Allan Alter

Ever since 1964, when a researcher named Michael S. Scott Morton coined the phrase “decision support system” in a basement office at Harvard Business School’s Sherman Hall, technologists have tried to build systems that can help managers understand what’s going on inside and outside their companies, and thus make better tactical and strategic business decisions. […]

The news on the IT security front is alarming. Recent months have seen one report after another of companies exposing, selling or simply losing customer data to criminals. The reason: The security threat has changed, according to Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane Internet Security Inc., of Mountain View, Calif. In the past three years, he […]

The language is dry but the findings are damning. Despite some improvements, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, in its first comprehensive study of computer security in the federal government conducted under the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act, found “pervasive weaknesses” in security practices at 24 major agencies. The departments of Defense and Homeland Security […]

They don’t like to be told what to do. They enjoy more autonomy than other workers. Much of their work is invisible and hard to measure, because it goes on inside their heads or outside the office. They are a growing part of the U.S. workforce, and their skills are hard to replace. They’re knowledge […]

Pedestrians gabbing on cell phones and office workers checking their PDAs are as much a part of the street scene today as traffic signs. But mobile and wireless technologies are no longer just a convenience; for most companies they have become a necessity. In this month’s survey, 83 percent of the 357 IT executives who […]

88% of companies reach customers through their Web sites 19% of IT budgets go to customer-focused activities 43% of CIOs have regular contact with top customers 43% say billing or account problems have hurt customer satisfaction 42% of customer data is used to better understand customers Some truisms get truer with time, and “the customer […]

5.4% of corporate budgets are spent specifically on innovation. 73% of IT departments are involved in new product and service innovation. 28% of companies are early adopters of information technology. 68% of companies have received significant payoffs from adopting emerging technology. 64% say emerging technologies play an integral role in supporting corporate innovation. To download […]

On April 13, William H. Donaldson, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, held a roundtable to discuss the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. He and his staff had heard stories, he said in his introductory remarks, of unanticipated expenses, management-auditor misunderstandings and redundant testing procedures. “Are these isolated instances or are they widespread?” he […]

26% of CIOs spent half their career in IT and half outside of IT 55% say contributing to corporate strategy is one of their three top responsibilities 34% of CIOs manage another corporate function while running IT 16% spend most of their time dealing with emergencies 55% report to the chairman, CEO or president of […]

Businesspeople are driven not just by money and achievement, but by fear—fear of failure, of losing power, of appearing incompetent. But the greatest fear of all is probably fear of losing one’s livelihood. That’s why the specter of outsourcing can still evoke a bell-in-the-night dread: No one wants to get fired, or be the bogeyman […]

Fifteen years of research, books and articles have earned Mary Lacity, a professor of information systems at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, a reputation as a top expert on IT outsourcing. She says the current offshoring trend greatly resembles the domestic outsourcing frenzy of the early 1990s. CIO Insight Executive Editor Allan Alter spoke with […]

The recession is over, the economy is improving, IT spending is increasing, and IT hiring is rebounding. When this combination of conditions last occurred a decade ago, companies launched an IT arms race. Fortunes were spent and frequently wasted on information technology in the days of the Internet bubble and Y2K. Today, we’re once again […]