Business Leadership
Teaming Up To Tackle Risk
By Howard A. Schmidt
For many organizations, the term risk management can serve as a sort of institutional Rorschach test. Executives challenged to define and describe it tend to perceive what they want to see, and in articulating their thoughts on the subject reveal their disciplinary heritage, experiences, and priorities. As a result, what many major organizations in both the public and private sectors have in place is a highly fractured, silo-bound approach to understanding and managing risk. It's dangerous for several reasons, but chief among them is the fact that the very nature of threats to major organizational interests crosses business lines and support organizations.

Business Management
Overcoming IT Ambivalence
By Jeff Hughes
Despite years of expanded technology usage and various models and metrics, IT continues to generate ambivalence. CEOs want IT to support offshoring, a service-oriented architecture, or some other fashionable concept. Business-unit heads probably just want their applications to work. And the rest of the company may look at the IT infrastructure—the entire technical environment short of desktop applications—and see dollars going into an endless black hole.

Collaborative Strategies
Working Toward Working Together

Over the last six months, Gartner analyst Betsy Burton noticed a significant uptick in the number of inquiries she was receiving from CIOs about collaboration. Investigating further, she found four fundamental shifts that are increasing the importance of—and interest in—collaboration.

Realizing The Power Of Innovation Webs
By Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
Corporate knowledge monopolies are breaking down. Emerging in their place are open, interoperable standards and infrastructures that are causing businesses to rethink how they create and own intellectual property—and just what it means to innovate in this new paradigm.

Online Sidebars For Innovation Webs
By Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
Wanna know what companies are already ahead of the pack when it comes to collaborative innovation?

Corporate Culture
Stop Aligning, Take Risks!
By Brian Sommer
Alignment isn't strategic. It's order-taking and an abdication of what a CIO should really be about: innovation, exploitation, and business partnering in ways that achieve competitive advantage.

Corporate Governance
Lock Out Business Risks
By Amir Hartman with Craig LeGrande and Tom Goff
Companies must address compliance issues the same way they do other risks. The thinking and processes that go into managing competition, adverse market conditions, disaster recovery, and supply-chain problems are no less applicable to regulatory compliance and reputation risk.

Customer Relationships
Fighting B2B Frustration
By Jeff Thull
Frustration and animosity are stifling the business-to-business sector. Vendors are frustrated, because they can't translate the differentiated products and services, which they work so hard to create, into bottom-line profitability. Their customers, whether in business or IT, are also frustrated, because they frequently don't achieve the benefits they expect after purchasing those same solutions. Vendors and CIOs stand on opposite sides of what we call the value gap, and they blame each other.

Technology Innovation
Securing An Advantage
By Derek Top
CIOs and IT executives are finding new ways to justify security investments. Some experts are now saying that building a reputation as protector of data security—even after an embarrassing public headline—can deepen customer loyalty, build business value, and improve a company's stock price.

Global Issues
Dealing With Chindia

Is the balance of power in technology shifting from the United States and Europe to India and China? Not yet, according to Forrester analysts Navi Radjou and Simon Yates. There are three scenarios that could derail China and India's redefinition of the world order of technology.