Best of the blogs: Perhaps my headline seems obvious, particularly since this is a technology publication, but one reader wrote in to ask Bob Lewis what is so strategic about IT in a company where the business decides what needs to be done, and the tech staff merely follows-through? Excellent question. “You’re quite correct in wondering how someone who receives work-orders and processes them is in any way strategic. The answer is that they aren’t. CIOs who run this variety of IT department are playing it safe,” Lewis answers. So, the trick becomes asking the right questions of your own IT shop.Columnist’s corner: No one can ruin a project quite like a manager. Or, worse, can embark upon one that never should have been started in the first place, as our Off the Record author learned this week. A pile of money, wasted software, an unused server later, and a portal they just had to have was in place — the only thing missing was people accessing it. The news beat: Google fixes a flaw in Gmail that could enable spammers to reap email addresses from users’ contact lists. The OpenBeacon open source wireless tracking system gets tested at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. And Apple faces a class-action lawsuit here in the U.S. alleging that it violates antitrust laws by preventing any music sold via iTunes to be played on devices other than the iPod. Technology Industry