IBM’s Mark Lynch tells the anecdote of an organization that had five business units sharing a piece of its IT infrastructure. When it came time to allocate costs, each unit was charged 20 percent. Only after managers had applied an automated usage tracking system did they discover that one unit was consuming 60 percent of the resources.

Do you know what each business unit is consuming in terms of IT resources? Many organizations don’t even bother to track it. Rather, they just divide the cost equally between the business units. It’s simple, easy, makes sense, and seems fair. Unfortunately, it often is wrong.

Even in this recession, both IDC and Gartner project IT spending worldwide to increase, albeit at low single-digit rates, for the next few years. Not surprisingly, IT asset management has emerged as a critical discipline as IT usage and the corresponding expenditures balloon. As expected, there even is an association that focuses on the practice, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, Inc. more

Seismic — or, certainly systemic — regulatory shifts loom on the horizon, yet GRC executives are starting to be confronted with a more immediate change: the behavior of their directors.

Associations and consultants who represent and serve corporate directors are not waiting to see how the U.S. new regulatory regime ultimately shakes out. Instead, these experts have been busy working with directors for several months to help them expand their own governance, risk, and compliance management awareness and activities.

CFOs, compliance officers, chief audit executives, and other GRC executives can expect a slew of new questions from directors, including the following: more

Among the many associations that come to mind when you mention New Jersey, one of the more favorable is that of pharmaceutical capital of the nation. Michigan has its automobiles, Texas its oil, and California its technology. And for some time, New Jersey has been regarded by many as the “Nation’s Medicine Chest” or even more boldly the “Pharma Capital of the World.”

But New Jersey’s dominance in the pharmaceutical realm has been slipping, and recent events suggest that its dominance has now moved from a slow demise to an accelerated demise stage unless some actions are taken. The title contender, or perhaps new heavyweight champion of pharma, appears to be California. hrow a highly innovative Massachusetts and its robust research corridor into the mix, and the picture looks even bleaker for New Jersey.

Why the poor diagnosis for New Jersey pharma?

It’s worth noting that this decline is not something new. As Ted Sherman reports in the NJ Star Ledger, one in five pharmaceutical jobs used to be in the Garden State. That ratio is now in one in seven. Sherman reports that “California now has a bigger share of the nation’s pharmaceutical jobs, with New Jersey dropping from 20.3 percent in 1990 to about 14 percent today.” The Garden State has been trimming pharma jobs for some time. more

Health insurers are starting to subscribe to the old saying “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” as the U.S. moves toward health care reform. But they’re not about to submit to changes that would brutalize them financially. more