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1. It's a good intranet alternative. Most companies have an intranet meant to facilitate employee collaboration and act as a portal for company information. But employees often use it so infrequently that they forget their passwords. Lawrence DeVoe, chief technology catalyst at Initiative Media, deployed Yammer last April, starting with 10 invites, and within three weeks had gained 400 users. Today, the Yammer population at the company has grown to 1,400. And DeVoe says Yammer cost less than half of what was spent on his previous Intranet tool.

There may be no two groups more opposed to each other than IT and marketing. One traditionally focuses on back-end support and long-term strategy. The other values creativity and quick wins. Their leaders form the ultimate odd couple: CIO and CMO. In the best cases, the two coexisted, but rarely collaborated. In the worst, the relationship was downright acrimonious.

Workers increasingly expect to do their jobs anywhere, anytime, on any device. But according to the 2011 Forrester "State of the Workforce Technology Adoption" survey of 4,985 information workers, it's executives driving that advancement. While 35 percent of employees are all-day desktop users tethered to the office, 90 percent of executives regularly shuttle between work, travel and home.

Meetings, conferences and training programs in a 3D virtual world such as Second Life can be more engaging and productive than traditional online sessions and phone calls, and much less expensive than face-to-face meetings requiring travel. But some companies aren't willing to take on the security and compliance risks of using a public platform and are instead opting for private virtual worlds created behind the corporate firewall.

At a recent event, I posed a question that caught the roomful of CIOs off guard. We were talking about cloud computing and how a study by CIO's sister magazine Computerworld found that while it's currently the most overhyped technology, it's also one of the top three most important technologies for 2011.

If you are looking to land your next tech job, creating and promoting a personal website can help you control Google search results, better highlight relevant skills and provide an edge in a competitive job market.

A new report from Forrester Research finds that while businesses continue to adopt <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/598122">enterprise collaboration tools</a> in 2011, they're not seeing a wide range of benefits from them.