To be sure, many of the internal functions of Outlook.com will be brought over from Hotmail.

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Companies that succeed in creating frameworks that cross internal functions, free of departmental silos, gain a competitive edge.

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As such, they did not feel comfortable supplanting the functions of the Internal Revenue Service or the tax court in rendering a ruling on what they believed to be an unsettled area of the law.

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Over the last several decades, companies have spent billions to improve their internal efficiencies, automating key business functions such as procurement and human resources and processes like accounts payable.

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On top of these six categories is the cost of the other functions of government including all of the internal departments (DOJ, Homeland Security, EPA, Commerce, Interior, State, etc.) and the off budget expenses of the agencies (FNMA, FHA, GNMA, FHLMC, Post-Office, Amtrak, etc.).

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Smart IT leaders cope with this shortage of generalists by moving to hybrid IT departments that manage cloud computing as well as more traditional IT functions, and that essentially run as virtual internal service providers, drawing on a menu of external managed services as demand requires.

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Originally an internal project at Apple, General Magic proposed making personal communicators that would let individuals get messages, perform computing functions and take calls remotely.

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