It was a year back that I thought of developing a GPS/GPRS enabled device, which when fitted on to tractors can help farmers monitor their tractors' health and performance for better control and maintenance, easy operations and improved productivity. I am now getting a patent for the solution and the technology behind it. This is important to me as this innovation has come from IT, and not from R&D. 

A company must use a document management system to remain competitive. Paper is the largest 'database' within a company and the most difficult to access. Therefore, an EDM solution is necessary to manage and access information held in paper form. But an EDM is not going to automatically take your operation to the next level. Only f you use the tool correctly you will see strong incremental improvements that will cut cost and speed decision making. 

Here's a list of things that I personally think worked and created some good noise in the industry. For example: MacBook Air, the Core i5-based, ultra slim machine that is a technology marvel. And HP ePrint, that addresses a lot of issues by allowing you to print from mobile devices through email. This is my personal list and therefore I shall not be blamed for being biased. 

What the industry really needs to focus on are methods that yield demand capture as opposed to demand generation. Demand capture takes a deeper look at the customer and understands from a customer's perspective what matters. What are the challenges a customer faces, and therefore what are the products that customer will need? 

What should be a CIO's top priority - cost or quality? A very profound question with an equally profound answer - depends! To say that either cost or quality is always the first priority would be incorrect. Cost is always a consideration, especially in the case of companies in the social domain, whose target segment is the poorest of the poor and the objective is to ensure maximum returns.