Welcome to one of my favorite issues of the year. It's our opportunity to give you a closer look at some of the people we believe will shape business technology in the year ahead through their innovative products, technologies, or services, or through their influence and insight into new markets or new ways of doing things.

Inside you'll find a profile of a CEO who not only guides a major financial company, but also helps President Bush guide national security (and, by the way, he still answers his own phone); a look at how the computer scientist who invented Word and Excel plans to make software code more comprehensible to users; a remarkable story of a Chinese dissident who helps lead an education-software company; a VP on Wall Street who's turning his firm into a leader in the high-performance computing space--using servers that are "dirt cheap, dumb as dirt, and incredibly disposable"; a politician who is helping redefine federal IT policy; a research director who's revolutionizing the modern-day supply chain; a CEO trying to ease the complexity of data storage and another who's working to simplify data warehouses; and a CIO (and emergency-room physician) helping to advance the use of IT in health care.

Some of these folks may be familiar to you, while others you may be meeting for the first time. But all of them, we believe, will make a significant impact on the business of technology in 2003.

Stephanie Stahl
Editor
[email protected]

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