Controlling costs and aligning IT with business were among the favorite topics of our Web site visitors in September. They also showed interest in the emerging Web 2.0 offerings of corporate social networks and virtual worlds. Here are the top 10 requested articles from last month.
1. 8 Ways to Cut IT Labor Costs: But Should You Do It?
Staff expenses represent nearly one-third of IT budgets, and become prime targets for some CIOs to reign in costs. See where CIOs reduced labor costs and how they evaluated which expenses to cut.
2. 12 Techniques to Control IT Costs
CIO Insight surveyed 255 senior IT executives and managers about the techniques they use to manage IT costs. Here are a dozen techniques ranked in order of their potential savings.
3. Will Microsoft Become Facebook for the Enterprise?
Microsoft software is powering a social network for 110,000 Wachovia employees because of its ability to integrate different productivity and desktop tools.
4. Companies Falter at Aligning IT to Business
According to a new study, most companies find their IT to be ineffective and poorly aligned to their business.
5. The 30 Most Important IT Trends for 2007
Thousands of IT executives contributed to a year’s worth of data that reveals the direction of the industry.
6. 5 Smart Practices for IT Risk, Governance and Compliance
After interviewing CIOs and other experts, we offer five smart practices for IT governance, risk and compliance.
7. Convergence, Yes; Alignment, No
Aligning IT with business is a fundamentally flawed and limiting concept, says Faisal Hoque, chairman of the Business Technology Management Institute. Instead, companies should achieve a true melding of IT and business minds–what he calls convergence.
8. Outsourcing: What Savings?
There are many other valid reasons for outsourcing. But cost savings, despite the conventional wisdom, is the least of them.
9. A Second Life: 10 Web 2.0 Apps CIOs Personally Use
CIOs are avid consumers of many Web 2.0 applications. See what technologies they personally use.
10. IT’s Bad Reputation
The inconvenient truth for some IT executives is that they must change their ways of managing if they want to be leaders in the rapidly changing enterprise of the 21st Century. In the future talent, not title, matters.
