Due Diligence: Days of Wine and Roses
By Eric Nee
E-commerce is back with a vengeance. After years of being held down by anti-quated laws designed to protect entrenched businesses, e-commerce has finally reached a critical mass, signaled by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to allow interstate sales of wine over the Internet. The ruling will pave the way for the repeal of more artificially restrictive legislation, allowing e-commerce to flourish. Columnist Eric Nee points out the many looming battles between the burgeoning e-commerce industry and stodgy old business cartels. But the courts, and consumers, have spoken—and CIOs would do well to listen to what they have to say.
Law of the Jungle: Identity Crisis
By Larry Downes
The list of organizations that have lost customer data has grown to include such big names as ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, Citigroup and the University of California at Berkeley. The almost daily stream of disclosures this year has raised the volume of calls for legislative action to a shout. But legislative remedies, insists columnist Larry Downes, would be a terrible mistake. Governments, he argues, are ill-suited to deal with problems involving confidential data, while Congress has a poor track record of writing legislation in a crisis, particularly when that crisis involves rapidly evolving technologies. The answer? Market-driven self-regulation and greater public education.
Expert Voices: Steven Weber
With Edward Baker
As a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, Steven Weber likes to work on what he calls "large-scale political action problems." That's how he sees the open-source movement: as "an experiment in social organization for production around a distinctive notion of property." For Weber, the movement's distinguishing characteristic lies in its concept of intellectual property, which is centered, in his view, on "the right to distribute, not the right to exclude." In a recent interview with Editor Edward Baker, Weber discussed the open-source movement and what it means for intellectual property rights, corporate management theory and globalization.
Trend: Telecom Industry
It's been almost a decade since the enactment of the 1996 Telecom Act, and the corporate telecom customer continues to face a heady mixture of opportunity, progress, confusion and concern. Big mergers have been coming so fast that it's tough to keep track of which company owns what anymore, much less enumerate the different services they offer, or plan to offer soon. But those mergers, and a variety of new technologies, have begun to bring the future into focus. Even if it is not yet clear who will dominate a world in which voice telecommunications are subsumed into data communications, the long-anticipated convergence of services and networks has taken a big step forward.
Case Study: Thomson Corp.
By Rob Garretson
Eight years and $7 billion in divestitures ago, Thomson Corp. was an old-school media conglomerate, held back by a core business—newspapers—that was slowly dying. Now Thomson is a streamlined electronic services firm with substantially lower costs and brighter prospects. Critical to the transition was the new role IT played in transforming Thomson's business. As Joe Rhyne, Thomson's senior vice president of technology, puts it, "Technology is everything now. It's the product. It's the distribution channel. It's the factory that produces the product." Business writer Rob Garretson analyzes the wrenching changes Thomson underwent and the value of cultivating technology leaders to support the company's new strategy.
Strategic Technology: Communications
By Debra D'Agostino
In the digital communications market, convergence remains a grand but as-yet-unrealized goal. Sure, it's nice to imagine how linking your e-mail, voice mail and Web conferencing could improve collaboration and boost productivity. But a truly unified messaging system that includes all the trimmings—VoIP, instant messaging, e-mail, Web conferencing, document management and collaboration—has yet to arrive. Until a complete product hits the market, reports Debra D'Agostino, companies that invest now could end up spending more than they hoped—and get less in return.
Research: Customer Strategies
By Allan Alter
Customers are more sophisticated and demanding than at any time in history, say 84 percent of nearly 300 respondents to this month's CIO Insight survey. Companies are responding to that sophistication in a variety of ways. The Web has become both the main point of contact between companies and their customers and the main vehicle for providing self-service options for purchasing products and obtaining account information. Most respondents feel their customer-service activities are meeting or exceeding their expectations, and just 21 percent see a customer backlash against self-service technologies. But meeting business goals remains elusive.
