Healthcare

Web Services Hurdles
Developing a service-oriented architecture is full of challenges, such as governance, security and reliability.

Flexibility, Finances Keys to Web Services Adoption
Web services are one of IT's most promising advances, but they have yet to enjoy their predicted widespread adoption. What's the holdup?

The five missing pieces of SOA
Maturing Web services standards make an SOA seem practical. But should you start now or wait until they fill in the gaps?

What about performance?
Critics of Web services and SOA often cite performance as a barrier to adoption. But there's always a speed tradeoff in standardization.

Web Services: Managing the Building Blocks
You could have hundreds of Web services. Here's how to make sure you can organize, catalog, find and reuse them.

Web Services Security: Trouble in Transit
Web services put more of your company's data into the ether, offering more chances for someone to snatch it.

Fun With Web Services!
Sure, Web services can enhance business processes and facilitate business-to-business transactions and all that stuff. But hey, they can do a lot more than that. Here are some creative, useful (and perhaps semiuseful) utilities that show the wide range of their capabilities.


Lean Manufacturing

From Tech Smart to Business Wise
How the CIO of Scotts turned his IT staff into business advisers Just five years ago, the ability to nurture the information assets of the company we worked for was considered the main metric of success for CIOs. Today, we need to excel in business areas and functions such as supply chain management, customer relationship management and shared services. Understanding and deploying technology is table stakes.

GM CTO sees more code on future cars
Although cars had approximately 1 million lines of software code in 1990, that number will jump to 100 million by 2010, according to Anthony Scott, CTO of GM's Information Systems and Services organization.

Why IT Will Continue to Matter
The cost squeeze is on. Automobile companies are racing to get slimmer. According to The New York Times, automakers are now ranked according to how few hours they spend building a car. For instance, General Motors claims to be the leader, with only 35.2 hours per vehicle. Chrysler puts in 37.42 hours. Ford takes 38.6 hours. They're all keeping an eye on the efficiencies of Toyota, which assembles cars in Fremont, Calif., in only 21.92 hours while gaining market share.


Financial Services

Checkpoint for Check 21
This week, U.S. banks will reach the first mandated milestone on the way to what's arguably the biggest change in the way they process checks since the introduction of magnetic ink character recognition almost a half-century ago.

U.S. Bancorp, VeriSign team on banking security
U.S. Bancorp will use a hardware-token-based authentication service from VeriSign Inc. to secure access to commercial banking services for its customers, and may soon introduce a similar service for consumer banking customers, according to a VeriSign executive.

Agents of change
Autonomous agents could one day play a key role in everything from setting market prices to creating more resilient networks

Financial firms compare notes on disaster recovery
Some of the nation's leading financial services companies said this week that their IT executives met earlier this year for the first time to share current disaster recovery schemes and discuss future technology recovery strategies. And what they found was that they had a lot in common -- including headaches.



Re: Sources

For more information and resources on regulatory compliance, please visit this CSO Magazine research center:
Laws & Compliance — Understanding new legislation and managing regulatory compliance

And be sure to check out these recent articles from the IDG family of business/technology publications: How to keep your company in step with compliance issues


Building a Compliance Framework
Federal, state and other mandates are sucking up far too many resources, and there's no end in sight. Companies that find ways to build compliance into their corporate cultures will save time and money for strategic tasks, and IT is well positioned to lead the effort.


Remote offices: The Achilles' heel of regulatory compliance
Backing up data in remote offices is a problem that IT managers must solve if their companies are to meet regulatory requirements. Steve McCanne, co-founder and CTO of Riverbed Technology, explains one technology that's allowing companies to store data from remote offices in a centralized location.


Outsourcing sparks concerns over IT controls to meet Sarbanes-Oxley
IT auditors worry that outsourcers may not provide the documentation needed to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley.