Stories by Cindy Waxer

Despite the increasing popularity and convenience of ecommerce, 92% of purchases continue to be made off-line, according to the U.S. Census.

There are plenty of reasons for organizations to embrace edge computing. By moving applications, data, and computing services to the edge of a network, as opposed to a large data center or cloud, organizations can lower operating costs, improve application performance, reduce network traffic, and achieve real-time data analytics.

These collaborative robots work alongside human employees, sending productivity sky-high. But IT teams must be ready to take on complex programming, deal with connectivity issues and get used to sharing workspace with 6-foot-tall machines.

To some, the job of a higher-education CIO might seem downright cushy. After all, unlike their corporate counterparts, these IT leaders don't have to answer to shareholders, cater to business-line leaders or survive acrimonious mergers.

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night can compare with the challenges currently facing the United States Postal Service. Email continues to have a crippling effect on the centuries-old agency: The volume of first-class mail, or stamped mail, plummeted by 2.8 billion pieces in 2013.

Technology professionals are among today's most infamous whistleblowers. The list of those who have made headlines for exposing corporate or government skulduggery includes Shawn Carpenter, a network security analyst who blew the lid off a Chinese cyberespionage ring; Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, who shared more than 250,000 classified State Department cables with WikiLeaks; and Edward Snowden, who leaked top-secret information about NSA surveillance activities.

After years of fighting tooth and nail with vendors for meager price discounts or modest service-level agreements, IT has seen the tables start to turn: Sweeping changes are reshaping the vendor landscape, shifting negotiating power from stingy service providers to savvy CIOs.

When it came time to select a new human resources management system, William Graff, senior vice president at Cerner Technology Services, had his pick of offerings from deep-pocketed, well-established vendors. Yet Cerner opted for a tool from a little-known startup. "The functionality was richer, the pricing model was more in line with the value we were expecting, and they were more willing to negotiate a better price," says Graff.

Ever since President Obama signed the Open Data Executive Order, government agencies have been making their vast data stores available to the public. These once-secret data sets are proving a valuable business resource, too.

Companies are taking matters into their own hands with internal controls, open privacy policies, ethical codes and greater candor over how they're collecting and parsing personal data. But many wonder whether it's enough to allay consumers' fears as techniques for manipulating data multiply.

From movie-like videos with comedy sketch warmups to hands-on freestyle hacker contests with big cash prizes, fresh approaches to training are helping a new generation of IT professionals get engaged in their training.

There's nothing coincidental about the way grocery stores display and price their merchandise. Focus groups used to be the go-to resource for such market research, but today manufacturers like beverage behemoth PepsiCo find virtual simulation technology to be the cheaper, faster option.

Ten years ago, Logicalis, a systems integrator, would have needed a wiretap to overhear the grumblings of a competitor's dissatisfied customer or prospect. But when a Logicalis sales representative stumbled across a LinkedIn status update revealing an individual's frustration with a rival company's cloud service, he knew just what to do.

Delivering packages to customers in a timely fashion takes more than a good shipping label.

The odds weren't in Republican John Albers' favor when he decided to run for Georgia State Senate from District 56 in May 2009. "I was the underdog in the race," recalls Albers, CIO at Ronald Blue, a financial-management firm. "In fact, when the race first started out, most people said I wouldn't get one percent of the vote."