Stories by Thomas Wailgum

Of the many consequential effects of the "app store" phenomenon, there is one staring down IT departments today: Not only does your average consumer now expect application selection, purchase and delivery to be pretty darn seamless, so too does your smartphone-toting knowledge worker and line-of-business manager.
If the app store can do it, the thinking goes, then why can't my corporate IT department roll out that Web-based application just as easily and quickly?

Best Practices: It's an often overused term that can apply to literally any decision-making process: parenting quandaries, personal finance questions, buying a house, getting a job, or selecting a puppy breed.

In 2008, the number of commercial aircraft that offered in-flight wi-fi service totalled just 25, according to market researcher In-Stat. By the end of 2010, however, In-Stat predicts that number should reach 2000 planes.
Based on these numbers, it's clear the airline industry sees in-flight broadband services as another critical offering for its customers-and also a way to make more money off travellers.

At what point in a fledgling company's existence does purchasing an ERP system make financial, operational and technological sense?
It's a perplexing question that many small and midsize executives who dream of growing their companies face. It often occurs to them when they experience unprecedented growth or a regulatory disaster, and they soon realize that Excel spreadsheets and QuickBooks simply don't cut it for their businesses anymore.

A new report from the CMO Council and Accenture on the strategic relations between CIOs and CMOs offers a grim outlook: "Marketing and IT executives do not believe they are highly effective partners, as they struggle to achieve common goals in the race to adopt and keep pace with rapidly evolving digital marketing capabilities," notes the report.

"ERP financials" usually refers to the software package that businesses use to manage their general ledger, invoices, purchase orders and the like: Nothing that's terribly exciting, yet those applications are crucial to running any going concern.
The "financials of ERP," on the other hand, is a topic that can make any CFO (or CEO and CIO) very excitable. The cause? ERP sticker shock.

Twitter can be as socially brutal as a middle school playground: Half-baked opinions are delivered by some people with questionable authority; reputations may be altered forever with a single sentence; and gossip serves as a valuable form of currency.
Two HP executives who presented at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 conference felt the full force of Twitter's instantaneous sharing Sunday night - even though the execs hadn't a clue that the OpenWorld Twitter stream (#oow) had turned on them.

All too often, it seems like there's a full moon out when it comes to Twitter: People who use the microblogging service do some very strange things.
Since Twitter is such a new place for millions - with many unwritten rules, nebulous social mores and unfinished codes of conduct - it's sometimes fun to watch people act like they're working with half a Tweetdeck. These are my 10 favorite observations about today's Twitter Twilight Zone and those who enter it:

For decades, the inner workings of IT departments everywhere have been referred to as a Black Box, since non-tech executives typically had little insight into or appreciation for IT's dark arts.
The Black Box moniker correlated mostly to IT "stuff" - coding, networking, servers, storage and such. But IT's accounting and budgeting processes have also been a mystery at many companies - which, in turn, led to unyielding questions of IT's value over the years.

CIOs know all about change management - from jettisoning legacy apps, to prodding line of business VPs to share virtualised resources.
But today, CIOs themselves are in the midst of a make-or-break personal change-management project: CIOs who can only take orders, who can't speak the language of the business, who can't step out of the proverbial back-office and into the front lines of customer service, social media or supply chain management will soon go the way of ancient tech gear - remembered fondly on occasion but sidelined in the future.

Software bugs are called "bugs" for a reason: These pests have been around for a long time, they always turn up in code at the most inopportune times, and there's no proven way to eradicate their existence.
Today's brutal business climate-a dearth of time and staff as well intense cost pressures-have made "the need for speed" a more apt mantra for development teams rather than assuring that "quality is job No. 1."

How will people work 10 years from now? Gartner thinks it has a pretty good idea, predicting 10 major changes that will occur during the next 10 years.

The liberating and game-changing effects of cloud computing on today's IT shops cannot be overstated: On the fly, it seems, CIOs and their staffs are reprioritising application-portfolio strategies, rearchitecting systems roadmaps, rethinking vendor contracts and much more. Prices may have dropped, but strategic IT planning is still as relevant as ever.
CIOs are trying to keep up with the flurry of cloud options now offered to them. (Whether some of those are total bunk or not, is a CIO's job to determine.)

To upgrade, or not to upgrade your company's core enterprise applications? That is the vexing decision that haunts companies, CIOs and budget planners everywhere.

What makes a CFO uniquely qualified to be heading up IT?