For the last several months Microsoft has been pushing for their Office Open XML (OOXML) office suite file specification to be accepted as an international standard by ISO, presumably to help them gain traction for future government contracts (look, this file specification is an ISO standard, it must be good).

If you needed any more reminders about why it isn't a good idea to use external mail services to conduct critical business, the recent break-in to US Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com Yahoo inbox should be it. Of note is that following the disclosure of the inboxes the compromised address and another address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, have been suspended.

In recent days, news and government websites in Georgia have suffered DDoS attacks. While these attacks seem to indirectly affect the backbone of the Georgian Internet, it is still there.

With recent reporting showing the ineffectiveness of breach disclosure laws on the rate and scope of data losses, what sort of teeth will HIPAA and similar laws have when electronic health records are compromised in similar numbers and scope.

Why would someone complete medical school and residency training, then spend a decade in IT to become a CIO?

Great contributions to civilization inevitably bring great capacity for misuse. The highly popular management concept of TCO, or total cost of ownership, is no exception. TCO is a good way to measure systems costs - but not overall business value. Unfortunately, too many shops willingly allow TCO to substitute for a solid business value analysis as input into IT investment prioritization decisions. Any chance your shop is unintentionally throwing these decision-making curveballs? Let's take a closer look at the real nature of TCO and the role it should play in IT selection decisions.

Every $1 invested in computers yields between $5 and $17 in stock market value. Whereas, $1 invested in property, plant and equipment (book value) only yields $1 in stock market value. And $1 investment in other assets (inventory, liquid assets and accounts receivables) yields only 70 cents. So say a distinguished group of researchers - Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT Sloan School of Management), Lorin Hitt (University of Pennsylvania Wharton School) and Shinkyu Yang (New York University Stern School). They set out to see whether a company's stock market valuation correlated with the size of its computer investments and its organisational practices. It does!

CIOS AND CFOS may not always see eye-to-eye, but one topic is dear to the hearts of both, and that's value.

CFOs look for certain things in a good IT budget. Here's what yours should - and shouldn't - include.