Stories about: INS

Bruce Marcus, the executive vice president and CIO of The McGraw-Hill Companies, answers questions about moving into leadership positions, dealing with a difficult boss and the impact of the economy on IT.

In 2003, after endless rounds of political maneuvering and countless agitations against the privatization of major airports in India, the Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport became part of a global fraternity of airports run by private stakeholders. The airport is India's busiest, with 22.2 million passengers and 480 tons of cargo passing through its doors in 2006-2007.

What's it take to be a superstar CIO? One thing is an entourage of trusted advisers, including project managers, recruiters, publicists and troubleshooters who keep top CIOs at the top of their game

"As an IT manager, are you going to put your reputation on the line that five guys from a small startup in Vancouver are to deliver for your organization," asked Jevon MacDonald, blogger and co-founder at StartupNorth.ca.

Score one for the good guys: Last week, Microsoft announced that not only would Office 2007 Service Pack 2 support the ODF (Open Document Format) standard, but the productivity suite would not offer support for the ISO standard version of Microsoft's own OOXML (Office Open XML) format until its next major version, release date unknown.

Demand for new applications is pushing IT departments to their limits. Here's why the workload has exploded and — more important — how to handle it.

There's been a lot of talk recently about Generation Y. Its members, born between 1982 and 2005, are known for their sense of entitlement, outspokenness, inability to take criticism, and technological sophistication. Fortune deemed Generation Y in its 28 May, 2007, issue the most high-maintenance, yet potentially most high-performing generation in history because its members are entering the workplace with more information, greater technological skill and higher expectations of themselves and others than prior generations

As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format remains in ISO limbo, a trio of countries are pushing forward an adoption of the alternative Open Document Format (ODF) instead, according to an ODF advocacy group.

Microsoft has been branded as immoral for years, and Google famously pledged that it would never be evil. But as many have learned, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Here are eight signposts on the path to wickedness. How many of them does your own company exhibit?

Despite official urging, telecommuting within US federal agencies is languishing, in part because standards for how to secure mobile endpoints don't exist -- mainly the laptops telecommuters would use when outside the office.

At Microsoft, developers will tell you that they "test their own dog food," using their own software before and after shipping to customers. Jo Hoppe, CIO of Pegasystems, prefers a classier term to describe how her colleagues utilize her company's business process management (BPM) software before it hits the market. "We're drinking our own champagne," she says.