CIO Insight Staff

If some vendors can dramatically improve, why can’t others? The outsourcing and telecom vendors have been the lowest-scoring industries in our annual Vendor Value surveys, and many of these vendors remain mediocre performers. Yet a few have shown dramatic improvement. Accenture and Deloitte improved their scores by 14 and 12 percentage points, respectively, while Sprint […]

As an early adopter of RFID technology, Kimberly-Clark Corp. CIO Terry Assink is experiencing life on the bleeding edge of a supply-chain revolution. And that has meant big changes in the way his role is perceived inside, and outside, the company. CIO INSIGHT: RFID is viewed as a disruptive technology in the retail industry. How […]

In 2001, when he was assistant general counsel at Intel Corp., Peter Detkin famously coined the term “patent troll” to describe firms that acquire patents only to extract settlements from companies on dubious infringement claims. Today he is a managing director of Intellectual Ventures LLC, a Bellevue, Wash., firm some observers fear is itself a […]

It’s a common problem: business managers overwhelm IT staffers with nagging, small support requests—everything from changing the graphics on a Web site to setting up a personal iPod. At Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., the $4.6 billion, Miami-based cruise line, one-third of IT’s time was being spent on such small fixes. So Richard Shapiro, the company’s […]

After years of contraction, companies large and small are once again turning their attention to growing the top line. And CIO Insight’s own research shows that 80 percent of business and IT executives believe their IT alignment efforts have a direct, positive impact on their company’s growth. With that in mind, the finalists for this […]

Everyone knows that losing private data is bad. Now we know it’s expensive, too. Larry Ponemon was the founding partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ risk-management privacy practice before striking out on his own. Today, as chairman of the Ponemon Institute, in Elk Rapids, Mich., he has conducted the first comprehensive study—funded by PGP Corp.—of the costs associated […]

Winning the 3-Legged Race: When Business and Technology Run Together By Faisal Hoque, V. Sambamurthy, Robert Zmud, Tom Trainer and Carl Wilson Prentice Hall, Dec. 2005 256 PAGES, $27.99 If there is one thing the best CIOs have learned, it’s this: Managing technology is as important as the technology itself. Every company can buy the […]

Strong Signals: Big Companies in Small Markets By John Parkinson There’s an elite club in Corporate America. Call it the $50 billion club—the 26 publicly traded U.S. companies with revenues of more than $50 billion in 2004. Powerful as they are, these companies are not well served by the mainstream IT industry, says columnist John […]

About 60 percent of the military are now on an electronic medical records system that functions worldwide. The military recently put on a public demonstration of the system, called AHLTA, which operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. AHLTA – not an acronym – is the system’s name. The $1.2 billion system uses […]

The fear, uncertainty and doubt that has surrounded open source since its inception seems to be dissipating. A resounding 81 percent of respondents to this month’s survey say they have deployed or are considering deploying some sort of open source system or application. Seventy-two percent report plans to expand their Use of open source within […]

NIST researchers are studying how “intelligent” building systems can be used by firefighters, police and other first responders to accurately assess emergency conditions in real-time. One of the biggest problems faced by first responders is a lack of accurate information. Where is the fire within the building? How big is it? Are there flammable chemicals […]