Digital Lifescapes

IT needs to overcome a perception that it's more tactical than strategic -- "Business and IT executives differ in their perceptions of strategic and operational IT issues, from IT's strategic role to its performance. And an A.T. Kearney survey of senior business and IT executives conducted this summer by Harris Interactive suggests that senior business executives don't believe IT is keeping pace. Many of these business leaders believe IT is tactically focused and that the best technology innovations come from the business side. Unless significant changes are made, those differences may continue to define -- and possibly limit -- IT's strategic role."

"Java has suffered as a mobile content platform, compared to Qualcomm Brew, by having a fragmented channel and a confused economic proposition for developers. Nokia aims to change that with its new Preminet aggregation, download and billing framework. Although operators can brand the service themselves, reflecting the shift away from handset branding, in the longer term Nokia could sideline them by accelerating the creation of open IP portals. Nokia aims to stay out of the battle of content branding and ensure that it controls the underlying software and relationships, giving it the critical position whatever trends drive mobile applications in future."

"While it�s not universally admired, few would disagree that the phenomenon of community development around the open-source software model has taken hold in many organizations. While first seen by proprietary software companies as perhaps everything from fad to fascism to a force to be reckoned with, many have realized that it�s better to ride Goliath�s massive strength than to nip at its heels."

"The key to improving customer experience is to understand and cater to the expectations and needs of your online customers. A good first step often involves usability testing, where customers sit down and react to the site based on their goals. Surveys and focus groups are less effective."

"Big Blue" may also earn the nickname "Big Linux Supporter" as IBM continues to embrace open-source efforts to hike its market share and challenge competitors, including Microsoft." The company "plans to announce today that it will contribute some of its speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups," the New York Times reported.

Collaborative technologies such as Web conferencing and online workspaces promise to improve productivity�if you can get people to use them. Better get ready, since VoIP may lead to convergence of these technologies sooner rather than later.

In principle, the larger the company, the greater the benefits that can be realized from internal knowledge sharing. In practice, knowledge management efforts have found it difficult to exploit valuable but scattered knowledge about customers, competitors, products, and techniques.

"In many ways, organizations are just beginning to confront the most fundamental inefficiencies that stretch horizontally across their own ecosystems and those of their partners. We have lately looked at how enterprises are just crossing gaps between execution and planning in the supply chain; reacting better to exceptions in demand and supply; and responding by use of historical intelligence and more current information now being sensed in enterprise systems. In every case, enterprises are trying to break down the walls between applications, lines of business, departments and individuals. They are looking to create more continuous business processes that transcend these artificial boundaries This is of huge importance because business process automation really helps enable the future everyone talks about: the true engagement of business operations with information technology."

"Corporations are spending up to one-quarter of their budgets on marketing initiatives, but few are noticing the results or planning long-term integrated strategies, according to a study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. The study of more than 320 global technology marketers, conducted during the first quarter of 2004, revealed that just 16.8 percent of the respondents' companies have formal marketing performance measurement (MPM) systems despite some spending as much as 25 percent of their revenue on marketing."

"AMSTERDAM, June 1 (Reuters) - Nokia has overtaken PalmOne as the world's top seller of mobile computers in the first quarter, as consumers chose smartphones over handheld computers to organise their lives, a survey showed on Tuesday. Finland's Nokia increased its market share to 28.2 percent, up from 21.5 percent in the first quarter of 2003, while U.S.-based PalmOne saw its share dwindle to 16.8 percent from 26 percent, British research group Canalys said."

Search Showdown: The Brand's the Thing In a series of user tests run by Vividence, the answers that search engine users obtained for a variety of research questions were not significantly different. Google, MSN, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo! all gave similar success rates to users. But Google shone in terms of customer satisfaction, which goes to show that search is a potentially fickle brand game, resting on perceptions and preferences rather than performance. A couple of observations: - These kinds of test are often skewed toward simple, factual look-ups. That's not necessarily what people's real-life inquiries look like, however. Factual research is often part of larger, more complex problems a user is trying to solve. The test might say something about these services' quality relative to each other, but not suitability to all real-life research tasks. - Real-life searching is often not confined to a search engine or the content it can point to; savvy users view...

Despite carrier efforts to promote their wireless enterprise offerings, new research shows a significant number of information technology managers who have purchased wide area wireless data products don't know what kind of wireless network they use. Source

White Paper Explores Mobile Enterprise Apps Device manufacturers and developers can extend mobile access to Internet-enabled applications and transactions with IBM WebSphere Everyplace Embedded software. Source

Java hasn't always been a viable option for Palm OS applications. Things are different now, and Eric Giguere explains why. Source