Allan Alter

Picture the kind of person you’d consider a security problem, and what leaps to mind? Chances are it’s the image of a young male who thinks he’s pretty darn smart—the Kevin Mitnick type. But it’s time for CIOs to focus their security efforts on young men and women who aren’t thinking smart. Will your security […]

In today’s overworked, overachieving world, David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (Viking, 288 pages; $24.95), has developed a large following for his approach to personal productivity improvement. The Ojai, Calif., author, speaker and coach provides a system for organizing all one’s tasks, projects and personal goals into a closed-loop […]

CIO Insight editors designed the 2007 Open Source Survey together with members of the Ziff Davis Media research staff. IT executives gathered from Ziff Davis Media publication lists were invited to participate in the study by e-mail. The questions were posted on a password-protected Web site, and 92 qualified respondents from companies with revenues in […]

Linus Torvalds, Eric S. Raymond and other visionaries of the open source movement, take a bow. Your dream—a thriving ecosystem of freely improvable, freely available software—has become a reality. Linux, the flagship technology of the movement, is well beyond the trial stage: A CIO Insight study of 90 companies with revenues below $500 million finds […]

Finding 1: It Pays to Be a CIO Compensation is increasing at large and midsize companies. The Society for Information Management’s warnings about an impending shortage of CIOs seems to be coming true. It’s the most likely explanation for the 12.4 percent increase in base salaries and bonuses for top IT executives since last year’s […]

What will you be doing in 2010? according to our latest annual study on the CIO’s role, you will be busy creating strategy and exploring new ways to use information and emerging technologies. CIOs may still come primarily from IT’s professional ranks, but just 8 percent of the 291 executives we surveyed believe technological acumen […]

Top I.T. executives at small and midsize companies are much less likely to have business cards that say “CIO” than their peers at organizations with revenues topping $500 million. But in other ways, the two groups are not very different. They have the same aspirations to create business strategy. Their personal backgrounds are comparable, primarily […]

I just can’t shake it. Our annual survey of top IT priorities ranked improving alignment No. 1. Alignment has topped the list of IT issues or priorities for decades, and I sometimes wonder if there’s anything new to say on the subject. But that’s the thing about alignment—it always is, and always will be, a […]

While most small and midsize businesses use outsourcers, they are more finicky about how they use them, compared with larger organizations. Except for application development, hosting and integration, fewer than one in four mid-market companies outsource major IT activities. But perhaps mid-market CIOs should use outsourcers more often—their peers at companies with revenues of less […]