As I explore in the accompanying Executive Report, CRM continues to ride a growing wave of interest as businesses struggle to find any way to gain advantage in difficult markets and difficult economic situations. Companies have demanded, or at least pursued, strategies that I call the "Three Fs" (features, functions, and fads). Vendors have responded. New features, new functions, new fads, and even new CRM packages have hit the market at an amazing rate.

Understanding how to employ technology effectively to create new products, reach new markets, service customers, reduce and manage costs, allow employees and partners to communicate, collaborate, and innovate, as well as collect, store, and analyze vastly increasing amounts of data, among other business challenges, can be both a differentiator and a competitive su

Social media is increasingly relevant not only to the professional life of your colleagues and employ

The success of a technology project depends on numerous factors -- the technology itself, the efforts and talents of the project team, the market, and a vast network of stakeholders who can promote or hinder progress toward the goal.

Social media, including but not limited to social networks, is no longer just where you spend your evenings when

The accompanying Executive Report, aimed at both leadership teams of organizations and members of product delivery teams, details our experience changing the Cisco Voice Technology Group (VTG) waterfall culture to an iterative and incremental delivery system. In the report, we discuss how we went about initiating the change, what went well, and what we won't do again.

The accompanying Executive Report explores how cloud computing can play a vital role as a catalyst in accelerating the leveling of modern society by fueling the ongoing shift from top-down, "supply push" business environments to bottom-up, "demand pull" bu

Agile software development methodologies such as Scrum and XP have grown in popularity over the past 10 years. This growth has coincided with the injection of lean terminology and practices into the software development lexicon. Of course, software development organizations are not drawn to concepts like lean and agile for their own sake. Other underlying goals or deficiencies cause the organization to want to change. Primarily the motivation is the culmination of myriad issues that lead to the inability to deliver software on time or, more important, in a predictable manner.

There is one common link that all complex projects share: the need for a very special type of project manager, a person I call a "complex project manager" (CPM). This family of professionals has not yet been formally defined.

In this two-part Executive Report series, we share in detail what suppliers have been saying to us and our colleagues about clients during the past two decades -- the things they wish clients would know or do as well as things they wish clients didn't know or do. In Part I, we covered the 10 statements suppliers make about establishing the outsourcing arrangement. Here in Part II, we examine another 10 pertaining to managing outsourced services.

The accompanying Executive Report provides executives, government workers, and security professionals a fast track to gaining insight into cyber security. It covers executive liabilities and accountabilities, the top eight cyber security cases, situational awareness, and a multitude of need-to-know issues for immediate practical use.

In this two-part Executive Report series, we share in detail what suppliers have been saying to us and our colleagues about clients during the past two decades -- the things they wish clients would know or do as well as things they wish clients didn't know or do. In Part I, we cover the 10 statements suppliers make about establishing the outsourcing arrangement.

As an executive coach, I continuously hear new clients say, "All I want are results. Is it too much to expect people to deliver on their commitments?" After a few minutes of additional dialogue, we typically discover several organizational, technical, and managerial challenges that have culminated in some noticeable and negative result.

Organizations deal with pressure on a daily basis. Executive and managerial pressure frequently comes in the form of on-time delivery, cost cuts, and scope coverage; customer pressure usually comes in the form of feature requests and better quality; employee pressure continually asks for more time to finish tasks, fewer work hours, and better guidance.

In today's business realities, there are circumstances in which traditionally employed information access schemas are incapable of securing information against breaches. Such a class of problems can be identified as sensitive information security related to conflict of interests.

Chinese technology firms are rapidly growing into the world's most innovative and competitive players.

Businesses are faced with ever-increasing complexity, competition, and cost pressures. New products and "silver bullet" solutions are espoused by vendors, but more often than not, they fall short of expectations, and worse, add to the complexity of IT challenges. Yet, there is hope for getting a handle on this complexity and finally addressing the challenge of business/IT alignment. The approach is not based on a new product or technology but rather on an architectural foundation that brings the complexity of IT into focus from a business perspective.

Over the past few decades, the perception of IT has evolved dramatically from an internal unit that provides back-office support to a meaningful group that supports the organization's business processes and, finally, to a revenue-generating division. This "new era" IT is more involved in the business elements that allow the organization to grow, profit, and prosper.

Unstructured data accounts for some 80% of the data within a corporation and countless amounts of relevant additional information on the Web. This includes data that cannot fit into standard corporate databases and data warehouses and is therefore immune to the BI processing by which companies gain insight into their business and the markets in which they operate.

Government is often perceived -- by its most overt critics or ambivalent constituents -- as unnecessarily bureaucratic, fraught with inefficiency, and less than agile in its ability to react and respond to the needs of its citizens and the industries it serves. Examples abound and are highly visible across all levels of government. They include, but are not limited to, the following archetypes:

The accompanying Executive Report establishes the Adaptive Project Framework (APF) as an umbrella framework that encompasses all project management methodologies.

The success or failure of negotiations often depends on your ability to negotiate in the presence of strong emotions. You need to develop an awareness of what you are feeling during the negotiation and be able to respond productively to those emotions.

Groups apply different methodologies hoping to successfully complete important, innovative, and meaningful work, but their projects do not always reach their full potential. These methodologies independently address how individuals interact in collaboration for organizational effectiveness, business management, or technology advances.