Stories about: Alpha

Using teleconferencing technology has lately become an obvious and financially practical choice to offset rising business travel expenses. Yet sometimes simple chatting doesn't cut it. There has been growing interest in the notion of online conferencing with a "virtual presence" emphasis, which enables people to share information and their very selves with one another with a stronger sense of near-tangible "face time."

Pity the poor IT managers.

That the PR hordes at Microsoft would begin the jungle drumbeat for the next version of Windows within an ace of the launch of Vista was, of course, to be expected. The company's default position whenever challenged about its latest products has always been to pique the appetite for the next version through calculated leaks, the drawing up of roadmaps, the tossing around of code names and the issuing of possible feature details. This predictable tactic is rearing its head again with a steady stream of stories appearing in the media: Google News today lists 862. The question is: why do we play along?

Virtualization has gotten into many nooks and crannies of IT infrastructure, but some of the available vendor technology is half-baked, according to a recent report from Forrester Research. According to Forrester, as of Q2 2008, server and client virtualization is mature enough to pay off in the short term, but storage virtualization-particularly application storage-is "not very advanced" and doesn't yet offer much payback.

Zero point one per cent. That's about the number of women out of the pool of CIOs in India. Given that a tad over 15 per cent of engineering graduates are women, why do their numbers thin out so massively by the time they are ready to run IT in an enterprise? Why is it that tracking down a woman CIO is tougher than finding water in Rajasthan?

Ever wonder what that cop is doing in his cruiser that's parked behind your car with lights flashing -- while your heart is pounding and you're searching for your license and registration?

By 2003, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer found itself with a costly business problem: Paper. Reams of paper. Mountains of paper. Pfizer was up to its neck in the stuff

Enterprises conduct most of their business processes internally to limit transaction costs and keep intellectual capital confidential, but also partly out of habit

Some days, you wish you had telepathy. You just know that your development staff is holding back in some way, but you don't know how to get them to communicate. Is the project in trouble, but they're afraid to tell you?

Happy 2007 — here's hoping it will be a very good year for all of us. If nothing else, it will certainly be a notable year for CIO: locally we'll mark our 10-year anniversary and the US mother ship will observe a score.

Early adopters of new IT and customers of start-up vendors can win competitive advantage and other treasures, but only if they look before they leap