Management

CIOs looking to find a reliable cloud provider should seek one whose service has already fallen over, according to Dan Foody, vice president at Web services management provider Progress Actional.

Every company-from the smallest start-up to the largest firm-needs to be agile in today's market to respond to changing dynamics and new competition. But these days it's often the smaller companies who are better positioned to adapt: as the barriers to entry have decreased, emerging companies now have access to data streams-and techniques for analyzing them-that used to be the exclusive province of the largest companies.

No one has to remind CIOs just how bad the last 10 months have been: New data from our exclusive survey of top IT executives shows that CIOs may have hit rock bottom with their budgeting and cost-cutting measures.

Cloud Computing is coming to your neighbourhood, and market competition soon will demand that you give it attention, because its likely rapid growth will bring large benefits for enterprises.

Web 2.0 is a set of technologies, a huge set of related functionality and almost a lifestyle choice. This straight-up, non-techie tutorial will help you separate the facts from the hype.

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

Enterprise 2.0 has the potential to provide knowledge and content management in a surprisingly cheap and easy fashion using Web-based tools. Learn what it's about, what distinguishes it from consumer Web 2.0 technologies and why you should pay attention.

Most organisations can benefit from a balanced scorecard approach, which can raise the profile of key projects, increase functionality, and predict future performance — and it often leads to greater financial return.

It isn't often that you have access to your local neighborhood data centre, literally a few steps down the block. But I did. I live in a residential area of the US state of St. Louis called the Central West End, and I pass by the offices of the Regional Justice Information Service (REJIS) almost every day. When I learned that it was going to be moving its data centre, I knew that I had to be there for the actual move.

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?"

When Gartner's current CIO took the helm and called attention to terminal misalignment, was it a case of the emperor's new clothes? Here's a candid look at where Gartner's been and where it's going.

Announced in 1996, AMPlus, the IT alliance between AMP and then Andersen Consulting, was hailed as an "engine of transformation" by then CEO George Trumbull. Today, AMP is minus the "plus" and going it alone - welcome to IT@AMP

Power Twitter user, former Mac evangelist, and Alltop cofounder Guy Kawasaki knows a thing or two about innovation. But, he says, that doesn't make it easy.

Microsoft researcher Don Syme talks about the development of F#, its simplicity when solving complex tasks, the thriving F# community and the future ahead for this fuctional programming language.

IT leaders were told to "do more with less" even before economic woes exacerbated the issue. Savvy managers have always kept their eye on the goal: demonstrating what IT can do for the business, so that it's not always viewed as a cost center. Last week, one IT manager explained her strategy.

MIT Deputy Dean JoAnne Yates is co-author of an upcoming article on information overload called "Ubiquitous E-mail: Individual Experiences and Organizational Consequences of BlackBerry Use"

Small and midsize businesses that want to roll out ERP technology are paying too much attention to TCO and not enough to ROI, says new research. That could be a costly mistake.

Three business practices to learn from entrepreneurs, even if you're already bringing in the big bucks.

Everyone wants business/technology alignment and commodity services can help provide it this year.

In the first part of this series on The Case Against Cloud Computing, I noted that in speaking with a number of people involved with cloud computing, they (rather paradoxically) discussed with great vigor all the barriers to enterprises adopting cloud computing. As a result, I thought it would be useful to discuss the list of issues they (collectively) raised and offer some thoughts about them, particularly with regard to the potential for mitigation. The first of the series addressed the issue that, today at least, it is not possible to do a straight migration of a typically-architected corporate application into any of the common cloud services-they all impose their own architecture.