Steve Andriole

There have been lots of “studies” on job migration and outsourcing over the past five years that try to position outsourcing as something political: outsourcing creates jobs … outsourcing is the inevitable consequence of globalization … outsourcing will destroy the U.S. labor force. But what’s really going on? We need to level set for a […]

We know from industry analyses that “strategic” technology investors spend around 7%-10% of their gross revenue on technology, while companies that are considered “tactical” investors spend 1%-3% of revenue on technology. (Those in the middle I guess are “operational” technology investors, whatever the hell that means.) But let’s be candid: Most companies – except for […]

How much do you spend with Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP or Dell? How much? What do you get for all that money? If you’re completely happy with these vendors, you’re misguided. Why? Because if you’ve been a loyal customer and spend more than a million bucks a year with these guys, you should get much, […]

It is amazing to me that many of the companies I work with cannot answer the following questions. Can you? 1. How much money do you spend annually on all flavors of technology and technology support services? It’s important to know the total and the relative allocations across the obvious categories — hardware, software, communications, […]

Here are some gift ideas for the technology friends and family in our lives. Some are cheap and some cost a fortune. Some are just fantasies; some are more than possible. You be the judge. 10. I’d like to give Larry Ellison another appearance on Oprah to reprise his “network computer” sales pitch – the […]

One of my graduate student teams recently pitched me on the virtues of open source software. The leader of that pack works for a not-for-profit corporation, so you know what his bias was. The rest of them work for companies that exist for profit — and you probably can guess what their biases were. We […]

Twenty years ago ‘information overload’ was all the rage. ”Oh my God,” everyone said, ”how are we possibly going to process all of the information that we’re creating day after day? We’re buried in information coming out of copiers, reports and memoranda.” Well, here we are a couple of decades later and we’re not only […]

Nicholas Carr – again. Outsourcing. Identity theft. Security – again. Wireless. Web Services. Service Oriented Architectures. Longhorn, then Vista. RFID – again. If we were pattern-recognition experts, what would we see? “Nothing,” you might say, “it’s all chaos!” What the hell is going on in our industry, anyway? Here are three things to think about. […]

Ideas are like viruses – they multiply no matter how hard we try to stop them. For decades I’ve wondered why there are so many books on management and leadership. I just searched Amazon.comand found no less than 16,380 offerings. I then Googled “Leadership Books” and turned up 30,800,000 hits. How can there be so […]

  Time for an outsourcing reality check. Since everyone’s excited about how well – or poorly – outsourcing works, let’s take a look at what’s happening now, and what’s likely to happen over the next few years. Let me say first that much of the fate around outsourcing has already been sealed. How could this […]