Students

With any luck at all, there isn't a giant asteroid headed our way soon, but in the world of information technology, an extinction event may be on the horizon.

When employees make up their minds that a knowledge management (KM) system is more trouble than it's worth, they simply stop using it. This decision affects the employer's bottom line and is a crucial factor in whether the big aspirations for a KM system pan out.

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, the authors of "Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers" are so passionate about the value of business blogging, they admit having toyed with the idea of titling their book "Blog or Die." Blogging, the authors insist, promises

Last year, some 28 percent of corporate managers surveyed told Evans Data, a market research firm, that their primary driver for outsourcing was cost cutting. You'd think saving money would catch the eye of Wall Street but, in fact, it doesn't.

Few companies operate independently in the Electronic Age, which means that the security vulnerability of every business partner -- outsourcer, client, whatever -- whose computer system has access to yours is a potential portal to your most sensitive data.

To customers, there's not much to loyalty programs; on the surface they're usually just a piece of plastic and a "Here's how much you saved" line at the bottom of a receipt. But experts at the W. P.

In the world of the miscellaneous, information isn't the important stuff; it's what happens between those bits and pieces that counts, according to David Weinberger.

In our last issue, Ajay Vinze and Raghu Santanam, both information systems professors at the W. P. Carey School of Business, discussed how principles of supply chain management might be applied to public health emergencies.

With about one billion computers currently in use, information technology rightfully owns some of the blame for the world's sustainability ills. The lifetime toll for a computer includes substantial resources for manufacture and delivery, then more energy consumed in home offices and companies.

Increasingly companies are viewing technology not just as a way to get things done but also as a way to move forward.