Christopher Lindquist

Like it or not, you live in the era of the "shadow IT department." Consumer tools and toys have attached themselves to your corporate infrastructure, usually without your knowledge and consent. You feel the impact in the form of security problems, support issues and user frustration.

A service-oriented architecture can be a powerful tool for changing your business

With the price of colour laser models dropping below US$200, ink-jets being given away free as come-ons for computer stores and even cheap units able to deliver decent photo-quality prints, it's hard to find anything worth printing about printers anymore. But a recent demonstration by Brother Industries and separate news from MIT and Hewlett-Packard recently made printers exciting again.

The corporate culture issues surrounding the arrival of a new application can be daunting, but within the next few decades CIOs are going to...

Imagine a green field just waiting to grow an IT operation capable of supporting 1,000 college students, staff and faculty. You and your team need to set standards and design the systems necessary to make the new school a model research university.

What is utility computing, really? Better yet, what does it mean to the CEO? Vendor bombasts would have your CEO believe that the brave, new utility world is just around the corner. And while some businesses are already taking their first steps toward utility (using existing tools and practices), this relatively new form of computing shouldn't be on every company's agenda.

Halsey Minor, founder and CEO of Web services integrator Grand Central Communications Inc., thinks they have it all wrong. The big vendors, he said, are intent on pushing application intelligence to the edges of the network while keeping the centre

Twice in the past few weeks I've taken part in conference panels dedicated to helping startup companies improve their chances of surviving in hard times. In short, these folks paid to try to wine, dine and putt their way to the Buy It Now button buried deep inside every CIO's head. By and large, the feedback wasn't encouraging.