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"

CIOs should never forget that while new technologies have a maturity cycle, the maturity cycle for human beings in IT is even longer

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

Every innovation, every business process improvement, comes with an IT complexity tax that must be paid by CIOs in time, money and sweat. Here are strategies to mitigate the increasing complexity of IT as it enables new business.

It's one of the great truths of capitalism: Businesses want to grow. Small businesses want to become midsize businesses, and midsize ones want to get big.

If Apple were a football team, the New England Patriots would have had some serious competition this year.

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.

Moderator-Julie: Welcome and thank you for coming. Our guest today is certification guru Patrick Regan. Patrick has penned over a dozen books, written the study guides for the A+ certification exams for Cisco Press and is currently writing an Exam Cram on Windows Server 2008. When not writing books, Patrick is a senior network engineer at Pacific Coast Companies supporting a large enterprise network and a celebrity blogger for Microsoft Subnet. We are giving away 15 free copies of Patrick's latest book, too. Go to the contest page for details. Now onto the chat.

Like many gearheads, I've owned a lot of portable computers over the years -- and I've wanted to replace every last one with a smaller, sleeker upgrade, from the "luggable" Apple IIc onward. But most of those upgrades have left me disappointed: with the lack of software; with cheap, hard-to-use interfaces; and with "optional" add-ons that were in fact very much necessary to make the machine useful.