Most people think of Peter Drucker as a business visionary, and for good reason. Drucker, whose 100th birthday is being celebrated posthumously this month, was a renowned management professor and consultant, retained by some of the biggest and most powerful companies, including General Electric, Procter & Gamble and IBM. He was also a prolific writer, having published 39 books on management and penned a column for The Wall Street Journal for 20 years, in addition to writing for Forbes, Fortune, The Atlantic and other leading publications.

Cloud service providers can make compelling and simple sales pitches in terms of cost of individual services-$100 per user per year sounds pretty good. But "hidden" expenses can alter a company's outlook. Costs related to people, processes, and architecture associated with both the transition and the operations require analysis and planning before signing up for a business case based on a move to the cloud. CIOs and other IT professionals are already well acquainted with such expenses, but the challenge will lie in uncovering them in the relatively unfamiliar cloud model and determining accountability for each.

Developing a business case for any IT investment is a complicated exercise. But building a business case for SharePoint poses specific challenges because much of its ROI is intangible: SharePoint deployments can lead to process improvements, but it's not always easy to quantify the dollar value of those process improvements.

It's become an all-too-common scam: A legitimate Web site pops up a window that looks just like a real security warning. It says there's something wrong with the computer, and click here to fix it. A few clicks later, the victim is paying out US$40 for some bogus software, called rogue antivirus.

Public sector outsourcing is "in," as state and local IT leaders contend with shrinking budgets, limited human resources, and increasing demand for IT services. "There appears to be a perfect storm for IT outsourcing at the state and local level today," says Jason Khan, chief technology strategist for Washington, D.C.-based Touchstone Consulting Group.

Cloud service providers can make compelling and simple sales pitches in terms of cost of individual services-$100 per user per year sounds pretty good. But "hidden" expenses can alter a company's outlook. Costs related to people, processes, and architecture associated with both the transition and the operations require analysis and planning before signing up for a business case based on a move to the cloud. CIOs and other IT professionals are already well acquainted with such expenses, but the challenge will lie in uncovering them in the relatively unfamiliar cloud model and determining accountability for each.

Collecting money from customers should be the easy part of your business, but a contrary billing system can make life unnecessarily difficult for CIOs. In this edition of 5 open source products to watch, we take a look at billing systems. They’re open source, Web-based and can be extended and integrated to suit specific needs.

When the CEO says "Show me the money", CIOs are often caught short and unable to demonstrate the value of IT projects. Here are crucial steps CIOs should take to instil a benefits management focus in their organisations and ensure that project success is judged by the value that's created.