Stories by Robert L. Mitchell

Mobile management morphs

Customers are pushing the limits of the software -- asking it to manage and do many more things than it was originally created to do -- and vendors are happy to oblige.

Premier 100 IT Leader: Garry Lyons

When MasterCard WorldWide's chief innovation officer, Garry Lyons, launched MasterCard Labs two years ago, his approach to hiring was anything but conventional. Lyons began by recruiting talented people who didn't know anything about the payments processing business. "If you know too much about a particular domain, you end up saying 'that won't work' or incrementally improving something." And that, Lyons says, won't lead to the kind of innovations that bring disruptive change to the business. "Our goal is to get next-generation payment solutions into the market faster and cheaper than ever before," he adds.

After Stuxnet: The new rules of cyberwar

Three years ago, when electric grid operators were starting to talk about the need to protect critical infrastructure from cyberattacks, few utilities had even hired a chief information security officer.

Political IT: How campaigns mine the Web - part 2

Thanks to the Web, social media and an exploding culture of sharing pretty much anything online, advocacy groups and political campaigns have unparalleled access to vast amounts of new and very detailed psychographic data on voters interests, hobbies, lifestyles and political leanings. (See "What politicians know about you" in part 1 of this series.) Organizations are grappling with how to best exploit these vast troves of unstructured data without getting burned.

Predictive analytics go to work

Predictive analytics projects involve both art and science, but getting started isn't for high rollers only. Here's how to ensure a successful outcome.

Globalized IT operations pay off

By interlocking business services, companies gain customer knowledge, efficiency and speed. The payoffs are huge, but laying the groundwork for IT standardization is no easy task.

Putting predictive analytics to work

Predictive analytics involves both art and science, but getting started isn't for high rollers only. Here's how to ensure a successful outcome.

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