Excerpts from the interview follow:

You indicated in your keynote address that IT didn't force mobile computing on your workforce and worked with your business units to achieve heavy laptop penetration and thousands of smart phones. How forceful can you be as a CIO or IT manager to bring about these kinds of changes? Our desktop-to-mobile conversion wasn't done in the dark. We like to do pilots and get hundreds or even thousands of users in the pilot. We're very data-driven at Intel and have to have data supporting our decisions. The pilots prove a concept. Some innovations are early-adopter-focused and we just built on that success.

You have something like 85,000 laptop users, about 85 percent of your workforce, which is an increase from 66 percent using laptops in 2003. What's the most important measure of the ROI with that change? We know we get two hours per week per employee of improved productivity based on a 40-hour week. That's a very conservative measure. That's roughly a 5 percent improvement. But the proof of the value is in the decision by users to keep using mobile computing, laptops and handhelds. It's not an IT effort or to reduce head count.

Has that productivity resulted in lost head count? Really, it's more so in getting more done with what you have. People can cover more ground.

OK, you have a lot of laptops being used internally at Intel. What about tablet PCs? They haven't sold nearly as much as the vendors would have liked, and I'm wondering what users think. I've tried tablets a few times, and they're not ready for my usage model. They're getting better, and the software is still evolving. The usability is still not quite there. The ones we've seen weren't quite as stable as you'd like, with problems with restores and locking up. There appear to be bugs in the software, although they are certainly better than they were a year ago.