Business Leadership
A Model Of Growth Through Innovation
By Fred Matteson, CIO, Fireman's Fund
Although the insurance industry has always relied on technology to streamline operations and reduce costs, it's earned an unfortunate reputation as being slow to use technology for new-product innovation. Now, companies like ours are realizing that the decisive use of new technology can fundamentally change our competitive position. See also the accompanying Q&A with pundit Geoffrey Moore, "Prying Innovation Loose."

Business Management
Closing The Alignment Gap (It Still Exists!)
By Jaime M. Capellá
To get the most out of information technology's relationship with business stakeholders, it's best to focus on strategic capabilities such as scoping, metrics, and communication.

Collaborative Strategies
Righting The Health-Care Crisis
By Philip Meza
In health care, the adoption of IT, and the enjoyment of its many benefits, have been far slower to develop than in other industries. That's unfortunate, because our most recent research at Stanford University found that more and better use of IT in health care could make transaction processing far more efficient, reduce costs, and improve the accuracy of diagnoses and treatment, thereby improving the quality of health care in this country.

Corporate Culture
Why The Gray Matters

Three years ago, consultant Eamonn Kelly started thinking about how the world is moving toward polarized thinking at exactly the time it needs to accommodate multiple, global viewpoints. For executives—such as CIOs —who regularly struggle with complexity, he recommends considering ways to accommodate divergent viewpoints in their decisions. At first glance, this might not seem to be a concept for technologists, but it is, specifically because Kelly implores us to stop thinking hierarchically and start thinking about how communication actually works, especially in different cultures. If there are two issues CIOs must deal with today, it's the ramifications of collaboration within the company's boundaries and globalization beyond them.

Managing Consultants for Maximum Benefit
By Katherine Spencer Lee
It's almost impossible to run an IT department without outside professional help, but how can you guarantee you are receiving the greatest possible benefit from your use of consultants or contract employees, and ensure you are maximizing your investment in their services? The key lies in optimal advance planning, careful management and excellent communication. Katherine Spencer Lee of Robert Half Technology offers some practical tips.

Technology Innovation
Building Blocks Of Process Innovation
By Jean-Pierre Garbani
Combining the elements of best-practice frameworks such as ITIL, ISO, and COBIT can result in integrated systems and process improvements.

Financial Management
Death Of A Software Company
By Howard Baldwin
Once upon a time, there was a database company named Informix that went from $100 million in sales to $1 billion in a few short years. Its market cap went from $200 million to $5 billion during the same period. Within the same amount of time, it hit a wall and suffered an premature death, its CEO jailed for security violations. Steve W. Martin, an Informix sales alum and author of a new book on the blazing arc of the company, talks about what went wrong.

Global Issues
The Coming Shift In Outsourcing

In outsourcing, it has never worked to throw a process over the wall and expect that it is going to work well--almost immediately after outsourcing began, it became apparent that the relationship had to be a partnership first and foremost. But now, according to Gartner analyst Allie Young, both customers as well as outsourcers are discovering that the relationship needs to be more than tactical--it needs to be strategic.

Grabbing A Globalization Partner
By Umesh Ramakrishnan
If American business is to respond successfully to the challenge of global competition, it must develop what Christian & Timbers' Umesh Ramakrishnan calls the global collaboration executive. CIOs need to understand what this position is and how it will affect their work—and their future.

What India And China Can Teach Us About Innovation
By John Hagel III and John Seely Brown
CIOs must begin to rethink their traditional approaches to outsourcing, especially in light of the quest for globalization. The critical connection between innovation and outsourcing is a key theme that many business executives seem to overlook. Ask most executives to define innovation, for instance, and you'll likely hear that it's the ability of a company to develop and commercialize breakthrough new products and services. Unfortunately, this answer reveals three misconceptions about innovation.

Strategic Innovation
Reinventing IT

The rules are changing again. In an insightful Q&A, Gartner analyst Andy Kyte talks how IT management will need to change in the future, and develop an infrastructure that will support decision makers doing non-routine, cognitive work. Those IT professionals who remain fixated solely on data and transactions, he says, will be left by the side of the road.

Making Web Services and Outsourcing Work Together
By Phil Fersht
Although business leaders in many enterprises are enthusiastically embracing BPO, clear disconnects are becoming apparent between this board-level Nirvana and the organization's practical ability to deploy BPO, says NelsonHall vice president Phil Fersht, when they dive into the weeds of business and operational process redesign. One of the largest impediments in many organizations looking to BPO is the ability to configure IT systems to deal effectively with the management of outsourced and multisourced business processes.

The CIO As Innovation-Process Champion
By Peter Boatwright, Jonathan Cagan, and Craig M. Vogel
Ever since Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced his theory of business efficiency in the latter half of the 19th century, companies have viewed information management as a way to achieve competitive advantage. The chief information officer role became imperative when information access and management became essential components of business success. Now the role is evolving again. The question today is not what can you do to manage your information, but what your information can do for you.