Having returned from the African Computing & Telecommunications Summit in the UK, Paul Booth examines the major local and international IT happenings during the past three weeks.
Re-engineering, which was seen as an excuse to get people off the payroll, resulted in little sustainable change in real processes and systems, causing more harm than cost savings.
Last week saw Lucent Technologies take-over International Network Services in a $3.7 billion deal, while there was a flood of local financial results.
Although it was a quiet IT week locally, there was a plethora of financial results, while the $13.5 billion buy-out of One2One by Deutsche Telekom AG stole the international IT limelight last week.
In today`s market, where perception is reality, it is clear that publicity creates brand and advertising reinforces the message.
While telecommunications bundling is becoming the norm in global competitive markets, SA is sadly lagging behind and losing out on an important service benchmark.
Last week saw several international companies reporting losses and announcing significant job cut-backs, while the Datatec and Dimension Data overseas acquisitions made local headlines.
To ensure smooth deliverables, work backwards! Identifying what outcome you want to achieve with your PR allows you to work backwards to a definite goal.
The IT sector is heading for a challenging time as the year 2000 nears and we wait with breathless anticipation to see whether the stocks will rally or face massive collapse.
The move by Canada`s Geac Computer Corp. to acquire JBA catapults the new software group into the top three in the ERP space with only SAP and Oracle ahead of them and leaves PeopleSoft and Baan trailing in their wake.
There are many categories of news and lumping them all together creates an unfair expectation that lies at the heart of so many ructions between client and PR.
While the acquisition by IBM of Sequent Computer Systems was big international IT news last week, the local industry saw a host of financial results being released.
There`s more to evaluating the impact of good PR than by counting column centimetres or minutes of air time, particularly as you cannot correlate value with cost.