CIO Soapbox

It’s time to get back to reality and offer something positive and constructive: better planning; saving by investing into your staff; shutting down failing projects; and delivering solutions together with your client.

During the past few years, free consumer applications and social technologies were the primary focus of start-ups in Silicon Valley. Now, with venture capital drying up, these same firms have begun tightening their belts, announcing layoffs while shelving new development projects. Though this will have obvious effects on the consumer Web, it will also profoundly hurt business technology, which, at its best, mimics the moves of its cooler consumer cousin.

Like a falling guillotine blade, stock markets around the world come crashing down, chopping off the head of the old economy. Something old is dying so that something new can emerge. It’s scary but in some ways it’s also a relief. It seemed like the old economy was turning us into obsessive, compulsive, out of control creatures we politely call “consumers”. Can anyone really say they’re surprised at what’s happening (anyone except Alan Greenspan who is “shocked” - like Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca who enters Rick’s Café and says, “I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!)?

An article from the Financial Times serves to highlight yet again the damaging flaws in the often-repeated ratio of IT maintenance to new IT investment.

Is there a time when a job seeker should stop trying to find a new job? If your job search has been going on for months, maybe over a year, is there an appropriate length of time or some other condition when a job seeker should "put a fork in it" and quit?

You can develop a business case that is strong, well thought out and fully supported by all of the facts – in other words, one that is entirely intellectual, which “aims for the head” - and watch support for the project gradually decline as the inevitable difficulties emerge.

The word is that the next president of the United States will invest heavily in technology, and at least one candidate has already discussed choosing a Chief Technology Officer to lead the charge. Who do you think would be right for the job?

A recent experience of being in a writing slump got me thinking about just how transparent we should be with our bosses regarding our workloads and our productivity--especially when we're not performing at our best and especially when the economy is bad. When it comes to your boss, there's honesty, and then there's too much information, and your job security may depend on you knowing the difference.

Banks and lenders make no secret of the fact that they rely on their own and the credit-card companies' data mining, analysis and predictive-modeling software to scour databases chock full of consumer financial and personal information.

If I had to do it over again, I would have inserted a few snarky questions into our cloud computing survey that came out this week. They would have been added around the section about security, seeing as security concerns topped the worries IT pros and leaders had over cloud computing.

In my analysis yesterday of SAP's recent increase in maintenance fees for all of its customers, and why that pricing should actually have gone down, I might have left some of you hanging: "Well, now that you've told us we're basically stuck with SAP, then why don't you give us a solution, Mr. Bigshot Opinion."

Though it's tempting, skipping a Microsoft Vista migration and jumping right to Windows 7 could be disastrous for your enterprise, Gartner advises. Here's five points to consider before writing off Vista for its successor.

Nobody likes to pay more for something that they've been already getting, for roughly the same price, for a decade.

During a recession, will we get more ideas that foster the creation of innovative technologies? Or will incessant cost-cutting and increased unemployment stifle innovation for years to come. History, and surveys of the venture capital landscape, offer different takes.

In the battle to get enterprise customers to switch to Gmail and the Google Apps software suite, Google has to meet higher expectations than existing business software vendors. While that might be unfair, it's their cross to bear for being such a powerhouse on the consumer Web and for all the high-profile media coverage the company receives.