Mitch Betts

Squandered staff time, project disruption, missed cost-cutting opportunities and rework -- all things CIOs need to avoid as they start planning their finances for the coming year

Beyond the fourth year, laptops are more trouble than they

CIOs know intuitively that too much customization and a hodgepodge of IT products will boost costs. Yet when business managers have argued that their particular group has unique needs requiring yet another custom system, CIOs haven

The economy seems to be picking up a little; IT budgets are supposed to be edging upward this year. But still there's a dip in the morale of IT workers, according to Computerworld U.S.'s 2004 survey of 16,968 IT employees at the 100 Best Places to Work in IT.

These are challenging times for IT project managers.

Ever wondered why IT project status reports are so upbeat, managers continue to fund losing efforts, and some projects are doomed from the start? Sue Young, CEO of ANDA Consulting in Colchester, Vt., thinks about that all the time. She talked with Computerworld's Mitch Betts about preventing failure in IT projects and why risk management isn't enough.

Sometimes the results from data analysis are just plain absurd. Web logs show that one of the most common search phrases entered at Computerworld's Web site one week was

When people think of management dashboards, they often think of what used to be called executive information systems (EIS). An EIS provides a fancy computer display of key financial metrics for the corner office. But research by John Hagerty, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. in Boston, indicates that dashboards (also called scorecards) are showing up at all levels of the company and provide data other than financial metrics.