Business Leadership
Leading IT At a 70-Year-Old Startup

Starting over with a blank IT slate is nothing new for Sam Coursen. He was in IT at NCR when it was spun off out of AT&T (along with Lucent Technologies), and now he’s taken over as CIO at Freescale Semiconductor, whose spinoff from Motorola became official at the beginning of this year. In this Q&A, he talks about the advantages of being at a "70-year-old startup" and how he’s collaborating with other CIOs in the Austin area.

Emerging Thinkers

Here's a sampling of the best and brightest thinkers you'll be hearing and reading more about, including Nicholas Carr, Jeffrey Rayport, Chris Trimble, Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres, and Ellen Kitzis. Also, check out the sidebar on leaders in academic thinking—Harvard's Robert Kaplan, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford's Paul Romer, Michigan's C.K. Prahalad, and USC's James O'Toole.

Can Early Detection Thwart Business Disasters?

Wouldn't it be nice if impending corporate disasters had an early-warning system, the way fainting canaries used to warn coal miners of a gas leak? Gary Sutton, in addition to being a turnaround expert, is the grandson of an Irish coal miner, and he's fashioned a guide to five threats that executives—including CIOs—can watch out for to skirt catastrophes. Corporate Canaries: Avoid Business Disasters with a Coalminer's Secrets (Nelson Business) will be released in October.

Avnet's Transfer Of Power
By Ed Kamins and Steve Phillips
In a relay race, each leg can either slow the team down or accelerate it toward the finish line. Every exchange of the baton creates an opportunity to succeed or fail, depending on how well it's executed. In IT management, too, a winning team is created through consistent strategy and direction so that each runner can stay on track, regardless of what changes may occur within the business. Avnet's outgoing and incoming CIOs describe how they effected a transfer of power after an acquisition—and stayed on track.

The Second Annual Power Issue

We profile the people and companies that represent the 'power centers' of the business-technology world.

Most Powerful CIOs

The world's most powerful CIOs—Linda Dillman, Randy Mott, Rob Carter, Robert DeRodes, Gary Reiner, Carl Wilson—talk about influence.

CIOs You Should Know

These CIOs are movers and shakers in their own companies and, increasingly, have clout among their peers. And some of them—as the sidebar shows—are women.

Business Management
Drawing New Lines Around Security
By Umesh Ramakrishnan
It doesn't matter where a company is located; the impact of Hurricanes Katrita is being felt in CIO offices across the country. Boards, CEOs, and CIOs are reviewing and renewing their commitment to security, but with a twist. How are physical and information security intertwined?

Knowledge Management In Its Model T Era

Knowledge management may be highly maligned, but consultant Ross Dawson still defends it. He cites its importance in supporting the connected economy and social network analysis and notes the value of more-recent technologies such as XML and Web services in bringing it to fruition. In this Q&A, he talks about how it needs to evolve.

CIOs' Rising Influence
By Kaihan Krippendorff
The latest generation of CIOs is making good progress in establishing power and influence within their organizations, despite a few years of backtracking. Now that they've gotten costs under control and streamlined their operations, it's time to move on to the more powerful goals of innovation and creating business value. To do this, they must continue to work in lockstep with CFOs and COOs before gaining credibility with CEOs and the board.

Collaborative Strategies
Katrina's Wrath
By Julia Harwell Segars
You can do all the disaster-recovery planning in the world, but the plan must work when nearly 25% of your 4 million customers are out of power and you're trying to account for all of your employees. That was the case at Southern Company—a group of power utilities across four Gulf Coast states—the day after Hurricane Katrina flooded our coastal region, leaving thousands of residents homeless and all of our Mississippi Power customers without electricity.

Corporate Culture
The Three Hurdles Of Global Web Sites

One of the most difficult issues companies are dealing with in the new global economy is thinking locally and managing globally. The global economy requires that companies provide a consistent image to customers, no matter where they are. But companies can't just impose a one-size-fits-all view on their Web sites. Success requires collaboration and expertise in something that CIOs already understand quite well: the delicate balance of an architecture that's centralized and federated at the same time.

Customer Relationships
Three Best Practices for Optimizing Customer Interactions
By Philippe Cases
Now that the online environment has settled down (somewhat), companies need to rethink their Web site strategies. The Web site stopped being just a PR tool a while ago, and now must provide an all-encompassing experience to the customer—one that includes efficient marketing, sales and support. Thus, the focus must be shifted outward, through a customer’s lens, on the customer's interaction experience. But, according to Partech venture capitalist Philippe Cases, it's not enough to respond to this increased Web site activity.

Privacy Problem
By Howard Baldwin
The Customer Respect Group gave the financial services industry a rating of 6.8 on a scale of 10.0 in its latest industry-specific report, based on a study of how 72 firms treat customers on their Web sites. That score is better than the average of all the industries tracked, with financial services below average in only 3 of 13 categories tracked. One of its sore points, however, is its predilection toward sharing information with third parties without betting permission from customers.

Technology Innovation
Getting Out Of The Maintenance Morass

Does this sound familiar? When it comes to maintaining an application, the business unit think it's IT's responsibility and IT thinks the cost should come out of the business unit's budget. The time spent arguing over whose responsibility it is would be better spent just doing the work. In this Q&A, Forrester Research analyst Phil Murphy talks about the ways both IT and business need to think about the life cycle of an application in order to avoid rancor.

Strategies For Successful Integrations
By JP Morgenthal
Integrating applications across enterprise systems is a priority for most businesses because they can significantly improve decision-making and boost productivity. But the move to apply an EAI or an EII (enterprise information integration) strategy requires identifying your information-technology requirements correctly as either data or process integration is critical to selecting the right software to fulfill business requirements.

Vendors Talk Business, Not Bytes

Despite vendor consolidation, ongoing infrastructure build-outs, and sharper price negotiations, there was tremendous consistency year over year among respondents on which vendors and service providers are most highly regarded.

Global Issues
Washington: Business As Usual

For the average CIO, 2005 hasn't been a very good year in Washington, D.C. A while back, technology leaders were told bluntly that to influence lawmakers they had to play the usual Washington game of wining, dining, and forking over big campaign donations. And what have they gotten for their efforts? Not much. In 2005, several long-standing issues were finally decided, mostly not in favor of CIOs. Unfortunately, 2006 doesn't look much better.

Strategic Innovation
Because That's The Way It's Always Been Done

In his new book, FutureThink, coauthored with consulting colleague Edie Weiner, Arnold Brown connects the idea of how our thought processes affect the way we deal with change in our organizations—a topic deeply resonant with the CIOs who are frequently asked to be change agents. In this Q&A, Brown talks about how CIOs should approach the idea of change—and thinking about change.

Influential Analyst Companies

Bigger is apparently better when it comes to I.T. research, analysis, and advisory firms. Gartner Inc. remains the most influential force CIOs and their staffs use to aid their purchasing and business-technology decisions, based on our survey results.