I have a personal example. In 1983, Steve Wozniak's mother asked me to create a technology to celebrate his birthday. I came up with the electronic greeting card and patented the use of electronic multimedia to deliver greeting cards over computers and networks. (Patent No. 4,965,727, issued Oct. 23, 1990, covers the process, and No. 4,951,203, issued Aug. 21, 1990, covers the product.) The patents cover wide-area networks, such as the Web, even though they were issued years before the browser was invented. I have little interest in enforcing these patents; to date, most if not all e-greeting cards are free, and the royalty percentage from even a billion free transactions is still zero. However, it's patents like these that will be dusted off and used in potentially disruptive ways.

Because this is sure to happen, it's essential that we as CIOs and IT managers ensure that every technology contract we sign has appropriate protections for intellectual property infringement. I may gain only partial protection from legal issues by doing this, but I'm reviewing all my contracts and thinking about ways to mitigate my business risk.

John D. Halamka is CIO at CareGroup Healthcare System, CIO and associate dean for educational technology at Harvard Medical School, chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network, CIO of the Harvard Clinical Research Institute and a practicing emergency physician. Contact him at jhalamka@caregroup.harvard.edu.