More mobile products and bulletproof security top the wish list

By Karen Bannan, Techweb

There's a reason people play the lottery. It gives them a chance to dream, to imagine what they might buy if Lady Luck had her way. Even in an economic downturn, and times of IT belt-tightening, CIOs need to keep innovating and staying on the leading edge. We asked four top IT executives to do a little dreaming of their own, and tell us what emerging technologies they would buy with their IT lottery winnings. Here are their answers.

Phil Fasano
Chief Information Officer, Kaiser Permanente

In my company, there are about 10,000 people focused on some type of technology, and we'll spend $4 billion on technology this year alone. Unlike other companies, we're blessed with an abundance of financial resources. But even so, there are things I'd like to do to be the best at providing preventive health care services.

If I could spend as much as I wanted to, I'd invest in tools and technology that would help us interact better with people and really personalize healthcare, bringing the clinic of tomorrow here today.

We would, for example, expedite digital radiology equipment, so we could seamlessly share radiology reports, and our top radiologists could be involved in every case. Specialists are very dear and you can never have enough of them. Digital technology would let us expand access to these experts.

I'd also like to expand into mobile technology so we could interact with the public, via cell phone, to give daily reminders about health, or remind them to see physicians, or go for lab work. We're doing things like that right now online, but we haven't expanded into mobile yet.

Joseph Galarneau
Chief Technology Officer, Thomas Publishing Co.

We're a business-to-business digital publisher, with most of our publications online. Our main digital product is Thomasnet.com. It's a site you come to if you want to buy a jet engine, a nut, bolt, or flange. Most of the purchases I'd make would be for product enhancements, such as providing digital mobile content.

The mobile play in the consumer world is letting people instant message their buddies. But if you're an engineer, like some of our users are, you want to use your smart phone to find parts or companies to do business with.

With mobile-based products, there's no box to buy. My money would go toward partnering with a mobile-application developer and hiring people to help us integrate and test new capabilities. There would also be ancillary costs related to working with carriers, and buying test equipment, so we could test the applications we're developing in house.

The end result would be better connection with customers. I'd want to use the investment in mobile technology to help people source industry products better than they can on the web.

Larry Bonfante
Chief Technology Officer, United States Tennis Association

There are two parts to this&emdash;what I could buy today with all the money in the world, and what I would want if I could rub a magic lamp and create something that doesn't exist.

In terms of real-world technology&emdash;stuff that already exists&emdash;I'd like to implement more Web 2.0 technologies for my internal clients. This would lower our operational costs and make our entire organization more effective. For instance, right now collaboration is done the old-fashioned way: people are e-mailing files back and forth. I'd like us to move to an online collaboration method, using wikis, portal technology, and blogs. This would take an additional training investment, but it's also a culture and a mindset change. It will happen eventually, but it's going to take a lot of heavy-lifting and time.

What would I want that doesn't exist? To create everything as a service. I'd love to have instant infrastructure and instant applications, without spending money on overhead and licenses we don't use. I'd also like security hardware that intuitively learns about new viruses and threats, without intervention. We do have great security hardware in place, but the bad guys are always coming up with new stuff, too, which means we're always updating and making sure everything is protected.

Tom Gilbert
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Engineering, Blue Ridge Networks

Our employees do more work on their laptops, and off the company network, than on. I'm concerned about increased susceptibility to malware, unauthorized access to our servers, and the loss or corruption of critical data. Although we use top-notch security products, I have no visibility into their effectiveness on mobile computers, nor do I know if our users are complying with our safe-computing guidelines. This makes me uneasy, since I'm accountable for continuity of our business. Therefore, if I had an unlimited budget, I'd design and build a bulletproof mobile security product, and implement it across our entire workforce.

Mobile computing is the most exciting thing to happen to IT since the PC, but it is just as scary. Ideally, I want our employees to be able to access any information or application to which they are authorized, at anytime, and from anywhere. This is a powerful vision, and it seems inevitable. But I would like to regain a sense of control that I had when most of our computers were behind the firewall and inside our walls. In addition, as we move toward this vision, I want our necessary security safeguards to be less restrictive.