On Friday, Intel said that it would cut its IT staff by nearly 10 percent. Perhaps most interesting about the news is the manner in which it was announced. A company spokesman confirmed the reduction after he was asked about an anonymous blog posting that spells out in detail the process Intel uses in cutting workers and the assessment that's used in the process. The news should come as a wake-up call as companies continue to determine how corporate or internal bloggers are impacting the business. In this case, the blogger uses the name "Intel IT Guy" when he writes his blog, the Intel Perspective Blog. "This is primarily [a] 'skills-based' redeployment, which means we are
going through a skills assessment process for each employee, scoring them, comparing scores and then determining which skills we can most afford to lose from our individual groups," the blogger wrote. "It's unpleasant, painful work, and just not going well--at least not for my team." Intel would not give specifics on the reduction, but said that the redeployment is a process that allows workers to remain employed for up to two months while they look for other jobs inside the company. Assuming that they're not redeployed internally, they receive severance packages, according to a company spokesperson.

For all the details on Intel:
- see the article in ComputerWorld
- and read the original blog