Stories by: Robert L. Mitchell

As CIO at USAA, Greg Schwartz oversees technologies that help the company deliver financial services to its core customers: members of the military and their families. Here Schwartz talks about how mobile is redefining the business, how increased regulation has refocused IT resources, and how USAA is engaging customers through social media.

NBC Universal had no room to expand its West Coast data center, located on the Universal City lot in Los Angeles. So Dan Johnson, senior vice president of platform technology, and his team recycled it. The data center refurbishing project, which CIO Christopher Furst refers to as "converting a brownfield," virtualized 60% of the physical servers and shut down 2,000 physical machines.

A tag-team effort by Kaiser Permanente's data center IT and facilities groups delivered a one-two punch to energy consumption in the company's three data centers this year, cutting an eye-popping 7.2 million kilowatt-hours of power from overall data center operations -- and over $770,000 from power budgets. "We are one of the few companies that have the data center facilities team as part of IT," says Steve Press, executive director of data center facilities services, who credits collaboration for the results.

Jim Thomas, director of IT operations at Pella Corp., expected to be wrapping up his Windows 7 deployment by now. The window and door maker, an early adopter of Microsoft's latest Windows PC operating system, began deployment in February 2009, just four months after the product shipped. Plans called for half of Pella's 5,000 desktop and laptop users to transition by the end of 2010, with the rest following by this December.

If you've already virtualized the servers in your data center, desktop virtualization may seem like the next logical step.

Before becoming administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in May 2009, Craig Fugate was a customer. As director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, he oversaw the state's response to many hurricanes. Since coming to FEMA, he has responded to disasters such as the tsunami in American Samoa and the massive floods in Tennessee last year. Fugate spoke recently about the need for emergency data feeds, how social media can play a role in disaster response, and his vision of a future that includes a proactive, location-based warning system that contacts cell phone users in harm's way and provides detailed instructions on what to do.

If multitouch display technology is proliferating, haptic feedback is helping to fuel the trend. Haptics provide tactile feedback to your fingers as you touch a display by vibrating all or part of the display surface.

The apps on your smartphone might be brilliant, but what about the display? Emerging technologies could soon deliver the richer, Wizard of Oz Technicolor experience you crave while performing like a Maserati.

Touch-screen panels have been around for more than a decade, but it was the 2007 introduction of a multitouch screen in Apple's iPhone that galvanized the market. Now the business is going gangbusters -- as are the innovations that touch-screen manufacturers hope will build on Apple's success.

Thanks to a handful of emerging technologies, virtual touch-screen keyboards are getting closer to the feel of real electromechanical keyboards. Enhancements such as tactile feedback and surfaces that change to mimic physical keys could eventually redefine the virtual keyboard experience for millions of users of devices ranging from smartphones to tablets and touch-screen PCs.