Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Generous people wanting to help victims of Hurricane Katrina should direct their financial contributions carefully, so that the money isn’t diverted by e-commerce thieves.

Scammers taking advantage of the disaster don’t need much capital or personnel: The Web provides them all they need in the way of cover, illusion and false identities.

Yahoo Inc. has gone into beta on an enhanced version of its e-commerce hosting service, which is positioned for the small business that can’t justify its own Web team nor the time to outsource it to programmers and Web designers.

It has been said that CIOs at large companies today have limited direct power and—more than almost any other C-level executive—need to push the IT/business agenda by persuasion and by maintaining good relations with other stakeholders.

Taking that to heart, the CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the heat for a wide range of technologies that weren’t working out.

Are consumers seeing self-checkout as the anti-customer-service initiative they feared? Not according to one industry study, which predicted self-checkout revenue would double in 2005 (compared with 2004) to $161 billion, and could hit $454 billion by 2008.

The study, conducted by retail consulting firm IHL Consulting Group, found some intriguing trends.

With almost 3,000 stores in all 50 states, the Rent-A-Center retail chain needs to be able to expand quickly and easily.

But its business model allows customers to rent and return merchandise with little notice, forcing store layouts to be flexible. What if 30 customers return mattresses to the same store tomorrow?

A major regional fast-food chain—with 433 restaurants in the Southeastern United States—is going to offer free wireless connections to anyone who wants to surf while sitting in a burger joint.

The Krystal Co. (the nation’s second-oldest fast-food restaurant chain, founded in 1932) is clearly hoping that a lot of customers will be intrigued and will munch on a burger and fries while gulping from its unlimited refill 802.11 fountain.

At a time when IT executives are finding users less and less tolerant of network delays, CIO William Morgan has perhaps the least tolerant set of users in the world.

Morgan runs technology operations for the 215-year-old Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s first stock exchange. But its age doesn’t make its daily load any easier, with networks having to handle 120,000 messages per second and peaks of 200,000 messages per second.
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Typically, a CIO arguing for a $30 to $40 million IT investment for new payment systems has to answer a lot of questions from a skeptical CEO, chief financial officer and board members. But that wasn’t the experience of Canadian Tire Corp. CIO Andrew Wnek.

At a time when IT executives are finding users less and less tolerant of network delays, CIO William Morgan has perhaps the least tolerant set of users in the world.

Morgan runs technology operations for the 215-year-old Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s first stock exchange. But its age doesn’t make its daily load any easier, with networks having to handle 120,000 messages per second and peaks of 200,000 messages per second.

But because it is a financial exchange, any delay?even a half-second?is not acceptable.

“We measure transactions in milliseconds these days. This business can’t tolerate delays: We’re pricing customer orders,” Morgan said. “It’s survival for us.”

In recent years, financial activity has pushed that IT demand much higher. “If you go back five or six years, probably the number [of messages per second] was 10,000 or less,” which is one-twelfth today’s volume, Morgan said.

Morgan delivers that real-time speed with some homegrown applications sitting atop Sun Microsystems Solaris 10 servers, Stratus fault-tolerant servers in a Nortel network.

The CIO argues strongly for using as much standardized software as possible; the exchange’s Web site runs on Windows, and e-mail is using Microsoft Outlook.

“We use the standard Windows environment for all that, but not for our trading. On the trading side, there simply aren’t many packages,” he said.

“There are many for broker dealers, but a select for exchanges. There aren’t that many exchanges and, because of the custom nature of each exchange’s business, it’s very hard to find an off-the-shelf” package.

Having the network deliver all of those messages per second?Morgan’s people stress test their system with 200,000 messages per second?is only part of the battle.

After the messages are delivered, they have to be stored, catalogued and archived. These days, that’s about one-half billion messages every day.

All…

In the Visa data theft case, much has been made of a security audit that cleared the clearinghouse that improperly handled the data. But security experts see audits rarely shedding much light on what the CIO doesn’t already know.

The Overstock.com Web site is all about pricing, as it pitches itself as saving consumers as much as 80 percent compared with other retailers. But in its rapidly growing IT department, the obsession is speed.

How fast? During a major deployment of some large Teradata packages—including CRM, profit analytics and an enterprise data warehouse—Teradata bid on the assumption that such large installations typically take between nine and 12 months to deploy. Overstock’s IT department finished the deployment in 70 days, said company CIO Shawn Schwegman.

When it comes to privacy issues, the online airline/travel industry is moving in the opposite direction from most industries and is using personal data more aggressively than it did just a few months ago, according to a new report from an industry consulting firm.

In the Information Age that we’re in, quality of information trumps quantity every time. And for CIOs, that’s good news.

But there’s a big piece of bad news, too. The flood of information at the command of customers is both good and bad, and many customers—especially consumers—rarely can tell the difference.

Top payment-system executives traveled to Washington on Thursday to try to convince members of Congress that no new laws are needed for credit card payment security, that the industry can police itself just fine. But the facts delivered during the testimony told a very different story.

What forced the hearing was a well-publicized security breach in May, when CardSystems Solutions reported that someone had broken into its systems and stolen the details of as many as 40 million payment cards, including names, account numbers and expiration dates.

The CIO of Reitmans needs sales associates to know a customer’s history before the sale starts. Given that most customers use loyalty cards at the end of shopping, that’s a tough sweater to pull on.

In the retail world, selling clothing is mostly about convincing customers what looks good on them. And it certainly helps if the salesperson already knows what’s in that customer’s closet, what her favorite colors are, her price range and her size.

During congressional testimony, executives from bank and credit card companies involved in the largest credit card data loss ever pointed fingers at a new culprit for gaps in security: the auditors who had certified the credit card processing systems as being up to snuff.

But in an interview those auditors said one of the CEO witnesses was either lying or very mistaken.

Retailers are using cameras and pattern recognition software to fight back against shoplifters who try to hide items in the compartments underneath grocery carts.

Those spacious compartments underneath grocery carts may be convenient for shoppers, but retailers say they are also attractive to shoplifters as they usually can’t be seen by a cashier nor by typical security cameras.

As the CIO for a $4.1 billion health care products distribution company, Jim Harding knows only too well the changing face of medical technology today.

He sees senior physicians hand-writing prescriptions, penciling notes in patient folders and resisting electronics while the younger physicians embrace PDAs and digital transcription units.

In analyzing more than 6,500 data points from the top 19 e-commerce sites, a new Keynote Systems report found sites that were too slow, failed too often and often glitched during the crucial checkout period.

In analyzing more than 6,500 data points from each of 22 top e-commerce sites, a new Keynote Systems report found that many sites were too slow, failed too often and often glitched during the crucial checkout period.

Jim Harding, CIO for the $4.1 billion health care company Henry Schein Inc., doesn’t like taking risks with other people’s money. Especially not the money of the people who control his salary.

It’s certainly fair to say that Harding is risk-averse, but that doesn’t prevent him from considering unproven, cutting-edge technologies such as voice over IP. That’s why I was startled when he spoke so vehemently this week about his fear of buying products from Oracle.

A Pennsylvania payment vendor is preparing conversion equipment to create contactless vending machines, aimed as much at addressing the finite supply of coins and facilitating price increases as shortening lines.

The vendor, USA Technologies, said it has had contactless vending machine technology ready for some time, but waited to introduce it until the market seemed ready for widespread contactless deployment.

Corporate Web sites are becoming bloated bandwidth hogs, which should surprise absolutely no one in high tech. But a survey is proving that the reckless use of multimedia, animation, JavaScript and other impressive but non-informational offerings is starting to have a negative impact on site traffic. The site visitor’s pain from overdesigned or overprogrammed sites—those being two different but equally sinful efforts—is more than mere time-wasting.

When Cingular announced it was buying AT&T Wireless, top executives promised a seamless integration for users. Easy for them to say.

The top execs of the $32 billion combined wireless phone company who were making those announcements didn’t have to wrestle with 2.5 petabytes of data, more than 600 overlapping applications, and tons of redundant and incompatible systems. That task fell to CIO Thaddeus Arroyo and his team of more than 6,000 IT professionals.

Trying to make eBay as attractive and comprehensive as possible for small businesses that represent a huge portion of eBay’s revenue, the auction company is offering to help customers create their own Web sites to complement their eBay presence.

A major pharmacy chain’s program designed to let customers view a history of their purchases in e-mail had weak enough security to make it vulnerable to identity thieves, forcing the chain to temporarily shut down its Web site while it reconsidered security.

The chain was CVS Corp., which has more than 5,400 stores in the United States.