Stories by: Mary Brandel

CIO Jeff Saper drives a hybrid car, favors service providers that use alternative energy and has launched many green IT initiatives at his strategic communications firm, Robinson Lerer & Montgomery in New York. But he's also concerned about a type of pollution that even Al Gore has yet to tackle: digital pollution.

Microsoft calls it TownSquare. Deloitte hosts D Street. IBM has its Beehive, and Best Buy its BlueShirt Nation.

Solid-state disk, once considered a niche technology for ruggedized, industrial and military applications, is on its way to the mainstream. This is partly because of SSD benefits, which include performance, power efficiency, ruggedness and a lightweight, compact size. But other developments have also come into play, including technology and market developments that have begun to help this technology overcome its pitfalls -- namely capacity, reliability and price.

It's a management axiom that the smarter the employees are, the harder they are to manage. Employees with a high degree of left-brain intelligence, which is common among IT professionals, can be demanding, blind to the opinions of others, easily bored and bent on being "right," according to the people who manage them.

So you accept that new position, and within the first couple of weeks on the job, it all becomes clear: Your boss is an idiot. Now what?

You'd think the words "brain drain" would strike fear into the hearts of IT managers. As the calendar has turned to 2008 -- and the oldest baby boomers are now eligible to receive Social Security -- it has become clear that growth in the number of older workers will soon surpass the growth in the number of those just starting out. In eight year's time, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in four workers will be 55 or older. And particularly in IT, there's not a big influx of new talent. According to the Computing Research Association, computer science enrollments dropped 14 per cent each year between 2004 and 2006.

Aaron Martin likes to plan ahead. One year ago, the IT manager at Loro Piano, an Italian luxury goods manufacturer with US operations in New York, plunked down US$30,000 for a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet storage array from Nimbus Data Systems. At the time, it was one of the only iSCSI-based storage systems available that took advantage of 10G bit/sec Ethernet speeds, with most systems supporting 1Gbit/sec Ethernet.

Corporations are woefully unprepared to counter attempts at corporate espionage, say experts who perform vulnerability assessments designed to uncover security weaknesses. US corporations lose as much as US$300 billion a year to hacking, cracking, physical security breaches and other criminal activity, according to Ira Winkler, author of Spies Among Us (Wiley, 2005) and president of the Internet Security Advisors Group, which performs espionage simulations and provides other services.

The statistics of mean time between failures (MTBF) and average failure rate (AFR) have gotten lots of attention lately in the storage world, especially with the release of three much-discussed studies devoted to the topic in the last year. And for good reason: Vendor-stated MTBFs have risen into the 1 million-to-1.5 million-hour range, equaling 114 to 170 years, a lifespan that no one is seeing in the real world.

It has become a cliche to talk about IT project cost overruns and blown deadlines. When an IT project achieves a good return on investment, that's news.

Vince Kellen has had a successful IT career. Currently CIO at DePaul University, he is also an international speaker on customer relationship management and the Internet. He has written four books on database technology and is completing a Ph.D. in computer science at DePaul.