Searching For A Signal

There's a good study out from Citigroup Investment Research that features the results of a first-quarter 2007 survey of 100 U.S. CIOs. Of those surveyed, 83 percent expect to see economic recovery in 2007, yet almost half say that their spending will remain flat. When they do spend, security tops the list as does server consolidation, application and business intelligence software deployment and regulatory/compliance projects.

In today's issue, we have a few excerpts from an interview with Google's CIO on security. The company has been pretty quiet about its security initiatives, but has lately become more vocal, even featuring a security blog on its site. We've also included some information on succession planning for CIOs, which is an issue that comes up frequently when I talk with CIOs. And in today's technology section, we discuss Municipal WiFi, based on news and interviews that came out of a conference this week in Boston, where a number of CIOs discussed deployment plans. Personally, I'm pretty excited about the prospects of MuniWiFi. After spending the last four days in three different cities, I'm getting a bit tired of searching for the nearest Starbucks and handing over $10 a day for Internet access--and that doesn't even include the money I spend on coffee in the process. -Patty