Stories by: Christopher Koch

It's been a brutal couple of years. Terrorism, preparations for war, a clampdown on IT spending, corporate scandal and malfeasance - it's left us shell-shocked, hoping that whatever comes next has got to be better. We think it will be.

Upgrading software from one version to the next appears like a small step - after all, you're not ripping the stuff out and replacing it, you're just improving it a little bit - but Nextel senior vice president and CIO Dick LeFave finds himself about to step off a precipice with his Oracle ERP software upgrade.

Can an old guy come out of retirement and save one of the icons of the new economy? In an exclusive Q&A, Harold Kutner says that's exactly what he's going to do.

David Drew used to have his own supergroup for IT decision making at 3M: the Information Systems Steering Committee. He had all six business division chiefs in there, along with the top functional leaders, meeting together six times a year to do nothing but jam on IT strategy, endorse IT projects of more than $US1 million and prioritise IT resources

Now that every company on the planet is trying to automate the relationship between suppliers and customers, it's worth remembering who invented this stuff more than 20 years ago: Procter & Gamble. Specifically, teams of business and IT people led in 1980 by P&G brand manager Duane Weeks (who now runs his own software company, Exemplary) and in 1987 by Ralph Drayer, P&G's vice president of customer services (who now runs his own consulting company, Supply Chain Insights).

Jerry Hale is giving the cold shoulder to the big consultancies that want to help him run his most important software projects. " I refuse to turn over the leadership of my ERP project to consultants," says Hale, vice president and CIO of Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical, which has 6000 users of SAP's R/3 ERP software. He felt burned by a consultant-led ERP project in the mid-90s that went over budget, over scope and far beyond the original project schedule. So when the time came to replace that system with a new one, Hale decided to use his own people to do the project along with a few handpicked consultants brought in to do small, specific tasks. David Johns, senior vice president and CIO at Ohio-based Owens Corning, doesn't rely on consultants either. He and his IT staff now run Owens Corning's big software projects themselves, using consultants only for certain tasks.

Y2K and the e-commerce gold rush made ROI analysis little more than an empty formality at most companies. Now ROI is back. We give you seven tips to see if your method measures up.

Getting different vendors to truly integrate complex software is impossible. But that doesn't mean a more limited form of interfacing can't be achieved.

When corporate spending is tight, spend money on better ways of working, not on better computers. Here are eight ways to cut wisely.

Corporations pay technology analysts US$ 15 billion a year for unbiased technology research. But many common analyst practices look suspiciously like conflicts of interest.