Stories about: Adroit

It's no secret that maintenance and support for enterprise applications is wildly profitable for vendors and, likewise, incredibly expensive for IT shops. Some of those IT shops, in fact, are overwhelmed by the cost and find too little return to justify paying for it.

Another week, another Aussie Internet bank scam.

Palm Solutions Group is attempting to reinvent itself as a serious participant in the enterprise.

A small town in anywhere, USA, a man eats his breakfast every day at Lulu's Diner. He spends his US$3.95 there--and not at the restaurant across the street or the new chain out on the highway--because the waitress knows he likes one of the yolks broken but not the other, butter not margarine, his coffee black. Why go elsewhere?

Keppel Telecommunications and Transportation Ltd. (Keppel T&T) has high expectations that its latest commercial activity, electronic business, will grow to become its third core business with an expected revenue contribution of S$250 million (US$144 million) by 2004.

The phone rang. "Mr. Bass?" The voice sounded official. "Your house is glowing on our satellite photos." No wonder. I had two digital subscriber lines (DSL), a cable-modem connection, and an Internet-beaming satellite dish installed in my home office.

The self-proclaimed dean of creative thinking, Mike Vance, believes he knows how to stir creative juices in CIOs. He's authored several books and worked with many of the 20th century's most influential thinkers, including Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. He's helped high-tech companies such as Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM Corp., as well as old-fashioned stalwarts Johnson & Johnson and General Motors Corp., find new ways of approaching their markets. CIO asked Vance to share some of his ideas about creativity.