The News - April 16, 2008

"Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other, everything to gain ” – Diane de Pointiers

Top Picks

Windows is 'collapsing,' Gartner analysts warn
“In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts.”
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9076698&pageNumber=1

Sucking It Up
“Here's a consequence of escalating oil prices that many businesses have yet to contemplate, or don't want to: The supply-chain management strategies spawned during the last 20 years — quick transport, lean inventories, and a growing reliance on low-cost, offshore labor — may not make good business sense anymore.”
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10918113/c_11042248?f=alerts  

IT Audit / Internal Audit

FAA Auditing of Airlines Criticized at Hearing
“In the recent audits, to determine if the airlines are complying with F.A.A. orders, ‘we found we had achieved 99 percent compliance, but it’s the other 1 percent that keeps me up at night,’ Mr. Sabatini said.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/business/11hearing-web.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
[I find the FAA debacle fascinating.  It’s a textbook example of what can happen when audit looses objectivity, there is management over-ride, and loss of guidance in terms of tone-from-the-top.  Basically, we are seeing what happens when audit fails.] 

IT Process Improvement / Quality Management

Emergency Changes Shouldn't Change Anything
“The ITIL change management process is intended to balance the risks associated with making a change against the risks to the organization of not making the change. To do this, it recommends a series of controls that help manage risk including the formal submission of requests for change, creation of change records, scrutiny of requests, testing, and so on.  These steps, of course, take time and during a crisis, time is a scarce commodity. To facilitate the ability to respond quickly, while still supplying a modicum of risk management, ITIL recommends that one or more emergency change models be created.”
http://www.itsmwatch.com/itil/article.php/3735976  

Legal and Regulatory Compliance

PCAOB Pings Grant Thornton on Lax Testing
“Grant Thornton didn't do enough testing to support some of its 2006 audit opinions, according to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's most recent inspection report of the second-tier independent audit firm.”
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/11042016/c_11042248?f=alerts  

Security and Risk Management

You won't guess who's the bad guy of ID theft
“Surprisingly, the real villains in Zero Day Threat are not the identity thieves themselves, despite their unsavory lives of crime. Rather, the villains are supposed pillars of communities: bankers, credit-bureau managers and computer makers who enable the burglars, and who could ameliorate the identify-theft crisis but, instead, look away in the name of larger corporate profit.”
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/books/2008-04-13-zero-day-threat_N.htm

Virtualization's Dark Side
“The decision to switch to virtualization is easy enough: As companies discover that the process can consolidate hardware and save space, energy and money, virtualization is sweeping through the world's desktops and data centers. Now comes the hard part: keeping a new and largely untested IT world safe from hackers and data breaches.“
http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/09/virtualization-rsa-malware-tech-virtualization08-cx_ag_0409virtual.html?partner=alerts  

Healthcare / Bio-Informatics / Care Delivery Organizations (CDOs)

U.S. Biotechs On Sale
“Takeda, Japan's biggest drug company, is buying Cambridge, Mass.-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals for $8.8 billion, or $25 a share. That's a 50% premium and a price Millennium stock hasn't seen in more than five years.  The deal signals a new reality for U.S. biotech companies: While increasingly risk-averse U.S. investors avoid stocks of small and mid-size biotechs, foreign firms are buying.”
http://www.forbes.com/business/pharma/2008/04/10/pharmacuticals-millenium-takeda-biz-healthcare-cx_mh_0410takeda.html

VA data center outage hobbles VistA again
“The Veterans Affairs Department suffered a regional outage of its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) because of a hardware problem at its Denver data center, a VA official said today.”
http://www.fcw.com/online/news/152251-1.html

Human Error / Safety / Environment

Passengers sue Southwest over missed inspections
“Four passengers have filed a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines, saying the company broke its contract with travelers by carrying them on planes that missed safety inspections over a period of about six years.”
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-04-15-passengers-sue-southwest_N.htm

Reports: Data on Vioxx was misused
“Corporate and government documents from Vioxx lawsuits indicate that the drug's maker, Merck & Co., apparently downplayed evidence showing the painkiller tripled the risk of death in Alzheimer's-prone patients, researchers report today.”
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2008-04-15-vioxx-drug-conflicts_N.htm  

Outsourcing / Globalization / International

China's economy slows, inflation still high: govt
“China's economy slowed in the first quarter of the year while inflation lingered at 12-year highs as food prices continued to soar, the government said on Wednesday.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080416/ts_afp/chinaeconomygrowthquarter_080416074950  

Economics / Business / Misc.

Rate of home foreclosures expected to get worse
“The nation's already alarming pace of home foreclosures is poised to accelerate through the rest of the year, according to RealtyTrac, which reported Tuesday that foreclosure filings jumped 57% in March from March 2007.”
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2008-04-15-foreclosure-filings-march_N.htm