MIT Deputy Dean JoAnne Yates is co-author of an upcoming article on information overload called "Ubiquitous E-mail: Individual Experiences and Organizational Consequences of BlackBerry Use"

Charles Giancarlo spent more than a decade at Cisco Systems and was widely considered a likely heir to Chairman and CEO John Chambers before he left last year for investment company Silver Lake Partners. Then Silver Lake orchestrated a private-equity buyout of Cisco rival Avaya, and Giancarlo stepped in as interim president and CEO. In January, former JDS Uniphase chief Kevin Kennedy will take over day-to-day operations as president and CEO, and Giancarlo will become chairman. Stephen Lawson of the IDG News Service spoke with Giancarlo on Tuesday after he delivered the opening keynote at VoiceCon in San Francisco.

Microsoft this week launched its cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, which is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform for developing applications extending from the cloud to PCs, datacenters, phones, and the Web. Microsoft's goal is to let Windows developers transition from Windows client development to Windows cloud development, using familiar tools, both those from Microsoft and other sources such as Eclipse. Developers would continue to develop apps on their desktops, but the Azure platform would handle the app deployment in the cloud.

When Anne Mulcahy took over as CEO of Xerox in August 2001, the outlook for the company to which she had devoted 25 years of her life could hardly have been bleaker. Xerox was over $17 billion in debt, bankruptcy appeared inevitable, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating alleged accounting irregularities.

Bill Vargas has been working for The Children's Hospital at Westmead for more than two decades. When he started, its use of IT was primarily concerned with corporate functions such as patient billing and demographics. Today, as the CIO of its Information Services division, Vargas and his team increasingly deploy solutions designed to improve clinical processes. He chatted with BRIAN CORRIGAN about the changing role of technology in the healthcare industry.

If not planned in a careful way and overseen with vigilance, IT systems can easily grow into complicated beasts that are hard to manage, overly expensive and, ultimately, a roadblock to corporate success. For many firms, simplifying their systems is the key to ensuring that IT is more of a help than a hindrance. Canada-based furniture manufacturer Palliser Furniture has been undertaking its own simplification process for the last three years. CIO Jason Bergeron talks about the difficulties involved and his team's successes.

With 20 parks and nearly US$1 billion in sales, Six Flags is the second-largest amusement park operator in the world. Since coming to Six Flags as part of a management reorganization two years ago, CIO Michael Israel has overseen a bottom-up rebuilding of the IT architecture in the parks and in the company's data center, which moved from New York to Dallas. Israel describes the amusement park business as a shopping mall with rides. "Spend per attendee is everything," he says.

Traditional, arranged marriages over the Internet. Try selling that to conservative and technology-shy Indian parents. Laughable. That's what the concept behind Shaadi.com must have seemed in the early 90's.

In the early 90's, Domino's outlets in the US called off their 30-minutes-or-free program after a woman sued the company when a harried delivery-person hit her. Media pressure to safeguard the lives of pizza delivery people soon came to India. Suddenly, pizza chains eased away from their 30-minute guarantees. Some companies moved to a 39-minute promise while others decided to forgo the concept entirely.

Merrill spoke to us before he announcing his move from the search giant.

Michael Schrage has some advice, and it's not just for IT managers.