Stories by: Laurianne McLaughlin

Cloud computing looks to be a "classic disruptive technology," says Forrester Research in an interesting new report published this week. For enterprise IT shops, cloud computing still poses some real risks, including an almost complete lack of service-level agreements and customer references, plus some genuine security and compliance concerns, according to Forrester. But even so, IT shops are tapping into cloud services for targeted projects: "There's a high likelihood that developers inside your company are experimenting with it right now," writes senior analyst James Staten in the report,"Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise?"

Last year, the big question about virtualization in data centres was: "How much money and time will this save us?" This year, the big question will be: "How secure are we?"

When Rich Phillips became COO OF Maritz Travel about two and-a-half years ago, he sat down and took a hard look at the big industry picture

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

Managing a complex project with multiple moving parts and deadlines being worked on by a diverse team can get downright nasty. Here's how one company solved the problem.

Improve your leadership IQ. Check out James Kilts's take on the factors that truly matter to a leader's success, plus his advice for IT executives on the rise

Alec Palmer, CIO for the US Federal Election Commission, had a clear mandate from his business side: Our database presentation tool doesn't serve the public well. Fix it. And he did, in-house, with no extra staff, for $US12,000, in six weeks.

E-mail attachments have become a staccato series of shooting pains for many a CIO. Today's attachments --packed with images, presentations, PDFs, video clips and other space gluttons -- keep getting bigger, with no end in sight. They can bloat your servers, clog your systems and slow user mailbox opening to a crawl (prompting help desk calls).

You are where you sit: Your choice of perch for your regular meetings can send the wrong message and even hurt your career, say executive coaches, BusinessWeek.com reports today.

If there's one goal CIOs want to achieve this year, it's to help drive revenue. Some shrewd CIOs have found a little-known route to get there: Price optimization software

What technology keeps you up at night? That's not the right question to ask CIOs anymore, I've learned this week at CIO's leadership conference here in Huntington Beach, California.