Edward H. Baker

Nobody likes to think about worst-case scenarios. But for Ian Mitroff, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, it’s more than just a preoccupation-it’s his job. Mitroff is an expert in crisis management, and given the sheer volume of full-blown crises the U.S. has endured in just the […]

Nobody likes to think about worst-case scenarios. But for Ian Mitroff, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, it’s more than just a preoccupation—it’s his job. Mitroff is an expert in crisis management, and given the sheer volume of full-blown crises the U.S. has endured […]

Among my tasks as editor of CIO Insight is to read the letters we get and decide which ones to print. Usually, it’s a fairly straightforward business: Like every magazine, we publish the best and most interesting articles we can, and in response we get a healthy combination of thoughtful analyses, hearty compliments, mild disagreements, […]

We continue to be impressed by the overall optimism of CIOs as they contemplate the future. Perhaps it’s in their nature: After all, people who deal professionally with technology are bound to believe not just in the virtues of technology but also in its ongoing progress. This month’s research on the future of IT (page […]

This month’s issue of CIO Insight includes our second annual Vendor Value survey, in which we asked more than 1,000 top IT executives to rate the value and reliability of a total of 44 top vendors. It’s a remarkable list, for any number of reasons—the most obvious being the generally high level of dissatisfaction IT […]

Over the course of the past two years, I’ve had to submit regular monthly claims to my health insurance company, UnitedHealthcare, for doctor’s visits related to a recurring medical condition. Eventually, all the claims were paid, but the effort involved in getting the insurance company to cough up the money almost drove me to an […]

Last March, this magazine held an Alignment Summit in New York City to discuss and analyze, from a variety of angles, the causes and cures for the age-old gap at too many companies between business strategy and IT. The usual suspects were lined up and examined: poorly communicated strategy, poorly designed IT financing and compensation […]

Every executive has heard it before: In the face of a big technology project or a major new strategic initiative, you need to manage change. In the view of John Kotter, however, that’s getting it the wrong way around. Says Kotter: “How often have you heard the expression ‘change management’ rather than ‘change leadership’? You […]

As I write this, it’s been almost a week since J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., with a degree of candor unusual for a public company, announced plans to terminate its $5 billion outsourcing contract with IBM Corp. and take back 4,000 employees previously transferred to IBM as part of the deal. Since then, the business […]

After authoring two books on business strategy—Competing for the Future (1994) and The Future of Competition (2003)—the subject of C.K. Prahalad’s new book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2004), was deceptively simple. “I was concerned about new growth markets,” says Prahalad. So he turned his attention to the five billion poor people […]

The flurry of lawsuits pitting outdoor outfitter L.L. Bean Inc. against online marketer Claria Corp. and four of its (alleged) clients over Claria’s use of adware to create pop-up ads on L.L. Bean’s Web site has not been resolved yet. But the issues giving rise to the suits led CIO Insight to discuss the implications […]

The amount of information that can be collected about a person—not just name, age, address, Social Security number, but shopping behavior, travel plans, eating habits, reading preferences and the like—is simply staggering. We have built ways of collecting such information, and the means of storing, analyzing and profiting from that information, that would turn the […]