Stories about: IT People

With the CIO role under greater pressure to change than at any time since the bursting of the dot com bubble a decade ago, is the clamour from some quarters for the rise of the Chief Innovation Officer soon to be answered?

Globalization means watching the barriers that have constrained world trade, communications, employment and social discourse since time immemorial fall like dominos, under the weight of new technologies and a revolution in social and business dynamics

Barbra Cooper started as a CIO when the position was still called "VP of IS". In her more than 30 years in IT, she's seen the role become ever more strategic; now the CIO is in the unique position of being the C-level officer who can "see across the entire enterprise"

In many ways, managing a developer is just like managing any other employee. Developers want managers who'll help them solve business and technical problems, who'll protect them from unnecessary office politics and who will help them meet their personal career goals. But programmers are...different. Like musicians, these creative folks can alternate between big-picture thinking and persnickety detail in a heartbeat. They can be sidetracked by silly toys, and convinced to work overtime by the promise of pizza and a T-shirt. Trying to understand and motivate these people can drive managers-particularly nontechnical managers-to distraction.

A strange advert reminds us to recruit IT people who expect the goalposts to move, and enjoy the challenge.

All over Beijing, Olympic countdown clocks tick off the seconds that China has awaited for seven years: the moments until Aug. 8, 2008, at 8:00 pm, when the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics begin.

Derek Gannon has a state-of-the-art Apple MacBook Air on his desk when we meet at Guardian News & Media's London offices on the busy Farringdon Road. "I like to play with new things," Gannon says, while agreeing that, like the newspaper group that employs him as chief operating officer, Apple has a brand seen as fashionable, liberal and, some would say, design-led.

As budgets become tighter, the need to get IT people off pesky maintenance issues so they can drive innovative projects becomes more essential, making software as a service (SaaS) offerings an even more compelling option for CIOs.

Beset by funding and other resource challenges? IT governance, if done right, will improve your reputation, increase funding and help your IT systems impact strategic business operations

"Your skills are about executing through people," says Rorie Devine the former chief technology officer (CTO) of Betfair. Devine left Betfair after a four year career in which he was credited, by the Hammersmith based organization, with transforming the organization.

The development of innovative products and services - or for the sake of brevity, let us just call it new product development - is an imperative for enterprises of every stripe in response to rising stakeholder expectations and growing market competition. Unsurprising then that when asked about such things in the latest Gartner survey of CIOs, supporting and driving new product development was one of the predominant IT issues for 2008 and beyond