Kim S. Nash

Saving money while boosting employee morale was the impetus behind allowing employees of Baxter International to bring their own phones and tablets to the office and plug them into the corporate network. But before a wide-scale bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) program could be adopted, legal raised some concerns.

Baxter CIO Paul Martin says in-house attorneys specifically wanted to know whether, in the event of e-discovery, the $13 billion healthcare company could still access information held on a privately owned device. And if information did need to be obtained, could IT access it in a way that protected the company from liability. At the time, there was no formal policy covering such events.

Economist and author Umair Haque says future economic prosperity depends on using IT for more than improving efficiency. CIOs need to focus on making consumers’ lives better.

Consumers check in on Foursquare. Your employees chat with customers on Facebook. Everyone tweets. Social media is everywhere, right? Not quite.

The one place it isn't is inside traditional CRM systems. While the marketing department and sales team are busy interacting with customers on social-networking sites, the potentially valuable information created by these exchanges remains largely isolated from core customer databases and analytics systems.

Remember knowledge management? In the 1990s, KM emerged as a way to collect and share expertise across a company. Employees would fill out profiles for a database about their skills and knowledge. Colleagues could query the system to find the best person to help with a project.

Pooling employee brainpower, KM proponents said, would speed up and refine how a company operates by facilitating collaboration. But KM never swept the corporate nation. People would forget to update their profiles, or find doing so too cumbersome, and the database would become less useful. For KM to work, people have to want to capture, catalog and share what they know.

The promise of cost savings derived from cloud computing is attractive, but concrete financial returns are not always quickly achieved. Except, perhaps, when it comes to disaster recovery.

Offloading the expense of buying your own hardware, software and networking capabilities for use during a prolonged outage, as well as that of the ongoing maintenance of duplicate infrastructure, can produce measurable savings, says Eric Heidrich, director of IT at Help At Home. He expects to save $150,000 over three years, mainly by cost avoidance.

Decreasing expenses isn't Genworth Financial CIO Scott McKay's top priority when he evaluates new IT. Rather, he says, it's how the new technology can improve Genworth's competitive position. When, in 2008, the company spent about $500,000 on videoconferencing systems to cut down on travel, it wasn't just trying to save money. Executives wanted to make business decisions faster.

The $9 billion financial services company installed Polycom's CMA 5000/4000 high-definition videoconferencing system in 38 offices in the United States, Europe, Australia, India and Canada-the major regions where Genworth does business. Such ubiquity is the key to getting the most out of videoconferencing, telepresence and other networked collaboration technologies, says Don Lewis, president of consultancy Strategic Intersect. "If you skimp on it, it won't get widely used."

How we miss the quaint times when text was just a quick way to chat with buddies. Today, these fleeting missives, now integral to so many work lives, amount to a multimillion-dollar corporate risk. Organizations sit largely unprepared while text messages replace e-mail as the digital smoking gun.

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Not to be alarmist, but WAKE UP, PEOPLE! Our information security is, in many ways, failing.

Ask the 11 alleged hackers charged in August with breaking into TJX and other retailers by way of insecure Wi-Fi. Forty million credit and debit card numbers were stolen. Ask the Medicaid claims processor at the outsourcer EDS. In February she pleaded guilty to stealing Social Security numbers and dates of birth, and selling them for use on fake tax returns. Ask the courier hired by the University of Utah Hospital to take backup tapes to offsite storage. One day in June, he used his own car instead of his company's secured van. The tapes, containing billing data for 2.2 million patients, were stolen from his front seat.

Started in a dorm room four years ago, the social networking site Facebook now claims to be the fourth most-trafficked site in the world. Ninety million active users pound on 10,000 servers every day, uploading millions and millions of pieces of information in a given month. For example, "friends," who socialize in 21 languages, add 500 million photos per month.

At last count, Facebook stored 6.6 billion photos total, more than any other photo site. Roughly 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs have built 25,000 applications for the platform and about 140 new applications are added per day. (For more on Facebook's application user interface appeal, see Why Microsoft Should Bring a Facebook-like Look to SharePoint and Web 2.0: Companies Gain Competitive Edge with Social Networking Tools).

Welcome to the last installment in our 5-part series on IT cost cutting.

BlackBerry, iPhone, cell phone, pager -- personal devices of every sort were rampant at Title Resource Group, a real estate closing company that's part of the $6 billion Realogy Corp., which owns Century 21, Coldwell Banker and other franchises.

Welcome to Part 4 of our series on IT cost cutting. Each day this week, we'll look at ideas you can steal for money-saving IT projects.

In Part 1, Lafarge North America learns to negotiate from a position of strength with vendors AT&T and Hewlett-Packard, saving "seven figures" in the process.

Welcome to Part 3 of a 5-part series on IT cost cutting. Each day this week, we'll look at money-saving IT projects that you can replicate.

In Part 1, Lafarge North America learns how to negotiate from a position of strength with vendors AT&T and Hewlett-Packard, saving "seven figures" in the process.