Digital Lifescapes

While it's true that cloud computing infrastructure is often primarily deployed to enable an IT organization achieve a business agility goal, there's always the expectation that an operating cost reduction will also be the outcome -- as a direct result of cloud service adoption. In particular, the tier-one hyperscale public cloud service providers are able to influence Line of Business leaders by demonstrating how they can offer limitless access to more IaaS resources for a lower cost. This trend continues to raise the bar of expectations for CIOs that currently rely upon legacy IT infrastructure. Make no mistake, the competitive cost assessment of IT services will likely remain a constant KPI -- used as a peer-group benchmark test that's applied to the performance evaluation of every CIO and IT manager in a large enterprise. Why Superior Negotiation Skills Matter According to the latest Cloud Price Index from 451 Research, while on-demand pricing has fallen only sl...

Measuring the performance and resulting impact of a marketing organization has always been difficult -- particularly where the primary metrics tend to be quantitative, and few are qualitative. Today, most marketers would like to demonstrate meaningful online influence as their key performance indicator (KPI). But when capturing that metric proves to be elusive, they attempt to refocus their monitoring efforts on target stakeholder engagement. By far, the more common outcome that's reported, however, tends to be counting activity-oriented or event-oriented metrics (clicks, impressions, etc.). eMarketer reports that companies now realize that amassing fans and followers is not the ultimate goal of social media marketing. Yet the challenge remains -- how to measure marketing success that a chief executive would gladly reward. Data from the August 2011 Chief Marketer “2011 Social Marketing Survey” found that only 26 percent of marketing professionals saw amassing total follow...