cio

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Most discussions about where computing is and where it's going end up touching on three big themes: mobility, big data, and cloud computing. Yesterday's MIT Sloan CIO Symposium was no exception, whether those precise terms were used or not.

Perhaps the most striking example of just how rapidly mobile devices are forcing IT organizations to adapt came from Scott Griffith, the CEO of Zipcar, who said that "60 percent of interactions are now through an Android or an iPhone." He also noted that essentially BlackBerry's entire share had shifted to Android over a … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--One of the reasons I like to attend events like the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is that they're opportunities for a reality check. Vendor confabs can sometimes feel like a bit of an echo chamber that is a bit disconnected from what IT departments are really doing or, at least, the pace at which they're doing it.

To be sure, the companies attending and speaking at events like this symposium tend to be more leading edge and forward-thinking than average. Even so, I was still a bit surprised at how strongly most of the end-user panelists … Read more

Historically, users viewed IT departments as the people who ran the basic infrastructure "plumbing," were inflexible when it came to doing anything new, and generally far more of an inhibitor to the business than an enabler. That take was at least middling unfair in most cases, but it was grounded in certain realities.

For most organizations, IT was primarily focused on a fairly common--if hardly standardized--set of tasks. Functions like enterprise resource planning, financials, human resources, and e-mail all had to work. But they weren't something that especially advantaged the organization most of the time. Yes, an … Read more

Concerned over the use and abuse of social networks, many CIOs are now clamping down on employee access to such sites, according to the results of a Robert Half survey released Tuesday.

Among the chief information officers questioned for the survey, 38 percent said they've created stricter policies on employee use of social networks compared with 17 percent who said they've relaxed their rules.

Many CIOs are particularly worried that sites like Facebook and Twitter can be a distraction from work. As a result, 23 percent of the executives surveyed said they've placed limits on social networks … Read more

Who better to show people how to handle information in the digital era than a former Google chief information officer?

Douglas Merrill, Google's CIO until leaving in 2008 to steer EMI Music's digital unit, is raising his profile again a year after leaving the record label. He's written a book that he says can help people improve their cognitive skills and he's also founded a new start-up.

Merrill is the co-author of "Getting Organized in the Google Era," a book that offers advice to people who wish to improve their memories and sharpen their … Read more

CIOs are eyeing relatively flat IT budgets this year, but that's better news than last year when spending took a nosedive.

IT budgets will rise on average only about 1.3 percent this year compared with last year, though that marks a halt to 2009's recession when spending dropped by 8.1 percent, says a Gartner CIO survey released Tuesday. The research firm's report "Leading in Times of Transition: The 2010 CIO Agenda" questioned almost 1,600 chief information officers, all of whom saw 2009 as their most challenging year in a decade.

This year'… Read more

For years, Red Hat sat unopposed at the top of the CIO Insight Vendor Value study. In 2008, however, Google pushed Red Hat aside with its low-cost, easy-to-use enterprise applications. This year, Red Hat has come roaring back to share the top ranking with Google.

Could this be a sign of CIOs' restive relationships with traditional vendors and an increasingly insatiable appetite for the cost and ease-of-use advantages of open source and software as a service/cloud computing?

The answer is almost certainly "Yes." It is telling that old-school vendors like IBM (ranked 20th overall), Microsoft (25th), Novell (… Read more

Apple's desktop market share has been inching up for some time and, if analyst stats are right, now hovers around the 8 percent mark.

But the business world remains largely immune to the pull of Apple's hardware, with few--if any--workers in most companies using anything other than the classic Wintel combination, in spite of demand for alternative desktop options from staff.

It's a situation that looks unlikely to change, despite the launch of a new Mac OS: a recent poll of the Silicon.com CIO Jury found that none of the IT chiefs surveyed said the release … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The Obama administration on Tuesday announced a far-reaching and long-term cloud computing policy intended to cut costs on infrastructure and reduce the environmental impact of government computing systems.

Speaking at NASA's Ames Research Center here, federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled the administration's first formal efforts to roll out a broad system designed to leverage existing infrastructure and in the process, slash federal spending on information technology, especially expensive data centers.

According to Kundra, the federal government today has an IT budget of $76 billion, of which more than $19 billion is spent on infrastructure alone. … Read more