The problem with pricing, say consultants at Deloitte, is you. Senior executives don't recognize the importance of consistent and detailed pricing strategy, Deloitte says, and leave it to employees further down the chain to manage. Companies that do this pay the price in lost profits.
CIOs at companies where the IT organization is considered a business peer or game-changer predict a good year ahead for their organizations, more so than do CIOs not viewed so favorably-48 percent vs. 34 percent.
At Maple Leaf Foods, a $5 billion consumer packaged-goods company, IT doesn't just respond to business decisions, it participates in the planning that leads to those decisions. For starters, CIO Jeff Hutchinson sits on the executive committee, and some of his IT leaders sit on business unit committees.
What's wrong with how most companies create a business strategy?
New Year's Eve brings Monte Ford a bittersweet resolution.
Cloud's ability to ratchet server power and storage up and down as needed suits the demands of online marketing campaigns that tend to gear up and wind down quickly. So a few years ago, sneaker manufacturer Puma ran fast toward adoption.
Shell's Ecosystem Guiding Principles mandate how its 11 core vendors should treat Shell and each other. To mitigate competition between suppliers-on Shell territory, at least-CIO Alan Matula has banned most salesmen from his offices and demands Shell and vendor staff respect the culture and heritage of each other's companies.
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) will, of course, take a room reservation no matter how a customer makes it. But it sees enticing sales potential in moving hotel guests to mobile applications.
Saving money while boosting employee morale was the impetus behind allowing employees of Baxter International to bring their own phones and tablets to the office and plug them into the corporate network. But before a wide-scale bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) program could be adopted, legal raised some concerns.
Chip-munching, sedentary people have made Pfizer a bundle of money. Lipitor, a drug that lowers cholesterol, ranks as Pfizer's top-selling pill for 12 years running. A blockbuster among blockbusters, Lipitor brought in $10.7 billion, or 16 percent, of the company's $67.8 billion in revenues last year.
In your new book, The Leader's Checklist, you suggest leaders make a list of principles to review when making decisions. How does a checklist help a CIO, who has probably been leading a long time?
Mike Relich, CIO of Guess, wants to take the guesswork out of mobile computing. He welcomes mobile devices of all sorts for corporate use, charging his team to find ways around any processing power, presentation or security issues.
H&R Block's (HRB) virtualization project -- a CIO 100 Award winner this year -- is putting thin clients in the tax preparer's thousands of retail stores in an effort to simplify its operating environment and cut expenses. The change should also help it to better compete with chains such as Jackson Hewitt, as well as with independent tax preparers and software-only rivals such as TurboTax and Intuit (INTU).
The once-sprawling software development groups at American Express have been reined in.
When Yum Brands set out three years ago to develop a global know-how-sharing framework to step up its ability to exchange information about best practices, the $11.3 billion restaurant company knew it had to build technology to let employees easily find, share and study corporate data.