CIO Insight Staff

Mark Lutchen, the former global CIO at PricewaterhouseCoopers, wrote the book on managing IT as a business—literally. The author of Managing IT as a Business: A Survival Guide for CEOs (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2004) avers that CIOs don’t need to sit at the executive table to be successful. What really counts is providing […]

According to the “2005 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey,” published by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, electronic employee monitoring is on the rise. Roughly 76 percent of all companies monitor workers’ Web site connections, and 36 percent track content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. Half of all U.S. companies store […]

When it comes to making sense of the overwhelming volume of data that’s been unleashed upon the world over the past ten years, no company has had more of an impact than Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. Anyone who had the misfortune of using Alta Vista as their primary search engine in the early 1990s […]

Rocketing oil prices are driving the nation’s big oil companies to record profits, but even among this powerful group, one stands out: ExxonMobil. No company seems clearer about itself and its mission. Exxon uses its financial might to invest heavily in applications that give it an edge in finding increasingly harder-to-reach oil and gas deposits. […]

Companies need to do a better job managing their intellectual property, according to a recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers. The study, which surveyed CEOs from 339 private, fast-growing companies, revealed that less than a third of such firms have a formal process in place to manage their IP—patents, copyrights, corporate secrets and the like. Furthermore, CEOs […]

Bert Reese, 58, is chief information officer of Sentara Healthcare, which operates seven hospitals in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. Sentara, which had $2.2 billion in revenue in 2005, in January began rolling out Epic Systems’ clinical information system. The project is expected to cost $270 million in hardware, software and operating expenses over […]

If yet another Windows release date falls by the wayside, would anyone care? That’s the question that Microsoft watchers are asking, as Microsoft comes into the home stretch with its Windows Vista release. Researchers with the Gartner Group issued a customer note on May 1, claiming that Microsoft will ship Windows Vista in the second […]

EDS announced Friday a seven-year information-technology outsourcing contract with Kraft Foods, the $23 billion food company, worth an estimated $1.7 billion over that time—making it the biggest deal EDS has ever signed in the consumer packaged goods industry. EDS will assume responsibility for Kraft’s I.T. infrastructure, providing a range of services including managing data centers, […]

The colossal merger of Union Pacific and Southern Pacific in 1996 created the nation’s biggest railroad, one that today covers more than 32,000 miles of track, with 8,000 locomotives and more than 100,000 freight cars. Yet integrating the two railroad companies was something of a train wreck. Difficulty combining the two railroads’ computer systems led […]

Service-oriented architecture is catching on fast: According to a recent IDC report, SOA spending will reach $8.6 billion in 2006—a 138 percent increase from 2005, when spending totaled $3.6 billion. By 2010, IDC estimates companies will spend upwards of $33 billion on SOA services. But some companies got in on the SOA action early. Starwood […]

When it comes to Windows Live, there are a lot more questions than there are answers (at least public ones). Is there any rhyme or reason as to what Microsoft is launching as an add-on service, versus a bundled feature? Is there any intentional order in the rollout of Windows Live services? When will these […]

Are you paying enough attention to your company’s data center? Probably not, according to AFCOM, the Orange, Calif.-based association for data management professionals. AFCOM recently released a set of predictions resulting from a membership study it completed in March. The facts are startling. For starters, while 83 percent of respondents say their company has a […]