Businesses collect mountains of data and spend vast sums storing and protecting them. Yet excess data carry a steep price tag for storage, maintenance, and protection, and incalculable potential costs in terms of liability. Similarly, most companies guard their intellectual property at great expense. Yet many efforts to safeguard intellection property are ineffectual or even counterproductive – depressing the value of that which they hope to protect.

In recent years, many of the most significant corporate success stories have been because of IT innovations. Despite the gloomy economic mood, success stories like Amazon's Kindle demonstrate that the value of IT innovation has not diminished. In fact, leading executives understand that IT innovation is a major factor for their companies' bottom lines and future growth.

Although most companies realize that business units and the technology organization must be much more integrated, many don’t know how to make this happen. Leaders of business units sometimes have only a vague sense of technology’s value, while technology executives often fail to address issues in terms that businesspeople find meaningful. In an imaginary memo to a CEO, a chief technology officer proposes a solution: an annual report for technology, analogous to the annual report for investors and the broader market.

Stoney deGeyter offers up The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!, a master website marketing checklist covering over 400 specific items over 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, etc. This list doesn't cover any "how tos," which are essential ingredients to successful online marketing, but sometimes you need to first know what to do so you can then discover how to do it.

Usability evaluations are good for many things, but determining a team’s priorities is not one of them. The Molich experiment proves a single usability team can’t discover all or even most major problems on a site. But usability testing does have value as a shock treatment, trust builder, and part of a triangulation process. Test for the right reasons and achieve a positive outcome.

Six steps to getting Web site visitors to take your link bait and how to hold on to them.

FutureNow analyzes and expands on Seth Godin's list of difficult and important questions you have to answer before you spend a nickel on a site redesign.

Your search and clickstream data is missing a key ingredient: customer intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where they bailed, but not why they came to the site. Your internal site-search data contains that missing ingredient: intent. Learn five ways to analyze your internal site-search data—data that’s easy to get, to understand, and to act on.

Web design is to a large extent a creative process and can therefore be called more art than science. But because it is intrinsically a medium of presentation, some rules (or at least principles) apply. By following some simple pointers, anyone should be able to create a visually pleasing design and take one step closer to fame. Okay, it’s not that simple, and talent and experience do matter, but anyone can turn their home page into something prettier within mere minutes. (Hat tip to@ManiBodhi)

A joint effort by IT and business leaders can help companies not only to save money but also to prepare for the return of growth.

Chris Anderson’s book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” In this article, Malcolm Gladwell challenges the core assertions underlying the book.

Many IT organizations are buckling under the pressure of corporate expectations--not because of a lack of know-how, but because of excessive complexity that has developed over time. By building an IT application blueprint, you can remain flexible enough to meet the changing needs of the business.

According to Marketing Experiments, friction can be defined as psychological resistance to a given element of your sales process that causes aggravation, fatigue or confusion. While impossible to eliminate resistance, your goal is to minimize it as much as possible.

We’ve all heard the adage, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” For many e-tailers, both large and small, the weakest link lies in the checkout process. Mistakes at this critical juncture are costly and unnecessary. Below, I’ve gathered 12 of the most common mistakes I see with checkouts.

Here are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content.

We at FutureNow sometimes wonder why more companies aren’t busy optimizing their websites and online marketing, or why those who are “on board” with the concept don’t always commit the right amount of resources towards the effort.

I’m not a mind-reader, but I think it’s due in part to an all-or-nothing mentality where nothing short of a full optimization ‘project’ is worth putting effort into. Most companies are more interested in redesigning their websites all at once instead of incrementally, even though incremental optimization is far less expensive, less risky, and more accountable!

Bay’s conjecture is simply this: Autonomous machines are more demanding of their operator than non-autonomous machines. Venkat Rao expands on the significance of this conjecture.

The basic spreadsheet and accounting programs you've relied on 'til now won't help your growing business eliminate decision-making bottlenecks, reduce IT costs, increase productivity, or improve the customer experience. To do all that requires an enterprise-wide, integrated software system. Learn how an integrated system can help take your business to the next level, and how to ensure you get the right system for you.

Pricing software can spot pointless discounts and other profit-killers, but it isn't cheap.

In the days of old: circa 2007, social-media marketing meant monitoring the blogosphere and managing forums, but today marketers are jumping in by actively creating and managing brand communities. Dave Balter is the founder and CEO of BzzAgent, a word-of-mouth media network headquartered in Boston. His company recently launched BzzScapes, a network of brand-centric communities, created by advocates and dedicated to the collection and ranking of the most relevant digital content for each brand.

Guy Kawaskai asked him what it takes to create a truly exceptional brand community, and these are his top ten tips.

Not all analytics are created equal. Like most software solutions, you’ll find a range of capabilities with analytics, from the simplest to the most advanced. In the spectrum shown here, your competitive advantage increases with the degree of intelligence.

Mashable's online business toolbox lists more than 270 online apps for running your business, broken down into the following categories:
Accounting, Billing, Invoicing, Estimating & Contracts
Calendars & Scheduling
Charts, Diagrams, and Whiteboards
Collaboration & Workgroups
Conferences, Presentations & Meetings
Crowdsourcing, Networking & Community
Customer Relationship Management, Customer Service & Contact Management
Database, File Storage & Information Management
Email
Employee Management, Payroll & Human Resources
Feedback
Marketing & Publicity
Money Making & eCommerce Solutions
Office Applications
Organization & Management
Phone & Voicemail
Task Lists, Planning & Project Management
Time Management & Tracking
Virtual Office Platforms
Website Tools
Industry-Specific
Miscellaneous

Failure to manage e-mail can cost millions in court. A popular framework (EDRM)and an archiving system can help get your house in order--and pay dividends in the legal realm and beyond.

A study of interactions reveals how pervasive they are. As they increase in number, answers to fundamental questions about integration, scale, and scope will change. But what will happen when workers can carry out their jobs in half the time?

Editor's Note: written in 1997 and it shows in a few spots, but still a good read...

The market is getting crowded with Web-based software and storage offerings. Here's what you need to know about the cloud computing strategies of Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and five other leading vendors.