Stories by Bart Perkins

IT's problems can draw unwanted notice now that Sarbanes-Oxley requires them to appear in 10-K reports as 'material weaknesses.'

Service interruptions seem unavoidable as companies move to the cloud. Here are four areas you should manage well if youre going to be dependent on cloud computing.

The whole point of an information systems contingency plan is to be prepared before catastrophe strikes. Unfortunately, we're all adept at postponing planning.

Headquarters staffers often belittle the importance of functions located elsewhere, and they just as often have things backward.

You can't assume that if you just design a better approach, people will automatically embrace the new system.

Their endless questioning can be painful at times, but a loyal skeptic can help keep your project on track.

Both corporations and their employees who tweet on the company's behalf must clarify the question.

For many organizations, service centers are necessary evils that eat budget dollars while adding little value. Because they are viewed as overhead, many service centers (a.k.a. call centers, help desks, etc.) are outsourced to reduce costs. But that may not guarantee that you'll save money, and worse, it can alienate customers by presenting as your public face service-center staffers who may have insufficient product knowledge, language capabilities or civility.

Every corporation wants an effective workforce, but few want to pay for the training that can give them one. Some executives seem to believe that their IT staff should be able to keep up with new ideas and technology on their own time, with minimal corporate financial support. Those organizations that do support training and education tend to do so only in good times, so those items are often among the first to be slashed when IT budgets get tight.

In 1929, Frigyes Karinthy conjectured that anyone on Earth was connected to anyone else, on average, through just six people. Social networking may be increasing connectedness. Facebook recently studied connectedness among its 721 million active users, concluding that the average distance between any two Facebook users is now only 4.74 "hops" (down from 5.28 in 2008).

Project plans sometimes go off the rails. That's always been the case, and with the perfection of the human race nowhere on the horizon, it will remain true. But we can reduce the number of projects that fail.

IT organizations are expected to complete projects on time, on budget and with high quality -- but often don't.

Many organizations are considering shutting down their data centers and migrating most IT functions to the cloud. Beware, though: Not all clouds are soft and fluffy .

Virtually every IT organisation is feeling the impact of the global downturn. But there is a silver lining. It provides an opportunity to challenge the status quo, eliminate ineffective systems and services, and make changes that management has previously refused to consider.