Dovetail Software Blogs

"Customers are growing less satisfied with the products they buy and the service they receive. That's the finding of the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index, compiled quarterly by researchers at the University of Michigan. 'There is some cause for concern,' said David VanAmburg, who is managing director of the index. 'There is a very strong connection between the satisfaction of consumers and their willingness to continue to spend.'"

"As consumers continue to flood the World Wide Web, the marketplace is making a grand shift: Formerly captive customers are becoming informed consumers, says Larry Freed, president and chief executive officer of ForeSee Results. Freed is also author of the latest American Consumer Satisfaction Index Annual E-commerce report, released this week, which revealed that e-commerce -- with a score of 81.6 on a 100-point scale -- continues to outpace the rest of the service sectors. The closest competition came from healthcare, a distant second with a score of 76.8."

"It is an unfortunate reality in the IT industry: A large number of projects are cancelled before they are complete. This would not be a problem if the IT industry were like many other industries, where the labor pool is made up almost exclusively of permanent employees. But the IT industry is filled with temporary employees, contractors, consultants, and even permanent employees hired specifically for a particular project. So when a project is cancelled, workers lose their jobs. Knowing the signs of an impending cancellation can help these workers land on their feet. Here are some signs to watch out for."

"Enterprises around the world are facing a momentous transformation, as they move away from traditional, inflexible approaches to leveraging information technology (IT) resources to a more agile way that helps to improve business process. This transition from an aggegration-centric view of technology that leads to brittle assemblages of heterogeneous assets to the composition-centric view that positions IT resources as flexible services that the business can compose together to support and manage flexible processes heralds a new era of value to organizations."

"The basis of any good support center staffing plan is an accurate workload forecast. Without a precise forecast of the work to be expected, the most sophisticated effort to calculate staff numbers and create intricate schedule plans is wasted effort."