The 2013 Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leader awards focus on accomplishments, but it's often the mistakes - and the lessons learned along the way -- they got these IT executives to where they are today. Award winner Joseph Eckroth, senior vice president and CIO for The Hertz Corp, shares two stories of failure and redemption that shaped his career.

There's a fantastic bakery in my neighborhood where everything is terrific. Whether you're getting bread or cakes or cookies, they are the best in town. Unfortunately, there's one problem.  Nothing is labeled. Insider (registration required)

When we talk about big data, we often focus on the stress of storage costs on IT budgets, or on the need for faster and more powerful analytics. But big data also has implications for collaboration. Insider (registration required).

Tomorrow's CIO must be consumed, even obsessed, with one objective: improving the customer experience

Are you on a hot career track - or a dead end? A recent salary survey may provide some clues. Insider (registration required)

From mHealth applications to genomics, the concept of personalized health is allowing individuals – long before they become patients – to make better, more informed health decisions.  Insider (free registration required).

Yes, they are out to get you. Yes, they want your passwords. And if you're like most folks out there, you've given them plenty of ways to take them from you. If you're dead serious about securing your online life, here's 10 tips for locking down and protecting your accounts. Insider (free registration required).

In the financial industry, software is largely considered a trade secret. Speed is everything in the trading environment - so how an application performs can make or break competitive advantage. But there is a delicate balance of giving back to the open source community while also maintaining competitive advantage and trade secrets. I encourage the financial industry to continue to find that balance, investing and supporting open source projects that can help the industry overall. Insider (free registration required).

In the same way that mobile technology has enabled countries to skip the costly and complex deployment of copper, easy-to-deploy-and-use SaaS-based tools are enabling companies to benefit from the latest collaboration technology without all the pain of an old-style on-premise software deployment.

WAN links have been around for many years and they continue to be one of the most critical parts of any IT infrastructure. When I first started my career as a network engineer in the nineties, link speeds of 32Kbps were not uncommon. Thankfully we have moved on from this and link speeds of 10Mbps+ are not uncommon today. However, for most networks, bandwidth on WAN links is still limited, due mostly to the expense of upgrading to higher link speeds. In today’s world there are lots of demands for more bandwidth as more and more services are centralized to main data centres