Allan Alter

Value scores: down. reliability scores: down. Customer loyalty: no surprise—these numbers are down, too. Increasingly, CIOs are disappointed and disgruntled with the performance of their most important vendors. In fact, the number of companies with lower scores in 2006 than in 2005 outpaces those with higher scores by a margin of two to one. How […]

DTE Energy in Detroit, a diversified $9 billion energy company that includes Detroit Edison, Michigan Consolidated Gas Company and other energy companies, is undertaking an experiment: Its software developers are using open source techniques to develop reusable code. Lynne Ellyn, senior vice president and CIO of DTE Energy, and a Cutter Fellow with the Cutter […]

In an ideal world, customer service ought to improve every year. But this year’s survey suggests that service levels are taking a step backward. Except for product or service quality, service levels dropped or remained the same as in 2005—even though IT organizations are providing support for more kinds of service. For more data and […]

Applications rarely become ubiquitous, no matter how much fuss and bother there has been about them. Case in point: the technologies that are supposed to be transforming sales and marketing. Technologies like customer analytics, competitive intelligence and salesforce automation are used by only 40 percent to 60 percent of respondents. Blogs and podcasts? They’re used […]

Robert Reich, who was secretary of labor under president Bill Clinton and is now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the leading experts on economic policy in the Democratic Party. Executive Editor Allan Alter spoke to Reich the morning after the historic 2006 election and asked him […]

Companies have boosted IT spending in order to collect more customer data. But they aren’t necessarily reaping the benefits of the increased information, because they aren’t actually analyzing and using all that data. Some customer initiatives are succeeding, such as collecting and sharing customer feedback, and creating a consistent customer experience. Companies are also utilizing […]

In his dual role as incoming president of the Society for Information Management and CIO of Altria Group Inc., the $98 billion, New York City-based conglomerate that includes Philip Morris and Kraft Foods, Jim Noble is in an unusually good position to see where corporate IT is heading. In his view, the big question confronting […]

The current economic expansion is five years old, and IT executives expect the good times will continue: 80 percent of respondents to this month’s Customer Strategies Survey say they are focused on revenue growth, not on cutting costs. But when the inevitable recession arrives and 2006 starts to seem like the good old days, will […]

Why wait until your retirement party to think about your legacy? It will do you—and your company—far greater good to begin leaving it today, says Robert Galford, co-author of Your Leadership Legacy: Why Looking Toward the Future Will Make You a Better Leader Today (Harvard Business School Press, September 2006). Galford is managing partner of […]

The “e” in “e-commerce” now stands for “everyday.” The Internet, once a novelty, then an important customer service and sales tool, has now emerged as the most popular sales channel. But are companies getting all the benefits they could? That’s the question we are asking in our new Customer Strategies survey, on which we will […]

You can buy a used copy of Michael Hammer and Jim Champy’s 13-year-old book, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, on Amazon.com for a penny; a new copy will set you back 49 cents. But while business reengineering is now out of favor, its less radical cousin—business process improvement—is very much in vogue. […]

More than 90 percent of BPI projects involve cross-functional processes, yet only 34 percent of respondents to our most recent survey say their company’s various departments work together effectively to coordinate their processes. And there’s BPI’s biggest challenge: Clearly, high quality software isn’t enough. A good one-on-one working relationship between CIOs and other executives isn’t […]