"We like the idea of bringing in strong, young minds," Wal-Mart CIO and Executive Vice President Linda Dillman said this morning at the Forbes CIO Forum in New York. Most of the company's current IT employees as well as the new hires work out of Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Ark., headquarters, where salaries and housing costs are lower than in other parts of the country. Wal-Mart also wants to retain centralized control over IT, Dillman said.

Wal-Mart has tried, and largely rejected, IT outsourcing because it didn't deliver as advertised. "We tried offshore development, and we weren't very successful," Dillman said. "We found that the hourly rate was less, but that it took more hours [to complete projects]."

Still, the company is in the process of developing what Dillman called "remote development centers" in Brazil and parts of central America where it has acquired other retail chain operations. "We want to take those associates and have them become remote development teams doing projects outside of the U.S. It will help us bring more of a global understanding to our [IT] development," she said.

Asked what's on her IT wish list, Dillman said her top priority is a tool for effectively managing e-mail. "E-mail overload is the biggest drain on an organization, and there aren't effective tools out there," she said.

Second on her list are tools for effectively managing Wal-Mart's massive inventory of 3,000 servers in Bentonville as well as another 8,000 remote servers. "There is a lot of excess capacity, and we need tools to better manage it," she said.