canadian IT pros say

2011-09-27T20:07:00Z

If it's ERP, CRM or business intelligence software, don't expect the majority of Canadian IT departments to go off-premise anytime soon.

In this first look from our inaugural State of Cloud Computing in Canada report, I've broken out a chart where we asked our audience to rate their deployment plans within specific categories. As you can see here, it's not that they're ruling the cloud out for enterprise apps, but many are still months or years away before they are willing to make a move. And there is a considerable number who say they simply don't plan to do it, period. This could say a lot about the mission-critical nature of these programs, but it could also speak to the security concerns about the loss of control over data. This report, by the way, is based on a survey of more than 200 people in our audience, mostly CIOs and IT managers with large companies of 500 or more employees.

Look for a lot more from this report as we lead up to the on-demand Webcast I'll be hosting that delves into the details. In the meantime, use the comments below to tell me what your thoughts are vis-a-vis enterprise business apps and the cloud.

BPM challenges: A ComputerWorld Canada poll

2011-09-26T20:49:00Z

When something in the enterprise takes too long or generates errors, costs often start to go up. So do tempers, and when the finger-pointing begins the problem usually comes down to the way in which people are working.

That was the opening line for the invite to a recent series of events we hosted in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary called From Conflict to Censenus: How IT leaders get things done. The focus was on business process management, which we know continues to be an ongoing challenge for so many people in our audience. As we talked to various event attendees we asked them their biggest BPM pain points, and gathered a small poll of about 40, the results of which are presented below.

Overall, Canadian IT professionals rate their capabilities around BPM fairly highly based on this feedback, although the biggest challenge is still around KPIs. More interesting is that lowest score – why aren’t more people using automation to reduce downtime? Is it that they aren’t experiencing downtime or that they don’t believe the tools out there are up to the job? With so many vendors focusing in data centre automation it’s funny that customers don’t seem as focused there.

Do you or your Organization face any of the following challenges (Check all that may apply)

Work processes which are not fully understood or lacking KPI’s (Key performance Indicators)	35%
Need to reduce costs (i.e. monitoring) by streamlining operations	23%
Need to reduce downtime through automation	11%
Inability to quickly exploit business opportunities through sensing and responding to patterns of business activity and to deploy new business services/applications	16%
Inability to deploy information and application assets across the organization without having to worry about the underlying IT infrastructure	15%
Cannot ‘see’ into processes which hampers management of the business	15%

What about you? Where would your results be in this poll?

HP CEO Meg Whitman: The possibilities

2011-09-22T19:41:00Z

It’s rather difficult to suggest which would be the more demanding job: running California in the wake of Arnold Schwartzenegger or HP in the wake of Leo Apotheker? Let it not be said that Meg Whitman isn’t up for a challenge.

As I write these words the news is all but official: Whitman, former leader of eBay and failed gubernatorial candidate, will expand her role at HP (where she already sits on the board) and take over from ex-SAP exec Leo Apotheker. If it doesn’t happen, the taint on Apotheker’s reputation is already too large to cover up. If it’s true, Whitman will inherit a company that only recently seemed more focused than ever before.

With the proposed spin-off of its Personal Systems Group, the killing off of its TouchPad tablet and an increased focus on enterprise business applications, Apotheker was charting a firm, decisive course that would take HP further from its roots as a printer and PC company towards something that looked like, well, SAP. That HP’s board would prove more skittish shouldn’t be a surprise. The moment former HP CEO Carly Fiorina decided to take over PC rival Compaq about 10 years ago, internal debate over the move eventually led to her ouster, too. HP’s board doesn’t really like bold new visions. It prefers slow, progressive evolutions, the sort of stately growth enjoyed by old-school firms like Proctor & Gamble, Hasbro and the Walt Disney Company – the kind of places that Meg Whitman learned everything she knows.

When you look into the literature (I’m tempted to say scholarship) about Whitman’s leadership style, you encounter the kind of hagiographies paralleled only by those devoted to (or co-written by) former GE leader Jack Welsch. Take this one from PaidContent, circa 2007 titled Meg Whitman: America's greatest CEO:

Meg Whitman has become the type of leader who doesn't need to wield power just to show she has it, unlike certain Presidents I could mention. Because she isn't in a position to enforce her will, she must learn how to guide through influence. In so doing it, it is safe to say that she is the type of leader who distributes power, but that isn't to say that the buck doesn't come back to rest on her desk.

She certainly did a good job at eBay, but eBay was not in the midst of the kind of transition that HP is experiencing. Neither would Whitman necessarily be described as a turnaround artist. What’s interesting is that her biggest success was at an online auction company. This is as opposed to a products and services company, a place that makes stuff. Instead, she excelled at a place that offered a valuable service, just as HP is trying to become more a service company to its customers.

Whitman’s track record has also been primarily with consumer-focused companies, as opposed to corporate clientele. That too could be a useful trait at a time when so much IT is being procured by everyday consumers, but there is no question her first order of business as HP CEO would be to prioritize the best areas of growth for its enterprise business.

If she takes over HP, she will have to decide whether to undo much of what Apotheker was in the process of starting or (more likely), guide through the changes in a way that is less turbulent to HP’s customers, employees and ultimately its shareholders. Of course, poor decisions can lead awfully quickly to severe financial repercussions, but the same was true when eBay was just one of so many fledgling dot-coms. In choosing Meg Whitman, HP would be bidding on a leader who knows how to act fast before time runs out.

The CIO Canada Debate program: A discussion to stimulate Canadian competitiveness

2011-09-21T20:27:00Z

Attention, IT leaders: I have a unique opportunity to raise your profile as an IT industry leader and join a discussion about an important issue affecting CIOs across Canada.

We are in the process of bringing to market a program originally developed by our sister publication in the U.S. called the CIO Debate. The concept brings together two senior IT executives who can share their perspectives on the opportunities, challenges and best practices around specific kinds of business strategies. We videotape conversations with these two CIOs and showcase them online. An example of the U.S. version of the CIO Debate can be found here: http://cio.com/debate.

Please note that there are no “winners” or “losers” in this debate. It’s not really adversarial at all. It’s bringing the concept of the word “debate” back to its roots: an interactive dialogue between two people who can look at all sides of a given topic. It’s also not a live debate: Because it’s filmed on video, we can capture exactly what you would like to say. CIOs will most likely be filmed individually and we would work around your schedule as much as possible.

The point of these debates is to look at the technology-driven business strategies that could make Canada more competitive. Below you’ll find outlines for the first three sessions, which will look at business intelligence/analytics, the cloud and social media as potential tools for this mission. I need two CIOs for each session; it would be up to you which topic might be most appropriate. I’m not looking for experts in these areas, necessarily, but some CIOs who can talk about how they’re thinking about potentially using these technologies, and how their adoption may (or may not) help boost the competitive metabolism of their firm and perhaps Canada as a whole. If you're up for it, e-mail me at sschick@itworldcanada.com.

The CIO Canada Debate Program Overview

As the country continues to fall in international rankings for innovation, productivity and other key performance indicators, CIO Canada magazine is bringing together IT leaders to help develop a plan to boost our competitive metabolism.

The CIO Canada Debate will examine three key areas in which senior IT executives, as individuals and as a group, can influence the culture of organizations to make better decisions, to allocate resources dynamically and to better collaborate with customers, suppliers, employees and with each other. Our initial three debates will include:

Innovation Through Insights: Can business analytics lead to better decisions?

Canadian companies have been collecting, storing and managing data on all kinds of transactions and activities for many years. More recently, they have been building data warehouses and using sophisticated applications to try and derive the kind of intelligence that will lead to better outcomes. Yet many seem to struggle with effective business analytics. Will this technology ever deliver as promised, and, if so, can it help create a competitive differentiator for Canadian companies vis-à-vis organizations elsewhere?

The Off-Premise Organization: Can IT live and thrive outside the company’s walls?

Cloud computing is finally gaining traction as an area where Canadian companies are beginning to experiment with having third parties host non-critical workloads, but the potential is much greater than that. To what extent will this emerging computing model allow corporations here to act faster or grow more quickly than their international counterparts, and how will it change the CIO’s role?

The Constant Conversation: Can social media be standardized and trusted?

Businesses are pulling back on prohibiting the use of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and beginning to examine these tools for potential use in marketing, hiring and customer service. What will the nascent era of “social business” look like and how it can it be used by Canadians to generate innovation between companies and their customers?

The CIO Canada debate program will be the beginnings of a call to action by IT decision makers to create meaningful changes in the way we think about technology, and ultimately the way it can used to change the way we work.

Data you can trust: From quality to governance

2011-09-08T20:50:00Z

As the volume of data in organizations increases exponentially, Canadian enterprises need to develop a strategy that will turn it into information that drives business success.

This is the heart of information governance – creating consistent processes that manage an enterprise’s most critical assets.

Join me and my guests David Corrigan, Director of Product Marketing, IBM InfoSphere, and Jorge Garcia, analyst with Technology Evaluation Centres, on Oct. 4 as we discuss what information governance really means, why smart companies are investing in it and how to sell an information governance program internally.

Discover how information governance can provide a quality control discipline for managing, using, improving and protecting organizational information. Learn how to measure the right key performance indicators and build support among the stakeholders you need to be successful. Register here.

Suggested user lists and the people who make them: An IT department exercise

2011-09-07T20:39:00Z

If Google+ was not a public social network but your company’s intranet, would anyone in the IT department make the suggested user list?

The search giant’s recent Suggested User List for Google+ includes an array of celebrities like Paris Hilton, Ashton Kutcher as well as business people like Richard Branson. Online reaction has been somewhat negative, with critics calling the idea elitist. It’s like joining a new high school and being told in advance who all the popular people are, whether you want to associate with them or not.

Most corporate intranets lack the ability to “follow” people, though a number of them allow you to make “friends,” facilitating messages through the portal. I’ve never come across one yet that actually recommended coworkers with like-minded projects or interests, though it would be highly interesting to see it happen. Most likely you would see the same pattern that happens in public social media – the highly engaged, online power users would rise to the top, as would people (like the CEO) who may not be using the system but who carry significant influence.

But let’s put that fantasy aside for a moment. Even without a fancy intranet, there are already suggested user lists in the enterprise; they’re not just always written out. They’re the people that everyone wants a meeting with, with whom everyone does a check-in before venturing too far with a new initiative. They are the idea people, the problem solvers, the people who know how to work hard but also have fun, who can connect with people on a more personal level. Even in the largest companies, this list can be incredibly short.

IT managers aren’t always known for being extroverts, but their success will increasingly be defined not simply by their technical abilities but the way they share information, insights and inspiration – the same kind of things the most popular people do on social media.

Task of the week: Look around your company and compile your own suggested user list. What makes them worthy of inclusion? What can you learn from their approach? Then make sure you get on everyone else’s mental list, too.

IT Leadership Awards 2011: Who's in the running

2011-09-06T20:33:00Z

This is a great way to kick off the fall: recognizing great Canadian technology talent.

We have shipped off the nominations for our second annual ComputerWorld Canada IT Leadership Awards to our panel of judges this morning, and they have about three weeks to score them before we meet in person to determine final winners. The results will be announced in late October -- more details to come on how we'll be doing that this year.

I'm pleased to announce that Andrew Dillane, CIO of Randstad Canada Group, is the Chair of this year's awards, and that almost all of our other judges have returned this year.

Congratulations to all the finalists this year. The list below will be posted to the main awards site soon, along with video interviews with our judges, leadership advice and more. Best of luck to all.

Charaka	Kithulegoda	SVP and CIO	ING DIRECT
Daniel	Neufeld	VP, Information Services	Leisureworld Senior Care Corporation
Dino	Miele	CIO	District School Board of Niagara
Hugh	Gray	Director, Enterprise Desktop Management	Acrodex
Roy	Wiseman	CIO	Peel Region
Ashwin	Kutty	Program Manager	eHealth
Soussan	Tobari	CIO	Ontario Public Service
Avi	Pollock	Vice President, Innovation & Strategic Planning	RBC Royal Bank of Canada
Larry	Franks	VP Peterborough Technology Service	Peterborough Utilities Services Inc.
Asif	Sharif	CEO/CTO	eDev Technologies
Garry	Bezruki	Director of IMTS	City of Waterloo
Larry	Franks	VP, IT Services	Peterborough Utilities Group
Tarik	Sayeed	Network & Systems Manager	Valley First
Eric	Swanson	Data Center Manager	Agriculture & Food Canada (AAFC)
Shalini	Maden	Manager	Ontario Public Service
Shalini	Madan	Manager	Children Youth and Social Services I&IT Cluster
Kalyan	Chakravarthy	IT Director	Toronto International Film Festival
Dan	Hamilton	Director, Networks and Operations	BlackBridge Networks
Asim	Chowdhry	Director, Data Services	Appleby College
Tom	Lockhart	IT Systems Manager	Hastings & Prince Edward Counties Health Unit
Alice	Keung	Senior Vice President, Development and Delivery	eHealth Ontario
Faten	Alshazly	Professor	NSCAD University
James	Mckeen	Professor	Queen's School of Business

Technology should be about managing ideas, not information

2011-08-30T19:55:00Z

I would be surprised if anyone in human history has ever turned to a CIO and said, “You’re doing a great job of managing our information.”

And yet there is no “technology” in the CIO’s title. One would think the reason it disappears after someone has been appointed from the IT manager ranks is because they have become more strategic than merely making sure hardware and software runs as it should. But even “information management” is a dismal-sounding discipline. It calls to mind a vast warehouse where information is pushed from one enormous pile into a more conveniently-located pile when needed, a place that’s pretty full but kept neat enough that you can find things. Efficient but dull. Hardly an inspiring career path.

Which is why “The Elusive Big Idea,” by Neal Gabler in the New York Times a few weeks ago was an inspiration of sorts. Gabler blames an increasingly visual culture, the retreat of universities from public life and other factors for what he calls a “post-idea” culture, where we spend more time trying to be in the know (“Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions,” he points out) than coming up with theories or hypothesis that give real insight.

“In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information,” Gabler writes. “We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.”

Technology has given us access to something a million times greater than the lost library of Alexandria but not a plan on how to best use it. In the corporate world we tend to look at business intelligence or other analytical software to identify trends or patterns – similar pieces of information, really – while hoping someone else, the CEO perhaps, will experience the Eureka moment.

If IT departments want to reposition themselves in the organization, consider moving from information management to idea management. The latter not only means with coming up with ways of getting to important truths but empowering others to do the same. It might be a bit similar to the way Seth Godin recently described the ideal librarian of the future. It’s the difference between saying you want to focus on innovation and actually having an innovative idea that changes the way you interact with the world, the way you improve the quality of life for your customers, employees, friends and family.

Great use of technology facilitates communication between people and captures what would otherwise be forgotten or lost. It allows us to express what we’re thinking in multiple ways. It gives us greater perspective because it taps into more people than we can talk to in order to answer an important question. Idea management doesn’t mean behaving like an esoteric intellectual but it could mean offering a higher level of strategic insight than what is common in the enterprise today. And it definitely would mean a lot more fun for whoever gets to do it.

In defence of technology jargon

2011-08-29T20:50:00Z

If you asked a handful of strangers what’s meant by the word “computing,” they would probably refer to using a combination of hardware and software to manage information. I doubt many of them would talk about math, but that’s the original connotations. This is part of the complicated journey of human thought through language.

Most people in the IT industry hate jargon, even those who use it all the time. It’s become pretty accepted that we should not be creating more three-letter abbreviations and should figure out a way to get rid of the ones in our collective vocabulary. But there’s another side to this story, one that suggests we might do well to not only preserve jargon, but encourage an ever-expanding glossary of technology-related terms.

In a recent article on Miller-McCune called “Rescuing Endangered Languages Means Saving Ideas,” Emily Badger writes about a joint program by the U.S. National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities where researchers are trying to preserve dialects that are dying out in regions all over the world. They believe that as half of the world’s 7,000 languages are projected to disappear by the end of the century, what we are losing are not just ways to say things but things to say.

“As the famous example says, Eskimo have numerous words to describe what Americans would just call ‘snow’ and ‘ice,’” Badger writes. “This suggests language systems don’t merely translate universal ideas into different spellings; they encode different concepts. And when we lose a language, we risk losing those concepts.”

Of course, technology jargon is far from representing an entire language, but it does tend to focus on ways of encapsulating concepts, notions, representations of ideal states of information management. As major trends in the industry take shape experts often note that they lack common definition. This was true of business intelligence, service-oriented architecture, electronic health records, customer relationship management, cloud computing and many others.

Over time, through countless articles, panel discussions, online forums and via social media, we tend to work towards some kind of consensus on these terms. But the results can be limiting. I’ve been hearing more and more people, for example, reducing cloud computing to “the use of the Internet to perform tasks you have historically done on site,” or something to that effect. This leaves out a lot about private versus public clouds, software as a service vs. hosted infrastructure and so on.

Jargon doesn’t tend to get codified with the same rigour as, say, Italian or Farsi, but it is probably more “living” than many of the languages currently on the verge of extinction. If IT managers were able to take more time to pay attention to the various usages from different sources, they would come as close as possible to getting at that “tribal knowledge” that also seems to be constantly in danger of being lost. Just because so much of what’s said about technology remains open to interpretation doesn’t mean we have to be in such a hurry to settle on an interpretation.

Enterprise software purchase advice: IT World Canada partners with Technology Evaluation Centres

2011-08-24T20:48:00Z

Everything we publish under our ComputerWorld Canada, CIO Canada and Network World Canada brands is intended to help IT professionals achieve career success. Now our ability to assist with major application projects has taken a leap forward.

I'm pleased to officially announced our new partnership with Technology Evaluation Centres, or TEC. While based in Montreal, TEC has customers all over North American and beyond, creating the kinds of buyers' guides and RFP templates that have helped countess technology executives. They know ERP. They know business intelligence. They know customer relationship management and a lot more.

We'll be publishing excerpts of TEC guides and reports on our Web sites and in our magazines, adding related content and analysis based on what we hear through conversations with our audience. We'll also be working with TEC on entirely new products that will be unveiled in 2012. The first fruits of this agreement will include portions of TEC's recently-completed guide to human capital management (HCM) software, for which I wrote the introduction.

Full press release on our partnership is below. I look forward to giving our audience greater access to some really great content.

Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) and IT World Canada Join Forces

Partnership between TEC and IT World Canada provides 2.5 million IT professionals with expanded portfolio of research tools and content, including software selection tools, IT market reports and business software buyer's guides.

TEC and IT World channels reach an audience of 2.5 million

We want to offer a better understanding of the technology solutions available to help businesses solve issues and achieve their objectives.

Montreal, QC (PRWEB) August 07, 2011

Technology Evaluation Centers(TEC) and IT World Canada (ITWC), the Canadian affiliate of International Data Group (IDG), today announced an agreement to collaborate on the development and distribution of a wide range of original research materials for the IT market. The agreement covers IT market reports, business software buyer’s guides, and research articles. It also provides for expanded access to software selection tools and services for the two companies’ 2.5 million registered members through their Web sites, newsletters, and print publications.

Helping businesses understand IT solutions

Roy Semple, TEC’s Head of Internet Marketing, explains the rationale behind the partnership: “We wanted to expand our resources to offer a better understanding of the technology solutions available to help businesses solve issues and achieve their objectives.”

Reducing risk in complex decisions

“IT World Canada, with brands such as CIO, Network World, and ComputerWorld, gives us a wealth of additional expertise to create quality research on software selection issues, including the expanding influences of cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), multinational supply chains, and the complex hardware and network choices organizations are facing.”

The new content and expanded access to software selection tools will help software buyers and IT professionals evaluate, select, and implement software solutions from vendors such as SAP, Oracle, Infor, Sage, Microsoft, and others. “IT World Canada’s mission has always been to help our readers do their jobs better, and TEC’s valuable insights adds further credence to the information we provide,” says ITWC president, Fawn Annan.

Says Semple: “IT implementation failure rates have remained stubbornly high for decades, spurring demand by buyers and IT professionals for new and more effective ways to evaluate and select business software. We’re excited that both audiences will now have more ways to find the right enterprise software while reducing the risk of making the wrong choice.”

About IT World Canada

ITWC has become the in-depth IT information resource of choice for Canadian IT professionals. We leverage the IT community's favorite print publications: CIO Canada, Network World Canada, ComputerWorld Canada, Computer Dealer News, and Direction Informatique consistently building on being ‘anywhere, any time’ with our readers. Over the years we have transformed ourselves - from a traditional print publisher to a multimedia information provider, and now a portable size magazine. IT World Canada is the Canadian affiliate of International Data Group (IDG), the world's largest IT information provider. Publishing more than 300 publications worldwide and providing IT market analysis through 85 countries worldwide, one hundred million people read one or more IDG publications each month. Newsletters, mobile editions, targeted events and in-depth editorial deliver the best view of global IT content, with a Canadian perspective.

About Technology Evaluation Centers, Inc. (TEC)

TEC helps organizations choose the best enterprise software solutions for their unique business needs—quickly, impartially, and cost-effectively. TEC’s online Evaluation Centers, containing IT research and extensive knowledge bases, are the leading resource for IT decision makers around the world. By combining that information with a proven methodology, unique Web-based software selection platforms, and years of software selection expertise, TEC delivers an unmatched range of online software evaluation and selection services that bridge the gap between enterprise decision makers and the vendor/value-added reseller (VAR) community.