The Pin Factory

There have been a lot of blog postings and articles written about AT&T’s iPhone ordering problems in the past week as if it spells some doom for the iPhone or AT&T. The issue with iPhone data congestion on AT&T’s 3G cell sites isn’t the end of the world for AT&T or NYC. The iPhone works [...]

There is a lot of buzz in anticipation of the expected Spring 2010 launch of the Apple Tablet. Most of the buzz is focused on the user experience, but there are now enough threads about a revamped iTunes, eBooks, and IPTV, as well as the built-in web-cam and a price under $1000 is where the [...]

Over 233 years ago Adam Smith wrote about transformation and high performing businesses. He noticed by studying Pin Factories that the successful businesses were those focused on transforming their operations. Smith wrote,
First, the improvement of the dexterity of the workmen, necessarily increases the quantity of the work he can perform; and the division of labour, [...]

The promise of Cisco’s UCC environment to transform front-office contact center operations is tremendous, but organizational leaders often find the decision a difficult one to undertake given the required investment and the complexity of implementation project. Upgrading from non-IP to IP-based call center technology irrespective of the vendor is a daunting investment, but the value [...]

The 8 December, 2009 interview by Kai Ryssdal of Nancy Koehn of the Harvard Business School ended with the following:
RYSSDAL: So when we look back on this period, on 2008-2009, what lessons will we have learned? Will we have learned anything do you think?
KOEHN: I think we’ll have learned several things. One, that we are incredibly tightly connected. [...]

Apple’s Game Changer, Downloading Now is an article that appeared in the Sunday, 6 December 2009 edition of the New York Times. The article written by Jenna Wortham focuses on the success that Apple has had with the Apple iPhone App Store. She writes,
As the App Store evolves from a kitschy catalog of novelty applications [...]

Robert Dvorak posted this question on the WSJ community blog,
How real is “Cloud Computing” and how are large companies (>$1B revenues) adopting it? Which IT companies are most threatened by Cloud?
Cloud Computing in this case is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) referring to infrastructure delivered in a utility model. The utility model arises from the [...]

This WSJ article was published in the WSJ Politics website on 3 December 2009. In the article it sited,
Still, President Barack Obama, who is under growing political pressure to tackle the soaring deficit, stressed that the government’s capacity to overcome the nation’s jobs challenges is limited. With that, he charged the private sector with developing strategies [...]

WSJ – Getting an Edge from IT
The interview of Dr. Peter Weill, Chairman of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Information Systems Research appeared in the Business Insight report of the WSJ on 30 Nov 2009 focuses on the characteristics of IT-Saavy organizations.
Dr. Weill said in the interview, “IT-savvy companies make information technology a strategic [...]