Stories by David F. Carr

Advances in analytic technologies and business intelligence are allowing CIOs to go big, go fast, go deep, go cheap and go mobile with business data.

It's in demand. As mobile devices become more capable, users want the ability to print from them. Imagine an executive visiting a remote branch office and getting e-mailed a PDF of an important document to review. Which do you think he'd rather do: Ruin his eyes trying to read it on his 3-inch BlackBerry screen? Or send it to the nearest multifunction printer? Mobile devices are everywhere, and users increasingly expect to have the option to print when it's convenient.

Your cloud may not be a cloud. Private cloud computing goes beyond rebranding virtualization. Virtualization is an enabling technology, but public cloud applications are attractive because of their flexibility and pay-as-you-go nature. What are you doing to bring those characteristics within your firewall? If your infrastructure is virtual, but you're managing virtual machines the same way you've always managed servers, maybe your cloud isn't really a cloud.

Start now. Particularly if you skipped Vista, you need to start testing applications for compatibility with Windows 7. Microsoft says it will discontinue support for Windows XP in April 2014. Gartner predicts that many application vendors will drop support for XP versions by 2012. "Application support is the biggest problem to be concerned with," says Gartner analyst Michael Silver, even with some browser applications: Windows 7 forces an upgrade to Internet Explorer 8.

How CIOs can guarantee secure SaaS contracts.

Smartphones share many of the same risks of laptops and are easier to lose. Ajit Arya, deputy CIO for Arlington County, Va., supports both BlackBerrys and iPhones and is working to tighten its policies for managing them. "We have taken some basic steps," he says. For example, one recommended best practice is to require passwords. So far, the county has told employees they can set passwords but has not tried to enforce it as a requirement, Arya says.

1. Mainframe shops have to make decisions: whether to migrate to other platforms, add service-oriented architecture (SOA) interfaces or rewrite applications. With a half-baked strategy, IT winds up "bolting on all sorts of unusual, often architecturally inelegant" work-arounds, argues John B. Rabon, manager of legacy modernization at Aflac. "We saw this happening. You hit this wall of unintended consequences." Aflac is now 60 percent finished with a major conversion initiative.

For a pharmaceutical company like Wyeth, no function is more important than research and development - the process of finding new drugs that will lead to patents and profits. And for the information systems group that supports R&D, business process management (BPM) is emerging as a key technology and management strategy to make that function more efficient.