CIO Insight Staff

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. —Benjamin Franklin Last month’s mistaken execution of a London commuter by British security forces holds a management lesson worth learning for all kinds of organizations—from governmental to corporate to professional practices. The security personnel appear to have carried out their orders by the […]

Scientists at Stanford University have developed a new laser therapy that destroys cancer cells but leaves healthy ones unharmed. The new, non-invasive treatment is described in a study published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When nanotubes were placed inside cancer cells and radiated by the laser beam, […]

Animated images of the September 11th attacks are being used to help survivors cope with anxiety stemming from that day. Dr. JoAnn Difede, director of the Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Studies Program at Weill Cornell Medical College has studied virtual realty tools to help patients with more common phobias, like fear of heights or public […]

Tom Lange knows more about flying Pringles than probably anyone alive. As director of modeling and simulation at Procter & Gamble Co., it’s Lange’s job to use finite element analysis to predict what something will smell like, whether a bottle will break, and if a Pringles chip will take flight. “We break things into a […]

Add another powerful voice to the growing chorus of Sarbanes-Oxley critics: Congressman Michael Oxley. In early July, the coauthor of the controversial legislation spoke at the annual conference of the International Corporate Governance Network, in London, where he admitted that some SOX reforms are “excessive” and said that “if I had another crack at it, […]

Problem Compliance has been a moving target, and costs have piled up early and often. It was January 2004, and Bob Travatello, CIO of Blue Rhino Corp., the largest independent supplier of propane gas cylinder exchange for backyard grills in the United States, was feeling upbeat as he chatted with CIO Insight about his company’s […]

Beating the System: Using Creativity to Outsmart Bureaucracies By Russell L. Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin Berrettt-Koehler, July 2005 175 pages, $14.95 Who better to teach ways to defeat “the system” than the people who taught how to construct it in the first place? Ackoff and Rovin, retired Wharton School professors, provide a humorous account of […]

Strong Signals: Bit by Bit By John Parkinson At the present rate of innovation, by 2020 or so, technologists should be able to store one bit of information in one atom. But demand for storage space is growing at least as quickly; in fact, even if every atom of the earth were able to store […]

It’s no secret that poor software quality is a continually nagging issue for CIOs. But just how bad is it? The Standish Group recently estimated that low-quality software costs the U.S. economy $60 billion each year. And Gartner Inc. claims that 80 percent of unplanned downtime in the enterprise is caused by software application and […]

Consulting Mastery: How the Best Make the Biggest Difference By Keith Merron Berrett-Koehler, July 2005 265 pages, $34.95 Although it is obviously written for consultants, this book poses a basic question to the senior managers who hire them: What exactly do you want a consultant to do? Merron, the founder of the Avista Consulting Group, […]

Sample Personae: Some categories that might fit your customers. Name Ernest Demographics Age 45 Ethnicity White Family status Married with kids Occupation Call center manager Income $60,000 Geography Dallas, Tex. Education High school Debt $2,950 credit card debt Psychographics Financial Stage College planning Money personality Achiever Account Specifics Time in plan 10 years Account balance […]