Since taking over HP last year, CEO Meg Whitman has continued to help Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. That stance may carry risks ranging from public perception of the company to closer scrutiny by the government.

Next-generation CIOs will have to consider how technology affects other corporate departments as well as handle traditional IT management functions, especially those accompanying mobile device management and greater data analysis, according to panelists who spoke at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Consumers Energy has hired an outsourcer to take over some of its day-to-day IT operations, and it hopes the move will allow its own data center workers to focus on projects that directly impact its bottom line.

The National Football League may have big stadiums, big players and big games, but when it comes to computer systems, the league's vice president of IT, Nancy Galietti, doesn't use the word big.

Facebook's initial public offering may be getting even bigger.

Victor Hugo, the great writer of 19th-century France, said, "You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come." The same can be said of technologies.

IBM has reduced the number of applications it uses internally by 70%, but that's not enough for CIO Jeanette Horan.

It's an election year, so you're going to hear a lot about the "culture wars." You know: The endless battle between conservative and progressive values.

Running the internal IT operations of Cisco Systems is a big job not just because of the size of the company -- more than 70,000 employees worldwide and a market capitalisation in the range of $US100 billion -- but also because Cisco is continually developing new IT products across a broad range of technologies and is known for rapidly adopting those products for its own use. Cisco CIO Rebecca Jacoby spoke with IDG News Service on the sidelines of the NetWork conference last week and shared some insights into the legendary enterprise IT company's own enterprise IT.

What does an average work day involve for you at Austereo? The average day at Austereo is an adventure. It's a combination of managing daily operational needs and activities and taking on the new challenges associated with an organisation that continually pushes itself and the traditional boundaries of our industry.

Mark Hennessy speaks candidly on transforming the IT organization at IBM, fostering a culture of innovation, managing IT during the financial crisis, maximizing the value of social networking tools, and taking advantage of an imminent technological game-changer.

Five key points CIOs should know when considering big data

At the same time, we also know that technology will change dramatically. Who could have predicted even 10 years ago that the CIO would have to deal with complications such as cloud security and virtualisation? To find out how the role will change in eight years, we tapped industry leaders, analysts and CIOs themselves to discover what the challenges of 2020 for the CIO will be like. Here's what we found out.

Five years from now, the CIO will be a better, faster, stronger version of today's top IT leader, practically running the company single-handedly. Or maybe other business executives will become more educated about IT and decide to hire cloud companies to do it all, leaving the poor CIO to wither, enforcing service-level agreements for a living. For almost as long as there have been CIOs, we've heard breathless speculation about whether the position will last, and if so, in what form.

When Ben Fried left his post as IT managing director at Morgan Stanley and took over as Google's CIO in May 2008, he knew what he was getting into: supporting a user base full of technology experts and computer industry stars, like co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt and Vice President Vint Cerf. In a recent interview with IDG News Service, Fried spoke candidly about his job and shared tips and advice for fellow CIOs, including the urgent need for tablet device strategies. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

Obama's appointment of Vivek Kundra marks an important first step for rectifying the nation's concerns about IT.