Business Leadership
Do You Need A Chief Compliance Officer?
By Dov Seidman
ONLINE ONLY: No C-level position is the subject of more discussion than the chief compliance officer. The role has long existed at companies that operate in heavily regulated industries—such as health care, financial services, and government agencies—but now other companies are considering whether they need such an executive.

Managing The Ecosystem
By Marco Iansiti
The days of the corporate lone wolf are over. In our increasingly interconnected world, standing alone is no longer a viable business model. Instead, smart companies rely heavily on networks of partners, suppliers, and customers to achieve market success and sustain performance.

The Human Side Of Collaboration
By Peter DeLisi
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Collaboration is a hot topic in IT circles, and we see many vendors competing to provide the software to accomplish this task. But is collaboration really a technological issue? After all, humans have been collaborating for thousands of years--long before the introduction of information technology. Here's a way that IT people can look at collaboration and become more influential in their companies.

Business Management
Mind Over Merger
By Scott Anthony with Clayton Christensen
With great fanfare, your CEO announces the big merger, and, for one day, your company beams with optimism and pulses with energy. There are news conferences, press releases, and television cameras. The deal is splashed across the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Astute CIOs, however, know better than to celebrate the news of a megamerger.

Corporate Culture
Leaders Wanted
By Katherine Spencer Lee
ONLINE ONLY: One of the key responsibilities of an IT executive is to assemble a management team that meets the needs of the IT department and contributes to the overall success of the company. Though the managers hired must possess hands-on technical abilities, soft skills, including leadership, are equally critical. The challenge is to find candidates with a mix of both qualities.

Real Deals--And Challenges

EXECUTIVE ROUNDTABLE: As we entered the new year, a new round of merger-and-acquisition activity heated up across a wide spectrum of industries. While many discussions center on the financial aspects of these deals, Optimize invited four M&A veterans to discuss what goes on behind the scenes when IT operations are upended and then reassembled to support a new corporation.

Customer Relationships
Retailers Sell Web Customers Short
By Howard Baldwin
ONLINE ONLY: The Customer Respect Group tracks 11 industry sectors and the top 100 U.S. companies to determine how well—or badly—they treat their customers on the Web. This month, we look at the survey results for the retail industry.

Technology Innovation
The Reuse Conundrum

ONLINE ONLY: According to Forrester Research analyst Liz Barnett, the market for application-development asset-management tools—which she defines as the new generation of repositories that support enterprise reuse of development assets—was nearly $30 million in 2004, up from roughly $14 million in 2003. As enterprises increasingly delve into Web services—ensuring that they reuse, rather than reinvent—XML code becomes essential.

The (Virtual) Show Must Go On
By Mark Winter, executive VP of IT, Deluxe Labs, North America
Sometimes the best way to get a job done is to give it to someone else. Deluxe Laboratories has found that outsourcing certain IT systems to a virtualized, managed facility is a powerful, effective, and money-saving solution.

ROI Valuation
In Search Of Knowledge

ONLINE ONLY: IDC studies have shown that business-intelligence projects that address only the delivery of information produce far less ROI than analytics projects that address operational decisions. In this Q&A, analyst Henry Morris talks about why CIOs need to raise the bar on business-intelligence deployments.

Strategic Innovation
New Responsibilities For The New Economy

ONLINE ONLY: In his new book, The Past and Future of America's Economy: Long Waves of Innovation That Power Cycles Of Growth, Rob Atkinson of the Public Policy Institute tackles the question of how business, government, and IT need to rethink the way they work together in order to maximize the benefits of the transition to the "network economy."

Navigating Toward 'Blue Oceans'
By W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
The biggest growth opportunity comes from blue-ocean ideas—those that create their own demand by giving customers a product or service they value highly. Selling in the blue ocean is better than doing so in the red ocean, where companies compete head-on and the waters often turn bloody.

Understanding Law
Sold, But Not Forgotten
By Edward Hansen and Craig Garnett
While much discussion centers on how CIOs will fare in mergers and acquisitions, their role in an ancillary event--the divestiture of a business unit--is rarely on the radar. Yet, these transactions are riddled with legal risks that can be costly if not addressed, and in the worst cases, can have serious operational impact.