How One Company Is Using Wikis and Blogs to Unclog E-mail Boxes

By C.G. Lynch

December 19, 2007 — CIO — CORT Business Services has adopted wikis and blogs to help foster internal collaboration across different departments and to manage the workflow for its e-commerce site, which rents out home and office furniture and helps companies relocate employees to new locations.

Top 30 offshore locations

Gartner Inc.’s top 30 locations for offshore services, by region, are:

Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Uruguay.

Asia/Pacific: Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.

Europe, the Middle East and Africa: The Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Northern Ireland, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine.

Gartner’s criteria:

1. Language
2. Government support
3. Labor pool
4. Infrastructure
5. Educational system
6. Cost
7. Political and economic environment
8. Cultural compatibility
9. Global and legal maturity
10. Data and IP security

Primer: Ajax

What is it? Ajax is a buzzword that describes a collection of Web-oriented programming technologies—all of them several years old—for creating Web applications that behave more like traditional computer programs.

What does it do? A Web application built with Ajax efficiently delivers additional information to a browser when someone clicks on a button or moves the mouse cursor over a part of the page, without refreshing the entire page. That, ideally, results in Web pages that respond almost as if they were a locally installed program. For example, a video rental company uses Ajax to automatically pop up a movie’s synopsis, complete with a thumbnail image of the movie poster, when a customer moves a cursor over titles in a list of search results. Previously, the site required loading to a brand-new page if a user wanted to find out more about a movie.

New CIO role: Change warrior

What separates effective CIOs from ineffective ones? The answer has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. Twenty years ago, technical expertise was the critical variable. Today, it’s whether the CIO can move the rest of the company to do things differently.

The problem is that many CIOs developed their management skills in the earlier era when technology assessment and implementation were the key issues. Now they need a completely new set of skills.