Ellen Pearlman

Here’s an early taste of next month’s CIO Insight research study: Seventy-two percent of CIOs point to customer service as the top business priority for their IT departments in 2004. We see that as a sign that the recovery is in full swing, even in Corporate America’s IT departments. In the hope that most CIOs […]

The days of tight budgets continue, and information technology executives at many companies still face a credibility gap when it comes to their promises to deliver projects on budget, on time—and with a clear business payoff. Sure, lots of tough cost-cutting during the past couple of years has helped ease some of the eye-rolling: Our […]

Given the state of the economy and the public’s crisis of confidence in the ethics of corporate leaders and the companies they run, it’s no surprise that corporate executives are finding themselves increasingly under the gun. Just ask Richard Grasso, the publicity-conscious, thin-skinned former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange: He’d been the subject […]

In recent years, countless executives have confessed that more than strategy or vision, managing people is their toughest and most important job. Recently, though, a more nuanced version of the “people first” mantra has emerged. Instead of managing individuals, the new thinking goes, manage the relationships between them. After all, nobody working alone can accomplish […]

Richard Clarke, former White House adviser for cyberspace security, says too little has been done to gird the nation’s telecom and information technology systems against terrorist attack. Recently, he sat down with CIO Insight Editor-in-Chief Ellen Pearlman and Executive Editor Marcia Stepanek to explain why. What follows is an edited version of his remarks. Take […]

Adaptive. Flexible. Responsive. Quick. The list of attributes characterizing what’s become known as “the real-time enterprise” just grows and grows—as does the sense of confusion about how to achieve it and what it all means. The goal is a laudable—if fuzzy—one: to speed up the ability of companies to respond to changes in their business […]

You can always tell that an industry cycle has hit the bottom when articles bemoaning its imminent death start to appear. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison’s recent diatribe on the impending consolidation in the technology industry comes to mind, as does Nicholas Carr’s recent article in the Harvard Business Review, called “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Carr’s contention […]

With this issue, CIO Insight celebrates its second anniversary of publication. We began with the idea of giving CIOs and other technology executives a magazine that combines extensively reported case studies on technology management and strategy with thoughtful analysis of the latest trends in information technology and corporate management, backed up with extensive research on […]

CIO INSIGHT: What’s the key business challenge that you’re using wireless to address? KEN JOHNSEN: Our business has changed quite a bit over the past 100 years, but our distribution method really hasn’t. We’ve gone from supporting something like 50 different SKUs, or beverage types, to something like more than 300, due to more product […]

Remember when “thinking out of the box” was unequivocally considered a virtue, with innovation the necessary goal? IT management guru Gary Hamel’s 2000 best-selling book, Leading the Revolution, encouraged each employee at today’s older companies to “break the rules” and organize coworkers to challenge the status quo in ways big and small. What a difference […]

In this month’s CIO Insight survey on the role of the CIO, our respondents, CIOs and top IT executives all, told us that “leadership” had replaced “business understanding” as the CIO’s most important personal attribute for success at their jobs. That’s in keeping with their sense of the kind of year they’ve just had: Thanks […]

Ford Motor Co. has a problem. It’s not selling enough cars and trucks to turn a profit. And designing and producing the cars and trucks it does sell costs too much money. Part of the problem stems from the company’s abortive efforts to join the e-business bandwagon, as profiled in this month’s case study. The […]