CIO Insight magazine recently surveyed nearly 400 CIOs, and while many questions are only of interest to the respondent group, others are of more general significance. With all the talk about tight budgets and pressure to reduce costs, I was intrigued to find that cost reduction was only the top priority for 6.0% of CIOs. Here's the complete list:

• Aligning IT with the business: 31.7%
• Making the enterprise more adaptive, flexible, and faster: 18.4%
• Developing strategies that leverage new technology: 13.6%
• Ensuring security and business continuity: 11.9%
• Ensuring projects are completed on time and on budget: 10.1%
• Reducing costs: 6.0%
• Helping to launch new products or lines of business: 5.2%
• Ensuring systems uptime: 1.8%
• Recruiting, retaining, developing staff: 0.3%

By a 3:1 ratio, CIOs consider "making the enterprise more adaptive, flexible, and faster" to be more important than cost savings. All the more reason to think of the business-agility benefits of web services as the primary objective, and that leads to loosely coupled services as the place to focus your attention. [Doug Kaye: Web Services Strategies]

Where All of Us Live.

Lance Knobel posts a very nice map of where people live:

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Update: Excellent! Thanks! Eric Eisenhart says:

A higher resolution version with an explanation and credit is available at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030305.html

Posted by Eric Eisenhart at March 6, 2003 04:06 PM

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Update: And there is the still bigger version at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0303/peopleearth94_usda_big.gif. [Semi-Daily Journal]

Fascinating info-graphic

[McGee's Musings]

Eli Pariser and other young antiwar organizers are the first to be using wired technologies as weapons. But some of the old difficulties won't go away. By George Packer. [New York Times: Technology]

TopXML Mar 9 2003 4:42AM ET [Moreover - XML and metadata news]