As I look back on my calendar for 2005, I see a few appointments to get the car serviced, lots of Little League baseball and soccer games, tons of internal meetings, and industry events near and far. But more than anything, I see the names and dates of the many people I've talked with over the past 12 months.

From Mark Jen, the blogger who got fired by Google, to Bill Gates, the nonblogger who has grown tired of Google, to CIOs like Randy Mott, who was with Dell when the year started but works for Hewlett-Packard now, and UPS's David Barnes and Procter & Gamble's Filippo Passerini, to security experts, marketing types, entrepreneurs, industry analysts, and media critics, it all adds up to an incredibly engaging 12 months. I had dinner one night with Varun Jha, the CIO of Tata Steel in Jamshedpur, India, who traveled 40 hours through six cities to attend to InformationWeek's spring conference in Amelia Island, Fla.

It's people like these that make my job so interesting and that shape their companies and our industry in subtle and dramatic ways. You'll find profiles of eight of them in this week's issue of InformationWeek as part of our annual Innovators & Influencers series. They include Scott Kveton, who runs an open-source lab at Oregon State University; Blake Caldwell, a biosurveillance expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Dianah Neff, the civic-minded CIO of Philadelphia.

In profiling this group, including, posthumously, Peter Drucker, we've only scratched the surface of talented people we meet every day. But that's a good thing because, as it happens, we're about to enter a new year, and my calendar is wide open.

John Foley
Editor
[email protected]

Stephanie Stahl returns Jan. 2.

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