Stories by Scott Berinato

A blow-by-blow record of one of the worst health-care IT crises in history and what CareGroup CIO John Halamka learned from it.

Sure, determining an ROI for security is difficult. But it's also the key to selling your budget. Here's our three-step guide to getting started.

Let's start where conversations about software usually end: basically, software sucks. In fact, if software were an office building, it would be built by a thousand carpenters, electricians and plumbers. Without architects. Or blueprints. It would look spectacular, but inside, the lifts would fail regularly. Thieves would have unfettered access through open vents at street level. Tenants would need consultants to move in. They would discover that the doors unlock whenever someone brews a pot of coffee. The builders would provide a repair kit and promise that such idiosyncrasies would not exist in the next skyscraper they build (which, by the way, tenants will be forced to move into).

Data has no ethics. Data doesn't care how it's used. But the use and misuse of data has become the critical issue for today's information-intensive enterprise. Who owns the data? Who is responsible for its management? Who is the guarantor of its integrity? CIOs, the guardians of business data, need a code to guide them The CIO's code of ethical data management.

The real threat is to critical data, not to property. That's what CIOs should be focusing on.

For years CIOs have had to use scare tactics and other soft arguments to justify an investment in security. Now, for the first time, they may be able to get numbers they need to show a measurable ROI.

Enron's fragmented business units spent money on technology like there was no tomorrow. And now there isn't.

Are you clueless when it comes to the cost of adequate information security? Don't worry - you're not alone.

There is no bigger waste of time than listening to a vendor herald the nonexistent virtues of a nonexistent product in an impossibly obtuse language called marketese. Read these tips - courtesy of two whistle-blowing PR reps (we'll call them John and Jane) - so that you don't squander another second of your valuable time.

Here's a nice recipe for making a tasty, high-performance security checkpoint to replace a bland, low-performing single point of failure at the border between your network and the Internet.

Lew Goldstein is a sound supervisor editor for C5 Inc. in New York City. C5 does postproduction audio for major motion pictures - which means it creates or embellishes every sound you hear in a movie from a dog bark to every spoken word. They put the hurricane in Cape Fear. The woodchipper in Fargo too.

A visit to a software sales boot camp reveals the tricks and techniques being taught to folks intent on separating CIOs from their money.

On April 25, Pilot Network Services Inc. went out of business, abandoning 200 customers that relied on them for something rather important: security.

Find out why the PC endures - and how you can capitalise on its continued dominance.

A generation of projects have come and gone, and almost three-quarters have gone awry. Now, Agile Development is promising nothing less than 100 per cent success.