Collaborative Strategies
Buyers Are From Mars, Vendors Are From Venus
By Brian Sommer and Vinnie Mirchandani
The information-technology industry is generally thought of as smart and savvy. Accordingly, it has more engineers, entrepreneurs, investment money, and patents than most vertical sectors of the economy. Yet, even after five decades of technology commerce, the buying and selling of most business technology is inefficient, chaotic, and surprisingly primitive. Despite a given mutual dependence, buyers and sellers of IT know little about each other. Few CIOs have ever sold technology; few vendor salespeople have bought or implemented technology. With apologies to family therapist and relationship author John Gray, it's as if buyers are from Mars and vendors are from Venus.

Customer Relationships
How Well Do You Treat Your Online Customers?

In its latest report on how the largest 100 companies in the United States treat customers on their Web sites, the Customer Respect Group gave the companies a 6.5 rating on a scale of 10.0, a lower-than-average score compared with companies segmented by industry. The airline and retail industries, for instance, garnered ratings of 6.8 and 6.7, respectively. Nevertheless, 9 of the 13 facets on which CRG scores showed an improvement over last year's survey.

What's A Company's Scarcest Resource?

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: For 12 years, Martha Rogers, along with her partner, Don Peppers, have been hammering home the importance of customer relationships. Some businesses have listened; others have dismissed their concept of technology-based one-to-one marketing as fuzzy fluff without a quantitative ROI. In response to the doubters, Peppers and Rogers took a novel tack—for marketing people, anyway. They devised a way to calculate the actual value a company gets when it looks at customers from the standpoint of a lifetime relationship as opposed to a transactional one.

E-tailing's Next Lift
By Cayce Roy, VP, Amazon Services Inc.
Dramatic changes are happening in digital commerce, many of them driven by shifting buyer patterns and increased sophistication. In particular, retailers and wholesalers have new opportunities to combine customer information and market-segment knowledge to optimize their Web presence.

Technology Innovation
Stealing Ideas From Manufacturing

Alignment between IT and business may not be improving, but it's becoming more important. As companies implemented more Web-based processes—both for internal employees and external entities—they realized the importance of understanding business processes. Now, with service-oriented architectures bringing more granularity to business processes, that understanding is even more important.

Better Security Earns Credit
By Christofer Hoff, CISO, WesCorp
The largest corporate credit union in the United States has given security and risk management a high priority. By aligning IT projects with business goals, WesCorp CISO Christofer Hoff has reduced the company's exposure, improved business processes, and saved money.

Financial Management
Intellectual Property Puzzle

Sometimes it seems that all anyone ever talks about these days is their intellectual property (IP): how to create it, how to protect it, and how to make money from it. In this Q&A, PricewaterhouseCoopers partner David Marston talks about the role CIOs can play in partnership with CFOs to protect parties on both sides of the transaction.

Total Value Of Ownership: A New Model
By Jerry Luftman and Hunter Muller
As CIOs reaffirm their commitment to making technology a force that drives business success and competitive advantage, a total-value-of-ownership framework can facilitate IT alignment with a business' strategic priorities. Though total cost of ownership has received lots of attention in recent years, that framework focuses on costs rather than value. When assessing the benefits of an IT project, total value is a far better measure.

Strategic Innovation
Modernizing Knowledge Management

The 21st century conundrum: There are more ways than ever before to store and communicate information, and yet it remains locked in human heads where it can't be accessed. For a modern organization to thrive, companies are going to need to finally knock the issue of knowledge management—compiling, organizing, and accessing the knowledge that's in people's heads, without putting an undue administrative burden on how people work. Is such a thing even possible? McKinsey partner Lowell Bryan offers his vision.

Using Mergers To Spark Creativity
By George Chen, Pierre Loewe, and Naveed Moosa
CIOs can play a more strategic role in the acquisition process, but they need to understand what distinguishes financially successful acquisitions from those that destroy value. They should also help the executive team fully use an acquisition to rejuvenate innovation—an area of mergers and acquisitions that's often overlooked.

Understanding Law
The Compliance Imperative
By Bryan Mekechuk
As CEOs and CFOs sign their first Section 404 reports under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, many may wonder whether outsourcing will ultimately increase, rather than decrease, complexity and cost. If planned and executed correctly, outsourcing certainly can make compliance under Sarbanes-Oxley easier and less expensive. But there are many pitfalls that those responsible for managing service providers must avoid.