Rosie Lombardi

IBM is on a mission to transform the nature of work. Upcoming demographic shifts in the composition of the workforce are the catalyst for change in developed countries. By 2025, about 20 per cent of the populations of the U.S. and U.K. will consist of people over the age of 60. In older societies such as Japan and Germany, the comparable figures will be over 30 per cent.

Women have been entering traditionally male-dominated fields such as law and medicine in significant numbers in recent years, but they continue to be under-represented in technology-oriented fields such as computer science and engineering.

Demographic issues are in the air. IBM recently announced plans to train 10,000 new mainframe workers by 2010, the year boomers born in 1945 turn 65. Encouraging people to work beyond retirement age will be necessary to prop up declining labour force levels, according to a 2005 Conference Board of Canada study. IBM also launched a new consulting area to help organizations deal with the impending loss of experienced older workers. David Foot, author of Boom, Bust and Echo, throws light on demographics.

The Integration Consortium (IC) is taking the lead in cutting through the white noise generated by enterprise integration vendors. The Calgary-based organization is a not-for-profit, non-partisan global industry body dedicated to influencing the direction of the integration industry by focusing on actual business needs instead of vendors

The Kingston, Ont. police department says its new, automated "background check" system saves its staff valuable time, while enhancing customer service. The online system, which automates processing of background checks, was developed in partnership with Unis Lumin Inc., an Oakville, Ont.-based provider of IT products and services.

Data is everywhere, but useful information is in short supply. Many companies have or are planning to put in place a business intelligence (BI) system to transform all that leaden data into golden information. About 22 per cent of Canadian companies have BI in place, while another 34 per cent plan to invest in one over the next three years, according to Jeff Dutrizac, a research analyst at Info-Tech, a London, Ont.-based research consultancy.

The PMI Group is a global advocacy organization that promotes professional development for the project management profession, and offers certification, research and networking opportunities to help project managers advance their careers. PMI also develops and updates the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK), the project manager

Security experts are in total agreement that the emergence of SPIT (Spam over Internet Telephony) is inevitable. No official cases of SPIT have yet been documented, but that