Business Leadership
Insuring Synergy
By John Chu, senior VP of E-business and technology, Property & Casualty, The Hartford
IT leaders commonly lament that they aren't invited to the table when business units are developing strategies. And it's true that far too many line-of-business leaders view IT organizations as order takers rather than partners that can make meaningful contributions to business direction. At its worst, the relationship can be antagonistic and counterproductive. It doesn't have to be this way. Bringing about cultural and operational change takes commitment, persistence, and time, but it's definitely worthwhile to push the process forward.

Business Management
Straddling An IT-Business Divide
By Wing Lee, director of IT strategy and research, Sprint
For years IT has been relegated to performing tactically important, but strategically neutral, operational, back-office functions. But in the past two years Sprint has successfully demonstrated that IT can be a catalyst for positive strategic change, transforming both the form and role of IT at the company. IT now plays a leading role in changing the way the company deals with customers and partners as well as how we work internally to develop, sell, and service offerings.

Collaborative Strategies
Presenting A Unified Face
By James Grosvenor
Despite increasing recognition that IT and business are indivisibly linked, consolidating cross-business IT processes and applications remains an ongoing challenge for some CIOs, especially in large enterprises. Business units typically are still more interested in addressing their own needs with IT solutions than cooperating in complex cross-business-unit-IT prioritization endeavors. In catering to these specific needs, IT departments often find themselves implementing similar processes and applications for various business units over and over again. The resulting IT complexity not only drives up redundancy and cost, but is detrimental to the enterprise's competitive advantage.

Corporate Culture
Why Employees Really Leave
By Howard Baldwin
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Was money the reason you gave when you left your last job? Or was there something else—something you thought it prudent not to reveal? Employees may be departing your company—saying they’ve been offered more money elsewhere, but there may be other, more complex reasons.

Blog Rules
By Nancy Flynn
ONLINE ONLY: Do you think of blogging as an emerging technology that doesn’t yet warrant your time, attention, or IT dollars? Think again. Blogs are gaining popularity among both business and personal users. For employers challenged by workplace E-mail and instant- messaging management, blogs pose new and potentially costly risks.

How To Hire A Problem Solver
By Harry Joiner
ONLINE ONLY: A good CIO will start the requisition of a new employee by asking: What business problems do I want this new hire to solve? What quantifiable improvements will this person deliver to specific areas of my business? Will this person be able to deliver these improvements in a way that meaningfully differentiates my business?

Board Oversight
By Mel Bergstein and John Sviokla
The tried-and-true method to align short-term actions with long-term effects is to ask the board of directors—as part of its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders—to probe all material decisions with the goal of maximizing shareholder value and mitigating risks. It's their duty to address such hefty issues in a prudent, measured way. Beyond this, companies need to take a lesson from science-based businesses and create a technology committee of the board, a group similar to the audit or compensation committees that would open up more purchasing options while lowering the risk associated with outmoded systems.

Technology Innovation
Homework Assignment For CIOs

ONLINE ONLY: Telecommunications providers and CIOs alike should pay close attention to the convergence of people's work, home, and mobile worlds, according to research firm In-Stat, based on a recent survey. Driven by overlapping work and nonwork uses for certain telecom services across multiple technologies, we could soon see the development of what analyst Amy Cravens calls "integrated residential services"—which would provide a single point of access for voice, data, applications, and messaging.

BAM Keeps A Finger On The Pulse
By Ian Hayes
Business-activity monitoring gives companies insight into their operations in real time. It monitors business processes, and it sifts through immense quantities of event data and metrics spawned by those processes to track important trends and detect anomalies. The system applies context to metrics, converting raw data into actionable information.

ROI Valuation
Clearly Productive
By Vish V. Krishnan and Indranil R. Bardhan
For IT departments, improving information-work productivity—and proving it to the business—represents the next frontier. In the manufacturing sector, IT has already delivered significant, documented improvements to productivity. Elsewhere, white-collar information work remains in the early stages of being mapped, measured, and managed. The intangible and diverse nature of most information work presents unique challenges for those who try to measure and improve it.

Strategic Innovation
The Move Toward Techno-ecosystems

ONLINE ONLY: It's becoming clear that CIOs are on their way to gaining the upper hand in vendor relationships, if only because the flexibility of Web services is rewriting the rules of application development and connectivity. It's easier to pick and choose applications. In this Q&A, IDC analyst Cushing Anderson talks about how vendors and CIOs will need to change to make this new vision work.