Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »October 29, 2008 — CIO —
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.
You know how it goes: On mobile devices, employees peck out details of their private lives, remarks about colleagues and, inadvertently or not, confidential business information. Things people would never say out loud or in memos fly around in text, often memorialized in digital archives that you don't control. It's juice for a legal adversary.
Text messages about employee firings and extramarital sex recently brought down Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, Christine Beatty.
Last year, three police officers sued the city and the mayor for wrongful termination, claiming they were whistle-blowers who had been retaliated against for discussing possible misconduct in Kilpatrick's administration. During the case, Beatty testified that one officer, Gary Brown, "was not fired." But text messages subpoenaed from SkyTel, which provides pagers to the city, said otherwise.
"I'm sorry that we are going through this mess because of a decision that we made to fire Gary Brown," read one of Beatty's texts to Kilpatrick, with whom, as other messages revealed, she was having an affair.
The officers won the case and $8 million. The city executives lost their jobs; Beatty resigned in January and Kilpatrick in September. In October, Kilpatrick was sentenced to four months' jail time.
Corporations are just as vulnerable. When all 100 of the Fortune 100 are involved in legal proceedings, you know you probably can't avoid e-discovery at some point in your career. And when your company gets hit with a lawsuit, you'll likely have to retrieve and reveal employee text messages relevant to the case, along with other newer forms of communication, such as instant messages and the words, pictures and video from social networking sites, blogs and wikis. But the way some CIOs are managing these technologies—sometimes by not managing them at all—makes that task harder and more expensive than it should be, says Alan Brill, senior managing director at Kroll Ontrack, where he founded the computer forensics and computer security functions.