Information Week ranks Xerox among Top 10 Information Technology innovators
Stamford, USA: Xerox Corporation has been named to the Top 10 of Information Week 500, a listing of the nation's most innovative users of information technology.

The company ranked ninth among the 500 companies recognized for IT innovation in 2004, up from No. 220 last year. Xerox also was recognized as the leader in the "consulting and business services" industry category.

According to Information Week, companies named to the list "demonstrate a pattern of technological and organizational innovation," and this year the top 100 companies "are distinguished by crisp and efficient strategies that cut costs and optimize productivity. These businesses have raised the bar on corporate governance and made a science out of measuring return on investment and the value of business-technology projects."

At Xerox, for example, project teams are using Lean Six Sigma tools to identify, reengineer and further strengthen the key business processes and technologies that underpin the way Xerox and its customers do business, from proposals, to orders, to installs and services, to billing, to post-sale care and service. Another Xerox Information Management team used Lean Six Sigma - a disciplined, data-driven methodology to make processes better and leaner - to develop a new statistical algorithm to improve software delivery and testing and to cut software development costs.

In its 16th year, the Information Week 500 study examines business practices across companies' core areas of technology operations, including management priorities, investment approaches and IT strategies. Xerox has made the list 14 times.
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WSJ surveys corporate recruiters for top M.B.A. programs in the USA
New York, USA: In an expanded business-school rankings to be published today by The Wall Street Journal, the world's leading business publication corporate recruiters have placed their choices on board and the results are a revelation.

In the fourth annual survey conducted by Harris Interactive, leading corporate recruiters ranked the University of Michigan as the top National program; Purdue University as top Regional program; and the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), based in Lausanne, Switzerland, as top International program—a new ranking this year.

The Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive Business School Survey remains exclusively a reflection of a business school's appeal to recruiters, those who go after M.B.A. talent. But the methodology has been revamped to reflect differences in M.B.A. recruiting activity among the schools, resulting in three separate rankings.

The expanded rankings provide even greater value for schools, recruiters and prospective students because they allow readers to compare schools that tend to attract similar recruiters.

The new approach retains most of the elements of the original methodology used in the Journal's three previous M.B.A. rankings, including recruiters' perceptions of the schools and students and its mass appeal score—the number of recruiters attracted by a school. A revised and expanded part of the ranking formula is "supportive behavior," defined as the recruiters' intention to return to a particular school and the likelihood of making job offers to its graduates in the next two years.

The new International ranking is based on the perception and supportive-behavior components, but its mass appeal score is based instead on the number of countries represented by a school's recruiters, instead of the absolute number of recruiters.

Because the old formula resulted in a ranking that was increasingly driven by the number of recruiters a school attracted, rather than their opinion of the school and its students, it was adjusted to give equal weight to perception, mass appeal and supportive behaviors. In addition, to avoid "apples-and-oranges" school comparisons, three lists were devised--for National, Regional and International schools.

The survey of 2,849 M.B.A. recruiters was conducted online between Dec. 2, 2003, and March 31, 2004; respondents rated only fulltime programs where they had recent recruiting experience. To qualify for ranking, a school had to receive at least 20 recruiter ratings. In all, 71 schools were ranked.

Recruiters ranked the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor, Mich., as the top National school. The recruiters here were most likely to come from companies based in the eastern U.S., to hold senior-management positions and to offer the highest compensation. (Twenty-three percent of the national-school recruiters said they paid $100,000 or more in base salary.)

In the Regional school category, Purdue University's Krannert School of Management in West Lafayette, Ind., received the top honors among 44 schools. Regional programs are smaller for the most part and also tend to attract many recruiters from their local regions.

Recruiters ranked Swiss-based IMD at the top of the 21-school International list. This group, a combination of eight European schools and 13 of the North American M.B.A. programs in the other two rankings, comprises only schools that attract recruiters from a variety of countries.

The complete rankings of M.B.A. programs are listed below:

National Schools

Rank College (Business School)

1. University of Michigan (Ross)
2. Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)
3. Dartmouth College (Tuck)
4. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
5. University of Chicago
6. Yale University
7. Northwestern University (Kellogg)
8. Columbia University
9. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
10. Stanford University
11. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
12. University of Virginia (Darden)
13. Harvard University
14. Duke University (Fuqua)
15. University of California, Berkeley (Haas)
16. University of Texas (McCombs)
17. New York University (Stern)
18. Cornell University (Johnson)
19. University of California, Los Angeles (Anderson)

Regional Schools

Rank College (Business School)

1. Purdue University (Krannert)
2. Vanderbilt University (Owen)
3. Ohio State University (Fisher)
4. University of Maryland (Smith)
5. Brigham Young University (Marriott)
6. Texas Christian University (Neeley)
7. Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de
Monterrey (ITESM)
8. Michigan State University (Broad)
9. University of Denver (Daniels)
10. Thunderbird (Garvin)

International Schools

Rank College (Business School)

1. IMD International
2. University of London (London Business School)
3. ESADE
4. HEC School of Management, Paris
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
6. Dartmouth College (Tuck)
7. University of Michigan (Ross)
8. Thunderbird (Garvin)
9. Penn State University (Smeal)
10. Stanford University
11. University of Chicago
12. INSEAD
13. Columbia University
14. York University (Schulich)
15. Erasmus University (Rotterdam)
16. Harvard University
17. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
18. University of Navarra (IESE)
19. University of California, Berkeley (Haas)
20. Instituto de Empresa
21. Cornell University (Johnson)

The Wall Street Journal, the flagship publication of Dow Jones & Company, is the world's leading business publication. Founded in 1889, The Wall Street Journal holds 29 Pulitzer Prizes for outstanding journalism. Other publications that are part of The Wall Street Journal franchise, with total circulation of more than 2.6 million, include The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal Europe and The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com, the largest paid subscription news site on the Web. In 2004, the Journal was ranked No. 1 in BtoB's Media Power 50 for the fifth consecutive year.

Harris Interactive is a global research firm that blends premier strategic consulting with innovative and efficient methods of investigation, analysis and application. Well known for The Harris Poll and for pioneering Internet-based research methods, Rochester, New York-based Harris Interactive conducts proprietary and public research.
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