Relationships between the CIO and business executives will inevitably become strained, with broken promises and eroding trust. So how do you keep them from going completely off the rails?

Slowly but surely, many US companies are loosening their viselike grips on IT hiring and looking to add new staffers to bolster business growth in the year ahead.

Optus has slashed its IT help desk costs by 60 per cent after rolling out self-service security software.

A help desk can be a real lifesaver for employees, not to mention a productivity boost. A keyboard stops working, or Outlook crashes repeatedly, and a technician is just a phone call away. Even complex issues can usually be resolved internally, and relatively quickly, without needing an outside vendor.

If your help desk software is giving you trouble, there are some open source options available. In this part of CIO's five open source applications to watch we take a look at help desk software, which is the basis of incident response and IT service delivery.