Customer relationship management is the lifeblood of many businesses. But not every company has the in-house expertise necessary to configure and maintain a complex Salesforce implementation. Here’s where a Salesforce consultant comes in. Steeped with experience and know-how, a Salesforce consultant can pay significant dividends — assuming you choose the right one in the first…
As digital transformation threatens to alter everything we thought we knew about business, the C-suite is suddenly crowded with geeks, and companies scrambling to disrupt themselves or die trying are looking to technology for answers, but not necessarily to the office of the CIO. The need to spin customer data into gold has led to…
In 2015, Mary Cecola, CIO of Antares Capital, was faced with a dilemma. At the time, the middle-market private equity firm was a unit of GE Capital. Then GE decided to sell Antares to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) in a deal valued at about $12 billion. “There were some unique challenges with…
In 2007, Michael Spears became CIO of the National Council on Compensation Insurance. It wasn’t the usual promotion. Spears had spent two years as the NCCI’s chief data officer, and he kept that role when be became CIO. In his dual capacity, he oversees both the IT department and the data resources division, though they…
As IT organizations become more strategic, so too do their partnerships with IT outsourcing providers. Digital transformation, automation, and the data revolution are not just shaking up how IT operates, they are greatly impacting the kind — and quality — of services under contract with IT outsourcing firms. Here is a look at the technologies,…
A big part of the CIO role today entails hashing out a cloud computing strategy. Deciding whether to build a private cloud or to offload some workloads to a public cloud system while keeping others on-premises is just a start. Then there is the often painful haggling over service-level agreements (SLAs), those crucial contracts regarding…
We rarely get advance notice that a disaster is ready to strike. Even with some lead time, though, multiple things can go wrong; every incident is unique and unfolds in unexpected ways. This is where a business continuity plan comes into play. To give your organization the best shot at success during a disaster, you…
Google abused its dominant position in the search engine market to illegally promote its comparison shopping service, the European Union’s top antitrust authority ruled Tuesday, slapping the company with a €2.42 billion (US$2.72 billion) fine. The consequence could be still greater differences in the ways Google presents search results to users in the U.S. and to…
Windows users who work in tight spaces and need a small form factor workstation with multiple display ports and solid processing power have a new contender to check out: the new ThinkStation P320 Tiny. The workstation lives up to its name: At 1.4 x 7.1 by 7.2 inches, it’s the smallest workstation on the market…
Uber is now a driverless vehicle, after CEO Travis Kalanick stepped down Tuesday. Kalanick had already decided to take an indefinite leave of absence from the company, but now he’s leaving for good. The move came at the request of the board of directors, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The company has already lost Kalanick’s…