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The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM makes it easier for the managers to manage their sales staff. Which is true...

This represents an area of concern because setting up a secure environment is only the first step. As the second law of thermodynamics tells us, all things trend toward chaos -- this is no less true with a virtual environment. Stand up a virtual environment today and walk away from it and you'll wind up with an unmanaged security nightmare tomorrow. As technical staff create new VMs, modify existing VMs, create "orphan" snapshots, and take other action in the environment, the environment slowly moves away from the defined, "secure" state into a less known one. This has a security impact.

However, the CEO of Circuit City, in a move to "cut costs" (translation:impress Wall Street), fired most if not all the knowledgeable sales staffnationwide and hired newbies at a lower wage. Guess what happened? Thesenewbies knew close to zero about any product in the store. And soCircuit City's death spiral began in about 2003. This was the maincause...

Amazon has taken a relatively hands-off approach to Zappos, letting Hsieh and his staff run the company the way they want to However, "if folks are using the same password for Amazon as they were for Zappos, they are now breached on both services, and if it were determined Zap...

"But with the prospect of someone being able to transfer the many gigabytes of files onto a device they carry around in their pocket or purse -- and which bears absolutely no resemblance to a portable hard drive -- the chances of a rogue member of staff being detected with this data are close to zero without using automation to audit and analyze access activity," he added...

"Hollywood is going about it in the old way -- getting to know Capitol Hill staffers, trying to affect legislation. Meanwhile, tech companies -- while they have more of lobbying presence now than they even did five years ago -- are still not as good at that game. So they are trying to mobilize citizens to make it as painful as possible for Congress to pass the legislation."

In that vein, it's important to ensure that measurements are done correctly because "reporting metrics can be manipulated to look better than they actually are" and so staffing is key, Noble said The Stratfor Fallout Continues...

Being tasked with the protection of an organization's electronic data and the responsibility of ensuring the reliability of applications upon which critical business processes depend demands comprehensive planning, design, testing and validation. However, all of these responsibilities are impossible to tackle with understaffed IT shops fully consumed with operating the current environment. ...

Over the past year, we have seen many retailers making the switch to in-store mobility. Retailers such as Sears, Home Depot, Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom are not only equipping their staff with mobile devices -- they're handing them to customers as well, to help make shopping more efficient and convenient for all parties involved. ...

While you may be able to laugh it off, the reality is that the exceptional behavior of that one employee is likely to stick in your customers' heads with greater tenacity than all the positive actions of the rest of your staff combined. That's not because customers are vindictive -- that's just the way the human brain works.

1. Make Friends With Your Legal and Security Staff Any IT organization that is preparing to adopt any sort of cloud service needs to understand their data issues. If your organization is large enough, you probably have people in the legal department who specialize in data secu...

Despite its recent staff surge, Third Sun is not hiring at the moment. Rather, it's waiting to see what 2012 brings in terms of tax incentives, grants and political goodwill It's likely that the industry will experience a slight cooling-off in the coming months, said Hahn....

The following tale will show the effects of a positive co-dependent relationship between executives and their project management offices. The story is associated with responsibilities that co-author Michael O'Brochta had when he worked as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He spent decades managing hundreds of projects, managing project managers, and leading efforts to advance project management within the organization. The story begins with a strategic need and an executive who recognized this need and made a commitment to take action."I don't understand it; I have staffed my new organization with hundreds of highly skilled project managers. Yet even after our first year in business, we can't seem to deliver enough projects on time or to the satisfaction of our customers." Those were the words O'Brochta first heard when the director of the organization asked for help. He went on to describe the gap between his vision for his organization and the current reality: "I'm confident that running this organization as project-based is the way to go, but I never thought it would be this hard," said the director. "I periodically review project schedules and find them to be ever-changing. No one is happy about a moving target -- not me, and least of all, not the customer. Quite frankly, I do not see why anyone would come to my organization if they had a decent alternative." ...

They're also terrific assets for making specific, tactical changes -- do you have an employee who's a common factor in complaints? Is there a part of your billing process that's drawing customers' ire? Are there specific aspects of your product or service that frequently give customers heartburn? Are people chirping about your sales staff's approach? ...

What you can't get away with is a reliance on canned answers or automatically generated responses. While these may increase the productivity of your staff, they destroy the effectiveness of your CRM efforts. Customers can see right though anything pre-prepared, generic or worded like a marketing effort; they've been exposed to messaging for years, and they can instinctively sense the difference between people writing at them and people talking to them...

Carrier IQ's executives have reportedly met with officials at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, as well as the staffs of three senators who had written to the company expressing their concerns over the issue An End to Spear Phish...

Government and contractor staff remained consistent and stable IT and project managers maintained regular communication with the prime contractor...

IBM has innovated in all these areas for years, but the next major step lies in further optimizing workload performance for systems for every kind, whether they are general purpose servers or specialized appliances. In IBM's view, this process can happen most anywhere: in the customer's data center (implemented by IT staff or with the help of IBM service professionals); in the factory (for both individual clients' and special use cases); or by design (appliances developed/integrated for specific applications and processes, like Netezza's Data Warehouse Solution).

In a response to Franken's concerns, Sprint maintained that at any given time, only about 1.3 million phones are "tasked" to collect data, and of those, about 30,000 respond to queries from Sprint staff The information collected isn't used to profile customers to better provid...

On the other hand, you have the reality of organizations -- they move far slower than the speed of ideas. Even if there's one person on staff who completely grasps the implications and possibilities of a revolutionary way of changing the business -- like SCRM -- a lot of evangelizing to employees and management will be necessary in order for those ideas to manifest themselves in ways that change the business, unless that person is high in the C-level, of course...