Stories by Bart Perkins

Coding tournaments and similar challenges have emerged as innovative ways for employers to identify highly skilled IT professionals.

If your company isn't in the Fortune 500, you might find it difficult to get suppliers to provide product information, respond to an RFP or deliver adequate support. But there are ways to make your organization more attractive.

Service interruptions seem unavoidable as companies move to the cloud. Here are four areas you should manage well if youre going to be dependent on cloud computing.

The whole point of an information systems contingency plan is to be prepared before catastrophe strikes. Unfortunately, we're all adept at postponing planning.

Headquarters staffers often belittle the importance of functions located elsewhere, and they just as often have things backward.

You can't assume that if you just design a better approach, people will automatically embrace the new system.

Their endless questioning can be painful at times, but a loyal skeptic can help keep your project on track.

Both corporations and their employees who tweet on the company's behalf must clarify the question.

On April 11, our judiciary system failed the IT industry by limiting the ability of corporations to protect their internal software. Specifically, the U.S. Second Court of Appeals reversed the 2010 conviction of Sergey Aleynikow under the Economic Espionage Act (EEA). During his last day as a Goldman Sachs programmer, Aleynikov uploaded proprietary software that enhances Goldman's high-speed trading capabilities. Shortly thereafter, he joined a company that develops software tools for financial services firms. What a coincidence.

When companies think about an IT reorganization, the first two questions raised are usually "Who?" and "Where?" Wrong on both counts! The first two questions should always be "Why?" and "How?"

Every corporation wants an effective workforce, but few want to pay for the training that can give them one. Some executives seem to believe that their IT staff should be able to keep up with new ideas and technology on their own time, with minimal corporate financial support. Those organizations that do support training and education tend to do so only in good times, so those items are often among the first to be slashed when IT budgets get tight.

In 1929, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigyes_Karinthy">Frigyes Karinthy</a> conjectured that anyone on Earth was connected to anyone else, on average, through just six people. Social networking may be increasing connectedness. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/anatomy-of-facebook/10150388519243859">Facebook recently studied connectedness</a> among its 721 million active users, concluding that the average distance between any two Facebook users is now only 4.74 "hops" (down from 5.28 in 2008).

Project plans sometimes go off the rails. That's always been the case, and with the perfection of the human race nowhere on the horizon, it will remain true. But we can reduce the number of projects that fail.

Save the CIO, save the enterprise! It might not be the catchiest slogan, but there's more than a little truth in it.

IT organizations are expected to complete projects on time, on budget and with high quality -- but often don't.