CIO Insight Staff

Like a kid brother who looks up to his older siblings, midsize businesses have a lot to learn from the billion-dollar behemoths that dominate the Fortune 500. And all indications are that in 2007, mid-market companies will be going to school in earnest. Among the new tricks midsize companies are expected to pick up next […]

In some ways, midsize businesses will be dealing with the same general IT issues in 2007 as their large corporate cousins. They’ll be trying to help the business grow; watching the bottom line; worrying about security; and consolidating infrastructure. A Gartner Inc. survey of top IT initiatives in small and medium-size businesses for the coming […]

There are few disasters more embarrassing to a CIO than an expensive and time-consuming software rollout that fails to live up to expectations. Former Cap Gemini Chief Technologist John Parkinson and Scott Rosenberg, author of Dreaming in Code, share their tips on avoiding the biggest pitfalls in application development. 1. Don’t leap ahead before you […]

When James Copell wants to look for evidence of trends, he fires up an application called iQuest, from iQuest Analytics Inc. in Rehoboth, Mass. The application combines social-network analysis techniques with text mining and categorization techniques. Copell, who runs Copell Financial in New York City, a boutique investment research firm, uses this tool to simultaneously […]

A little more than 12 months ago, Salesforce.com, the Web-based, on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) and business services provider, was hit by a series of service outages over a six-week period that affected as many as 350,000 subscribers. The incidents jeopardized Salesforce.com’s relationship with some of its own customers and potentially sidetracked efforts to extend […]

As the new year approaches, here are the most popular articles that appeared on CIOInsight.com over the past 12 months: 1. The 40 Most Important IT Vendors CIO Insight’s annual ranking of the most important information technology vendors by by value, reliability and loyalty. 2. The 30 Most Important IT Trends for 2007 Thousands of […]

The business community is awash in books, manuals and courses on what it takes to be a great leader. So why do you need another one? Consider the source: Ram Charan, coauthor of Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done and author of What the CEO Wants You to Know. One of the world’s most […]

The key to project success is learning from what works as well as what doesn’t work . Baseline has compiled a list of best practices drawn from nearly 230 case studies we’ve written in the last five years. Lesson 1: Business processes should set the agenda, not technology. Toyota Motor is on track to pass […]

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Valassis Communications Inc. [VCI.N] said on Tuesday it would buy fellow direct marketer ADVO Inc. [AD.N] for $1.08 billion, an 11 percent discount to the original price in a deal ending a four-month legal battle. Valassis, a newspaper insert distributor based in Livonia, Michigan, will pay $33 a share in cash […]

There are often startling differences in scores that vendors receive from companies with annual revenues above and below $500 million. Sun Microsystems and Oracle received much higher marks, while Verizon Communications, AT&T, EMC and security vendors Symantec and EMC fared worse.