Stories about: Phoenix

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

Robert Fort, CIO of music retailer Virgin Entertainment Group, would have liked to wave a magic wand to give key employees the ability to easily transition between voice, instant messaging and videoconferencing technologies. His practical answer: a unified communications environment

Technical skills may never die, but areas of expertise wane in importance as technology advances force companies to evolve and IT staff to forsake yesterday's craft in favor of tomorrow's must-have talent.

We seem to have reached a point in our flat-world economy where virtually every private-sector CIO is a "global CIO" - a leader whose sphere of influence (and headaches) spans multiple continents.

You just rolled out Microsoft Windows Vista companywide, only to find your help desk flooded with calls. Or you spent hours with the mobile sales group going over the basics of laptop and wireless security, only to discover team members still opening rogue e-mail attachments and stumbling over password protocols.

Bad CIOs are a blight on the IT profession and on the organizations that employ them. The following list of behaviours common among bad CIOs will prevent you from hiring them into your organizations. If they're already there, it will give you good reason to eliminate them

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?"

As the technology partner (head of IT) at global law firm Bryan Cave, John Alber saw increasing resources being devoted to keeping multiple information systems integrated and the data flowing among them. Over time, the law firm brought in what it considered the best tools to handle tasks such as document repositories, e-mail management, conflict-of-interest databases and calendar management, to help attorneys and support staff research, collaborate and stay abreast of case developments

From adversity to opportunity: Scott's new job is good for him and for CIOs in general.

For the last 25 years, I have lived in TCP/IP packets more than I do in the real world. I do have personal connections; I'm involved in community activities, and I have warm-blooded friends who would notice if I quit breathing. Those people have my phone number and physical address... but my virtual correspondents do not. If I disappeared from one of those online communities, would they notice?

When it comes to cleaning up their act, many CIOs are recognizing data centres as among the lowest hanging fruit. IDC estimates companies spent $US26.1 billion to power and cool servers worldwide in 2005, with a monstrous $14 billion of that being spent in the US alone. In fact, data centres account for between 1.5 and 3 percent of all electricity consumed in the US. Should current trends persist, the research organization projects, that bill will soar to $US50 billion by the end of the decade