Spotlight Features

Imagine getting a $45 billion bill without knowing exactly how you ended up with such a big tab. That's exactly the situation facing Americans struck by identity fraud. In 2007, the misuse of lost and stolen identity information cost $45 billion, an average of $5,574 per incident, according to Javel...

"Smart" shopping carts have been around for a while, but until recently, they haven't managed to gain much traction. Now, some momentum is building, according to proponents of the computer-rigged market baskets that -- with a swipe of a card -- can flash an alert that a customer's favorite brand of ...

Device makers are hard at it trying to crack the market for mobile enterprise software applications. While BlackBerry devices put Research in Motion in a front-running position, enterprise users have an increasingly wide range of choices when it comes to high-end smartphones and mobile devices. Rece...

It's not easy to find something to like about air travel these days -- the industry, after all, has the lowest customer satisfaction ratings in the economy -- but Gail Bower, president of Bower & Co. Consulting, has: the self-service kiosks that just about every airline now uses to handle automa...

On July 11, when Apple had barely started to sell its much-anticipated iPhone 3G, Salesforce.com became the first customer relationship management vendor to announce the availability of its mobile applications for the iPhone in Apple's App Store. Now, two weeks after the phone's release, a few other...

Working from home has become an acceptable option for a wide range of professionals, including salespeople and lawyers. Until recently, this option, dubbed "homeshoring," was unpopular in the call center, although that perception has been changing. "Companies are becoming more comfortable in letting...

As more buyers and sellers look to the Web and as other parties in the real estate value chain move to Web-enabled business software platforms, the real estate industry has begun to embrace CRM as a sales tool. While enterprise-level leaders such as Oracle and SAP don't have specific CRM offerings f...

You're the manager of a Hilton Garden Inn, and it's the height of family vacation season. The lobby is abuzz with kids toting skateboards and moms pushing strollers; your front desk agents are overloaded with check-ins. In the middle of all this, a harried business traveler calls to the front desk f...

Casinos have been on a roll when it comes to customer relationships. The house has learned it always wins when it places its bets on the fact that humans are creatures of habit. Unlike other industries, however, the gambling lot does not leave the odds to a stack of faceless data mirroring only tran...

The Internet has seen massive adoption. Online retailing has continued to dramatically build its customer base and more and more companies are sending their offline customers to the Internet for service and support. To service both these old and new customers, the Internet has already had an abundan...

Having delivered on its goal of moving to a service-oriented architecture, SAP now aims to make use of that architecture as it drives innovation out to the fringes of its sphere of influence. CEO Henning Kagermann outlined in his keynote at the company's annual Sapphire conference a strategy to deli...

SAP is a company in transition. The Walldorf, Germany-based enterprise software firm has been around since 1972, which makes it older than Microsoft. To hear observers and insiders tell it, the firm has been showing its age in recent years. A combination of its massive size -- it is the third-larges...

There was a time when customizing enterprise software was a long, drawn-out, often painful affair. Then along came Software as a Service, recalls Dan Druker, senior vice president for Intacct, an on-demand financial management and accounting application. It was really easy for Ingres -- a provider o...

One of the common myths surrounding HIPAA is that it is not a privacy law at all, and that it weakened rather than strengthened individuals' rights to health information privacy. That's not the case at all, according to Deven McGraw, recently appointed director of the Center for Democracy & Tech...

Responding to heightened concerns about the privacy of individuals' medical and healthcare information, the federal government in 1996 introduced HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It empowered the Department of Health and Human Services to develop and manage the methods...