CIO Executive

Microsoft is readying its next major release of the Windows operating system. After months of demos, early testing, beta releases, and finally announced launch plans, here's what you can expect in an upgrade.

Sweden's Pirate Party won 7.13 percent of the vote in elections earlier this month. Its campaign for the respect of privacy, the reform of copyright law and the abolition of the patent system earned it a seat in the European Parliament, and it may yet gain another seat there, if planned changes to the number of seats attributed to each country win approval.

The .eu TLD (top-level domain name) for Web sites allows non-ASCII characters in its Web addresses, after it opened up the TLD to addresses written in Cyrillic and Greek letters, the European Commission said Friday.

The Palm Pre, the world's first webOS device, went on sale in the United States on June 6. With it Palm launched a corresponding mobile software channel, the Pre App Catalog, which already boasts a number of great applications. Earlier this week, Medialets, a mobile advertising and analytics firm, released App Catalog metrics that suggest Palm's new app store hit the 1M downloads mark on June 24, just 18 days after its launch. Palm Pre App Catalog Total App Downloads Since Launch, via Medialets

Google has launched Google Profiles, which lets you build an online biography listing your interests, educational and professional background, and links to your data on websites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

The combination of innovative IT and a cooperative orientation toward vendors leads directly to better vendor performance and firm profitability.

SLAs are a critical component of any vendor contract. Beyond listing expectations of service type and quality, an SLA provides remedies when requirements aren't met.

Advisory committees can help align IT and business objectives - as long as the CIO keeps a firm hand on the tiller

Six experts offer their ideas on the future of the CIO role, the supply chain, just-in-time manufacturing, security, management and other issues affected by the terrorist attacks in the US.

To witness the paradox of health care technology, take a stroll down the hallway of any hospital or medical centre

No matter how precious the dollars, the companies that continue to look for new ways to do business are the companies that succeed

How does the recruiting industry work?

Author Nicholas Carr and CIO (US) editor in chief Abbie Lundberg go toe-to-toe on the strategic value of IT

Hosting the Australian Open might sound glamorous, but for Tennis Australia it also means coping with the mother of all seasonal spikes.

Corporate executives have a hard time executing their business strategies because they just aren't tough enough, says strategic planning expert C Davis Fogg. A US-based consultant to blue-chip companies and the author of Implementing Your Strategic Plan (Amacom, 1999), Fogg says strategic plans flop because executives don't follow through. They fail to lead. They fail to hold their employees - or themselves - accountable for results.

In many ways, the role of the CSO is directly tied to business profitability. By creating and enforcing policies that protect human, physical and intellectual assets, the CSO ensures the very integrity of the organization. This link to the bottom line, though, is about to become much stronger--and quite possibly much sooner than anticipated.

Microsoft quietly got its proposed Office Open XML format through two European standards bodies. A member of the Free Software Foundation Europe looks at the low-profile process that made it happen.

Deploying Google Apps could be a "career-limiting move for enterprise architects" if they expect too much from the software-as-a-service collaboration suite and its "rudimentary" feature set, the Burton Group research and consulting firm says in a new report.