Management

PMO is an acronym with a range of different meetings with very different implications

Do video games stimulate the intellect? Are gamers more social and better equipped to make decisions than nongamers?

There are certain key points that have shaped the way technology is today. We've rounded up the 15 most important milestones and explained why they changed the course of the industry.

Enterprise IT shops are starting to embrace the notion of building private clouds, modeling their infrastructure after public service providers such as Amazon and Google. But while virtualization and other technologies exist to create computing pools that can allocate processing power, storage and applications on demand, the technology to manage those distributed resources as a whole is still in the early stages.

Let the IT manager who is without sin cast the first stone.

What is service-oriented architecture (SOA)? Do you need one? And if you do, what are the first steps you need to take to create an SOA of your very own?

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

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"

Charles Giancarlo spent more than a decade at Cisco Systems and was widely considered a likely heir to Chairman and CEO John Chambers before he left last year for investment company Silver Lake Partners. Then Silver Lake orchestrated a private-equity buyout of Cisco rival Avaya, and Giancarlo stepped in as interim president and CEO. In January, former JDS Uniphase chief Kevin Kennedy will take over day-to-day operations as president and CEO, and Giancarlo will become chairman. Stephen Lawson of the IDG News Service spoke with Giancarlo on Tuesday after he delivered the opening keynote at VoiceCon in San Francisco.

Microsoft this week launched its cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, which is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform for developing applications extending from the cloud to PCs, datacenters, phones, and the Web. Microsoft's goal is to let Windows developers transition from Windows client development to Windows cloud development, using familiar tools, both those from Microsoft and other sources such as Eclipse. Developers would continue to develop apps on their desktops, but the Azure platform would handle the app deployment in the cloud.

Businesses buy computer-related goods and services all the time. Just to name a few examples, they buy consultants and technicians' time, custom programming, software and hardware. The way the parties usually handle the paperwork is that the vendor gives the customer their form and the customer signs it. After all, the form is printed so it can't be changed. Wrong!

No two IT shops conduct business in the same way: CIOs report to various executives, project approval processes are all over the board, and personnel policies are vastly different. Unlike other professions, IT doesn't seem to have a common set of basic principles across companies.

As corporate budgets have tightened, your company has asked you to choose a maximum of four items to support your work. You will be provided only with these items. Can you get by without a BlackBerry? How much do you really need a desk? Your PC? Take a look at some interesting survey results.

Mentoring your team creates an IT department that is better able to compete for talent and business advantage, says the CIO of Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development.

Projects that sail along smoothly, with no resistance, are great. But it's the ones that throw lots of roadblocks in our way that end up teaching us things.