Expert Advice

Some companies have a "PMO of one," which means that instead of setting up a sophisticated project management office, they assign one person the task of establishing and enforcing common project management processes. This person often has to deal with a broad spectrum of project work being performe...

Like ERP and CRM before, collaboration is the next big space in software. By the numbers: SharePoint is a billion-dollar business. IBM Lotus is a $700 million business. Forrester Research claims Enterprise 2.0 will grow to a $4.6 billion industry by 2013. Collaboration software is evolving to mean m...

Consumers mostly used dial-up networks to access the Internet as recently as the mid-1990s. A screaming-fast modem might have synced up at 28.8 or 33.6 kbps. Surfing the Web meant waiting a minute or more for a basic Web page to open -- and forget about sharing images or video. The good news, howeve...

Contact center managers have started to think beyond "service levels," "average talk time" and "wait time." Slowly yet steadily, FCR has found its way into customer operations dashboards. A dual function of customer experience and contact center efficiency, FCR accurately portrays the overall health...

Although many usability principles might seem like common sense, they are often overlooked in Web site redesign. Among companies large and small, the same usability issues arise over and over again: not having a call to action for your marketing slideshow or product showcase; not having a search box...

The Linux operating system is highly compatible with two hot computing trends: virtualization and cloud computing. Just as the 2001-2002 recession helped usher in Linux as a mainstream solution, virtualization may accelerate Linux usage during and after the current recession. Linux already has a pow...

All new e-commerce businesses should address one vital question first and foremost: Will you collect and store payment card information on your Web site or offload credit card processing to a PCI-compliant merchant like PayPal? The answer to this question is paramount and should be well thought out ...

Over the past few years, it seems like there's one technology that almost everyone is deploying: laptop encryption. All over the industry, in nearly every vertical, it seems like everybody has either just deployed, is deploying, or is about to deploy some type of encryption technology to protect la...

Throughout the economic downtown, business managers heard virtually every cost-cutting measure, from furlough days to reducing IT investment. As we see shoots of recovery, we are reminded that no company can cost-cut its way to excellence; without some focus on the customer, eventually service start...

Today's data-storage customer has lost his voice in a sea of vendor jockeying and positioning. This glut of vendors creates a noisy industry and a crowded marketplace, where all vendors sound the same and marketing materials are nearly indistinguishable from vendor to vendor. Directly because of thi...