CIO Insight Staff

THE PROBLEM: The emergency management agency for Lake County, Ohio, mistakenly placed 5,600 automated phone calls to area residents between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. on April 13 and 14 about its rabies-vaccine program for wild raccoons, after a key component in its alerting system failed. Needless to say, county officials quickly caught wind of […]

It was once thought that the Internet would be the great equalizer, a place where knowledge could be shared across continents and cultures. Of course, in 2006, we know better: The rapid growth of the Web often makes finding credible information more difficult than the good old days of the Dewey Decimal System. But at […]

As companies seek to make Sarbanes-Oxley (Sox) compliance more efficient and sustainable, they are investing in a new wave of Sox-related software, says Paul Hamerman, vice president, enterprise applications at Forrester Research. “During the first cycle of Sox 404 compliance, companies were under time constraints and weren’t familiar with the new regulations,” Hamerman says, referring […]

Jeff Hawkins founded Palm Computing and Handspring Inc. Yet he doesn’t consider himself a technologist. “I don’t know if I’m even good at it,” he says. Hawkins is the creator of the Palm Pilot and the Treo line of smartphones, and has launched a new company, Numenta, that aims to build machines based on a […]

The Problem: In late January, California’s Employment Development Department, a state agency that provides job-placement services and disability insurance, mailed 63,000 tax statements that included Social Security numbers and income data—to the wrong addresses. The misdirected statements, which represented 4% of the 1.5 million the agency sent out, were supposed to go to individuals who […]

Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at Cymfony Inc., a media-analysis company based in Watertown, Mass., raves about Internet advertising. A veteran of marketing campaigns at such leading advertising agencies as Ogilvy & Mather Direct, Draft Worldwide, Bates USA and Hill Holliday, Nail says that response rates are not the only way to calculate […]

LEAD STORY: Which companies are the smartest? Using public financial data companies have reported over the past three years, Baseline contributor Paul A. Strassmann has developed a formula that can be used to rank companies by how smart they are. The formula is another way to evaluate how well an information-technology department is supporting an […]

In 1996, when Ralph Szygenda took over the top IT spot at General Motors Corp., he was the company’s very first CIO. His task: Take a highly decentralized company that had relied on one IT vendor, EDS Corp. (which GM owned) for more than a decade, and integrate its far-flung IT operations. “It was an […]

The U.S. Military is often criticized for overspending on its convoluted bureaucracy. But when it comes to electronic patient records, Uncle Sam may just be the model of healthcare efficiency. In the private sector, electronic health records are gaining about as much traction as a snowboard in quicksand. According to a September 2005 study conducted […]

Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change By Bob Seidensticker BERRETT-KOEHLER, APRIL 2006 272 PAGES, $15.95 Everyone knows we live in an age of unparalleled technology change that is revolutionizing the way we live, work and play. Everyone is wrong. So argues Bob Seidensticker, a veteran of IBM and Microsoft, who now writes both software […]