Stories by: Julia King

After studying the issue for a full year, researchers at The Concours Group came to the alarming but irrefutable conclusion that U.S. companies are on a collision course with their demographic destiny.

Norma Veta, 74, an IT retiree from The Aerospace Corp, spends two days a week helping her son's family and managing several rental properties. The other three days, she returns to Aerospace to work on special IT projects. After 40 years with the R&D and engineering services company, she knows the payroll and benefits systems almost as well as the faces of her three grandchildren.

Statistics show that women are less attracted than men to IT careers. Why is that? When choosing a major in college, a lot of women look just at the entry-level positions [available after graduation]. They don't see past software engineering and coding and sitting at a computer all day to the more interesting IT roles, such as project manager, where you interact with people.

Managers at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts used to show up at their monthly meetings armed with several pounds of paper documents -- departmental performance reports, printouts of e-mails and PowerPoint slides, and lots and lots of spreadsheets. The managers eventually agreed to lighten their load by regularly tracking a total of 45 business performance measures, which were printed out in 8-point type to fit on a single sheet of paper.

To hear industry pundits tell it, this is the year that instant messaging will really take off in the corporate world. Now that Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online all offer enterprise IM products with integrated security and archiving tools, IM is looking less Mickey Mouse and more like a serious business tool.

Sticking to a vision has its rewards. For AXA Financial Services LLC, those rewards add up to about US$55 million, which is what IT executives figure they've saved by adhering to a blueprint for the services-based computing architecture the company first laid out in 1990.

What's in a CMM rating?

Talk about chaos. For decades, corporate executives have made strategic business decisions based on information deduced from multiple reports that IT compiled by summarizing sets of frequently conflicting data.

"Data mirroring is like teenage sex. Everybody says they're doing it, but they're not." So says Charlie Miller, head of data center engineering at KeyCorp, which learned that lesson the hard way over the past two and a half years.

More and more workers aren't showing up at the office. Their cubicles are vacant, their desktop PCs idle.

In 1999, Volkswagen's top executives directed Chief Technology Officer Claus Hohmann and his IT team to design and build an IT infrastructure that would flawlessly support a unique and highly customer-centric automotive theme park. The idea was to create a spectacular and ever-changing marketing venue where visitors could experience state-of-the-art automotive technology. Buyers would pick up their new cars from one of the park's two gleaming 20-story, fully automated glass-and-steel towers.