Friday - February 10, 2012
Last week, after dropping off my Prius at the dealership for routine service -- as I've done regularly since I bought the car in 2007 -- I ambled over to the shuttle stop for a ride home. "Where you headed?" barked the driver, never raising his head from his newspaper. I recognized him -- he'd driven me back and forth from the dealership on numerous occasions, and we'd had many interesting conversations about airplanes and about our mutual hometown of Alameda, Calif. When I let him know where I was going, he immediately recognized me and his demeanor changed entirely.
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Thursday - February 9, 2012
Let's face it, even though it's 2012 and the recession technically ended in 2009, we're not out of the woods yet. If anything, this recession has made businesses of all sizes think critically about their processes and optimize their current resources to maximize efficiency. HR processes are no exception.
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Wednesday - February 8, 2012
There's been a lot of activity on the Web and in our industry in the last week, and I thought it might be fun to try and tie at least some of it together. Much of it in one way or another involves Facebook -- or "FB," as the proposed ticker symbol suggests. It's widely assumed that its IPO will make the very earliest buyers a nice pile of profit, but what about those looking for a longer-term investment?
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Tuesday - February 7, 2012
Identity theft and privacy breaches are reported almost daily. For example, last month two utilities in New York reported that an employee of a software contractor allowed unauthorized access to a database containing social security, date of birth and other information. That same day the DoJ reported the arrest of three women in California for engaging in a scheme to use stolen identities to illegally collect tax refunds.
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Monday - February 6, 2012
Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its forthcoming service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which will be released in Q2 2012. The service update will build on Microsoft's rollouts last year in such areas as social CRM and mobile. "We are on the path to deliver a significant new set of capabilities," said Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM's product management group.
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Monday - February 6, 2012
TeleTech has been placed in the "Leaders" quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant: Customer Management Contact Center BPO, Worldwide, 2011, and Yesmail has announced the release of its "Look Book" in celebration of its recent awards for mobile-scalable email design. Meanwhile, West Interactive and VBrick Systems have released major upgrades.
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Friday - February 3, 2012
Salesforce.com unveiled a new customer service help desk tool this week. Desk.com works with customer requests delivered over a social network. It is the byproduct of Salesforce.com's acquisition of Assistly last year. However, it is no mere product integration, said Alex Bard, former Assistly CEO and now vice president and general manager of Desk.com.
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Thursday - February 2, 2012
Every tool has a purpose. That's never more clear than when you see a neophyte do-it-yourselfer trying to use a tool for a purpose other than what it was designed for. For instance, anyone wielding a hammer while trying to fix a car's engine is probably not going to succeed.
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Wednesday - February 1, 2012
I take briefings from all sorts of vendors every day, from established companies with a new release to emerging companies with what they hope will be The Next Great Idea that the market will seize on. I am always happy to give my opinion and advice, and sometimes it's even taken. But I am usually reticent to write about most of them simply because it's not my job to provide free advertising.
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Tuesday - January 31, 2012
The sharp growth in the use of smartphones and tablets has spurred the U.S. government to keep pace with the private sector in the use of mobile devices. While federal agencies have been incorporating mobile technology for several years, the rate of adoption could be -- and should be -- far greater, contends Steven VanRoekel, the federal government's chief information officer.
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