Since the advent of the Internet, firms have enjoyed unprecedented flexibility to reveal information to competitors, customers, and suppliers. In this new technological environment, firms can implement transparency strategies by using information strategically to compete. In the online travel sector, for example, the business strategy of meta-search travel agents like Kayak is to provide a comprehensive view of products and prices to travelers. Other companies, like Priceline, use opaque mechanisms to conceal product features until after purchase. This article offers foundations and guidelines for sound transparency strategies that are the result of over six years of field observations and empirical research.

Managers have made numerous attempts to increase the understanding of how IT operates, and more importantly, how IT can be used to leverage the business and provide a competitive advantage for the firm. IT managers need to assess their capabilities by asking the following questions:
1) Are IT managers able to support the firm in obtaining its objectives?
2) Are they capable of keeping up with the constantly changing market environment?
3) Are they up to date on the latest and greatest technology trends and offerings to the marketplace?
4) Are they flexible enough to understand and lead business process changes as needed?
5) Are they capable of judiciously helping to manage the firm’s risk?

Managing a global company’s IT comes with a host of challenges. One of the most difficult involves striking an optimal balance between centralized and decentralized decision-making. Which choices should be the purview of local or regional IT organizations—and which decisions need to be made by global leadership? Too much decentralization and independence can lead to redundancies and unnecessary costs. Too much centralization risks forcing inappropriate solutions on situations that might be better served by uniqueness or customization.

Dutch global banking giant ING recently tackled this challenge in its Benelux operations. The company’s solutions and underlying thinking offer food for thought for other businesses that are wrestling with the same issue.

Information technology organizations and the businesses they support do not occupy parallel universes. Although most executives understand that, few have successfully aligned IT strategy closely with business strategy. Doing so, however, can unleash an organization's full potential.

Avinash Kaushik’s recently offered a webinar about how to use your analytics to gain insight into acquisition cost, revenue, net profit, micro-conversions, and economic value. The webinar is available to the general public (see link in article) and in it you will learn how analytics can increase marketing accountability. However, just in case you can’t squeeze that kind of time out of your schedule, below you’ll find a brief summary of the main concepts.

Here s a short engagement strategy checklist to help elevate engagement in your email programs.

A new model for managing IT combines factory-style productivity to keep costs down with a more nimble, innovation-focused approach to adapt to rapid change.

How a capabilities-driven information technology strategy can help differentiate your company.

By building on the extensive data generated as part of a business process outsourcing relationship, companies can more rapidly achieve higher levels of analytical sophistication.

When people think of selling goods over the Internet, many envision e-commerce sites such as Amazon or Zappos, but the majority of retail sales still happen offline. Jan Van Mieghem evaluated how vendor websites can lead to old-fashioned orders.

If we’re going to make better decisions and take the right actions, we’re going to have to use analytics. Sometimes intuitive and experience-based decisions work out well, but often they will go astray. Here are several assets and capabilities that organizations need to succeed with analytics initiatives.

What determines whether decisions happen on the bottom, middle, or top rung of the corporate ladder? New research finds that the answer often lies in the technology that a company deploys.

Many site small business owners' eyes glaze over when people start talking about analytics, click through rates, and abandonment funnels. Really, there's a lot of jargon that goes with measuring a site with analytics.

Small business owners should be paying attention to their site analytics because the data provides useful insights into their site traffic, which ultimately leads to more sales. If you're not paying attention to your site analytics, your business is leaving money on the table.

Most businesses generate a lot of data, but relatively few use it effectively to create competitive advantage and enable high performance. Accenture’s Dave Rich, Brian McCarthy and Jeanne Harris use research findings and their experience to outline how high-performance businesses are using analytics to pull ahead of competitors and turn data into actionable insights.

The question that thousands of experts, bloggers, publishers, and content creators want answered is, "If there is so much free content on the Web, what content will people actually pay for?"

Having been involved with launching more than 1,000 paid-content websites over the last few years, many of which are now very profitable businesses, I've concluded that the following are attributes that enable them to charge for their content.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most popularly adopted best practice implementation available today and includes an IT management framework emphasizing management from the perspectives of both the business and IT service consumers. By utilizing a pragmatic approach to implementing ITIL, significant improvements to an IT infrastructure can be achieved with a quick return on investment, motivated staff involvement, and minimal operational disruption during deployment.

Editor's Note: more of an overview of what ITIL is than a true guide to implementing it, but useful for those new to the ITIL concept. Just ignore the last couple of pages which go on to do a soft sell of the vendor's product.

Dave Schappell, founder and CEO of TeachStreet, talks about his company’s transition from a free to a paid service, and shares five tips that may help other startups make the leap as well.

It's important to ensure that visitors find the information and products they're looking for once they arrive. Whether you're marketing an e-commerce, informational, or B2B site, your site search is a critical feature of your site and deserves your time and attention.

By making some small improvements to your site search, you can reap higher conversion rates, more leads, and happier repeat customers.

One of the most lucrative assets companies own could be the data they possess. The challenge is turning it into relevant, usable information. Analytics can be a powerful tool in this effort. Accenture profiles a five-step model for putting analytics at the center of corporate decision making.

Companies that make the deep strategic, organizational, and operational shifts required to become effective digital marketers can not only make themselves more agile and productive but also accelerate revenue growth.

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.

Predictive analytics enables you to develop mathematical models to help you better understand the variables driving success. Predictive analytics relies on formulas that compare past successes and failures, and then uses those formulas to predict future outcomes.

This article provides a quick explanation of the nine most common data-mining techniques used in predictive analytics. Becoming familiar with them will go a long way toward enabling you to recognize patterns in customer preferences and buying behavior.

I understand that you may be trying to start a company and build a website on a shoe string budget.

You may think that you are saving money by hiring an individual or a small Web design shop to create your website.

You may think that you are getting a real deal because the individual or tiny shop happens to be highly creative and truly talented.

You may think that you are saving money by not having an IP attorney review the contract, if any.

You may think that you own the website design and logo that you paid to have designed. Your Web designer may even tell you that you do.

You may think that the contract that the Web designer gives you really assigns the copyright to you because it vaguely talks about ownership and copyrights in the same paragraph.

You may think that your Web designer will understand copyright law and not rip off other sites and put infringing material on your site.

YOU MAY BE VERY, VERY WRONG!

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.