Oh, it must be nice to be the CIO of a FedEx or a GE or a Credit Suisse. Places where IT and the business are so tightly aligned you can barely tell the two apart. Where corporate leaders understand that IT is a strategic asset and support it as such

Does your executive search firm know its MIS managers from its elbow? Does it even know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients?

"Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog . . . " The inter-generational office brew of Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y may not be quite as odious as that of the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, but even so it makes "for a charm of powerful trouble"

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

Often, the difference between success and failure is spotting critical early warning signs that a project is in trouble. Here are a few ways to identify the symptoms

Damaged. Lost. Stolen. Too big, too small. Insecure and unreliable. And just plain annoying. If you're in IT, there's just not much to like about laptops.

Whatever you do, please don't call Stephanie Lee a geek. Sure, she's majoring in information technology and marketing at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where she's a senior.

Penetration tests conducted by a group of non-IT students has set the cat among the pigeons in the security community, spurring analysts and security professionals to emphasise the importance of certified penetration tests.

Do you know how much your home office costs? I'm not talking about the price you paid for the equipment (you probably do know that amount). Rather, I mean how much of a financial and environmental burden it is to you and your community on an ongoing basis.

From the start, Henry Malmgren was determined to get to the South Pole. After graduating from Texas Tech University in 1998 with a degree in MIS he applied for a job in the Antarctic every year before NSF contractor Raytheon finally hired him as a network engineer in 2001. Since then he has alternated between the Denver headquarters and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, spending two summers and two winters there before finally working his way up to IT manager. Staying over is a commitment: Once the winter starts, there's no way to get in and out of the base until summer begins eight to nine months later. "I thought I would just do this for a single season, but somehow it always seemed too easy to keep coming back," he says.