The Heller Report: IT Inflation Is Rising. Howard Rubin on What to Do

Driven by AI, IT inflation – the costs of labor, software, hardware, cloud, and services have risen 15 percent in 2026, while most IT budgets are up by only 4 percent, writes Howard Rubin, founder of The Technology Economists. In this article, Rubin explains how to respond. “It's time to start managing technology spending like an economy: measuring IT inflation and connecting investments to outcomes,” Rubin argues.

Unstructured data—emails, documents, recordings, collaboration threads—doesn't sit cleanly within any single function, and that means responsibility for its security is a shared responsibility, writes Darlene Williams, CIO at Rocket Software. Williams argues: “What matters most is that the teams that touch the data—IT, security, governance, legal—are working from the same information and the same set of accountabilities.”

MapTap is an online game for geography lovers. To play, respond to each of five prompts by pointing to the requested location by rotating a globe. Receive a score after the daily contest’s five guesses, along with short writeups about each location. On the first day we played, the prompts told us to find Orlando Fla.; Manchester, England; Gangnam, Seoul, South Korea; Rosetta, Egypt, and Hong Kong. Said one player at TechCrunch: “What makes MapTap so delightful is that you really do start to learn more about geography and improve your scores over time.”

Heller was recently retained by ECI (Electrical Components International) to recruit a Vice President of Information Technology. Founded in 1953, ECI engineers and manufactures complex electrical distribution systems, control box assemblies, and mission-critical engineered components trusted by industry leaders across diversified markets worldwide. For this role, we identified Tim Cox who most recently served as Director of Information Technology for Brazeway. Cox holds a B.S. from Michigan State University and an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. Best of luck, Tim!