Business

The day Randy Mott left Dell for Hewlett-Packard in 2005 it caused a stir in the IT world. At the time, HP was a company in transition. Its CEO Carly Fiorina had been ousted following the most tempestuous period in the company's history, and the new CEO Mark Hurd recognized immediately that a major change was necessary to stabilize the company.

Sriram Raghavan and Ravi Rangan of Comat Technologies believe that willingness to adopt IT and a sense of ownership are crucial for e-governance initiatives.

Enterprise apps for the iPhone

Protecting the realizable value of your project

It's a good time to aspire to IT stardom.

We know your company uses open-source applications. We also know many of you already have an open-source policy. Sort of. As CIO.com discovered when researching the adoption of open-source in enterprise IT, a quarter of respondents have a formal policy in place to control how such software is chosen, supported and deployed. Another 18 per cent expected to adopt such a policy in the next 12 months. But those who have some kind of policy aren't necessarily thrilled with it; just 45 per cent said their policies are very effective.

Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center caused scores of companies to reconsider their disaster recovery and business continuity plans, whether they were affected by those catastrophic events or not.

The incessant waves of corporate governance legislation, industry codes and various other rules and regulations that have been passed in recent years might have been bad news for many, but they have been a blessing for companies operating in the field of enterprise content management, or ECM.

It's not uncommon to use more than one computer during the course of a week: a Mac at work, a PC at home and a laptop on the road. When people search for applications that will work across all platforms, many look for an open-source solution first, only to discover that apps that work on Windows are woefully underdeveloped for the Mac.

"As an IT manager, are you going to put your reputation on the line that five guys from a small startup in Vancouver are to deliver for your organization," asked Jevon MacDonald, blogger and co-founder at StartupNorth.ca.

Accountability without authority is a recipe for failure. Here's how to make sure it doesn't happen to you

Not many people-including business analysts themselves-are able to agree upon a standard job description, typical skill sets, proper training methods or a well-defined career path for the business analyst position.

Strategic CIOs touch every point of the organization, even some areas that are not considered to be their immediate territory. Over the last decade law firms have changed from fusty redbrick elite clubs to thrusting commercial organizations that compete for business in a market where customers are now fully aware that they can shop around. For Graeme Low, head of IT at Cambridge based law firm Mills & Reeve, his role involves enabling a company to continue its recent record of rapid growth, provide systems that entice staff to join the company and improve communications to customers. He tells CIO how he and his team have achieved this.

Until recently, many CIOs didn't know how much electricity their IT equipment used, and they didn't care.

A German scientific research institute is using an open-source database running on Linux and x86 hardware to store global seismic activity data and to interpret that data. The purpose is to ensure that countries around the world are in compliance with the terms of the nuclear test ban treaty.