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Recently, I've observed a wave of articles, product releases and even analyst reports that describe solutions for companies looking to "get into" master data management or "try out" an MDM project. Other reports claim that companies have been successful at MDM without having an MDM infrastructure in place. As someone who has been actively involved in the data quality, integration and management market for more than 20 years, there are several myths about MDM that have become commonly accepted.

The phone of Steve Bozzo, the chief information officer at 1-800-Flowers.com, does occasionally ring in the middle of the night. If all goes as planned, however, the site's customers never know about it. "We work hard with our partners to avoid those 4 a.m. phone calls," Bozzo told the E-Commerce Times. That doesn't mean Bozzo's days aren't filled with chasing technological solutions to business problems, of course. It just means that he spends more time looking ahead than putting out fires.

An IT career is once again one with a lot of long-term potential. While the market now does not resemble the halcyon times of the dot-com boom, demand is expected to remain steady in the short term and the future looks bright. "From all of the companies that we work with, the message now is, 'full speed ahead,'" said John Estes, a vice president with Robert Half Technology. Despite present perceptions, IT professionals are on solid footing -- at least for the moment.

For some people, November is all about festivity: turkey, cranberry sauce and the start of the long ramp-up to the December holidays. However, that's not always the case if you happen to be in IT security. If you are, you know that November can be anything but festive -- unless your idea of "festive" includes end-of-the-year network freezes, the inevitable holiday malware, spam out the wazoo, and, worst of all, the 2008 budget. Yup, 'tis the season -- the season for guessing at what you might need in the future and most likely won't get.

More and more data center managers have begun implementing virtualization and server consolidation strategies in an effort to cope with the growing complexities they face today, according to a Symantec report released Tuesday. The survey also found that data managers must confront a plethora of challenges due to "rapidly rising service level agreements, staffing difficulties, increasing expenditures and data center growth. Of the 800 global data managers Symantec surveyed, 65 percent reported that formal internal SLAs exist in their organization.

Setting its sights squarely on Research In Motion, Microsoft announced Tuesday its first dedicated mobile device management server aimed at enterprise users. The Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 is a new mobile-dedicated server solution that helps companies manage Windows Mobile phones much the way they do Windows-based laptops and PCs. The technology allows companies to deliver new applications to phones over the air as well as connect people via virtual private network with security-enhanced access to critical data, the company said.

OK, I admit it. I am an avid Boston Red Sox fan. For me and the rest of Red Sox Nation, a three-game sweep of the New York Yankees and four back-to-back home runs is just too good to be true. Baseball is often called the thinking man's game, and I couldn't resist the chance to correlate baseball and Web analytics, which both rely on statistics, data and a deep understanding of your business. As I sat in Fenway Park last week and soaked in some April baseball, I sorted my musings on analytics and baseball into some coherent thoughts.

Looking at the current state of line-of-business applications and how companies use them to track and manage their operations, one can't help but notice how there's a strong resemblance to the days before the networked enterprise, circa 1987. Back then, resources were dispersed in little silos we called PCs, each with its own island of resources. When we connected all those islands with the help of server networking, we got huge returns. Suddenly we could share the same contract someone wrote using Microsoft Word instead of having to save it to a floppy and copying it manually.