Stories by: Robert L. Mitchell

Two years ago, Catherine P. Bessant was tapped to lead Bank of America's Global Technology and Operations (GT&O) group, which has more than 100,000 staffers and contractors in 40 countries. Here Bessant talks about leading a tech group that includes five CIOs as direct reports, the importance of employee diversity, and how relying too much on third parties for IT services can backfire.

Just two weeks after Mohawk Fine Papers made the decision to sell its products on Amazon.com, integration work was complete, connections to its ERP system lit up and sales started rolling in. "Amazon generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue immediately," says Paul Stamas, vice president of IT at the $83 million, 725-employee manufacturer of premium papers.

Computerworld's survey about corporate Windows 7 implementation plans ran online from August 11, 2011 to September 14, 2011. Most of the questions and answers appear below. (The main story about Windows 7 implementation plans being delayed appears here.)

Jim Thomas, director of IT operations at Pella Corp., expected to be wrapping up his Windows 7 deployment by now. The window and door maker, an early adopter of Microsoft's latest Windows PC operating system, began deployment in February 2009, just four months after the product shipped. Plans called for half of Pella's 5,000 desktop and laptop users to transition by the end of 2010, with the rest following by this December.

If you've already virtualized the servers in your data center, desktop virtualization may seem like the next logical step.

Ian Cawson faced a hard deadline: Have a PC strategy in place for the Manchester, England-based retailer's 14 corporate offices, and have it ready when the new head office, a green building, opens in 2012. There wasn't time to conduct a full discovery process and gather all of the business requirements. "Best practices in this instance went out the window because of the time scales, and we knew it had to be done without business impact," he says.

If multitouch display technology is proliferating, haptic feedback is helping to fuel the trend. Haptics provide tactile feedback to your fingers as you touch a display by vibrating all or part of the display surface.

The apps on your smartphone might be brilliant, but what about the display? Emerging technologies could soon deliver the richer, Wizard of Oz Technicolor experience you crave while performing like a Maserati.

Touch-screen panels have been around for more than a decade, but it was the 2007 introduction of a multitouch screen in Apple's iPhone that galvanized the market. Now the business is going gangbusters -- as are the innovations that touch-screen manufacturers hope will build on Apple's success.

Thanks to a handful of emerging technologies, virtual touch-screen keyboards are getting closer to the feel of real electromechanical keyboards. Enhancements such as tactile feedback and surfaces that change to mimic physical keys could eventually redefine the virtual keyboard experience for millions of users of devices ranging from smartphones to tablets and touch-screen PCs.