Stories by Robert L. Mitchell

New containerisation technologies can help BYOD initiatives succeed by creating separate spaces on smartphones for work and personal use.

Ramon Baez, who was recently named global CIO at HP, reflects on five years' of successes and challenges in his previous role as CIO at Kimberly-Clark.

Even with continued success, ADP CIO Mike Capone keeps the pressure on to avoid complacency.

By interlocking business services, companies gain customer knowledge, efficiency and speed. The payoffs are huge, but laying the groundwork for IT standardization is no easy task.

Predictive analytics involves both art and science, but getting started isn't for high rollers only. Here's how to ensure a successful outcome.

DigitalGlobe's CIO, Scott Hicar, says Earth imagery presents the ultimate big-data problem -- but it can also solve a multitude of business problems.

David Brown is worried. As managing director of the IT transformation group at Bank of New York Mellon, he is responsible for the health and welfare of 112,500 Cobol programs -- 343 million lines of code -- that run core banking and other operations. But many of the people who built that code base, some of which dates back to Cobol's early days in the 1960s, will be retiring over the next several years.

After spinning off from Northrop Grumman in 2009, TASC had one year to establish itself as an independent company. That meant the 6,000-employee systems engineering operation needed to deploy a new IT infrastructure. In overseeing that effort, TASC CIO Barbie Bigelow built an IT organization and infrastructure from scratch. Her team spent about eight months working with 64 vendors and partners to design and build an operation that included a new ERP system, more than 4,000 computers, 800 mobile devices, 400 network devices and 134 data circuits across 60 facilities -- and they did it in six weeks. Here, Bigelow discusses the failures and successes that the team experienced as they pursued the aggressive schedule, and she reflects on how TASC's IT unit has evolved.

NEW ORLEANS

Arthur M. Langer is chairman and founder of Workforce Opportunity Services, a nonprofit that uses an outsourcing model to train economically disadvantaged youth and match them with hard-to-fill IT positions. Langer's "skills first" approach stresses getting vocational training and a job upfront, and then gradually fulfilling general education requirements part time to finish a degree in five to six years -- leaving students with no debt. And since many families today can't afford the cost of college tuition, Langer's model is one that could have much broader appeal.

Out of the thousands of cool add-ons out there for Firefox, Chrome and other popular Web browsers, only a select few make it onto the desktops of professional Web developers and designers. Which are the most useful for the day-to-day work of designing and developing websites?

David Brown is worried. As managing director of the IT transformation group at Bank of New York Mellon, he is responsible for the health and welfare of 112,500 Cobol programs -- 343 million lines of code -- that run core banking and other operations. But many of the people who built that code base, some of which goes back to the early days of Cobol in the 1960s, will be retiring over the next several years.

As CIO at Family Dollar, Joshua Jewett has had to grow with the business -- and become more business-focused along the way.

In two short years as CIO at Equifax, David Webb has worked hard to transform the credit reporting agency.

Guardian Life Insurance isn't about to take big risks when making IT investments, and CIO Frank Wander will be the first to tell you that he doesn't have a cloud computing strategy, per se.