"How Europe's Establishment welcomes immigrants in the future could play a big part in promoting economic growth--and stifling the hatreds and fears that have bedeviled immigrants for years."

The Web can be a great place to sell simple, high-volume products. But it's not so great for selling complex products--and it can be a lousy place to be a salesperson. Salespeople rely on persuasion, experience, and personalized treatment to sell. E-commerce has given sales professionals little opportunity to use those resources, because the dominant sales models have been the catalog and the auction, where price is the most important factor and the goal is to eliminate the human element. But business managers emphasize that the time has come to integrate traditional sales models with the Web so that E-commerce efforts connect to, and sometimes mimic, actions of the sales force.

A brief guide to getting started on patents, copyright, or trademarks.

"Innovation 100: The Customer is a listing of the most innovative companies in building profitable and successful customer relationships. We offer stories analyzing the business and IT practices of some of the businesses in this year's listing. You can also view the entire list of all 100 companies ranked from one to 100. And to see how your organization's customer strategies compare against the entire class of Innovation 100 organizations, and its vertical industry peers, check out the InformationWeek and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Innovation 100: The Customer Benchmarking Tool."

Companies find the applications limited, integration troublesome, and managing catalogs difficult. Is it worth it?

James Collins, author of Built to Last, discusses his research into companies that went from good to great (admittedly a small sample size) in this interview with InformationWeek.

Michael Hammer says forget the Internet - the real new economy is all about the customer. He offers four specific steps to take to turn customer focus from a slogan into reality:
1. Define the company's business proposition in customer terms.
2. Design all business processes and their supporting systems from the customer's point of view.
3. Present a single face to the customer.
4. Implement and use measurements that reflect what is important to the customer.

Technology has brought major improvements to the cross-border payment process. But the old problems, including payments never showing up or showing up very late, continue to hamper global commerce.

"Technology change management is not an isolated activity but a process that touches many of the socio-technical activities at work in an organization. This bigger picture of technology change management includes business and work processes and technical systems as well as processes related to group dynamics and collaboration. The connection is clear. When we ask people to change how they do their work, as we do in improvement or technology adoption efforts, we are asking them to learn. If you pay attention to how people learn, you will be capable of more effective change management. Learning and technology change management reinforce one another. If you are smart about how you manage change, you will help make your workplace a learning organization, and that will pay off in many ways."

In June, 1998, almost nothing at Seagate was going right. After years in which Seagate had enjoyed comfortable technical leadership in drives for high-performance computers, competitors including IBM and Quantum were catching up. The volume part of the business, hard disks for personal computers, was overloaded with production capacity and glutted with inventory. The largest customers, the computer makers, were demanding not only more storage per dollar--nothing new about that--but also more service, including caches of completed drives near their assembly operations. But Seagate seemed unable to respond expeditiously.

Something had to change--fast. Craig Nichols, an E&Y partner, suggested it was time to go further and "transform the whole operations side of their business." What Nichols was proposing was a DesignShop, a concept (and trademarked name) developed and worked out by Matt Taylor, an architect, and his wife, Gail, an educator. Their idea is to push--some would say shock--a group to leave behind the conventional and instead collaborate creatively on a new product design, a new process, the solution to a business problem, or even a completely new business strategy.

It's not enough to have Web pages that sell wares in English. With 75% of the world's Web market expected to live outside the United States by 2005, global appeal is the byword.

What happens when important news hits the financial markets? Suppose a company reports earnings much higher than expected or announces a big acquisition. Traders and investors rush to digest the information and push stock prices to a level they think is consistent with what they have heard. But do they get it right? Do they react properly to the news they receive? Recent evidence suggests investors make systematic errors in processing new information that may be profitably exploited by others.

Two experts argue that the MBA is heavy on the 'B' and light on the 'A'--teaching business functions, not the practice of administering.

Ever since the Internet entered the popular culture, futurists and technophiles have been telling the world that the new medium would transform homes into information-rich hubs of activity.

"According to a recently published study by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, the Internet currently accounts for only about 1.5 percent of all marketing money spent by advertisers. The top six advertisers spend less than 1 percent of their budgets for online ads, whereas Americans spend approximately 12 percent of their media time online.

The big question is why. Looking for an answer, I hosted "What Do Traditional Advertisers Want When Buying Media Online?" last week, a panel discussion with representatives from Nabisco, Castrol North America, Yahoo!, and MediaVest. According to the panelists, here are some of those reasons"

Consultants who form virtual project teams know that communication and coordination are two major challenges when team members are dispersed. Rick Freedman reviews two Web-based project collaboration tools (OnProject and ERoom) that can help make virtual projects a reality.

Spring so far has been full of surprises, not the least of which is the SEC's relief for private companies with at least 500 option holders that, under Section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, might have had to fulfill public company disclosure requirements, such as 10-Qs and 10-Ks. It could be extremely harmful for a private company to have to expose its books for anyone to see. The SEC's new and more flexible guidelines let companies seek relief for stock options that are immediately exercisable, as long as they are nontransferable in most cases.

Interesting multi-piece article looks at different issues to consider regarding your corporate brands, copyrights, identity and reputation in this brave new online world. Issues addressed include: meta taggers, cybersmear campaigns, cybersquatting and antidomains, anonymity rights, digital and web rigths management, and digital watermarking.

"Though companies may want to keep tabs on message board and chat room blather, too closely monitoring forums on sites such as Yahoo and Raging Bull may actually make a company responsible for the information in them, says Blake Bell, senior knowledge management counsel at law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and editor-in-chief of online newsletter CyberSecuritiesLaw. If a company establishes a presence on a forum either by linking to it or consistently monitoring it, the SEC may reasonably expect that company to refute all false claims that appear there. Companies should also refrain from responding to allegations in these chat rooms. If they reveal material information - news that could affect the stock price - when responding to a cybersmear, they may run afoul of the SEC's Fair Disclosure regulation. 'The best thing to do is ignore it,' says Bell."

This article takes says the following five rules have been learned about e-tailing thusfar:
Rule 1: You don't have to put the whole damn store online
Rule 2: Turn your inventory as quickly as possible
Rule 3: Customers like to know what they're buying
Rule 4: Keep shipping costs to a minimum, and don't blindside your customers with them
Rule 5: Use the Internet to get to know your customers better than ever before

Also of value is their Web File sidebar which looks at the following related issues:
- Online Sales
- Supply Chain Management
- Fulfillment
- Marketing
- Case Studies
- The Future of E-tail

Who has more product knowledge: 10,000 workers or 1 million customers?

Chart from InformationWeek special on E-Services breaks down how customers ranked their E-services vendors in the following categories:
- Knowledge of Networking
- Partnerships with Vendors
- Strategic Business Advice
- Industry Expertise
- Pricing and Value
- Reliability of Service
- Service-Level Agreements
- Programming Expertise
- Vendor Reputation
- Commerce and Brand Expertise
- Customer Service
- Availablility and Uptime
- Range of Services
- Customer Referrals

Somewhat topical discussion of e-marketplaces (by the master of re-engineering himself), but points raised are of long-lasting value.

"Despite big spending on information systems, many organizations are finding there's still a shortage of truly useful information, due to the fragmentation of data. How can organizations resolve this 'Information Paradox'?

Business intelligence (BI) solutions can put the information pieces back together to provide businesses with a more meaningful, complete picture. In this article, I'll describe the conceptual architecture commonly used for BI."

When the tech-stock bubble burst in 2000, a number of companies allowed key employees to cancel previous options-based stock purchases that had left them with deep losses. The implications of such favoritism are troubling enough that the SEC - not to mention shareholder activists - are taking a closer look.

The nation's leading high-tech centers are places where people from virtually any background can settle and make things happen.