I just read "Unleashing the Power of IT," by Dan Roberts and the folks at his consulting firm, Ouellette & Associates, which specializes in the "people issues" of IT. Here are two takeaways.

For example, here's my favorite, No. 5: High-performing CIOs allocate more time to talent development than to any other activity.

Dickie Oliver is on a mission to build an enterprise "know-how platform" so that 1.6 million employees across 110 countries can do a better job of selling chicken, pizza and tacos. And he isn't afraid to use some nontraditional IT approaches to do it.

An eclectic collection of my takeaways -- the things stuck in my head -- after Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders conference in Palm Springs, Calif. For example, I heard IT execs say that business folks today have zero tolerance for downtime and expect applications to be "Apple-simple."

It sounds impossibly fast. But Avnet Inc.'s M&A playbook allows it to bring acquired companies into the fold (including IT systems) with speed and sensitivity.

CIOs are starting to grapple with the BYOT (bring your own technology) phenomenon, such as employee-owned iPhones and iPads. And some common themes are emerging: Voice and data service costs will be capped. Lost devices will be wiped.

First, there are the "unstoppable forces" of mobility, cloud computing and consumer technologies in the workplace. And that's just the one of the trends sweeping through enterprise IT, according to presenters at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders conference. There are nine more to go....

Conference-goers typically say that a key reason they go to conferences is for networking with other people. Yet, today, many attendees are heads-down checking their e-mail on a smartphone. Hardly a way to make connections with other human beings.

The biggest enterprise risks (overall) include regulatory compliance, fraud, talent flight and (ahem) "IT risk." Now, what can the CIO do to mitigate those risks?

Private clouds are scalable, elastic, shared and metered. And one more thing.