Stories by Elisabeth Horwitt

Tools are the least of your worries. Federal and other regulations, and internal policies, must be addressed before you buy anything to help automate the situation.

Savvy business leaders are starting to recognize the paybacks of helping all their business groups work from the same data.

About 20 months ago, Charming Shoppes launched a customer insights project to "deliver actionable customer and market research and analysis to the business," says Jeffrey Liss, who headed up the initiative. Liss is now senior vice president of corporate strategy at the plus-size women's clothing retailer, which includes Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug and Catherines stores.

Development of enterprise mobile apps has been moving more slowly than development of consumer-facing apps, according to Gartner. One main reason is IT leaders' concerns about the security of mobile devices, which are often employees' personal devices, and are vulnerable to being lost, hacked or stolen. While there are plenty of established tools and practices for keeping Web visitors from straying (or hacking) into sensitive corporate data, managing security across a diverse set of mobile devices remains a challenge, IT experts say.

The Great Recession caught most of the used-car industry by surprise. Many dealers assumed that the downturn would be short and mild, so they continued to add inventory at a steady rate. As a result, many used-car inventory-financing firms didn't make adjustments until it was too late.

Self-service tools are becoming a must-have for successful BI vendors.

Tough economic times, and the availability of more software licensing models than ever before, have combined to shift more negotiating power into customers' hands.

Several years ago, Flextronics was struggling with a thorny security issue: figuring out how to prevent sensitive and proprietary information from going astray once it was in the hands of authorized users.

For Logiq the decision to go with a cloud-based provider of IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was a matter of cost and flexibility.