Stories by: Thomas Hoffman

As companies are diving deeper into virtualized storage projects, IT managers are getting a better understanding of the staff skills they need to make those projects succeed. The exact talents required depend on the type of storage implementation, but most employers say they're in the market for two kinds of IT worker: technicians with vendor-specific SAN or NAS knowledge, and systems administrators and IT architects who understand the complexities and interdependencies among applications, operating systems and I/O, all of which affect storage requirements.

BI projects are frequently driven by the demands of executives who want to scour dashboards to analyze sales and other business trends. But at Boyne Resorts, the company's BI directive was marshaled by its CIO.

IT professionals with strong technical backgrounds can drum up some great ideas for start-up companies, but they often lack the business acumen to keep those companies afloat. To help these would-be captains of industry, Computerworld recently spoke with Ken Blanchard, the best-selling co-author of The One Minute Entrepreneur and The One Minute Manager to gain insight on the steps that technology entrepreneurs should take -- and avoid. Step one: Remember the basics.

Jonathan Snyder's five-person team at Dreambuilder Investments isn't your typical IT organization. Or is it?

Five years ago, Jean Ritala was dating a businessman who started to demonstrate Jekyll and Hyde-like behavior. Well-spoken, charismatic and successful, he could also be manipulative and bullying, telling her that it was "his way or the highway."

Even in a town where almost nothing is smaller than huge, the joint US$8 billion-plus CityCenter venture between MGM Mirage and Dubai World has to be considered grandiose.

When Anthony McCloud graduated from Graceland University in 2000, he didn't have a smidgen of business experience. He didn't know the first thing about business processes, customer service, or the quirks and habits of business workers.

In 2006, author and technology think-tank head Don Tapscott teamed up with Anthony D. Williams to write Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Penguin Group), a book about the Web 2.0 economy that is still among the top-selling titles on Amazon.com in categories such as telecommunications, the Internet and communication skills. Now Tapscott and Williams have written two new chapters that offer business executives tips on how to embark upon mass collaboration efforts; the additions are included in a new version of the book that was released last Thursday. Tapscott, who is CEO of Toronto-based New Paradigm, spoke recently with Computerworld about the challenges of executing upon mass collaboration strategies in the corporate world.

When Jeff Steinhorn joined Hess Corporation as CIO of its marketing and refining division in the summer of 2006, he discovered within the first two months of his tenure that the IT organization had historically taken a short-term approach to project planning.

In an interview last month, Douglas Merrill, Google's CIO until he was hired Thursday as president of EMI's digital business division, talked about how the Internet search pioneer's IT organization is configured (not structured), how CIOs need to evolve and the most exasperating question that people ask him at cocktail parties.

Last November, a fire broke out in one of the buildings on ISTA Pharmaceuticals' main campus, forcing about 50 employees to move to another location on the property. After the building's sprinklers kicked in, the entire network had to be shut down because the water threatened the equipment carrying the company's inbound data traffic.