Terry Paulson, the widely-acclaimed author and motivational speaker once said, "Don't struggle against change; learn to use it to your advantage." North Delhi Power Limited (NDPL) did just this when it took over from the ailing Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB) about four years ago. The shift is a lesson in change management - and for NDPL, it has brought down its aggregate technical & commercial (AT&C) losses from over 50 to 22 per cent.

If there is any doubt to the power of social media, social networking and social software, then nonbelievers may need to Think New Orleans.

There are things you can do in just 20 minutes that can have a meaningful and even a long term positive effect on your IT organization, your career, your technology knowledge, your management skills and your relationship with the business. We've gathered 20 of the best ideas we could find

Author Jim Collins explains why he sees CIOs as quiet leaders, and what challenges they face in their drive to be the best

One essential promise for Enterprise 2.0, or Web 2.0 for the enterprise, is making important information available to the people who need it, in large part by using blogs and wikis to capture and store institutional knowledge, says Dion Hinchcliffe, president and CTO of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 consultancy Hinchcliffe and Company, during his session at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston

The era of voluntary reliability standards for electric utilities has ended, and power companies now face a set of US federally mandated rules that can cost them up to $US1 million a day in fines if they turn the lights out on their customers.

A year has passed, but Aug. 29, 2005, remains a fresh memory for Mississippi Power CIO Aline Ward: As Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast, Ward scrambled to keep communication lines open from a command center in the utility's Gulfport plant. Because this storm center was located several miles inland, Ward thought equipment would be safe from flooding. "We were on the second floor, but soon the water started to rise and come inside the building," recalls Ward. Working in the dark, Ward and her IT colleagues piled sandbags against the door and bailed water from the room to keep radio communications equipment up and running.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then capitalism is surely the mother of innovation. Five of this year's CIO 100 honorees were driven to develop unique applications of undeniably cool technologies by the almighty dollar (the need to make it and to save it).

When it comes to testing an IT system, William Cross, the CIO of Seminole Electric Cooperative Inc. in Tampa, Fla., uses an approach that his staff describes as "brutal." But it's a system Cross hopes will avoid sleep-disturbing middle-of-the-night production failures -- part of a larger effort to keep his staff from getting stressed out.

After three years of work and $US18 million spent, Philadelphia still has not deployed a water billing system for its half-million customers and is now working with Oracle Corp. -- the major vendor behind the project -- to get it back on track.