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This recommendation seems too obvious to mention, almost like "Try not to get infected!" Yet IT administrators who spend so much time putting out fires and maintaining an understaffed help desk, often never look at their system logs. They never monitor bandwidth usage. They cannot tell you who is connecting to what from their network. They have devices connected to their network that they don't even know about...

"Inside sales" has long represented a catch-all function relied upon by marketing and sales leaders to manage both the quantity and quality of leads entering the business development funnel. In search of the ideal balance between the value and volume of sales leads that enter into the prospecting pipeline, companies apply the same calculus to their selling staff, deploying lower-cost resources to "hunt" in order to filter the best revenue opportunities to more highly leveraged closers.

It should come as no surprise, then, that IT often views data leaving its network as a negative rather than a positive. However, Software as a Service cost-savings and the ability to help companies foster innovation within their own infrastructure is too strong a value proposition for most enterprises to ignore. Although management may be pushing cloud initiatives on reticent IT staff, many chief information security officers (CISOs) and chief technology officers (CTOs) are wary of the hype and have nagging fears about the loss of infrastructure control, loss of ownership of data, vendor lock-in and data security.

While managers can lead their staffs to the full use of CRM, they can also set in motion events that lead to CRM failure. Just as CRM represents a change for the people in the trenches, it also means a change of thinking for management, and if that change doesn't happen at the upper echelons it can start a very unpleasant chain reaction.

This is too subtle for Microsoft. The company actually may have the skills in Kathleen Hall (who was positioned successfully against Steve Jobs with the Windows 7 launch), bu tit is unlikely it will fund or staff this effort to a level that would assure its success. As a result, Google's exposures will likely be mostly internal for the foreseeable future. ...

There's fear within the medical community of a link between cellphone usage and cancer, according to the National Research Center for Women and Families. The Director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, Ronald Herberman, warned his staff in July 2008 that the risks from cellphone radiation may be higher than thought previously, the Center's Web site notes. He advised them to restrict their usage.

The tweets that helped add detail to the big picture were coming from trained journalists and ordinary citizens. Reporters tweeted from swat team stakeouts and neighborhood searches, but so did people living in those neighborhoods. They all found their way to the Twitter hashtag "#washooting," and news organizations sometimes took their staffing cues from what residents sent in from smartphones or computers...

Clark is a member of the boards of several organizations. He has a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University and a master's degree in military science from the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College. ...

In the building design trade, the information produced offers real-time advantages for what Autodesk technical specialist John Boehms calls "green team leaders," as well as the junior staff who work for and report to them CAD specialist Autodesk, based in San Rafael, Calif., m...

It also pays to train the first line of defense in these situations to start the process of transforming a complaint into an opportunity. That means training for your call center staff to deal with unhappy customers, and giving the staff the power to start the process rolling.

Ask any IT organization to identify the No. 1 cause of network performance problems, and they'll probably point to high-profile events: denial-of-service attacks, computer viruses, fiber cuts, power outages or hardware failures. However, studies show that more than two-thirds of network issues are actually tied to a simple everyday activity: The ungoverned process of IT staff making network configuration changes.

Most healthcare facilities take a fairly standard approach to marketing -- if they pay any attention to that function at all. While many hospitals may claim they have a staff "customer relations manager," often the person comes from a clerical, marketing or public relations background, or simply acts as a hospitality coordinator or greeter.

However, once a business starts to reach about 30 staff members, time reporting helps them understand costs, improve efficiency, and focus on the right areas, Journyx CEO Curt Finch told CRM Buyer. It helps them track how much is spent on each customer and decide which ones are more profitable...

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has released a report slamming the online business practices of three direct marketing companies -- Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty -- along with hundreds of online Web sites and retailers that participate in these practices. Many of the participating retailers are well-known brand names, such asClassmates.com, Hotwire and 1-800-Flowers.com.

Now if you're sensing a bit of snarkiness here, you're right -- I find these lists a bit frustrating. That's not because of inaccuracies in the lists themselves (to the contrary, many of them are dead-on), but instead because they sometimes inappropriately drive how IT managers make budgeting decisions. Don't get me wrong, keeping abreast of the new areas is always valuable -- and I'm always fully on board with keeping us and our staff up to date and capable of reacting to new types of threats. But it's also important to keep in mind that what's new isn't always what's most critical. Where should you be investing budget dollars? At critical areas, not just what's new and shiny...

The argument should not initially be about software delivery models or IT considerations, but about the impact on business. That means the impact of a well-tracked marketing campaign on sales, the impact of arming salespersons with customer data at the start of the selling cycle, the impact of data collected by sales staff on the service and product development processes, and the translation of all the results into marketing.

Security attack analysis to enable security officers and IT staff to characterize and mitigate an attack that slipped past network defense (e.g. zero-day attack) Beyond security, there are other day-to-day use cases for network forensics. This power of network traffic informat...

Less than 20 days until Cyber Monday. You've got staffing queued up. Your warehouse is full. Your shipper is standing by. But have you considered what will happen on your Web site after a flood of qualified buyers click on the irresistible and precisely worded ad for your product or service? Now (not then) is the time to find out if your Web site can take the heat that Cyber Monday will dish out...

Staff members of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agencies have the authority to seize electronic devices at U.S. ports of entry, examine the information they contain, and destroy copies of that information. That ...

I've seen layoffs cripple companies, result in deadly workplace violence, destroy morale, launch unions and create competing companies. For instance, I think layoffs are largely the initial cause of Sun's death spiral. The reason is that they are surgery by chain saw; there is nothing elegant about most of them, which seem to assume people are closer to machines than humans. They are vastly easier to do than force management to maintain high quality staff and balance costs with reasonable revenues. ...