Stories by: Martha Heller

As a CIO, you need a solid IT team to help you realize your strategic goals, make you look good in front of your peers, and allow you to focus on the most strategic elements of your job. Without a good team in place, especially at the leadership level, you will have a tough time moving up in the organization.

When e-commerce executives hear the word China, their mouths begin to water. Don DePalma, vice president of corporate strategy at Idiom, a web globalisation company, predicts that China will have 33 million Internet users and will produce $11.7 billion worth of e-transactions by 2003. With China almost certain to join the World Trade Organisation by the end of this year, the country presents a potentially lucrative marketplace for most e-businesses.

There is a technology-based scourge afoot...maybe.

Dan Geer, CTO of @Stake Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., an Internet security company, hires hackers. So does Firas Bushnaq, president and CEO for eCompany in Aliso Viejo, Calif., an Internet solutions company. In fact, a growing number of security organizations are hiring hackers--people driven by an unquenchable desire to understand programmable systems and find the weaknesses in them.

When Made2Manage Systems Inc., an Indianapolis-based provider of ERP systems for small- to medium-size manufacturing companies, decided to step up its B2B e-business offerings, senior management pulled a dozen people out of the 80-member IS department to form a separate "Eport" group. Their mission has been to launch and maintain m2mEport.com, a slick new website that houses Made2Manage's Web-based tools and services.

Politicians and high-tech lobbyists may be quibbling over legislative details, but nearly everyone agrees that this country is in desperate need of more foreign-born IS workers.

On March 23, the U.S. Department of Justice began a criminal investigation into the disappearance of thousands of e-mail messages, sent to and from the White House between August 1996 and November 1998, and subpoenaed but never delivered during congressional and judicial inquiries into the Lewinsky scandal and Clinton administration fund-raising activities.

A few months ago, I wrote a column called "Why does everyone hate the IS department?" and received more than 200 impassioned postings from embattled IS professionals. Some respondents argued that tight budgets, managerial deficiencies and personality conflicts run so deep that antagonism between IS departments and their users is here to stay. "IS management expects users to pay for training, and user management expects IS to pay," wrote one reader. "Cost-cutting demands that have been placed on management in every department create a standoff that never gets resolved."

Software vendors in Virginia must love their legislature. On Feb. 29, 2000, the state's General Assembly gave final approval to the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA), which Gov. Jim Gilmore, a staunch supporter of the high-tech industry, then gave his blessing.

Spam is annoying. It crowds inboxes, hawks porno sites and "get rich" schemes, and, unlike the junk mail of yesteryear, it clogs networks and forces consumers to foot the bill for download time. Like all things loathsome, it should be banned. Or so a group of anti-spam activists implies with its latest assault.

Employees of a payroll processing company in Norfolk, Virginia, owned by The New York Times Co., recently learned that jokes among friends can have serious consequences. Late last year, management fired 23 employees for e-mailing "inappropriate and offensive" material around the office. Rumor has it that employees were downloading graphic images from pornography sites and e-mailing them to their colleagues.