Julia King

When a company decides to outsource jobs or send them offshore, the morale of the remaining IT workers can nose-dive and pose challenges to managers who need to motivate them.

Ideally, top executives drive the effort to deploy a digital dashboard of key performance indicators. The dashboard is kept simple and made ubiquitous throughout the company. Users willingly part with their beloved paper spreadsheets. But beware. That isn

If you've heard it once, you've heard it dozens of times in the past three cash-strapped, resource-constrained, hyper-cost-conscious years: The one and only purpose of IT is to support and enable the business.

Larger companies are more inclined than small and midsize enterprises to cherry-pick from among their own executives for a new CIO. Nevertheless, two-thirds of all senior IT executives are recruited from outside, according to a survey of 607 companies entitled, "2003 Annual Report of Technology Issues for Financial Executives", released by Financial Executives International.

Every choice a CIO makes in today's painfully cost-constrained business environment is high risk. Rather than compromise a strategic IT project schedule because of a need to reduce costs, here's one firm that instead got creative and aggressive.

Learn where the jobs are, where CIOs come from, what they earn, and get your career questions answered by this month's guest columnist, Robert Reeg.

The most valuable project management skills

Choosing a star technical expert or a bored but deserving functional manager for a project management position is a big mistake.