Spotlight Features

It is difficult to think of an area where the pharmaceutical industry is not under siege these days. Regulators spawning new rules, governments putting price caps in place, safety advocates demanding more information on side effects, health maintenance plans implementing their own cost controls, and...

Combining in-memory data management, visual analytics, social networking and rich Internet applications, Software as a Service and open source software development, companies such as Advizor Solutions, Fractal Edge, Greenplum, LucidEra and others are filling what was an open niche in the BI marketpl...

After Best Buy lost the laptop Raelyn Campbell had brought in for repair, the D.C. resident filed a lawsuit demanding $54 million from the company. That eye-popping claim -- and the publicity it engendered -- was the culmination of a long blog campaign during which Campbell related her frustration w...

Law firms stand to gain as much as anyone from the advances being made when it comes to CRM systems, and CRM software providers are keen to fill this potentially lucrative market niche. LexisNexis, Microsoft and Salesforce.com are among the firms out there offering CRM systems specifically geared fo...

Rapid and cheaper deployment and the enhanced information sharing and communications collaborative applications afford organizations are helping the technology catch on in government agencies just as in the private sector. "Today's government agencies face growing pressure to improve efficiency, inc...

The fact that we pay the taxes that support the costs of government ought to make us the customers of the government, right? That seems logical, but often taxpayers and constituents are treated more like an annoyance than a valued customer. However, some government agencies are starting to see the l...

Perhaps nowhere as in government services is the need for truly collaborative software and information systems so great. The organizational and information management challenges are as immense and far-reaching as government itself, and if anything have intensified in the face of budget cuts and cons...

Call center reps get a bad rap. They're expected to be constantly nice in the face of increasingly not-nice customer interactions, field the blunt of management's never-ending drive for increased performance, and solve every problem that randomly hits their line. It's no wonder the industry faces a ...

It wasn't so long ago that the chief technology officer was sequestered in the IT department, cut off for all intents and purposes from the hub of enterprise power. It is different now, of course: The CTO position has grown in visibility over the last 10 years and become more closely tied to that of...

Database vendors, as well as human resources, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and specialist recruitment management systems developers are all working with organizations to improve their recruiting and personnel management capabilities -- and they're taking advantage o...

Voice over Internet protocol has recently become more common in corporations large and small. By combining separate voice and data transmissions onto the same line, this new communications option enables companies to lower their telecommunications costs and, after taking advantage of the savings, co...

The holiday season may bring joy to consumers and retailers alike, but hand in hand with that joy comes the inevitable pain of post-holiday returns. Gift returns can be a hassle for consumers, but for retailers they pose a daunting logistical challenge, requiring speedy adjustments throughout the pi...

Few industries in this online era can lay claim to a longer or more venerable history than newspapers can -- but today, it's no secret that newspapers are in trouble. The rise of the Internet has wrought changes to the competitive landscape that are drawing away both readers and advertisers, leaving...

The familiar adage that the consumer is always right has taken on a new meaning in the Internet age. Rather than talk with a store manager, consumers are now making their feelings about different products known on message boards and blogs. "Many companies tried to ignore the online forums, but most ...

In the ultimate game of bait-and-switch, several Web sites try to pass off a bot as a bod. That is to say that Live Chat is offered to users, but there's no flesh-and-blood person on the line, there's only a chat bot making a robotic guess at what the user might want to know. Few are fooled by the s...