For all businesses, growth is a good thing. More sales, more customers, more demand, more revenue. But growth has a funny way of exposing inefficiencies by shining a harsh light on wasteful, entrenched business practices, loosely stitched together by siloed IT systems, that lead to high operational costs and act as roadblocks to real change.

In all the world's religious cultures, particularly the most extreme, every adherent knows exactly what constitutes acceptable behaviour. There is usually a rigid hierarchy, and everyone shares a language, set of ideas and beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, rituals and ceremonies. Typically, the culture was defined so long ago that no living person has any real idea how the habits and practices now considered the norm evolved. And typically, that does not matter one whit, because everyone knows what they need to know: if they move beyond those norms they will be ostracized.

Ronald Reagan once famously said: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" Inside the government itself, the most terrifying words in the English language may be: "The information security office is here to facilitate your office's goals and objectives."

As governments around the world grapple with IT security, the US National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) has released a brief on making the business case for sustainable IT security funding.

As the government pledges a $200 million airport security plan, one company is warning of another pressing need: the adoption of knowledge-based technology for name recognition.

Radio Frequency Identification has the potential to revolutionize logistics, but first it must overcome its reputation as an intrusive technology.

Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft is not the dawn of a scary new era for CIOs; it's the twilight of the old ERP age. It may also be an opportunity to create an ERP future that adds value, not cost, to your business

Sure, you can save money by working with an outsourcing vendor in a faraway land. But don't trust the outsourcer to install the right security protections. Follow these best practices to verify that your relationship is cost-effective and safe.

Computing on the Net is heading for a fall because security is a joke. So we summoned the best minds to see if we could put Humpty back together again.

Is the job of looking after security too big for government CIOs to handle?

A recent survey of CIOs on their experience with business integration projects presents a worrying scenario - costs as a percentage of IT budget are high, successful completion is going down, the easy ones have all been done and the remaining projects are more complex and prone to failure in reaching their expected ROI.