Editors' Choice

Wireless bandwidth: Are we running out of room?

Soaring demand for wireless bandwidth is putting a squeeze on the wireless spectrum. Experts are divided on whether it's a temporary crunch or a full-blown crisis.

Hands on: HP's Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance
This new appliance from Microsoft and HP can bring in all database instances from around the network and host them in a fault-tolerant device with lots of features -- and a hefty pricetag. Insider (registration required)

The new help desk: Agile, educational, efficient
Whether it's a 'teaching moment' or a system that provides more efficient ticket tracking, the help desk is getting a much-needed assist in some shops.

13 Windows 8 features worth knowing about
From a Windows app store to support for new wireless protocols, Windows 8 introduces a host of new features. Some will benefit consumers, some businesses -- and some, perhaps, nobody.

In Search of an Energy Yardstick
We take a comprehensive look at the new green-IT metrics for measuring data center efficiency and productivity from The Green Grid and other industry groups. Insider, registration required.

Wireless bandwidth: Are we running out of room?
Soaring demand for wireless bandwidth is putting a squeeze on the wireless spectrum. Experts are divided on whether it's a temporary crunch or a full-blown crisis.

Gamification goes mainstream
Adding game-like features to applications can keep users coming back for more, bemuse them or alienate them. But forget zombies and orcs.

Hire a vet? IT Says Yes
Microsoft, Siemens and AT&T are just a few of the corporations discovering the value of veterans' tech training, global perspective and surprising arsenal of soft skills.

The New Rules for Enterprise Apps
To be successful today, enterprise software must be more user-friendly, get updated more often, and offer users outside your company more transparency than ever before.

The Grill: John A. Benanti and Donald Stanton
Deputy Commissioner of Technology and Support Services John A. Benanti and Assistant Commissioner Donald Stanton talk about how technology fits into the operations at the New York City Fire Department, one of the largest fire departments in the world. (Insider, registration required.)

How to cope with HTML5's dueling standards bodies
Pay no attention to those chattering consortia -- when it comes to charting a course for HTML adoption, the browser is the new standard.

The Agile Infrastructure
To keep pace with a fast-changing business environment, these companies are ditching inflexible legacy systems in favor of software as a service and cloud computing. Are they getting the speed, flexibility and cost savings they thought they would? Insider, registration required.

Cyber insurance offers IT peace of mind -- or maybe not
Cyber insurance can help mitigate damages after a breach, but it's no substitute for top-notch security, IT pros say.

IT Staffers Shed 1,500 Pounds
Kaiser Permanente's 'CIO Challenge' pumps up IT morale while promoting healthier lifestyles.

Grow Your Own Data Center With Colocation
Colocation is becoming a popular option for quickly adding capacity to an aging data center. But it's not as simple as throwing servers at a new site; be prepared to spend at least three months searching for a vendor and planning the steps of your migration.

Self-service IT
Sure, today's end users are pretty tech-savvy, but do they have the technical and business chops needed to take full advantage of self-service technologies?

The Grill: Indranil Ganguly
Indranil 'Neal' Ganguly, vice president and CIO at CentraState Healthcare System, is helping to communicate the benefits that technology can bring to healthcare and shape public policy on the issue. Insider (registration required)

Bandwidth bottlenecks loom large in the cloud
To avoid problems, get your networking staff involved early and often, and make sure to test apps the correct way.

Up-and-coming tech jobs -- and how to land one
Big changes in IT are spawning a new class of tech job titles. Here are a few up-and-comers -- and a rundown of the skills you need to land these positions.

Cloud SWAT teams
Cloud computing poses unique security challenges. Here's how cloud-specific 'security incident-response teams' could help governments and large enterprises respond to malicious activity and make the cloud more trustworthy. Insider (registration required)

Tech luminaries we lost in 2011
A look back at the lives and contributions of 13 technology pioneers, including Dennis Ritchie, Ken Olsen and Paul Baran, who passed away in 2011. See many of the luminaries featured in video interviews.

The Grill: Doug Cutting
Hadoop creator Doug Cutting says he expects the surge in interest in the big-data storage and analytics framework to continue.

IT's winning (and losing) job titles
In today's work environment, IT jobs are increasingly found outside the IT department, embedded in other business functions, with the employee working alongside technology-savvy business colleagues.

Paul Glen: Want to own the future? Build rich relationships
Technologies come and go, says columnist Paul Glen, but the ability to connect business and technical people will always be the rarest and most valuable skill an IT professional can offer. (Insider, registration required.)

CIOs describe their ideal job candidates
Thanks to rapid-fire industry change, it's hard for IT workers to plan their careers. We asked four IT leaders about their current hiring needs and the "dream" resumes of candidates who could fill those positions. (Insider, registration required.)

Thornton A. May: Sustaining your career during unsettled times
Columnist Thornton A. May sees an evolving world of IT work, where what you did and what you learned isnt the career decision point. These days, what you can do and what value you can create is where the new action is.

6 job-hunting tricks for a Web 2.0 world
A new Computerworld survey shows that some 53% of IT workers are looking for new jobs, yet many of them are new to job hunting in a Web 2.0 world. Here are six tips from recruiters and savvy job finders.

IT workers' top 4 dream employers
Computerworld asked 431 IT workers where they dream of working someday. Here's a look at the work environments of the four companies that came out on top.

Securing the daisy chain
Some cloud computing vendors outsource parts of their services to subcontractors, who may in turn outsource to others. Here's how to know who has your company's data and how secure it really is. Insider (registration required)

Fernando Gonzalez
Fernando Gonzalez, CIO at San Francisco-based Byer California, is happy to be working at a private company, without shareholder pressure, and with an IT team whose members are all in one location. But Gonzalez also revels in the constant and evolving challenges of IT.

When IT Gets to Play
IT skunk works are alive and well -- not so much as a place to hide experimental projects from a stifling corporate bureaucracy, but as a place to reward hard work, build employee loyalty, breed innovation, learn about risk, conduct pilot projects and educate in this time of rapid-fire tech change.

The Real Costs of Cloud Computing
Moving and storing data and integrating and testing applications are all costs you need to plan for when moving to cloud computing.

Big fish, little pond: Some IT execs go small, and love it
Sure, there are budget constraints and far fewer resources. But being an IT leader in a small shop has numerous benefits, not the least of which are agility and a greater ability to influence the business.

Mobile mania spurs demand for unified communications
Unified communications isn't easy or cheap, but for companies that want to differentiate their customer service, it's becoming a must-have. Insider (registration required)

The cloud security checklist
To choose the cloud service provider that best matches your company's risk tolerance, you should first develop a checklist of security mandates and required features. Experts explain how. Insider (registration required)

Mohawk Fine Papers builds integration-in-the-cloud
The paper manufacturer says it has saved millions by leveraging a cloud service brokers service oriented architecture and by using it as a central integration point for all of its B2B transactions.

How to bulletproof your website
'Tis the season for websites to crash and burn. Here are some strategies used successfully by retailers to make sure they don't go down. Ever.

Joe Spagnoletti
Joe Spagnoletti, senior vice president and CIO at Campbell Soup, recently earned the Fox IT Leader Award from Temple University's Fox School of Business and Management. Here, he talks about technology's role in business world.

Off to a Fast Start
There's heightened interest in agile BI, a rapid development methodology for creating BI systems that involves the end user as early and as often as possible -- and thus saves time and effort. Insider (registration required)

IT's age problem
IT workers over 50, or even 40, are having a tougher time than their younger colleagues staying fully employed. Is it age bias or something more complex?

When Cybercriminals Attack
Criminal hackers are industrious -- they stay up late devising new ways to attack individuals and businesses. Watch out for cyberattacks that can turn smartphones into spam bots, shut off electricity to homes and businesses, jam GPS signals and more.

Linux loses its luster as a darling among developers
The simplicity of Apple's OS X development tools, if not their price, is enticing enough to cause some developers to leave Linux behind. Insider (registration required)

Hire a vet? IT says yes
Microsoft, Siemens and AT&T are just a few of the corporations discovering the value of veterans' tech training, global perspective and surprising arsenal of soft skills.

Today, the Internet -- tomorrow, the Internet of Things?
There is another computer revolution around the corner, where everything is instrumented and users can interact with the resulting data. And it's closer than you might think.

Greg Schwartz
Greg Schwartz, CIO at USAA, talks about how mobile is redefining the business, how increased regulation has refocused IT resources, and how USAA is engaging customers through social media.

Legacy Application Fixer-Uppers
Justifying the cost of legacy software replacement isn't easy. Here's how three shops approached the issue. One common theme: identifying business challenges and opportunities.

Big data goes mainstream
Like the cloud, the concept of 'big data' is the subject of a lot of hype and means different things to different people. Here's what it really means, who's really doing it, and what it could mean for the future of data mining. Insider (registration required)

IT Workers With Heart
More and more companies are offering paid time off to employees who want to do volunteer work for charities -- either on their own or as part of company-sponsored initiatives.

Wi-Fi tethering: Smartphones with mobile hotspot capabilities
Does your smartphone support Wi-Fi tethering? Which ones offered by which carriers do? Find out in our comprehensive table.

Wi-Fi tethering 101: Use a smartphone as a mobile hotspot
Which smartphones can be used as mobile hotspots? How do you get started and what should you expect? Here's everything you need to know.

3D chips: The next electronics revolution
Stacked silicon is being hailed as the wave of the future. Experts expect volume production in two years. Insider (registration required)

Standardizing the desktop: Strategies for success
It's not easy to walk the line between locking down the desktop and providing some flexibility for employees to do their jobs. Here's what has worked for some shops.

Car tech: The connected car arrives
The technology is still in its infancy, and there are technical, legal, safety and privacy issues to be worked out -- but we're entering the era of cars that connect to the Internet, to each other and to the public infrastructure.

'Big data' prep: 5 things IT should do now
Ready or not, big data is coming. Here are 5 things IT managers can do today to prepare for the data deluge of tomorrow.

High-speed Ethernet planning guide
Ten-gigabit Ethernet was so last year: Standards-based 40- and 100-gigabit Ethernet switches and routers are starting to show up in enterprise networks. Here's what you need to know.

KPMG: Aims to reduce its carbon footprint by 25%
KPMG has made the use of green technologies a key component of its efforts to optimize its investments in IT, including a data center transformation that is expected to save about 15% in energy costs.

The top Green-IT organizations: Hard-wired to be green
Computerworld's top Green-IT organizations for 2011 have woven energy-saving initiatives into the very fabric of their IT strategies

JM Family: Eliminates more than 1,400 physical servers
JM Family first started to virtualize its data center servers in 2006, and since then, it has eliminated more than 1,400 physical servers and has avoided using more than 5.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.

Prudential Financial: Moving to a virtual environment
Prudential's green-IT initiatives include using alternative energy sources to help power its data centers. In a project expected to be completed this year, solar panels are being installed at its Roseland, N.J., data center.

Northrop Grumman: Virtualizing 3,000 servers
Northrop Grumman's "greeNG" sustainability program aims to reduce the firm's greenhouse gas emissions, manage automatically its desktop power and migrate some 100 server rooms and data centers to just three enterprise data centers.

State Street: Cut storage use by 50%
State Street is using compression and deduplication technologies to reduce stored data, tackling a multiyear virtualization program and implementing processing on demand, an infrastructure as a service that provides on-demand capacity.

Raytheon: Boosted data center temperatures
Raytheon's IT team took cues from the company's initiatives for data center energy efficiency and applied the same steps to other areas, focusing on its networking and telecommunications infrastructure during the past year.

Nixon Peabody: Switched to VMware ESX servers
Nixon Peabody's IT department centralized its data centers, consolidated its storage assets and virtualized its servers. Its work cut power consumption by approximately 30%.

Citigroup: Desktop standardization cuts energy costs
As part of a data center transformation project, Citigroup's newly constructed data center uses 800 kilowatts less power than conventionally designed data centers for the same footprint, for a 30% reduction in energy costs.

Baker Hughes: Wake-on-LAN technology cuts energy use
Baker Hughes weaves energy reduction into its internal IT strategies, using a four-pronged approach of awareness, planning, harvesting and prevention.

Allstate: Reduces nearly 3,000 servers, devices
Over the past 18 months, Allstate Insurance consolidated its four data centers into two and recently earned LEED Gold certification for its data center in Rochelle, Ill.

Kaiser Permanente: Slashes data center power
Specialized green-IT teams at this healthcare company crank out dozens of eco-friendly ideas. The initiatives they spawn range from changes in the data center that yield big savings of power and money to a decision to use biodegradable eating utensils in dining areas.

NBC Universal: Recycled 47 tons of hardware
At NBC Universal, a new data center replaced 300,000 feet of copper cable and a multisite telepresence system cut internal travel budgets by as much as 80% in some divisions.

How CIOs can help curb e-waste
CIOs play an important role in controlling e-waste through purchasing and life-cycle management decisions, as well as community outreach initiatives.

Linglong He
Linglong He, CIO at Quicken Loans, leverages the company's stellar reputation in the industry to recruit the most talented IT professionals.

Windows 7 is on a (slow) roll
The economy has done a number on enterprises' Windows 7 deployment plans. If you're behind, take heart -- you're not alone.

Weaving BI into the corporate fabric
To get the most out of business intelligence projects, companies need a top-down commitment that permeates the entire organizational culture. At 1-800-Flowers.com, for example, achieving pervasive BI has been a 10-year commitment. Insider (registration required)

Really big data: The challenges of managing mountains of information
Here's how four organizations -- the Library of Congress, Mazda, Nielsen and Amazon.com -- manage their massive data stores.

Excel 2010 cheat sheet: Image gallery
We've got an array of screenshots to help you find your way around Excel 2010 and learn about the best new features.

Excel 2010 cheat sheet: Quick reference charts
New to Microsoft Excel 2010? Find your favorite commands from earlier versions of Excel with these charts. Insider (registration required)

Excel 2010 cheat sheet
Whether you're upgrading from Excel 2007 or an earlier version, we've got the goods on how to find your way around Microsoft Excel 2010 and make the most of its new features. Insider (registration required)

7 key skills new IT grads are lacking
They're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but new tech grads aren't quite ready for the work world, IT managers say. Here are seven skills they lack.

Extending the life of your data center
From relocating noncritical data to standardizing servers and storage, IT leaders offer their tips for how to get more out of your data center.

Extreme Storage
At some of the most recognizable institutions and corporate behemoths in the country, handling massive amounts of data requires using some innovative approaches.

Virtual Vexations
Server virtualization can complicate a storage administrator's job by slowing down performance and creating bottlenecks, but IT analysts and virtualization veterans offer their advice on how to deal with the challenges.

Listening to the Voice of the Customer
'Voice of the customer' systems can take some time to implement, early adopters say, but they can pay for themselves in valuable business insights.

Ken Murdoch
Ken Murdoch, CIO at the Save the Children Federation, credits his team with getting the organization's networks back online quickly following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which allowed Save the Children officials to disseminate information and appeal for aid.

Self-service IT: Are users up to the task?
Sure, today's end users are pretty tech-savvy, but do they have the technical and business chops needed to take full advantage of self-service technologies?

Industry-specific clouds come rolling in
Airlines and financial services firms have their own clouds, or will shortly. Here's what you need to consider before jumping.

Build BI tools fast with agile approach
There's heightened interest in agile BI, a rapid development methodology for creating BI systems that involves the end user as early and as often as possible -- and thus saves time and effort. Insider (registration required)

IT Gets Energized
Tech budgets are edging up and major purchases are on the rise. In 2012, IT leaders shake off the recession and get back to form with money-saving projects. Insider (registration required)

IT Juggles Its Social Media Roles
Although marketing still rules most companies' social-media strategy decisions, IT is increasingly getting a seat at the table.

The IT Shuffle
IT must constantly reshape its role to keep pace with new technology -- but change isn't easy. Here are the tricks to getting IT reorganizations right.

9 Hot Skills for 2012
Computerworld's Forecast 2012 survey uncovers the top nine skills IT managers will be looking for in 2012, leading with programming and project management skills.

Daniel Brusilovsky
The Teens in Tech founder helps young entrepreneurs like himself get started

5 more tech breakthroughs: Innovations in access, power and control
From over-the-air power to neural computer control, each of these technologies has the ability to fundamentally alter the digital landscape.

IT ratchets up social-media involvement
IT groups are starting to have a say in their companies' social media strategy moves and the decisions about social tools they deploy.

5 tech breakthroughs: Chip-level advances that may change computing
From flexible printed circuits to chips that can change abilities on the fly, these technologies could be the building blocks for a plethora of new and innovative products.

Wanted: BI Stars
Many businesses are looking to train or hire BI specialists who will be able to cull valuable insights from vast amounts of data. But some are finding that recruiting people with the right mix of IT and business skills is difficult, as is training in-house staffers to take on the role of BI specialist.

The Art & Science of Fashion
Predictive analytic tools, which rely on historical data to make future demand projections for any given product, can play a role even in predicting the whims of fashion. But right now, the hottest area for picking fashion winners lies at the intersection of analytics and social media.

Feds Begin Race to the Cloud
Tasked with adopting cloud computing as a first option in all IT projects, federal agencies are grappling with the hard realities of making that policy work.

Clifford Gronauer
Clifford Gronauer, CIO at the Missouri State Highway Patrol, led an effort to replace all five of the organization's major systems, simultaneously. He was named a finalist for the Award for Innovation Leadership at the 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

Sorry, tablets. Laptops still dominate the enterprise.
Consumers may be flocking to tablets, but laptops are holding their own in the enterprise, where they're viewed as the mobile device most likely to get the work done.

Age bias in IT: Should you sue?
Age discrimination lawsuits are on the rise, but they don't always come out in favor of the older worker. Here are points to consider before you call a lawyer.

Age bias in IT: The reality behind the rumors
IT workers over 50, or even 40, are having a tougher time than their younger colleagues staying fully employed. Is it age bias or something more complex?

Why Big Data Is a Big Deal
Like 'the cloud,' the concept of 'big data' is the subject of a lot of hype and means different things to different people. Here's what it really means, who's really doing it, and what it could mean for the future of data mining.