Allan Alter

Customer service is the No. 1 business priority for IT executives in 2008 but it’s not due to altruism. Without sales, few IT organizations would have reason to exist. That’s why our third Customer Strategies Survey examines the priorities, strategies and technologies used in sales and marketing as well as customer service. The study shows […]

Nanjing, China’s historic former capital, is home to 7 million people, 50 universities and colleges, 100 technical institutes and a large manufacturing sector. But Nanjing vice mayor Chen Gang told me, at CIO Insight China‘s Sino-American CIO Summit near Beijing recently, that the city needs "to change the model of [economic] development" so it can […]

CIO Insight surveyed more than 250 IT executives about their top priorities and most important technologies for 2008 and how they view the outlook for the economy and their own companies’ prospects. Cost Cutting Top Business Goal for Big Companies Other priorities include improving customer service, business processes and IT planning. With their often massive […]

Security requires eternal vigilance, regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley demand attention and pop-tech culture–think Facebook, Google, iPhone–serves as a public R&D lab. But CIOs have three long-term and never-ending agendas: The now-dominant improvement agenda concentrates on building better processes and services. The innovation agenda aims at creating high-potential technologies and ways to use them. But when the […]

CIOs Worry About the Economy, But Expect Their Own Companies to Grow Bad economic news puts IT jobs and spending at risk. IT executives are equally divided on whether the economy will grow at least as quickly as it did in 2007 or whether 2008 will see slower growth. That’s much more pessimistic than a […]

Who Looks Out for Mid-Tier Firms? HP, IBM and Symantec score with mid-tier companies, but many telecom firms play favorites with large customers. In an ideal world, vendors would provide terrific value and reliability to all their customers. But that’s not how it works in the real world: some provide more value and better service […]

The “Big Picture” charts are the heart of the Vendor Value survey; they provide ratings of 38 vendors on eight different value factors, along with data on what kinds of products and services are being used by their customers. This year, online readers can sort the data for the first time. The Big Picture charts […]

A year ago, we kicked off our annual Vendor Value survey with gloomy news: Value, reliability and customer loyalty were all down. This year, it seems most vendors heard the message and improved. How they did it varied: Check Point Software’s customers like the way it combined quality with lower costs; T-Mobile’s clients say it […]

How do vendors stack up to their rivals? In this part of the Vendor Value report, CIO Insight compares vendors in eight different product categories. This year’s headlines: Apple vs. Dell: Apple has fallen behind Dell in every major category, as more IT executives asking where’s the ROI? Enterprise Software: Red Hat caps off the […]

Move over, college kids and awkward adolescents: About half of CIOs and other IT executives use social networking Web sites too. LinkedIn, a site geared to adults seeking to build a network of professional contacts, is the clear first choice. But MySpace and Facebook also are used by about 20 percent to 25 percent of […]

Is IT becoming less important? No way: Technology hasn’t been this strategic since the dot-com boom of the 1990s. That’s what some of Gartner’s top analysts told us when we went beyond the formal presentations at October’s Gartner Symposium/IT Expo and met individually to discuss immediate and long-term IT priorities, the strategic role of IT […]