Stories by: Jeff Angus

Effective collaboration is essential to achieving synergistic productivity rewards. And what's good for the guild in World of Warcraft is good for the enterprise -- especially those that, dispersed or lean, struggle with diseconomies of scale.

People who live in dense urban areas or who work in turbulent environments are more likely to seek insulation from highly unpredictable stimulation. Or so a series of informal surveys I've undertaken on iPod use suggests.

When it comes to tech deployments, cool can take you only so far. Sure, cool can cement success in an app that gives people something they want or know they need, but coolness alone can't make a technology succeed.

Convenience trumps everything for the end-user. Add a soupcon of fun, and you have a killer app.

In its first incarnation, business intelligence helped the decision-making process by analyzing the enterprise's transactions, operations, purchasing trends and the like. Now it takes the next step: using the past to predict future trends and needs to push ever close to the leading edge. Jeff Angus reports.

The leaders of big organizations, especially businesses, can pay a terrible price for driving forward while gazing in the rear-view mirror. Many who did this at the turn of the millennium raced headlong into the Permafrost Economy on the fuel of wishful thinking and soothing official lullabies. Meanwhile, data in their own systems could have shown them both the coming chill and actions likely to buffer it. That is, the data could have if these leaders had invested in a software category called BA (business analytics).