Stories about: Cutter Consortium

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.

NetRegistry has acquired the assets of PlanetDomain from Primus Telecommunications for more than $8 million.

Xerox takes information security pretty seriously. It regularly conducts network vulnerability scans, as well as corporate audits of its risk mitigation efforts. A compliance program buoys employee awareness of its security processes -- as well as its disaster recovery, information privacy and Sarbanes-Oxley Act policies -- and an executive board champions adherence to them all. Meanwhile, the security budget at the U.S.-based company is holding steady compared with last year, even as its other IT spending is down.

Smart companies ensure they have balanced portfolios of low- medium- and high-risk projects.

Anyone who has ever worked on a global IT team has a culture-clash story to tell. For Rick Davidson, CIO at Manpower, it was the time he and a male co-worker were waiting for an elevator in Japan, along with two Japanese female colleagues. When the elevator arrived, the men looked at the women as if to signal for them to enter, while the women -- following their own culturally embedded rules of hierarchy that defer to men, especially male guests -- simply looked back at the men. "The doors opened and closed, and no one got in the elevator," Davidson says. "When we realized what happened, we agreed to a compromise -- they would enter first on the way up, and we would enter first on the way down."

No matter how good a project manager you are, you can't eliminate risk in IT projects. But you can and must manage it. And since you can't manage what you can't measure, good risk metrics should be part of your project tool kit.

Corporate IT is being drawn to the concept of software delivered as a service and its promise of less maintenance and lower operational costs. Vendors are responding with innovations and commitments to offer the model of hosted application services.

You've inherited the project from hell. Now management wants to know why it went bad and what you're doing to make it good. What do you do? Here's a quick survival guide.

At DTE Energy, lone wolves need not apply. "Lone-wolf developers" is actually what Lynne Ellyn calls them, and she says they are the reason so many companies fail at software reuse. Ellyn, a senior vice president and CIO at DTE Energy, claims that her company has found a better way -- one that marries the principles of open-source software with keen insights into how people learn and what motivates them.

Career building isn't for slackers, so don't ease up on the next step: into retirement, says Mary Brandel

Political savvy is a critical skill for IT executives, who must compete against other business unit leaders when they lobby for project prioritization and budget allocations.