Due Diligence: Rising and Setting
By Eric Nee

From the beginning, Sun Microsystems has seen itself as the irreverent outsider taking on the establishment. That led to Sun's early embrace of the microprocessor, Unix and the Internet. But as the rest of the world shifts further and further away from proprietary computing platforms to industry standard platforms, notes columnist Eric Nee, Sun continues to tout computers built around its own SPARC processor and Solaris operating system as the superior technology. But the vertically integrated model of creating computers is dead, and it's time for Sun to change if it wants to survive.

Synchronicity: Where's the Strategy?
By Marianne Broadbent

In her first column for this magazine, Marianne Broadbent, associate dean at the Melbourne Business School in Australia and a Gartner fellow, describes the plight of CIOs newly appointed to the executive committee—and thus closer than ever to the Holy Grail of The Business Strategy. Yet they soon discover that The Business Strategy does not exist in some document hidden away in the CEO's office. In the real world of strategy-making, strategy is dynamic: It is constantly evolving as the business—its customers, products, processes and services—interact with a volatile environment. It's a lesson every CIO who hopes to collaborate effectively on strategy creation and execution must learn.

Case Study: North Carolina Senate Race
By Edward Cone

In an age when political races can come down to a handful of votes, every advantage a candidate can gain is invaluable, says Senior Writer Edward Cone. In North Carolina's senate race, Erskine Bowles used an aggressive online campaign, replete with Weblogs and Internet fund-raising, to run against his Republican opponent, Richard Burr. Bowles used a host of former Howard Dean staffers to energize his campaign, creating a two-way communications hub for supporters and raising more than $500,000 online, but it wasn't enough to clinch the victory. While the power of online marketing is still in its infancy, Barack Obama, the senator-elect from Illinois, has collected more e-mail addresses in some states than the senators from those states. Stay tuned!

Analysis: Healthcare IT
By Jeffrey Rothfeder

Just how much can IT help the healthcare industry? Not much, so long as healthcare remains the poster child for the dysfunctional business model. Thousands of stakeholders—none of whose interests are aligned at all—are competing for a growing economic pie, and that makes the idea of investing millions of dollars in innovative IT to streamline operations and upgrade quality anathema. Yet the high stakes make it that much more critical to bring the efficiencies of IT to healthcare, notes Contributing Editor Jeffrey Rothfeder, and those leading the way are already seeing results.

Whiteboard: Creating an IT Performance Scorecard
By John Parkinson

Balanced scorecard models are a good way to think about the tricky issues of IT performance measurement, because they explicitly highlight the areas where measurement matters, and help to decide which measures are relevant in each area. This issue's Whiteboard was put together by John Parkinson, chief technologist for the Americas region at Capgemini and a columnist for this magazine, as an approach to an IT-focused measurement framework. As the graphic illustrates, the sets of measures—operational, business-oriented, architectural and ecosystem—are interdependent. That's because IT departments are dynamic systems, and everything must be kept balanced all the time.

Research: IT Organization
By the Editors of CIO Insight

IT departments have grown 3 percent on average in the past 12 months, and nearly 60 percent expect the number of IT employees at their companies will go up during the next two years, according to the latest survey of 581 IT executives. But where will the new hires come from? With outsourcing remaining at modest levels, and few companies tapping college IT graduates, CIOs will need to refocus on retaining IT talent and competing against other employers for IT pros with the right mix of skills. To do so, the results suggest, CIOs must focus on improving IT morale and performance, and create clear career paths for IT personnel.

Strategic Technology: Mobility
By Debra D'Agostino

Keeping track of all the wireless devices flooding into an enterprise these days is a bit like sticking your finger in a dam. The solution, argues Reporter Debra D'Agostino, is implementing a centralized mobility strategy to give IT a better view of the wireless landscape. Among the elements of that strategy: tiered support in which some devices are fully supported, some only a little, and some not at all; pushing the costs of procuring devices to the department level while managing the devices through IT; and protecting the network from security breaches with personal firewalls.