Checkmate! You're Toast.

Those are words you don't want to hear when playing chess. Similarly, you don't want to be checkmated in the rough and tumble of the business real world.

To win at chess and in business to you have to make smart decisions constantly and consistently - decisions that are guided by a carefully crafted strategy designed to checkmate your opponent or, at a minimum, to stay in the game. Deciding what moves to make in chess is hard enough even though it is just you and your opponent. The decisions businesses have to make everyday can be much more complicated and the stakes are much higher.

By William Band

A hot topic of debate among customer management thought-leaders right now is the business value of “Social CRM.” My clients want to know how much investment they should make in social computing technologies like: blogs, wikis, forums, customer feedback tools, and customer community platforms. And, they want to know whether and how these new capabilities should be, and can be, integrated with their transactional CRM systems.

In my opinion, there is a lot of hype right now with respect to the business value of the social media and how to leverage this phenomenon to more deeply engage with customers. My own recent survey of 286 companies shows that only 21% currently have established customer communities at present. But, I must admit that the same data also shows that an additional 16% are piloting customer communities, and 26% are interested in implementing them. And, recent research by Forrester’s Natalie Petouhoff on the application of social media to customer service provides evidence of a high ROI.

Forrester Principal Analyst, Randy Heffner is currently conducting research on how enterprise architects should incorporate cloud computing into their organizations’ IT strategies and architectures. He is looking for enterprise architects to interview — architects that have experience with evaluating Cloud offerings, if not actually using them. In the research, Randy is considering three broad categories of cloud computing offerings: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

I want to develop a Web application - a really good Web app. The kind of Web app that will make me so rich that I can buy an $9.4 million co-op over looking Central Park, a Yacht registered in Monaco, and hire an architect to build my dream-house west of Boston that is a combo of Buckminster Fuller, FLW, and MTV cribs.