Earlier academic studies didn't find a connection between IT spending and profits, but new research has a more upbeat conclusion: Investments in IT can have a positive effect on profitability--one even more pronounced than comparable spending on advertising.

For Ancestry.com, big data is about to get even bigger.

Technology managers at video distributor Netflix Inc., which last year took a big plunge into the public cloud, have started a remarkably candid blog about their experiences with mission-critical cloud computing.

It's not a Y2K-style crisis, but there's only a four-year window until Microsoft Corp. ends support for Windows XP. The need to migrate from XP to Windows 7 "will create an extra budgetary and resource burden on companies from 2011 to 2012," according to recent report by Gartner Inc.

CIOs monitor a lot of metrics, but advisory firm The Hackett Group Inc. says there's one more to watch: the number of enterprise software applications per 1,000 end users.

The first step in any application development project is to collect the user requirements. Get that wrong, and the project will be in trouble.

Various pundits say that one of the top goals of CEOs this year is to make sense of the terabytes of data swirling in and around their companies and then use that data to make better decisions. Key to that is data visualization technology, which tells a more powerful story than raw data alone.

Adoption of open-source business intelligence software is doubling every year because the products are viewed as "good enough" for routine applications, according to a recent report by Gartner Inc. analyst Andreas Bitterer.

Is the problem a bad set of user requirements? Poor business alignment? No. According to software architect Roger Sessions, the primary cause of software project failures is complexity.