Stacy Collett

After working at a large Midwestern manufacturing company for 22 years, a senior IT design analyst understood that times were tough for her firm, so she didn't complain about the two per cent raise she got in 2003. But this year her empathy turned to irritation when her performance improved but her salary didn't.

Viruses, hackers, unrest in outsourcing locations, employee apathy, a jobless economic recovery and stagnant budgets - these are the challenges that try IT leaders' souls. While 2003 brought a glimpse of economic recovery, few IT leaders at the annual Computerworld U.S. IT leaders awards program last December reported a positive impact on technology budgets or staff size. The mantra remains the same: do more with less.

It's 3 p.m. on July 3, a few hours before the long Fourth of July weekend, and Jill Fosmire is fully engaged in her most serious crisis since taking her job nine months ago.

When retailers jumped on the e-commerce bandwagon in the late 1990s, spinning off e-business units and loading up on bleeding-edge technologies, Milwaukee-based Master Lock Co. ignored the hype.

Toysrus.com is tripling the number of servers that process orders after ...

Intel Corp. was working feverishly earlier this month to find the root cause of and remedy for a bug in its Pentium III Xeon 550MHz processor. The bug affects the performance of some eight-way servers, but observers said the problem won