Six years ago, the World Bank teamed up with the Kenyan government to launch an ambitious digital villages project, commonly known as "Pasha."

This CIO-for-hire gets inside dozens of IT groups, and sees a lot in common.

As co-president of Oracle, Mark Hurd is tasked with selling an ever-increasing array of new software and hardware products, such as the Exadata database machine and Fusion Applications, while figuring out how to keep the company's vast installed base happy and fending off competition from the likes of SAP.

Avaya is pushing a new range of unified communications products, but is finding that managed services are becoming more popular among its customers who would rather turn over complex UC transitions to someone else for a predictable monthly fee, says the company's CEO Kevin Kennedy.

All work and no play does more than make Jack a dull boy. It can stifle creativity. A playful office helps corporate problem-solving and sparks innovation.

Emmile Brack leads the IT department at Aspire Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that manages 34 public charter schools throughout California. The system serves 12,000 mostly low-income students in kindergarten through 12th grade, and its goal is to get all graduating seniors accepted into four-year colleges. Brack is Aspire's vice president of technology. She says her department's task is to make sure Aspire's 1,500 employees and its students have the technology needed to transform the students' educational experiences. Brack says one way her team is meeting this goal is by deploying analytics tools. Here she talks about the lessons she has learned from that project.

As any CIO knows, an executive position is enough to fill up one's time. But Greg Taffet, CIO at U.S. Gas & Electric, felt a need to contribute his time and skills to another important IT endeavor: expanding access to technology in his Florida community. Taffet volunteers with the South Florida Digital Alliance, a group of area businesses and charitable organizations working to provide technology and Internet access to people who can't afford them. Here he talks about the digital divide, his work to bridge it, and what he has learned about leadership.

Since its introduction, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface has created a fair amount of controversy. UEFI was created through an industry consortium as an evolutionary step up from BIOS, the simple firmware long used when starting a computer to initialize all the components and load the operating system. Among its advanced features, UEFI includes an option called Secure Boot, which requires that any software used before the operating system starts, or after it shuts down, has been signed by a certificate authority.

There's no easy path to iPad adoption and a bogged-down iPad pilot program can spell disaster. Apple could be more helpful to businesses, but there are ways to simplify complicated iPad migrations. Here's what a tech services firm learned while helping Cablevision configure 3,000 iPads.

In an interview, the company's CEO and senior director of products discuss the mobile possibilities of their offering and defend Java's security

Game industry veteran Brian Fargo sits down to chat about PC game development and the future of PC gaming.