Every week, I share the most interesting and useful tech articles that I’ve found over the past week. This week’s top articles focus on essential CIO technologies, mobile BI, and more. I hope you find them useful:

4 technologies for every CIO’s roadmap
As a CIO, what areas must you focus on going into next year? While it varies by company, this article lists 4 game-changing technologies that must be on your radar. I personally feel that #2 and #3 are two of the most important areas a business can focus on.

10 hard-earned lessons from a lifetime in IT
A couple of weeks back, I put together an article that listed 7 things that developers wish they knew earlier. Here’s a similar article taken from a general IT perspective–and it’s packed with great advice.

Do you have the IT for the coming digital age?
Technology is evolving faster than ever. Can your IT department keep up? The IT department of the future must move quickly and adapt to change–something that many current IT departments struggle with.

Mobile BI: Native app or browser?
One of the next biggest trends in Business Intelligence is mobile BI, which brings data analytics and reports outside the confines of your office. The big question: Should you build native apps, or mobile web apps? This article leans toward the former, but with a couple of flawed assumptions:

First, it states that web apps aren’t mobile optimized…which just isn’t true. You can mobile-optimize any web app far easier than creating a native app.

Second, it states that native apps have offline capabilities. While true, that requires storing business data on the device itself, which presents a security risk. Offline capabilities do no good if there’s no data on the device, while storing data on the device isn’t a recommended option.

Now, It’s pretty clear which side of the debate I’m on. I think mobile web apps are the best option for business. If you’d like to hear why, check out this paper.